I'd hazard to say (and a lot of this is from some undergrad time in an architecture program) that's an additional factor with younger devs.
Undergrad college teaches you to lie to yourself about your productivity.
In the sense that time is equated to value (rather than work product being value). Which I think infects a lot of things.
If the game can't be delivered on schedule, and butts-in-seats time is perceived as valuable by a company, then instituting death march crunch hours seems reasonable.
On the other hand if a company values actual results, and a game can't be delivered on schedule, then it has to make a very different decision: push the schedule or increase people assigned to the project.
I'd argue that the end result of crunch is usually pushing the schedule anyway (because either more work can't get done, or sleep deprived work has more bugs), but I can see how the two perspectives would look very different to management. And explain a lot of dysfunction.
Undergrad college teaches you to lie to yourself about your productivity.
In the sense that time is equated to value (rather than work product being value). Which I think infects a lot of things.
If the game can't be delivered on schedule, and butts-in-seats time is perceived as valuable by a company, then instituting death march crunch hours seems reasonable.
On the other hand if a company values actual results, and a game can't be delivered on schedule, then it has to make a very different decision: push the schedule or increase people assigned to the project.
I'd argue that the end result of crunch is usually pushing the schedule anyway (because either more work can't get done, or sleep deprived work has more bugs), but I can see how the two perspectives would look very different to management. And explain a lot of dysfunction.