Sega Settles Discrimination Suit With Filipino Game Testers

Thanks to GamePro for its story discussing the $600,000 settling of a discrimination suit brought by Sega game testers who charged that "Sega directed [employment agency] Spherion to terminate the employment of 13 Filipino game testers due to their national origin." Complicatedly, it appears: "The move to fire the Filipino employees stemmed from a complaint of a former employee, who alleged in his exit interview that Sega was giving preferential treatment to Filipinos." Interviews with the testers paint a downbeat perspective of the job, with one of the fired employees saying: "I look around and see some friends who are game testers, and I talk to a couple of people who are in the industry, and what I get from other people is that game testers... are almost disposable."

Comments

Re:Say it ain't so

[Dixie_Flatline]

QA usually consists of tasks like, "Open and Close this dorr 1000 times, and see if anything breaks", or "Walk over this trigger 500 times and see if the server and client fall out of sync."

It's hard work, but it's not usually SKILLED work, in the sense that you don't need a lot of special training beforehand. I'm SUPER appreciative of our QA staff, but it's not something that you need a degree for. What you DO need is attention to detail, the ability to do monotonous tasks for hours on end, and a willingness to put up with annoying programmers like me that say that the bug can't be reproduced and that you're on crack for suggesting that it's still in the game. :)

I wouldn't say that QA is 'disposable'. It especially wouldn't be considered that if people knew what the job was like. It ruins a lot of people's ability to play and enjoy games. It really changes your outlook on life, from what I hear. You notice the flaws in everything, and see where OTHER QA departments have failed.