Jeff Kaplan: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, it’s such a complicated thing because yeah, okay, you could say that’s unhealthy, but I know a large number of people, especially in their 20s, but actually throughout their career, that have been at companies that do crunch for a thing they believe in, for a thing they love, and it’s some of the most fulfilling years of their life, months and years of their life. And they also… it’s not just fulfilling, they grow from it, they learn from it, and it… You know, and when they… Especially when they talk back about it, about that time, they can see how incredible it was. Of course, when you’re going through it, sometimes it’s extremely difficult, you don’t know. And then the crunch, like you mentioned, it’s supposed to be a month or two, and then it, it turns out to be a half a year, and then maybe it turns out to be something like a Titan type game where you never actually ship it, and it’s heartbreaking and the pain, it’s all… But then you look back and you realize how incredible that journey was. I think, like, my reflections on it many years later, and having gone through, like, pretty crazy levels of crunch to more controlled, I think where crunch is problematic and people are good to be vocal about being opposed to it, is when it’s forced and unnecessary. There’s a lot of like, “Hey, if anybody on the team stays, we all stay”- Yeah…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.