Sleep deprivation is known to cause strokes, take a look at how many millennials are expected to put in 80-100 hours for a 40 hour check , extreme high competition overtime just to hold onto their seat.
But that's a really specific situation for a short period of time.
At one place I worked, there was a "crack board", where they would have sweepstakes on who was going to come apart at the seams and lose it. Who knew mental health issues could be so fun? "lol".
Needless to say I no longer work in games, it has done damage to my body and psyche for very little return..
Companies just love "externalised cost". Screw the lives of the employees, environment, etc. Society is pretty broken.
And as long as thousands of developers handle/enjoy the game industry environment, there's no compelling reason to change.
But it should be, per labor law. At a minimum, its wage theft.
It's not universal, but I don't think it's uncommon.
I'd imagine I'm not doing myself any favours there health wise.
Planning on getting out before the next cycle of crazy hours.
But to answer the question - various reasons. It facilitated a relocation to Europe. Rapid career progression to managerial level. Control over what projects I want to do. Multiple rounds of overseas assignments. Minimal supervision. Exposure to new things in a notoriously secretive industry. Pay is decent too, but that's not really a motivation for charging hard.
>is the job market too tight to get a less cruel job
No I can walk into a job with equal pay and far less stress tomorrow. It would kill progression & personal development though. I figure I can always coast later if need be.
Enjoy your health while you have it, it's far more enjoyable than a few more coins in the bank.
I say this as a cardiac arrest survivor. I would be terrified to be stuck in an office for 7 days a week. It's just not right for the body or mind.
The first is strokes are incredibly rare. Going from 5-ish to 10-ish per 10K hospitalizations. "When I was that age" I was never hospitalized once, so you need to factor in how many times that group is hospitalized. I would theorize its extremely rare leading to perhaps better diagnosis or something rather than actual medical effects. Also its worth contemplating that "when I was that age" a kid who stroked out on coke was considered a coke related death not a stroke related death. A classic example when I was that age was the story of "Len Bias" a basketball player who celebrated being drafted by the Celtics by snorting coke until he died. There was quite a circular firing squad of blame but attitudes in that era were unified that coke killed, not strokes, despite the medical definition and all that.
The next numeracy issue is there's about 84 million in the group and unlike previous generations its not white majority and there are considerable differences in race and ancestry and socioeconomic group. Basically that group can't be usefully compared to historical groups because its literally a different people. You wouldn't compare Bolivia with Nigeria and claim the comparison means anything when there's no relationship between the separate and unrelated groups of people. Its entirely possible that (now older) middle class professional Scotts-Irish have a different stroke profile than formerly Mexican peasant villagers. Apples to Oranges means nothing. That group is a different nation merely coincidentally happening to inhabit the same plot of land. Like comparing the medical issues of the pre-Crusades residents of Jerusalem to Crusades ere residents. Or pre- and post- Holocaust ghettos in eastern europe. Its a different people, the comparison means nothing.
The next numeracy issue is there's 84M in the group, as of May 15 2015 Time magazine (per google) claims only 53M are in the workforce. As of 2013 Gallup poll indicated only 43% of the group have a full time job, and 43% of 83M is 36M. So there's a lot of handwaving involved, but when only 36M out of 84M are working full time, overwork is probably not statistically possible to double the instance of strokes. That would imply strokes are something like six times more likely among full time workers. Basically the socioeconomic group is extremely poor and disenfranchised and no percentage of ivy grad programmers dying at their desks at video game companies is numerically high enough to double the entire groups stroke rate. There are not enough SV programmers such that if they all died of strokes it would boost the numbers. Whats killing kids can't be work because the employment stats are so incredibly dire, permanent long term economic decline and all that.