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

Say it ain't so

[b00m3rang]

"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."

You mean, there's no shortage of people willing to play video games for a living? How could this be?

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.

Disposable Employees

[Landaras]

[W]hat I get from other people is that game testers... are almost disposable

Hate to be the one to break this to you, but the general business concensus in almost any industry is that just about anyone is disposable.

Not that I agree with this, but that is the reality, esp. when an economy is not doing overly well.

- Neil Wehneman

Re:Not a career, dumbass

[Scrameustache]

Working as a game tester is just like mopping floors at McDonalds. No brains, very tedious

It is very tedious, but the guys with no brains are laid off pretty damn fast.

There is a big intelectual step from noticing a flaw to describing the exact reproduction process of that flaw.

Former Sega Employee

[Propeller Arena]

This is my second post ever to /. As you can tell by my nickname, the last post I submitted was about "Propeller Arena," a cancelled Sega game.

In any case, I'd like to toss in my two cents about this whole deal. First of all, the fired employee who threatened a lawsuit in the first place is Steve Peck. I'll say it again, just so everyone knows. Steve Peck. That's the correct spelling.

Steve Peck is well known throughout the industry for his fanatic love of all things Sega. No kidding. He has a Sonic the Hedgehog tattoo. It's on his leg, if I remember right.

Now, I'm not trying to bash the guy, but he's quite an ass to work with. First off, he's by far the loudest mouth in any office I've worked in in the last 10 years. When he wanted someone's attention, he'd scream at the top of his lungs. He'd frequently do things like pass gas in other employees' cubes. While this may be amusing, the putrid ensuing stink wasn't. He'd also do this in front of new employees, thus showing them that it's okay to be a complete ass at work. He'd also incite pointless Mac vs PC arguments when he should have been working. What do you think your employer would do if they knew you were debating as opposed to working?

The main reason he was fired, and John Amirkhan told me this at the time of his firing, was because Peck decided he wasn't rich enough. Peck was falsifying his hours on his time sheets. Naturally, he was caught and fired. Steve, being the jerk he is, decided he couldn't let Sega management seperate him from his precious position as a game tester, so he threatened the lawsuit. In a blatantly knee-jerk reaction, Sega management proceeded to:

- Fire the test department management
- Fire all of Steve's acquaintances
- Fire pretty much everyone who was Fillippino

That was Sega's mistake. But this pretty much all stemmed from some total ass who couldn't tolerate the fact that the company he so adored wasn't going to pay him to sit around the office (or as the case may be, NOT sit around the office.)

Re:IAASPL (I Am A Senior Project Lead)

[Mike Hawk]

Been doing the QA thing for quite some time. Much longer than I intended actually, but they pay me too much to up and leave now.

Spot on. Though you paint a bit of a bleak picture and I want to polish it off a bit. Yes there is a high turnover rate for testers. Testers are hired generally on a temp basis, and they know full well what they are getting into when they apply. Being the one in a million long-shot cliche here guy to "make it" is rare. This is typical, though we are hiring a little more than we had been lately. Business is good. =)

Who comes in? Kids right out of high school or college looking for a fun gig before starting college or a career. Some guys make the rounds and seem to bounce from publisher to publisher. Then there is always just the random avid gamer who really really really wants to make games but doesn't have any qualifications other than they are good that them. I personally got hooked in out of school. Just applyed on a laugh. Got it, turns out Im good at it, and Im still here 4 years later. Though the whole bust and everything. HA!

Mostly though turnover is high. Some leave because that thing they were waiting for comes through. Others don't work out. And sometimes there is just no work. The best stay, the rest go, sometimes the medium guys get asked back next year.

Good QA is hard. Its not a BS job nor is it a fun job, but its fun-ish. Its fun for me because I actually enjoy the process more than the gaming. In fact I've pretty much been promoted out of actually playing them!

Are you going to come into a publisher, design a sweet game on their time, sell it back to him and become the next Will Wright? Hell no. Be realistic. Enjoy the job, take it serious, try hard, learn the many levels of the job and yes there are opportunities. Many of my good friends are now designers at various developers all over the US. I look at my AIM list and I can contact devs from coast to coast just to bullcrap. Some others are in production here. They all got hired based on their work right here in QA. Others went on to higher positions in other QA departments.

What's this all about? I don't know anymore. Just that yes, turnover is high in QA, but its because so many people want to do it. Not because it sucks or its not worth it. And some of that turnover is to fill a seat of someone who just got their dream job.

Re:You forgot a very important thing.

[cgenman]

There's another guy in the team who gets that collision intuition too. We had a chat about it as they were doing some more of that tedious collision testing. Our conclusion was that it comes from years of playing. You get a subconsious understanding of the conditions of a bug-free region and a bugged region.

Usually twitching is the dead giveaway. Even the slightest bit indicates that physics broke down. One of the favorite tricks in the first game I worked on (a basketball game) was to wedge a player firmly between two other players, causing him to vibrate slightly, then pass the ball. It would cannon up into the sky, and wouldn't come down for a dozen seconds or more. Nothing in a modern, well designed engine will cause twitches except problems or problem areas.

Slight hitches are also a sign of trouble. If you slide along a wall, and there is the slightest pause, that usually indicates that something isn't quite aligned, and there is a space that you could theoretically squeeze yourself into.

Remember Designers: The clip plane is your friend!

There is also the small space effect... Any time a player's space transitions from enough to not enough along a sloped line instead of a sharp point, problems will occur. You may have to try and wedge a shoulder in there, or filp forward and backwards rapidly, but be it a lower-than-90 degree corner or a small pipe that creeps too low lengthwise, it will cause problems to somebody.

Then there is the bowl effect, where you have a condition that the player should slide down but only encounters another place where they should slide down in the opposite direction. No designer worth his salt would do this normally, but on 80 hour weeks where the only thing to break up the death march is beer...

The pothole effect is about the same, where you have a hole near to the width of the character's collision box, that theoretically they should fall into but the engine can't quite make up it's mind.

There's the penetration ploy... Where you find something pokey and sharp, try to overlap that slightly in a way while walking away from the wall. Many engines will push you back through (or into) the wall. This was most famously demonstrated by The Secret of Mana, where you could traverse characters (including one blocking your return to your home village) by walking up to them and flipping back and forth. 3D engine examples exist too, though none come to mind immediately.

There are others, but those are just what come to mind right now.

And the bug wasn't there the day before. They went ahead and added something the day before the deadlines, the fools.

Don't you just love it when the Lead Programmer starts a conversation by saying "This shouldn't break anything, but we..."