Nod to all other fellow non-game developers who experience crunch on a regular but their employers are not called out by the public.

FYI: Crunch usually is a result of the discrepancy between how marketing and engineering works. 1/

Avoiding it while is possible, it's very difficult to pull off without negative impacts to public/client relations and/or staff stress.
Leaders have to weigh the options and choose the one that is the least bad of the bad options. 2/

You can romanticise work and industry as much as you want by saying that "you should delay, I'll be fine with it" or "they shouldn't promise what they can't keep". Unfortunately that's not how software works. Most teams believe they will be done on time until it's too late 3/

By that time, they've submitted dates to the marketing/sales machine who started making deals, signing contracts and putting up billboards (sometimes worldwide). You can't just go and say "JK, lol" to that. 4/

How can they not know they won't be ready, you ask?
Good question. Humans are horrible at estimating and even when working with fairly simple systems you constantly run into issues you didn't foresee. Every developer wants to be ready on time, on budget with the best quality 5/

It's not that they're doing a bad job at it. It's the fact that they have to deal with not just software systems but people systems too. The mixture of 2 results chaos, uncertainty and inconsistent requirements even with the best of intentions which makes the 6/

Time/Budget/Quality an iron triangle of which you can usually pick 2. Even if you pick time and quality, there's also the fact that there is a cap on how fast software can be produced. Adding more people to the problem has diminishing returns. There's a point where 7/

The more voices you add into the mix, the slower it gets which also means that the time to deliver something is inherently capped by the system itself. /8

So what can you do when 3 months ago you thought - hand to heart - that you will be done and dusted, you've paid out a small county's GDP on marketing and now need an extra week to keep up the quality?