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EA Games: The Human Story
An anonymous reader writes "An Electronic Arts employee spouse speaks out against company crunch time practices. From the post: "EA's bright and shiny new corporate trademark is "Challenge Everything." Where this applies is not exactly clear. Churning out one licensed football game after another doesn't sound like challenging much of anything to me; it sounds like a money farm. To any EA executive that happens to read this, I have a good challenge for you: how about safe and sane labor practices for the people on whose backs you walk for your millions?"
EA's bright and shiny new corporate trademark is "Challenge Everything." Where this applies is not exactly clear. Churning out one licensed football game after another doesn't sound like challenging much of anything to me; it sounds like a money farm. To any EA executive that happens to read this, I have a good challenge for you: how about safe and sane labor practices for the people on whose backs you walk for your millions?
I am retaining some anonymity here because I have no illusions about what the consequences would be for my family if I was explicit. However, I also feel no impetus to shy away from sharing our story, because I know that it is too common to stick out among those of the thousands of engineers, artists, and designers that EA employs.
Our adventures with Electronic Arts began less than a year ago. The small game studio that my partner worked for collapsed as a result of foul play on the part of a big publisher -- another common story. Electronic Arts offered a job, the salary was right and the benefits were good, so my SO took it. I remember that they asked him in one of the interviews: "how do you feel about working long hours?" It's just a part of the game industry -- few studios can avoid a crunch as deadlines loom, so we thought nothing of it. When asked for specifics about what "working long hours" meant, the interviewers coughed and glossed on to the next question; now we know why.
Within weeks production had accelerated into a 'mild' crunch: eight hours six days a week. Not bad. Months remained until any real crunch would start, and the team was told that this "pre-crunch" was to prevent a big crunch toward the end; at this point any other need for a crunch seemed unlikely, as the project was dead on schedule. I don't know how many of the developers bought EA's explanation for the extended hours; we were new and naive so we did. The producers even set a deadline; they gave a specific date for the end of the crunch, which was still months away from the title's shipping date, so it seemed safe. That date came and went. And went, and went. When the next news came it was not about a reprieve; it was another acceleration: twelve hours six days a week, 9am to 10pm.
Weeks passed. Again the producers had given a termination date on this crunch that again they failed. Throughout this period the project remained on schedule. The long hours started to take its toll on the team; people grew irritable and some started to get ill. People dropped out in droves for a couple of days at a time, but then the team seemed to reach equilibrium again and they plowed ahead. The managers stopped even talking about a day when the hours would go back to normal.
Now, it seems, is the "real" crunch, the one that the producers of this title so wisely prepared their team for by running them into the ground ahead of time. The current mandatory hours are 9am to 10pm -- seven days a week -- with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behavior (at 6:30pm). This averages out to an eighty-five hour work week. Complaints that these once more extended hours combined with the team's existing fatigue would result in a greater number of mistakes made and an even greater amount of wasted energy were ignored.
The stress is taking its toll. After a certain number of hours spent working the eyes start to lose focus; after a certain number of weeks with only one day off fatigue starts to accrue and accumulate exponentially. There is a reason why there are two days in a weekend -- bad things happen to one's physical, emotional, and mental health if these days are cut short. The team is rapidly beginning to introduce as many flaws as they are removing.
And the kicker: for the honor of this treatment EA salaried employees receive a) no overtime; b) no compensation time! ('comp' time is the equalization of time off for overtime -- any hours spent during a crunch accrue into days off a
Further down TFA you would see that the 8 hour, 6 day weeks were only the beginning. Next came 12 hour, 6 day weeks. Finally, that was upped to 12 hour, 7 day weeks. Now, I work on a major software product team, and even in our worst hours/days before ship we didn't have to pull those kind of shifts. Maybe a weekend, maybe a long night, but never multiple 85 hour weeks. Please RTFA and then post.
"What we elect to call imagination is mere combination of things not heretofore combined." - Frank Norris
No, ninety hour weeks are NOT an inevitable consequence of working in this industry.
45-50 hours, maybe. But >80 hour workweeks are usually seen only at startups where if a major deadline is missed, the company fails. And in those cases, the people put up with it because there's usually more than just a wage involved--working long hours at a startup can make you millions in the end.
Established companies pushing their staff that hard is not only morally wrong, it's bad business. Sure, EA makes a lot of money, but how much more could they make if they didn't have such high turnover?
According to forbes, as of March 2004, Probst was making $150k/yr and held $150M in stock.
I've worked at 3 different game companies, including EA. EA is the absolute worst for crunch time. I, along with most of my team, worked every single day for 4 months straight, 80+ hours a week, and were told by management that we had it easy (other teams had had mandatory Saturdays for a whole year). After crunch time was done, I mentioned my concerns about the overtime to management. This led to my being placed on a probationary "get your act together" period, one step away from being fired. Knowing that life could be so much better, I quit.
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
For everyone out there who says "tough, deal with it" obviously is one of those people who is being abused by their employer but is too scared to admit it. There are labour laws, guidelines and regulations that make 85 hour-weeks illegal (assuming the annonymous story is true, of course). Most people are too scared to take on their employer becuase their employer is their livelihood, but that does not give an employer the right to treat their employees like crap. Here in Canada, Ontario specifically, you can go file a complaint with the Ministry of Labour, which has offices in almost every major city. If your employer takes action against you for even talking to the Ministry of labour, threatens to take action, or tries to get you to sign a contract that it is forbidden to talk to the Ministry of Labour, not only is it illegal, but it gives both you and the government the right to sue. The Ministry of Labour is even allowed to prosecute and fine employers itself, the judges and courts are theirs, the fines are what they decide are appropriate. I am sure similar laws exist out there in just about every other Country/Province/State, it is just a matter of investigating it yourself and having the courage to talk to them. Sure, you MAY get fired, but your employer WILL get fined by the government, the government then signs off on any wrongful dismissal suit you file, and trust me, they then keep a careful eye on that employer to make sure they NEVER treat future employees like that again.
My little brother has gone through this process twice, all he did was speak out against dangerous and illegal working conditions for summer jobs. Both times he was fired, both times he went to the Ministry of Labour, both time the employer was fine 10k, charged with various labour crimes, and in the end, he received settlements worth more than what he would have made working the whole summer. And guess what, both times, he got ALL his money before the summer was out.
Assert your rights, you'll be surprised just how many you have.
If I could get EA CEO Larry Probst on the phone, there are a few things I would ask him. "What's your salary?"
According to Yahoo Finance it's a paultry $1.45 million. Course, with options he exercised about $23 million.
[Note: To anybody in a corporation, I highly recomend against looking up your CEO's salary. It's one of the most depressing things you could possibly do (my CEO makes in one hour what I make all year).]
Wrong. The Department of Labor enforces things like overtime laws. The problem is that it only works if you are not "exempt."
Typically, "Exempt" refers to "professions" such as lawyer, doctor, and engineer. It can also apply to "management." A software coder without the word "engineer" in their title might be able to be considered non-exempt. The only way to know for sure is to contact the department of labor: http://www.dol.gov/.
They may be a bit slow to answer their phones, but keep trying!
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Huh. I do application development and data warehousing for a pharma-related company. We're a tech company in that our main asset is data and the knowledge of how to use it. I do a lot of programming, though not 100% of my time. And, with the exception of maybe 2 weeks of crunch time per year, I work 40-45 (50 max) hours a week. During crunch time, I might work 60-70 hours/week.
I communicate well with people who don't have a tech background. They can't outsource me. They wouldn't try, nor would they want to try. If you make yourself more than just a commodity programmer, you'll be surprised how reasonably people will treat you. If you're really just a commodity, people will treat you as such.
> A person has a hard enough time running their own life, but socialism's idea of fixing this is that by putting ANOTHER person (or group of persons) in charge of 100,000,000+ lives, then that will somehow just work out.
As opposed to putting a person in charge of approx 225,000,000 people? (an elected person maybe, but socialism does not exclude that option, certain extreme governments that called themselves communist did, but that is an entirely different story)
If you want to critisize socialism, at least get an idea what it is about. There are countries in northern Europe that use a form of socalism, have democratic governments, and among the highest living standards in the world, so it can definitely work (oh, and unlike the USA, they do not have approx 12% of their population livign below the poverty line either)
a lot of game companies schedule the production cycle with crunch time built in. They plan on exploiting the coders. They know how week the job market is currently. It is an easy way to lower production costs. Buying dinner for a team of 40 every night is a lot cheaper than paying them for 6 extra hour of time per day.
Where I worked we were told that the over time hours were "mandatory". It did not matter if you were on track with your personal chunk of coding. You were to be in the office during the mandatory hours. As you can imagine morale was pretty poor.
After they closed down a lot of my co-workers went to EA, a few went to Lucas, and a couple to another studio of the same company. The guys at Lucas have been laid off, as have the guys who went to the other studio (as the co. went bankrupt).
But you want to hear horror stories.... just talk to an ex Saffire employee about how the company (Saffire) wanted them to all work without pay. There are still several hundreds of thousands of $$$$ of back pay from that fiasco that will never be paid.
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There is always the possibility of a mass revolt. Suppose if at 8:30 pm Friday (all the executives are off having a cigar) someone sent a corporate wide call to action out and they ALL walked. Pagers might go off over the weekend, but you could put the $xxx million project that has to be on the shelves by November 20th in the ditch. What are they going to do? Fire you? So? Organization is protected activity. Call up the Teamsters, see how many of their products make it to store shelves with them on your side.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Boo hoo. You have a hard job, and would kill to work in the game industry. Okay, jackass, I've worked in the game industry, I've put in 100 hours in a week in shops that have mandatory 80 hour weeks, and here's a newsflash for you: IT DOESN'T WORK! The lead programmer on one of the projects at our company was asked, "How goes the battle?" He said "The battle is lost." Turns out the coders were so damn brain fried that they were adding two more bugs for every one they fixed. Finally, senior management stepped in and ordered everyone to take a week off, and capped hours at 60 per week. Once they did that, they were able to pull it out of the toilet.
It's kind of exciting, in a fucked up, macho, Russian roulette kind of way. It's the camraderie of the battlefield, sometimes complete with a body count. Have you ever worked 100 hours a week, and wondered why your heart is beating 120 beats per minute--when you're sitting down? Extreme exhaustion does that to you. Hell, I was in really good shape at the time. Good thing, or I'd probably be dead. The problem is that it can take as much as 4 hours after work to calm down enough to sleep, so if your job is leaving you 8 hours to sleep, you may only get 4, and eventually, that will kill you. One of my coworkers told me about a company he was at--one of the coders called in sick and never came back. They found him dead on his couch. The smell was pretty bad. His immune system was so depressed that a minor cold turned into galloping pneumonia, and he was dead before he knew how sick he was. Too many hours, too little sleep, too much stress. And none of this is really necessary. I can't count the studies that show that extended crunch time is actually less productive that normal hours.
A lot of people would kill for that job--until they saw what it was doing to them. If they didn't catch on soon enough, they might die for the job. Too many people think that working in a game company is all fun and games. Apparently you're one of them. EA exploits that misperception to rope people into a sweat shop. So do most of the other big game companies. Of course, the people demanding these hours never put them in themselves. They work 9 to 5, if that, take days off when they feel like it, and you'll never see them in on a weekend.
This industry is insane, and it's because of companies like EA, who do their best to screw anyone they come in contact with. There are damn few decent shops to work in anymore. When I leave this job, I'll probably never go back to game development (though I've said that before.) And if you think that working in the games industry is the ideal job, you probably have no fucking idea what you're talking about.