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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
Instead of working on Duke Nu^H^H^H^H-- Good Ol' George B chimed in the yesterday regarding this article and said "There's a lot of truth in there, especially when talking about large scale, corporate game development, which is most of it these days."
:(
Interesting
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
Cause every programmer at one point or another wants to make video games. Don't like your job? Leave... there are 500 people that want to be in your place, anyway!
That's why most of the industry is young. Us 'older people' with families realize that they can't be in the gaming industry. I have a wife, kid, and another kid on the way. I'm not about to sacrifice my family so that I can work on video games. Sure, it was a dream of mine, but that's what the industry is about. Long hours, low pay, no pats on the back. If you don't like it, there is hundreds willing to take your spot.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Take your time, EA, and make a really good game. The people will buy it if it's quality.
Being as someone who is currently in the software industry but not in the game industry, I've heard many things about the "crunch time" policies of game makers, especially that of EA. Every time I'm in an interview, the first question I ask is the "crunch time" policy.
At the last interview I did for a game studio (which I, unfortunately, did not get the job for) they asked "Oh so you've heard the EA horror stories, haven't you"...Granted they were a much smaller developer for cell phone games and their crunch time wasn't nearly as long as the whole project, but apparently what EA is doing is more of the norm instead of the exception.
Which sometimes makes me rethink the whole notion I had when I was in elementary school saying "I wanna write video games when I grow up!" I enjoy living, and there's a point where you have to choose either to "live to work" or "work to live" - I prefer the latter.
I've come to accept perpetual crunch time, unpaid overtime, and no comp days as "industry standard."
I guess that makes me part of the problem. Reading this article woke me up a little... maybe I should be getting those things. I wonder how many programmers are in the situation of having little to no 'crunch time' and paid overtime and comp days? Especially paid overtime -- who gets that? Anyone?
A. Incompetant management. No new story here, and we've all suffered under it.
:)
B. Outsource the whiners to a country where, at least if they do whine, no one here will hear them. Also something many of us have lived through.
No, they aren't going to outsource management but thanks for the suggestion. In my experience, that's like throwing gasoline on a fire. You think the bastards in *this* country are greedy incompetants, wait till you see some of the lads and lasses Over There.
Simple solution? Don't do it. At one point in my career I was good enough at fomenting revolts that even the Indian and Russian contractors joined in. The key is to pick the part of the deathmarch where hanging management actually sounds like a reasonable solution. A few weeks of 12-hour days, seven days a week makes any way out welcome.
Rb
Isn't there some sort of government body in the US that regulates stuff like this??
Is this even legal to let people work for 12 hours every day ??
If my company here tried that, they would have a big fat lawsuit slapped on 'm before they could twist their nipples
This is the sig that says NI (again)
...would probably be something like this
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
yet another reason not to get married.
AFAIK you cannot be forced to work overtime. Thus employees could have said no. If there we dismissed then that would be grounds for a law suit. EA may treat their employees poorly but it seems that the employees treat themselves just as poorly. Stand up for yourselves.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
"Within weeks production had accelerated into a 'mild' crunch: eight hours six days a week. Not bad... When the next news came it was not about a reprieve; it was another acceleration: twelve hours six days a week, 9am to 10pm."
Call me lazy but working 80 hours of week while only getting paid for 40 is just stupid exploitation in my book.
Now I live in the EU where it's mostly against the law to make me work more than 40 hours a week without paying me for it. Of course I still work probably 50-60 hour weeks. Atleast it's my choise now and if I want to slow down I can.
--Smutt
The Information Revolution will be fought on the command line.
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
It's a copy of the article numbnuts.
to form a union. Only the lazy and the stupid need unions, right? I'm sure that the free market will ensure you are treated fairly.
I haven't had this much schadenfreude since hearing about O'Reilly's loofah.
Q:How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A:None. Obviously market forces will take care of it.
QUIT! See how much you like the unemployment line. How many people here would kill for that job at EA? You make me want to puke.
Working 12 hours for 7 days a week for months. Yes, I certainly would kill someone if they tried to make me do it.
I know atleast one profession now, where people don't go home and play video games to relax. It must feel like they were putting overtime :O
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.
Here's a news flash: Humane labor practices != socialism. Jackass.
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
I was wondering, if EA is engaged in breaking the law, and nobody does anything about it and the government doesn't seem to care, should software engineers unionize?
Think about it, if there are the screen actors unions and contruction worker unions, why can't there be Software Engineer Unions?
Maybe then we can make sure to work 40-hour weeks with extra pay. Maybe then will Project Managers put on themselves realistic expectations, maybe then will CEOs learn that software making is a profession as valuable as business management.
I lived through something like this myself during the first internet boom. I worked over-100-hour weeks every week of the year. I still remember having spent two new year eves working. All I had was two weeks of vacation a year which I had to take in one-week instances, and having provided a two-month advance notice.
I was not paid overtime, weekends, or holidays. I did it because I was young, naive, and trully excited about what I was doing, but when I think back I was definitelly exploited along with my fellow co-workers.
In the end I started my own company and moved to a country with better work practices. Let's only hope that those still toiling for the further advance of computer science get a better deal soon. Uninioze and I'll go back and join you. I know what you're going thru, and I will do all I can to support you.
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.
Did you actually finish the article? The 48 hour weeks were merely the tip of the iceberg. Yes, 48 hours a week isn't that uncommon, but six full days a week? I think the point of the article is that "crunch time" was not the extraordinary circumstance we all occasionally endure, but a way to manipulate people's schedules without any additional remuneration. It was clear that "crunch" was standard operating procedure.
The 85+ hour weeks combined with the "take it or leave it attitude", that's insane.
As long as they are making huge profits, EA are not going to change their practices unless their employees or the law force them to.
If, as the article says, EA are acting illegally then the author should report them or sue them.
If not, the employees can organize or quit.
Doing nothing is not an option. No company ever changed because someone whined at them.
This story can almost be word for word swapped with a story about some guy working in the coal mines about 100 years ago. They were told if you don't like it, get a new job (but first pay us back the money that you owe us).
Consider the difference between this and the Telco and gas industries:
During the winter, there is a MAJOR crunch time for those industries. It's not uncommon for telco employees to work 84 hours a week for a couple months. Why do they do it? One, it's MAJOR bling in a time when it's needed. Two, they know it's going to end. When the weather calms down and warms up, they all take thier vacation time and can relax. The money saved up allows them to do stuff that they missed while getting systems back up or filling tanks.
Would they work under crunch time, all the time? HELL NO. Thier job can't be done on extreme exhaustion. Would they work like that without compensation? Maybe for once in a long time, not for a couple months at a time.
Why do they get compensated so well? Unions and management that understands that running an employee hard for a short period is cheaper than wasting them for 9 other months, but they must be compensated.
They don't like the long hours, but they do welcome it. I consider what most of the software industry does to be on par with factories in third world countries. After all, if a guy making clothes doesn't like working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, he can always get another job. Can't he?
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Contrast this with a couple of other games I've bought:
- Quake. Worked in DOS. A free download let it work in Windows. Another free download let it make use of my Voodoo 2. I moved to FreeBSD, and a quick download and compile let me keep on playing. I moved to OS X, another free download later and I was playing the game again.
- Diablo II. Ran in Windows. Moved to the Mac, and the same game disk worked there too. Additionally, they released an installer recently (a couple of years after I bought the game) allowing me to install it in OS X without needing the classic environment. *NIX support would be nice, but I didn't buy it with the expectation of being able to run it anywhere outside Windows, so even Mac support was a nice bonus.
Both Id and Blizzard will have my custom again. In the case of both of them, I have been able to change operating systems and keep playing their games. EA didn't even support my migration to a newer version of Windows, so I have no guarantee that any game I buy from them will be playable in a year or two's time.I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Well it happens but you can't do it. There is a limit to the number of hours you can work before you have to take forced comp time or the company gets in trouble.
I forget what the hours are.
I've had this happen on a project before, and then they tried to do it on a second project and everyone just dug their heels and said "screw you". They didn't have a choice as EU laws are much more protective of the employee (even if the salary is much lower of a US employee).
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.
Libertarian, huh?
Hey 'Cheese, I say you read the article before you spout off. This person is talking about their significant other being the equivelant of a freaking slave. He is now being forced to work 12 hour days 7 days a week with what looks like no compensation. I will say this, I have no desire to work for EA, especially after reading this.
I agree, this person should really just quit, don't blast them until you read this whole thing. It is really quite sad. You would like to think that a company like EA is about more than the bottom line, but it doesn't look like it. Reading this makes me consider never buying any of their games again.
RonB
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
People should unionize. Get something moving. Go on strike or something! Why do people keep up with such crap? Are we all just a bunch of sheep?
It is easy to gather from this story that EA doesn't have much respect for its software engineers. But why? Unfortunately, it's no big surprise that a huge corporation has trouble respecting its workers, but here on /. we'd like to think that software engineers, specifically game programmers are special. I mean really, these people's sweat and creativity has made billions of dollars for EA, so why aren't they treated like kings and queens?
I would speculate that despite all of the success, programmers are still a part of a generally despised class, that of geeks and nerds. Yes some of these people have become famous and made a lot of money, but so have a lot of lawyers and we know how popular that class is! Heck it may well be that the CEOs, Directors, and Managers are the same people who used to beat the nerds up and steal their lunch money in grade school. Why expect them to treat the nerd class any differently now, especially when there are even cheaper nerds overseas who'll take the abuse for a lot less money?
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
I worked in the game industry for a year and 1/2. In that time I worked on 3 projects, and was always in cruch. I averaged over 75 hours a week for that year and 1/2 period. Some weeks I spent over 120 hours in the office.
Bad management, unrealistic schedules, artificial deadlines, I've seen it all while deathmarching. And the end product was always rushed out the door before it was ready..... so it was junk. The company killed a lot of previosly sucessful franchises by pushing junk, in order to meet financial obligations. There were controlled by their debt, not by any desire to produce a quality game.
Thankfully the company I worked for is now bankrupt, and hopefully dead.
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If Maxis is indicative of the rest of their corporate culture, EA Games is concerned only about getting your money, and do not do any quality assurance and testing... and will only fix the most extreme of bugs. Remember SimCity 3000? It had a bug in it regarding water-deals rendering them useless. Remember SC3K Unlimited? It had the exact same bug. Seen the Sims 2? It has that nasty "jump" bug which keeps your Sims from ever talking to anyone when their memories get full. And then they have the gall on their site to blame it on the user: "you're probably either cheating or have been using the Elixir of Life too much". Yeah, really fine job there. (Apparently they're caving in to fix it because it really is debilitating and they hope to sell a few dozen expansion packs, so...)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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).]
Care to guess at the ratio actors get paid for their time vs programmers? Ha!
And I would add that the main point in the article is not the long hours but the fact that EA deceives their employees into believing that it is a temporary measure. If they had stated their expectations during the job interview then everything would have been fine.
In my view they are taking advantage of an information asymmetry (which they create themselves) to pressure wages (compared to the amount of work). That is not optimal in a market economy - and leaves a lot of people with a suboptimal choice (they would have taken another job if they knew about it).
I guess the market forces can be restored in several ways. 1) More articles like this, or 2) Legislation requiring employers to specify the working conditions in a contract prior to employment (that is the solution we have in Denmark - and it works fine).
just make them fire you. Start working 50 hours weeks. They fire you for only working 10 unpaid overtime hours a week instead of 20 or 30...
And who do you think a jury will rule in favor of?
What cod piece?
I've been working on map design for various computer games in my spare time for the last six years or so. I haven't actually released many maps yet, but with my skills in map design and texture art I could almost certainly get a job in the games industry. Several of my friends already have, and are working on games you've almost certainly heard of.
:-)
Except I don't want to work there. From what I've heard, EA isn't alone, with many young, idealistic people working for long hours on lacklustre games because, well, it's what they always wanted to do. If they give up because of lack of pay, or quit because they simply can't continue to work like that, then there's always someone else to hire, someone else who hasn't learned how bad some of the employers can be.
So, I keep modding as a hobby, mapping purely for enjoyment. It's much more fun being able to work on your own projects without some looming deadline, without a boss breathing down your back. The games market is already saturated with clones, sequels and utter trash, and the chances of working on something memorable are pretty slight. Instead of working on Barbie's Fashion Adventure 7, I can build my own Twelve Monkeys-inspired, ultra-dark adventure in Half-Life 2 (one of my upcoming projects!)
However, I'm intrigued by Wideload Games' new approach, contracting in work as and when required with just a core team working on a project full-time. It's not so dissimilar to the work I'm doing at the moment, as a freelance web programmer and designer, and I wonder if it'll catch on. No, I wouldn't be able to make a full-time living from it, but it could make for some interesting side work, assuming anyone would want me...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
As opposed to "designing for whatever the current version of Windows is with total disregard for best current practices."
As in, testing with fast user switching (even if it's just exiting after finding it's running already as another user), testing with Limited User access (XP and 2K!), testing with families in mind whose parents don't want their kids destroying the family computer, testing whatever lame and innefective copy protection schemes to make sure they work with all of the above.
It's the end of 2004, guys! Why does The Sims 2 not work with limited user access? Just because of your ineffective copy protection scheme? You should challenge Safedisc or whoever you use to fix their broken system, to work on XP for limited users.
Use Evolution instead of Outlook? Bewa
If you're a motion picture actor in the US, you're (most likely) in the Screen Actors Guild. You're in a union, with all the benefits thereof. Programmers are probably more equivelent to crew members in film. Who are also unionized. Are you suggesting that prorgrammers unionize?
I'm active in the mod community for Neverwinter Nights and achieved some measure of success (modules on gaming magazine CDs, module of the year, etc.). As a result, I had a number of job offers from various gaming companies.
Fortunately I have a very well paying job as a web application developer working for the healthcare industry. It's stable, my customers love me, and I feel like I'm making a real difference in people's lives. So while it was flattering, I turned them all down.
My father once told me that the secret to happiness was either trying to make money from your hobby or work a real job that lets you support your hobby. I've chosen the latter and I have no regrets.
Very true. I don't know for sure, but I would bet that most of the developers at EA are fairly young. Not long out of school, smart, energetic, and absolutely positive that they know exactly what they are doing. No heavyweight process is going to get in their way! I know because I used to be this way myself.
Having been in the industry for a while now (18 years), I've seen my share of projects crash and burn as a result of developer self-indulgence. A small dose of formalization applied along the way can really help get things done on time. Yes, it can be boring. It can be awkward. Sometimes you feel ridiculous sitting in a meeting talking these things over, but it beats the hell out of staring fuzzily at the debugger at 2:00 in the morning after 14 cups of coffee.
No process is perfect, and there will be crunches from time to time. I think professionals in every field are OK with that.
What I don't understand is why EA encourages this sort of behavior (this assumes that the blog post is accurate, of course). This has got to be more expensive than doing things the right way. You will have more defects in your software, and you will burn people out. Naturally your best and brightest people will have the easiest time finding another job, so those are the ones you lose. And you're stuck with the bottom feeders and the new guys. Wouldn't it be nice to hang on to good people for a few years so they can apply their expertise? I wonder how many people have survived these conditions at EA for any length of time. Jobs may be scarce, but what kind of life is working 12 hours a day seven days a week?
Quitting a job because it's overworking you is not that simple. I've been in bad jobs before, and I have quit them to go to better ones, but each time it was a scary step - almost a leap of faith that the new situation would be better than the current one.
What happens if you don't have a new job lined up? I know people that have gone 4+ years in IT without jobs. If you can live in your mom's basement, fine, but if you have a spouse and kids, it's a lot harder. Car payments, Mortgage payments, etc. can wreck your credit rating if you leave too soon, and you can't just say "I quit my job, I can't pay for a while." (Thought - get the spouse on a job as coverage, and have the EA person spend time at home recovering and job hunting, to maintain income in the meantime.)
Quitting a job can have other impacts. When you go to your next interview, "Why did you leave your last job?" "I didn't like the work hours" sounds bad, even if they are inhumane. You are giving the new employer the impression you'll quit if you don't like the conditions.
Loss of Benefits: I don't know about this individual case, but I do know people that can't quit because if they do, they have medical coverage that will evaporate and leave them screwed. Again, if you have a spouse and / or kids, you're not just shooting yourself in the foot, you're unloading the clip in theirs as well.
I wholeheartedly say "If the job sucks, find a new one you like." Note I don't say "Quit." There is a difference. The trick is to find one you can slide into with little disruption; the catch is having the energy to do it while in Crunch Mode. The hardest part of finding a new job is finding the time and energy to do it while surviving the current one, especially if it's as crunchy as EA sounds.
Did you even read the post or just glean your idea from skimming it?
What upsets is that someone complains about unfair labor practices and you cry out quit, stand in an unemployment line and label them a socialist. Just because there are a hundred other people that would take that job doesn't make the management's practices right. We work in an educated country and salary slavery is just as wrong as outright slavery.
I've worked those kinds of hours and I can honestly tell you it sucks. I continued on because I enjoyed my work, but it soon extracted its toll on my health and my family life. When I saw what it was doing to me, I left for a better job for less money but I work normal hours and have a life.
So before you start labeling people and puking in the unemployment line, think; there is a human side to a business and these types of work practices reflect bad managment and not a rise in socialism.
Really. I'm a veteran of the coding wars, and yes, death marches are nothing new. The tactic of the perennially slipping deadline ("whoops, heh heh, crunch mode just got extended 2 weeks, sorry") is the telltale sign of incompetent software management. (My SO had a similar experience in the telecomm industry before the big crash.) A German shepherd could figure out what's happening to this organization.
The team involved has to revolt unanimously -- somewhere a manager needs to get seriously bitch-slapped with some slippage. I'm not talking about sabotage, mind you; let's stay professional, even though noone will ever die as a result of EA's bugs. But what about having an entire department or two calling in sick on the exact same day?
It's the crudest form of organized labor, but it works. Just like the "blue flu" that hits US cities when the policemen's union protests conditions. And the larger and more critical the department involved, the better.
Yes, there is the risk of an en masse firing. On the other hand, if this article is true, what is there for the engineers to lose? Paychecks are nice, but health and sanity are rather nifty too.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
Fuck That Place.
Seriously, it's a carrer choice.
I liked working as a field tech. Got to drive around, working on different people's problems. I loved helping people and getting to feel like a hero. I did not like the pay, or the, "Stay on site until it's done, but be here at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow" attitude. I quit after 1 year.
I liked working as a hosting admin. I dug servers, and working with the OS to do the developers bidding. I did NOT like getting paged constantly with servers issues that were beyond my control due to the crappy product. I quit after 2 years.
Now I am a programmer, and I currently like where I am. The whole time I have had a family to support, but I know if I am not happy at work, nobody is going to be happy at home. I bet the guy shoveling shit at the horsetrack doesn't like his job either, he should quit too. That's the great thing about America, you can just go get a new job. Sure you may have to give things up, but a job is all about choice.
You have to decide what is important to you. You will never be rich as a teacher, but be a teacher if it's what you love. You will never (I guess from this article) be rich as a game programmer, or have a life outside of work, but you get to do what you love. I play a lot of poker, and toyed with the idea of going pro, but after a very short try (kept my job, just played at the pro level for a few weeks), I really did not want to play poker.. at all! It became a job.. a job I wanted to quit.
So, pick a job you like. Some people LIKE having a job that is their life, some people like having a hobby that turns into a job. The whole of the job is equal to the sum of all it's parts.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise - William Shakespeare
When I interviewed with EA on a position for Software Engineer on Madden, I saw this first-hand. The people in my interview looked ghastly tired, and after the email tests, phone interviews, programming tests, etc, I was seeing the light, this is a sweat shop. About halfway through my interview-lunch, I realized that this isn't the place for me. I half-assed my way through the programming test, knowing I didn't want to work here. Above all, the HR people were unprofessional and borderline-rude. The first question I was asked in the interview..do you mind working weekends? long hours?.."oh by the way, we even bring in food for you when you stay late!". What an incentive...work 90hrs, they provide $5 pizza. Woohoo.
I have played computer games since I was 5 years old. I had an Atari 2600, 5200, inellivision, appleII, nintendo... etc. etc.
My dream was always to work in the game industry. So I got a BS and an MS in computer Science with an emphasis in 3D rendering techniques. It was my dream and my passion.
After working the industry, I don't think I would go back. Long hours are the norm not the exception. Every shop I know will deatmarch at some point. Some are worse than others. They beat the enthusiasm right out of me. Now I hardly play any games.
In the industry there used to be a reason for crunch. In the old days you received royalties from sale one of the product. I worked with several old timers who had made quite a bit of money back in the 80s and 90s from royalties. The ends justified the work. Now all the companies do a return on investment bonus. Ie you only get extra money if the games sells through enough units to exceed a certain profit margin and then you may see some bonus. Of course clever accounting will always show a loss on development.... I talked to lots of veterans of the industry who had worked for various studis. None had ever seen an extra dime on a ROI based bonus system. One even caught the president of the copmpany in a lie on the numbers of units sold. He was stating one figure to employees on why they had not seen a bonus and another figure to the game mags boasting of the title popularity.
I now work cyber security. Nice 40 hour work weeks, and a bigger pay check. My benefits are nt quite as good but the time with my family more than makes up for that.
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"I don't hear actors complaining very often about their long hours."
It's hard to complain when you're getting paid $20 million for six weeks work with all the free beer, coke and hookers you can handle...
I am a game programmer. And this story does not really tell me anything new about EA. The larger game developers really are little more then human meat factories as far as labour practices go.
From my standpoint, EA represents all that is bad about the game industry. They stamp out sequels with no originality. If EA puts out something new, its because they bought the company that made it. And they offer the worst possible hours. They probably pay very well, but your pretty much working 2 full time jobs for that cash.
However, pretty much every game developer I have met, except the rankest newbies to the industry, are fully aware of how EA operates. And EA is hardly the only offender. I have some co-workers who worked for Acclaim, and the same kind of hours were expected.
Death march hours suck. Employers who schedule a project expecting every one to work death march hours are retarded. I personally would never take a job from EA, or any company I view as a human meat factory, unless the alternative was unemployment.
But EA and the rest are the status quo in the game industry. For all the companys faults, EA does know how to be profitiable. Small game studios will not be able to thrive until they can get their game to market without the help of one of the big publishers. That wont happen until services like valves 'Steam' are viable.
Happily though, my job kicks ass. I probably could make more money at EA, but at my job, I dont have to work a Death march schedule. I suspect my company will do quite well for its self in the long run for it.
END COMMUNICATION
Sounds to me like the software industry is ripe for it's own version of Sinclair's The Jungle. More and more, the software industry seems to be turning into a modern day version of the turn of the century meat-packing industry.
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.
I am going to heavily disagree on this one::the folks COULD actually die from the kind of hours described in the blog. Heart Failure is a possibility, as are other problems. MOst of them will not be from people who are extremely healthy, but if you have a prior condition, this can kill you.
And, as someone else points out, this is against certain labor laws. I am not generally in favor of unions--they tend to cause certain problems, but I think that in this case that is what is needed.
The workers at EA (and some other places) need to get together quietly and talk to a labor lawyer. They should either then bring in a union OR file a class action suit. Documentation is their friend in this situation.
Another solution (one that would benefit the workers the most) is the elimination of salaried positions for game programmers. Make it an hourly position. This will change the nature of the job dramatically, but will seriously reduce the temptation on the part of management to call for overtime. In fact, it will virtually eliminate overtime.
As far as it goes, this is oppressive--there are fewer and fewer big game companies, and ANY employer involved in this type of action needs to have their VP of HR fired (I'll take the job--I am in the market) and replaced. HR folks should be the liasion between the company and its employees--going to bat for the employees as much as possible, while still representing the companies interests. HR should be the frontline for making sure that employees are treated well, are happy, and AREN'T LIKELY TO SUE!!!
EVERY lawsuit, even frivolous ones, cost the company money. In some ways, the smart thing to do here would be for all the employees to fire separate lawsuits. EA would be forced to settle or fight EACH ONE, costing them a lot of money, both in court costs, lost productivity, and bad press. IF they were smart, they would change some things immediately.
As far as quitting is concerned, it does fix the core problem (which is what I am concerned with). I personally think that humans should be concerned with this. I call for a strike(boycott)--DON'T BUY EA until this is FIXED!
Thanks.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
I worked for a game developer (Kesmai) that was bought by EA in early 2000 (the buy was announced in late 1999).
A couple of links from around then will tell the tale:
EA From the Inside I/II (LtM - I is a couple of entries below II. Sadly the links to the actual scanned memo are no longer extant, it was a stunner.)
EA harassment lawsuit (Fatbabies)
EA has been about maximizing profit and minimizing expenses first, and customer satisfaction second, and the health and well-being of its employees almost dead last, for a long time now.
-- Old Man Kensey
As Karl very astutely pointed out "capitalism leads to the exploitation of the worker."
I am not a communist, nor do I think communism is a good system, for this simple reason: people are lazy.
However, in the case of capitalism, laziness is defeated by greed. That makes it work a million times better than communism in the short run.
But every single business owner (or board of directors) is under perpetual pressure to decrease costs while increasing sales. This pressure never, ever abates. Eventually, little-by-little, policies involving longer hours and lower wages are the result.
This is just the natural evolutionary cycle of a capitalist economy, for better or for worse.
You did exactly what I would do, if I hated my job... you quit.
Nothing is more ridiculous than complaining about something you can voluntarily change. Real slaves can't just quit. There is no such thing as a "salary slave." That person's spouse is a slave to thier own fear of leaving. Nobody forced them to take the job, and nobody is forcing them to stay at that job.
Yeah, there's a human side to business, and if you think your company is evil, then quit. Just don't cry to me if you're too weak to do it.
A company that treats its employees well will be rewarded with better quality work.
The Philosophy of Liberty | lewrockwell.com
Get all your co-workers together and join a union, scehdule collective bargaining and make some realistic demands.
Making pleas on a personal level will get you no-bloody-where. (most) Companies and CEOs only understand force, and as a union you guys will have rights that you dont have as individual employees. Dont let these bastards get away with screwing you to line their pockets.
Getting another job won't help you; practices that are evil/profitable enough simply become industry standard. (The same is true in consumer products; anyone wishing to refute this, point me to somewhere I can get a cellphone or credit card without a long list of consumer-unfriendly terms & conditions).
Clueful management won't help you; market pressures force software companies to death-march everything (customers will just buy from the competitor that promises it unrealistically soon & cheap). This may mean that Doing Software Right is simply economically infeasible; nobody is willing to pay enough or wait long enough. This is why programmers tend to be more aware of the "race-to-the-bottom" nature of capitalism than others; it's blindingly obvious in our field.
Also, the race to the bottom is killing the U.S. software industry, it's only a matter of time. (Even if U.S. companies didn't offshore a single software project, eventually low-wage countries would develop their own software companies and kill the U.S. ones on price). Death-marches may simply be a consequence of trying to hold onto jobs in a dying industry.
I'm in the EU. Most of this tale would be so blatantly illegal over here that an industrial tribunal would last all of about 3 minutes.
I have to admit video games are a great hook for the industry. The vast majority of good programmers I've known over the years were into gaming, and many got into the computer industry with dreams of writing games themselves.
One thing about learning to code those old systems is that you ran right on the metal with assembler or even machine code in some cases. Languages like C or C++ were just another way of expressing the same constructs a bit faster, allowing the experienced "metal coder" to turn out applications and tools that ran far better and faster than most people think reasonable.
With the never-ending crunch to support more users and data on shrinking hardware budgets, the hardcore techie still has work while the average programmer may take a couple years to find another job.
Of course the hardcore techie starts out being tough to manage, because what they really want to do often has little do do with the work that's actually to be done. But if you find a manager who can appease the hardcore techie while getting them to do the real work, you can end up with an extremely productive and cost-effective team -- especially if your "techies" have a knack for applying solutions from other problem spaces to the issues at hand.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Not to discredit the entire article on one little thing...
But she says that programmers aren't exempt until they make $90k a year. That is a lie.
department of labor says it's $455 a week... he makes more than that I'm sure. Perhaps it's only wishful thinking.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
This company wasn't EA but EA is the biggest stockholder and what she describes was the same at that company.
I might have been able to deal with the crunch mode for 2 months had it not been for the fact that the REASON for crunch mode was that the code base on this product was so crappy. The price of permanent crunch mode is that your developers have no time to learn anything new. These guys were stuck in 1980's coding philosphies and making a single change to the code would result in massive side effects. If they lost any critical programmers who had been there for a long time the product would be effectively dead.I might be ok working crunch mode on code that I'd written, but certainly not trying to fix someone else's pile of junk that should have been aborted at birth.
The management also treated the people abusively (yelling at them, calling their work useless, etc) . It's a ripe place for petty tyrants to get jobs in management. Dinner was provided when staying late which is nice but really just an "everyone wins" deal. Management keeps you there and you get a nice meal.
But maybe this is just a symptom of game programming. Games go out of style rapidly. There isn't any motivation to create a flexible, reuseable code base or team because of the rapidly changing styles in games.A lot of the guys I was working with were very good debuggers but very limited in other ways. They were trapped working for this company because their skill sets were very old and they seemed to have no motivation to learn new things. DirectX was like the last new thing they learned and that's it.
I personally don't have extra motivation to work on games. I thought it would be an interesting industry to try. My experience is vast and flexible. As it turned out, I was way overqualified because they don't want skill, they want mostly effort, mostly. Actually, the one skill you should be very good at is using a debugger because that's what you'll be doing most of the time with the archaic practices that run rampant.
I'd say if you are young (19-25) and don't have a life, working games might be the thing for you.The salary was way up there 90k+ so its worth it if you are willing to sacrifice in other areas.
Not so much that only the lazy and stupid need unions - that's just insulting. Instead try to realize that unions just don't fit in with what software people do and the market they are doing it in. Also software people have a lot more freedom of choice in jobs than typical factory workers.
If you're all so fired up about unions, try to start one - I dare you. See what kind of purchase you get. Or are you just spouting off how great unions are without doing a damn thing to improve conditions for even yourself?
Some people seem to think that unions are a magic bullet which solve all worker ills. But really for software people the only people that can help are themselves. Gee, I guess that does sound Libertarian after all - but then most ideas based on common sense seem to end up coming off that way.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Let me see if I understand this right. This anonymous woman is complaining that her husband is "working late at the office" too much?
I mean, just becasue she believes him doesn't mean we have to.
No, if they where Chinese I'm sure there would have been a marked increase in ouput/productivity. This is typical American bosses at work (oh do I so wish it wasn't so), drag every ounce of work out of the employee because it's getting your money's worth (it doesn't matter about productivity - I guess EA hasn't hired any managers who read "the Mythical man month").
One other thing about Chinses bosses, they get executed if productivity doesn't go up (can somebody provide a link to that C.2000 story?).
M0571y H@rml355.
IMNSHO, the bunch of mugs who are willing to regularly work 80+ hour weeks for no overtime deserve everything they get. Others can only abuse you as much as you let them. If you are going to let them, then STFU.
background: i'm a hardware geek. i've worked for four companies in seven years in the valley. they all have had unspoken policies (that are always at least slightly mentioned during the interview process) regarding the fact that you'd better be OK with working arbitrarily long hours.
nvidia was the worst offender by far. total sweatshop. our VP (not our manager, mind you) would sometimes sit over your shoulder and TELL YOU WHAT TO TYPE. he even singled out a few pets in the group whom he would really make life difficult for. one guy had the VP show up at his apartment door on a sunday night, asking him "cmon, let's go over to the office and fix these problems". he then sat with him and directed him and watched him as he worked into the wee hours. he even cancelled my cube move on the day of the move without telling me or my manager, just so (apparently) he could keep an eye on me. i was moving cubes to get away from the jerk! so much for that plan.
a constant litany of messages both verbal and via email would rain down, using language like "you are letting down your team by not being here when they are" and "so-and-so person didn't get so-and-so task done on schedule. you MUST make up. this is unacceptable". this sort of beratement would take place on the project-wide email alias. wow is that good for morale.
the VP also made my group come to work on the day of the company christmas party. the rest of the company was given the day off (it was a weekday). he sequestered us in a conference room all day to discuss the project "big picture". he even wanted us to skip lunch and work straight through, until my boss convinced him that gee, it might be a good idea to take us all out for lunch... the natives were getting very restless.
that may seem like a very minor story in hindsight to people that weren't there, but man i can tell you that the venom seething in my coworkers that day was palpable.
then there was the boss at sgi who was convinced that our multiple-year-long asic project was 3 months from tapeout. after believing in this delusion and driving us all at redline for 18 months, she was finally replaced by a software manager who worked on the driver for said asic, who got things done in a very straightforward, no-nonsense, and highly effective manner. and she didn't even know (hardly) anything about asic development! just goes to show you how a good manager really can be effective AND multi-/cross-disciplinary.
every startup that i've been at has had the engineers working late into the night, later than management, and later than most execs (except for some founders are truly dedicated to the cause, and work longer hours than anyone). plus, said management doesn't see the work that goes on from home via broadband when your seat at work gets cold. that doesn't help.
bonuses are gone in this industry. options are almost completely worthless, save for the lucky few. comp time is nonexistent. you are simply expected to give up your life for The Cause. and then the same company espouses family values via their HR departments and very infrequent out-of-office activities. i'd gladly give up the crappy christmas party and i'd pay more for health insurance in exchange for a few less whipmarks on my back and a few less nights laying awake in bed, unable to fall asleep at 1am after getting home directly from work and being unable to get the waveforms out of my head.
and i can definitely attest to the toll that working 7 days a week takes on you. you get sick. and then the boss still wants you in the office. that drives me crazy too- let's get everyone sick! that will be productive.
williteverend@sunnyvale
Philosophical Debate:
What is a human life worth?
Some say it's priceless while others clearly demonstrate that it's worthless. This can be seen in all walks of life, culture, society, the world around. One man's trash is another's treasure can be applied to this dilema. The end result will always be the same. Until it affects you personally it's probably not an issue.
Consider the parents who drink and occasionally drive after holiday parties, this is even seen in movies. But when their child dies either because of drinking or driving or someone else's drinking and driving they become immediate christian's in pursuit of the nearest MADD chapter to place that child on a poster and parade it around as the next reason not to drink and drive.
I'm a firm believer is NO drinking and driving. No matter how little or how much. I vote for laws that increase these penalties and restrict the ability of people from doing so. I care about this BEFORE it hits near home.
I do care about it because I care about life. Yes, I'm generally against abortion. I have three children of my own. However, I also see the merits that keeping aboriton legeal presents.
While I prescribe certain ethical and moral boundaries to myself I do not feel that I can assert those same values on others unlike Emmanuel Kant who said "if you cannot universally agree that others should do as you did then it shouldn't be done", and his golden rule "do NOT to to others that which you do NOT want done to you."
The reality of the human life debate is literally within the mind of the person who is taught that human life is precious or a waste. I hear people often claim assraunces on both sides of the debate. They "flip-flop" on the idea. On the one hand "Abortion is horrible murder and should be stopped", and on the other "Send our children off to war to maybe die because that mad man needs to be stopped!"
Frivilous law suits are another one. The moment that you cap the awards limits is the moment the corporations win. They have tried like hell to get the average person to believe that some old lady burned herself with coffee and it's some how not their fault. The truth is that the coffee was a few degrees below BOILING. It caused third degree burns to her genitals. Her medial bills far exceed her ability to pay them. They had to perform skin grafts to her inner thighs. At first all she wanted was for them to pay the bill. I agree that she should NOT have used her lap as a "hot beverage securing device", but get real. This lady is scarred by hot liquid. Imagine if that was your child having to grow up with these scarrs. Unable to feel orgasm because the flesh was removed. Price tag that.
So, now we get to my point. A single person with no life can easily accomplish similar demands to EA's work policies. However, a person who even tries to have a life needs to reconsider.
A corporations pays you to do a job. On the flip side you lose that time forever. Never to be returned. Sure the kids are at school 6 to 8 hours a day. But you have to factor drive time, no paid lunch, frustration of working long hard hours regardless of the industry or job. I drive one and a half hours one way to my job. I love my job. I get paid well according to my standards, which are very low. However, they do not pay me nearly enough. I miss a LOT of my children's time. I'm on the road early, spend 9 hours at work and get home late. While I'm not working all that time I am gone all that time. Some of it willingly some of it because I don't have a choice. I can't get a job like this closer to home andI can't afford to move. I'm stuck.
Therefore, for 8 paid hours a day I get just over 50K a year. Tack on the drive time and that's 11 hours. Tack on an unpaid lunch and that's 12 hours. Tack on any overtime and I'm screwed. I recently pulled a 15 hour day to finalize a project. I didn't mind. It does not happen often.
But the bottom line is what's a human life worth? 5
... there is nothing that has not already been thought
> 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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Companies use job outsourcing to strike fear into employees
Alarmist, much? Job outsourcing isn't really realistic for most dev positions, and even if you're working a job where it's a possiblity you shouldn't we working for a company that tries to "strike fear" into you.
You'll hear this a lot on this thread, but this is NOT just in the game industry. This is a problem with software jobs everywhere and it is only getting worse...A lot of people still think it is the booming place of the mid-late 90's when you did your 40-50 hours of work and came home a rich and happy man.
This is exactly backwards in my experience. The boom era of the mid-late 90s was the era of long hours, "gotta make those options count"--even though for most people the options never amounted to anything. Nowadays companies are more realistic about their tech needs, and there is much less overtime and long hours. Pretty much every coder I know now has a 40-hour week, and a lot of us were doing the 65+ hour deal in 1999.
A lot of this has to do with better focus and more management familiarity with programming staff and how to not kill them; during the boom, there was often a sense of "man this Web thing is important, we have to have 5 9's of uptime even though we don't know why, we need triple-admin coverage in the office 24x7". Deadlines were immovable even for features where a delivery date wasn't really important to the business.
Now it's more business focused; there's less interest in whizzbang, be the PREMIER TECH LEADER! and more interest in doing dev work that has real revenue prospects and only worrying about uptime to the extent that's realistic. Deadlines for revenue-generating features are still held, but "gee wouldn't this be nice" stuff is prioritized more appropriately.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
You are a troll. But I will respond anyway.
If that is your only answer, I'd love to see how you are going to live in Redwood City on $7 an hour. That $7 an hour, full time, without subtracting taxes or anything, is not even enough for a median one bedroom apartment. "Sorry kid, no ramen for you this month."
Before you claim I'm full of shit, here are some numbers:
San Mateo County, California general information
San Mateo County housing statistics
Important points to note:
Median income, two person household (2001): $64,100
Average rent for one bedroom apartment: $1415
Average rent for two bedroom apartment: $1764
Median sales price for single family home: $590.000
Average sales price for single family home: $792,735
Housing wage (full time to afford average two bedroom apartment): $33.60
Average wait for Section 8 voucher (subsidized low-income housing): one year.
Oh, wait, San Mateo is too expensive? How about this?
Santa Clara CountyOr these?
Bay Area Housing AffordabilityI'm pretty sure this is a relatively free country. If your husband doesn't like it, then he's free to go find another job. If YOU don't like it, then you're free to divorce him. So quit crying to the tabloids and do something about it.
Berto
There are law firms in California who handle such cases. Kingsley and Kingsley is one. A class action lawsuit by an employee who recently quit might be safest.
I worked at EA corporate headquarters/studio for four years, though it felt like ten. EA is a dilbertian corporate hell. There was such an entrenched culture of lying, blame and spin that it was really difficult to get people to trust enough to work together effectively as a team. At one point they spent about a million dollars for an outside consultancy to come in and tell the upper management that they were too hard on people. Well Duh. Then for about a year the upper management rhetoric was "EA will be the number 1 people company". Rhetoric changed but nothing else. Pretty much every studio they buy up they have destroyed by imposing the "EA" way. Just a bunch of greedy Republican fucktards, welcome to 21st century America folks!
The _best_ 3D pr0n -> http://www.hookup3d.com
There's always something they can be doing. If they've decided that a particular piece of a project is important enough that the employees should be there until 2am, then there is probably real work that the manager can be doing.
If there's nothing that's directly applicable to the project at hand, then the manager can be the guy that runs for takeout food and makes coffee.
When the Apollo capsule was being built by North American, there was only space inside for (at most) two guys to work. Climbing in and out through the hatch was time consuming and awkward. Further, the capsule was a very complicated piece of equipment and most of the assembly had to take place from the inside. Consequently, North American had a policy--if the guys in the capsule asked for anything, the nearest person was to run and get it for them. Doesn't matter if it's a company VP doing a tour on the shop floor. The assembly of the capsule was essential to the Apollo program and the success of the company, and if the guys working on the critical tasks said "jump"--no matter where they were on the org chart--anybody listening would say "how high?" Similarly, if something is important enough and time-critical enough for a software company to keep its coders at work for ninety hour weeks, management needs to be available to provide support at all hours for any purpose. If managers are unwilling to do so, then perhaps the project isn't quite the priority they say it is.
To be fair, if the employees want the manager to leave, then he should respect that. Also, if they're fixing something that's their own damn fault, then the manager probably isn't obligated to hang around for it. Otherwise, no excuses!
~Idarubicin
I've worked in the Video Games industry for just under 20 years (first game published in 1985). The last company I worked for expected 50-60 hour work weeks -- several people were fired from there for not working the mandatory extra 10-20 hours a week as "slackers". They scheduled me on one project where I had to convert 400,000 lines of assembler in 4 months. That's about 3,000 lines of code a day, converted and debugged. I managed to do it by working 100 hour weeks with 16-20 hour days for four months. My health was so bad at the end of the project I nearly had a liver failure from an infection that a healthy immune system would have easily fought off.
The company I currently work at had us working nights and weekends to finish projects and during crunch (the last project had an 8 month crunch!) many team members were working around 70-80 hours a week. Unfortunately, successes under crunches like these tell upper management that it's a good thing to work employees under heavy hours and a high workload situations.
Due to lobbied labor laws that prevent salaried software engineers from receiving overtime pay, the industry has taken this as a "pay a set fee, work'em as hard as you can" attitude. If they double the hours worked, they halve their perceived cost per man hour.
Not surprisingly, burn out rate and job-hopping are really high in the games industry. Too bad it's pretty much the same at nearly all video game companies that I know. Mandatory nights and weekends leave little personal time for any software developers -- especially commuters or employees with families.
Oh well, at least the team I'm on has a big enough title that when the royalties come in, we'll make a decent wage per hour, but if you're on a smaller title or working without royalties, you might make less per hour than a Walmart manager if you go into video games programming.
Seriously. If EA has violated a contract then take them to court, else what you're putting up with is what you agreed to.
Note that EA doesn't have trouble finding programmers willing to do this. Yeah, it's tough. Perhaps not a good choice for someone with a family, but it's not EA's responsibility to be a good company for the "family man". Their responsibility is to make money or go belly-up. The owners of the company who rake in the big bucks likely took huge risks at the outset and are reaping the benefits of them. Without taking such risks into account, you can't compare a hired, salaried employee to a higher-up. CEO's are often hired after the fact (though not always), and are in enough demand to warrant such a salary. It's important to the company to attract talent, and it's pretty clear that management talent is expensive.
Bottom line is that you dont have to take on a high-stress job if you don't want to. There are plenty of jobs that you can live moderately comfortably on that are not ridiculous out there. No you won't make as much as an EA programmer, but you won't have trouble eating.
The entire tone of the article presumes one entitlement after the other. Bottom line is that the CEO of EA has no obligation to his employees beyond the contract they'ce agreed to. Since there is no mention of a contract in this appeal, I'll assume that it's simply someone whining about them/their spouse's decisions.
In this economy it's not so easy to quit. Do you have a family ? Do you have kids ? It sounds as though you don't. But if you do, and you're self-employed, then shut the FSCK up, because your talking apples and oranges.
Maybe someday when you grow up, and have someone call you "Dad", it might just dawn on you what the reality of it is. Hopefully for the rest of us within Darwin's view of human development, that won't come to pass....SNIP...SNIP, another branch off the tree.
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the uneven division of blessings, while the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal division of misery."
and
"Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried."
-Winston Churchill
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
My suggestion: unionize. This may seem really out of place for professional programmers and engineers, but consider this. My father works as a financial reports reviewer for the SEC and his job is unionized. Before they had the union, people in his position were abused. Now, they have a great atmosphere, good pay, and wonderful hours. I know, it is weird, but isn't the point of a union to prevent abuses like the ones written about here?
SIGFAULT
I have a friend who works for EA here in Vancouver. He was in "crunch mode" for about two weeks, then they hit alpha, and he went back to his regular schedule.
This is in Canada, tho, and there are specific rules for high-tech industry and it does not exclude overtime.
Very few managers I've worked with actually code much. And frankly that is often for the better.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hey, I would have joined a union in a heartbeat when I was at EA. Wish someone had come calling. Union organizers, you are missing a big chance.
...it's all true.
I worked at EA Pacific (now part of EA LA) for 1.5 years as a lead programmer on Command & Conquer: Generals.
Those were, by far, the worst years of my professional life, and seriously damaged my mental health -- no joke. A year and a half later, I am still bitter.
EA expects outrageous working hours, on the order of 80-100 hour weeks, for months on end. If you desire to have absolutely, positively, no life whatsoever outside of work, and are willing to completely sacrifice your mental and physical health to be able to write games -- then by all means, go for it. (This is only partly a facetious comment, as I know people who are willing to make that sacrifice.)
Let's add to that the complete moral bankruptcy of the production staff. I was recruited there by a former friend (emphasis on former) to help revive the C&C franchise.... former versions had been fun, tongue-in-cheek wargames, but outrageous in many ways and clearly divorced from reality. The new version kind of stumbled around for a while... until shortly after Sept 11 2001, when suddenly the game shifted to be all about middle-eastern terrorism. The game was later promoted with the tagline, "Leaders in the modern world need to have a command of words... words like "Scud Missile", "Carpet Bombing", etc." (I asked m management who hired the sociopaths for our ad campaign, but somehow they didn't listen to me.) Oh, and then there was the mission in the game where your objective was to play the terrorist side, and use their anthrax-spewing tanks to kill 200 civilians (!). (This mission had to be cut at the last minute after the European offices rejected it as being certain to get a "Mature" rating. Yes, I had tried pointing out the... unsavory... nature of the mission months earlier.)
As soon as the product shipped, I quit, as did most of the development team. (That is, the ones who weren't fired for refusing to work 80-hour weeks, or for insisting on taking Christmas off. No, I am not making this up.) In hindsight, I should have quit much earlier; I only stayed on because I wanted my name in the credits, in case I wanted to work on other games in the future (thinking it would be good on my resume). The joke is on me, as there's really no way I ever want to work in that industy again.
While I was there, Fortune magazine listed EA as one of their top companies to work for. This was a particularly bad joke to everyone in our office, except that it wasn't very funny. When the CEO of EA sent an email to everyone in the company stating how proud he was of this, I forwarded it to my wife, who responded directly to him, stating that he should be ashamed, as she had hardly seen me for months, and the working conditions were abysmal. He (or more likely, one of his minions) responded that "sacrifices were necessary" to make great games. Sheez.
Shortly after I left EA, I happened to meet someone who has just started at EA-Maxis. I tried to diplomatically warn him that things could get unpleasant, but he reassured me that he knew what he was doing. One year later, he contacted me asking if my current employer was looking for help, as he had to quit -- similar conditions had destroyed his life (and cost him a girlfriend, as well).
Take this for what you will, but I cannot emphasize strongly enough: EA is, perhaps, an acceptable place for crazed workaholics in upper management... but for any other position in the company, no, no, no, no no.....
I regularly work 10-12 hour days. I make it a point of being in the office for a few hours every weekend. I am a professional, and in order to maintain professional standards, I must dedicate a large part of my life to working.
On the other hand, I don't work in a restrictive corporate environment. I get an annual bonus. No one tells me to be here from x a.m. until y p.m. I can take a 2 hour lunch on occasion. If I need to leave early, I can and do. If I need time off, I don't need to get approval, I just need to give ample notice. These are the unwritten percs of being a professional.
While I don't feel much sympathy for the amount of hours these people work (or for the stress it causes them and their families--everyone is in the same boat on this score), I do think they are being treated little better than mules. Even though these EA programmers might not be entitled to comp time, if comp time is the customary reward in the industry for dedicated work for long hours to meet project deadlines, then EA is screwing these people. If I didn't get a bonus, or the kind of freedom I've described (which is customary for employees with my experience in my industry), I'd feel ill-used and under-appreciated. And I'd probably find someplace that would treat me better. Sounds like that avenue might not be open to these programmers, though.
My advice: if you don't agree with EA practices, dont buy any of their products. Hit them where it hurts, and if they lay people off, you're doing those workers a favor anyhow.
That's practical advise, in a sense, because if their "brand" turns sour (like Gator), then EA shareholders are in trouble.
The impracticallity is that most of the market are too young to care or be informed about labour practices.
If EA is really breaking the law, then a lawyer should approach any EA employees for the purporses of a class action suit. That would get their attention, and maybe there'd be some real change.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
This is (albeit dated) from the head of Cerner, a software company which makes hospital software.
m =FN&actio n=m&board=4686968&tid=cern&sid=4686968&mid=142 26
.....
Link:
http://finance.messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.m
-----Original Message-----
From: Patterson,Neal
To: DL_ALL_MANAGERS;
Subject: MANAGEMENT DIRECTIVE: Week #10_01: Fix it or changes will be made
Importance: High
To the KC_based managers:
I have gone over the top. I have been making this point for over one year.
We are getting less than 40 hours of work from a large number of our KC-based EMPLOYEES.
The parking lot is sparsely used at 8AM; likewise at 5PM. As managers -- you either do
not know what your EMPLOYEES are doing; or YOU do not CARE. You have created
expectations on the work effort which allowed this to happen inside Cerner, creating a
very unhealthy environment. In either case, you have a problem and you will fix it or
I will replace you.
NEVER in my career have I allowed a team which worked for me to think they had a 40 hour
job. I have allowed YOU to create a culture which is permitting this. NO LONGER.
At the end of next week, I am plan to implement the following:
1. Closing of Associate Center to EMPLOYEES from 7:30AM to 6:30PM.
2. Implementing a hiring freeze for all KC based positions. It will require Cabinet
approval to hire someone into a KC based team. I chair our Cabinet.
3. Implementing a time clock system, requiring EMPLOYEES to 'punch in' and 'punch out'
to work. Any unapproved absences will be charged to the EMPLOYEES vacation.
4. We passed a Stock Purchase Program, allowing for the EMPLOYEE to purchase Cerner
stock at a 15% discount, at Friday's BOD meeting. Hell will freeze over before this
CEO implements ANOTHER EMPLOYEE benefit in this Culture.
5. Implement a 5% reduction of staff in KC.
6. I am tabling the promotions until I am convinced that the ones being promoted are
the solution, not the problem. If you are the problem, pack you bags.
I think this parental type action SUCKS. However, what you are doing, as managers,
with this company makes me SICK. It makes sick to have to write this directive.
I know I am painting with a broad brush and the majority of the KC based associates are
hard working, committed to Cerner success and committed to transforming health care. I
know the parking lot is not a great measurement for 'effort'. I know that 'results' is
what counts, not 'effort'. But I am through with the debate.
We have a big vision. It will require a big effort. Too many in KC are not making the
effort.
I want to hear from you. If you think I am wrong with any of this, please state your
case. If you have some ideas on how to fix this problem, let me hear those. I am very
curious how you think we got here. If you know team members who are the problem, let me
know. Please include (copy) Kynda in all of your replies.
I STRONGLY suggest that you call some 7AM, 6PM and Saturday AM team meetings with the
EMPLOYEES who work directly for you. Discuss this serious issue with your team. I
suggest that you call your first meeting -- tonight. Something is going to change.
I am giving you two weeks to fix this. My measurement will be the parking lot: it
should be substantially full at 7:30 AM and 6:30 PM. The pizza man should show up at
7:30 PM to feed the starving teams working late. The lot should be half full on
Saturday mornings. We have a lot of work to do. If you do not have enough to keep your
teams busy, let me know immediately.
Folks this is a management problem, not an EMPLOYEE problem. Congratulations, you are
management. You have the responsibility for our EMPLOYEES. I will hold you
accountable. You have allowed this to get to this state. You have two weeks. Tick,
tock.
Neal
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Cerner Corporation www.cerner.com
2800 Rockcreek Parkway; Kansas City, Missouri 64117
It's not about putting one person in charge of everybody else's life, but about making sure that the STATE (run, of course, by persons) takes care of those aspects of community organization usually left behind by self-improvement-seeking individuals. E.g. health care, education, human rights watch.
I don't have a sig.
Something is seriously wrong here.
I am not meaning to cast aspersions on people who play these games, but I have to ask if the total manhours with the associated damaged health etc. is an appropriate price to pay for a product that will a) sell some number of copies and will then become unavailable except for the used market b) will only run on a device that will itself no longer be sold in stores c) serves no real purpose other than consumers' temporary entertainment. Do the same number of people work as hard for as long to produce a movie? To write the software that can automatically land an Airbus in a rainstorm? To develop a chemo drug that's the first to target a particular kind of cancer?
How badly do we want these games, and at how low a price?
Having worked in the games industry for 6 years, I see a bigger issue being presented. Yes, some people read the EA Spouse open letter as a series of complaints, but having been in the industry myself, she is totally valid and 100% correct.
The attrocity of the situation is not that people have to work hard, but that the companies make no regrets and little compensation for scheduling them to work ridiculously long hours.
During my time at LucasArts, it was painfully obvious that the company created schedules that were totally impossible and would require the employees to work more than a reasonable work week.
On top of that, little, if any, comp time was ever provided, and the tools we worked with were so painfully antiquated that even upgrading them to current technologies would have brought the work week into more reasonable lengths.
The real issue is that LucasArts and EA are not the only ones who treat their employees and perma-temps this way. And it is downright disgraceful, evil, and illegal.
Saying that people should simply quit and go elsewhere is not dealing the problem of employee abuses.
Myself, I left LEC and have built my own business, but the past 4 years of that have been extremely difficult, given the economic situation.
Jory
This is the norm in game development. I doubt any developer out there even blinks an eye at this article, with the exception of George Broussard (at least it puts to rest why Duke is taking so long).
Seriously, I have always worked these hours in the game industry, and every person at every company I know, both independent and publisher owned, work them as well. There is nothing "eye opening" about this article. It's the way it is if you are a game developer. And yeah, all our spouses feel that way, but it's not like you can quit and go elsewhere unless you are willing to change the field you work in.
If it was any other job description you might think the husband was cheeting on the wife and the long hours were a lie, but obviously he's not president of the United States so we can trust him.
The best thing to do for programmers is just not work the required hours and let them get rid of you if they like it. A lot of programmers get in this mode where they think they're on a ship at sea or they can't stand the ego bruising associated with a death march. The fact is you don't have to obey crazy hours if you don't want to and a termination is a small material consequence compared to losing your standard of living or suffering brain damage.
The single solitary justification for crazy hours is maybe if you're trying for a management job somewhere else. Long hours in high risk startups are a requirement for anyone looking for eventual management jobs. Unless you consider EA a high risk startup you're probably wasting your time.
In California at least, where EA is based out of, the noncompete part of it is generally illegal and unenforcable for any period of time. It basically protects the company to the extent of, I could probably get nailed on it if I left EA while working on Need for Speed to go to Activision to make a functionally identical racing game. Other than that, they are not enforcable.
Disclaimer: I worked at EA for a few years as a programmer on sports titles. It was extremely consuming work.
I wonder if the claims of "abuse" aren't more than simply "expectations not met". The former is serious problem, and there may be laws or employment contracts to help you. The latter simply means you're working at the wrong job for you.
I see more than a few suggestions here to "just unionize" and I strongly disagree. We're talking about professionals. People who, by definition, are well educated, literate, capable of understanding and negotiating on their own. Engineers have their own professional society as support, as do many other professions. Programmers can join professional organizations such as IEEE or EFF for resources they may find helpful. Professional organizations are a far cry from unions, and thankfully, they don't generally promote union-style blocking of communication and empathy between management and workers.
Also, please consider that as more unionized programming shops and union-only projects are created in your country, more and more programming opportunities will be lost to nations where programmers are content to negotiate their own terms and work without unionized representation.
For me, personally, EA Sports was a really really exhausting place to work. The demands were very very high. The hours were all-consuming. No personal life during finalling. The salary was okay. I loved it for years and then moved on before burnout arrived. If you don't want that life, seek work elsewhere because I assure you that what you consider abusive, hundreds or thousands of other people consider a dream job. Nobody is being whipped, starved, or prevented from quitting. They're just working really really damn hard.
What I would do, if I were working there, would be to start a union. Either they fire me for it, and I get to collect unemployment and file a lawsuit against them, or I get a union going and make management deal with the consequences of their actions.
IT workers have been getting fucked over for quite awhile. Sooner or later, being bright and educated individuals, they will realize that they don't have to put up with abusive practices such as these.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The first step is for EA employees to sign representation cards. Those cards indicate an interest in being represented by TAG in collective bargaining.
When about half of the EA employees have signed rep cards, the company is required to hold a secret ballot election in which the everyone votes. If the majority vote yes, the company is required to bargain with the union.
There's a reason the most stable and successful studios in feature and TV animation have almost all been union. When we have our rights respected, we're more creative and productive. Unfortunately, company executives usually don't respect us unless they're forced to.
Call Steve Hulett at (818) 766-7151. He's the Guild's business agent, and he can meet with you, get you rep cards, and answer your questions. We've already gotten a smattering of rep cards from EA, but the problem is that most people in the games industry don't know about the Guild, and don't know what their rights are, so they stay silent.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
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.
One parallel I see to the videogame industry is the entertainment industry (meaning film and television). Workers get abused because there are 1000 people in line waiting to take existing jobs, so if you have a job you accept abuse. The difference is that there are strong unions protecting actors and behind the scenes workers. Videogame companies are not yet under that pressure of collective bargaining.
Take note, the days are numbered about when videogame company employees will get their due. EA is a California company. California has two things that are constant: a lot of lawyers and strong labor laws. An employee at EA who clearly documents all of this bogus stuff, gets an attorney to take it on contingency, and then obtains class action status for all EA employees is going to make Mr. Probst's $22 million in stock options look like pittance.
Think that is ridiculous? Ask Microsoft about their attempts to screw over "contractors" in the 80s and 90s. You can label someone whatever you want, but there are definitions for words and there are only so many changes you can make before people stop accepting those changes. In Microsoft's case, they lost their battle to call someone a contractor when the person was treated like an employee. Those people won their stock options.
Me? My wine glass is empty so I need to go now...but you've got to be impressed that a drunk person worked "pittance" into their slashdot post.
I have an interview with EA next Thursday. I can't wait to see the look in their eyes when I pull this one out on them. You want to work 12 hours a day for 7 days a week, get paid a minimal salary, and then be "turned-over" after 2 years...I'll point them to your alias.
There are any number of things that make that hard, but considering the unemployment in this country I would say #1 is the financial impact it would have. Many people can't just up and walk out on a job that sucks if they have bills to pay. EA is abusing it's employees plain and simple. And they have the employee right where they want them because they know that person needs to pay the bills.
;P
Another factor is that when you work twelve hours a day, seven days a week, it becomes nearly impossible to do a job search, update your resume, or do interviews. Without that ability, leaving one job for another one that treats you better and pays just as well is unattainable. If you want to work twelve hours days every day of the week and get paid the very minimum that EA is willing to offer for that kind of back breaking sacrifice you're more than welcome to pick up and move and apply for a job. Until you do that, you can shut the hell up motherfucker. Said with the best of intentions of course.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Perhaps inspired by ea_spouse Joe Straitiff weaves a personal story of what happened around him and his project prior to his dismissal. If this stuff doesnt make you cringe I dont know what will. And trust me folks, I work for EA, stuff like this does happen.
What's a sig? Pete Brubaker
This has been well verified, with the CEO actually saying that this was a "joke".. Shame no one told anyone else it was a joke.
a sp
yes, and Mr. Patterson is still the CEO..
http://www.cerner.com/aboutcerner/default.
First of all these hours are insane, voluntary or not. This practice ensures the end product is going to be utter crap, that everyone will leave if they can and that precious experience will go down the drain, ensuring that future products will be crap too. Now EA is also getting bad press.
This is terrible management practice.
Second of all I'm a bit sad of the "stop whingeing" reactions and general lack of empathy in this forum. There are reasons why there are labor laws and why they should be applied. In this instance EA is exposing itself to consumer backlash and possible lawsuits, hardly something smart. This reeks of 19th century mining company practices.
People shouldn't be forced to work long hours for extended periods of time, period. Some people might choose to do it if they are able and have the motivation in return for appreciable benefits, but to *force* people to work in this fashion for nothing invites very real negative effects such as poor health, divorces, possible violence, accidents in and out of the office, etc, all of which have costs for the entire society associated with them.
We know corporations have no morals and don't care about the above. This is precisely why labor laws exist and must be enforced.
A player from my old MMOG guild actually got a job as a dev for that same game... and proceeded to drop off the face of the earth.
He showed up just long enough to post this gem on the guild boards (in reply to a thread about a game bug)...
"I'm coding the UI, jackass.
I don't really need to understand the exact details of what the live team has been doing lately with gameplay balance in order to work on that.
I played the goddamn game for 4 years and ruined a pretty damn good relationship because of it. Then I got a job at [MMOG Company] and worked 100 hours a week for a YEAR. I slept at the office 4 or 5 nights a week. For the year and a half after that, I only worked 70 or 80 hours a week. I carpalled out my wrists and now I can't play PC games anymore.
I'm sorry that I'm not dedicated enough to [MMOG Company]'s products for you."
Sounds like a real pleasure cruise...
It's no wonder that the relationship between MMOG customers and devs is so toxic.
At least when you buy a copy of GTA:San Andreas or Madden 2005... you don't have to worry about some burnt out, mindfucked basketcase acting as your "Dungeonmaster."
I'm a lead programmer in a european independent games studio (about 100 employees), and while I'm very familiar with the extreme overwork stories, especially from the other side of the pond, my own experience is rather different. I have two children (aged 6 an 9) who I care for on an equal basis with my wife. We both have 36 hour contracts (each having an afternoon for the children).
Though in practice I work closer to 45-50 hours a week, I rarely spend more than the 36 hours at the office, the rest is done in the evenings at home. We shipped two games this year, both on schedule. The game I worked on even met every single milestone the publisher set, and has turned out to be a fair commercial succes. During the peak "crunch" time, I worked late (11pm) one day a week, all other days I would work 10am-6pm, plus a couple of hours in the evening when the kids were in bed. I also came in on about 5 saturdays, but that was it. Even this amount of very mild crunch time (by industry standards) put quite a bit of strain on my family life and mental well-being, but nothing that couldn't be fixed (meeting al our milestones also meant we were getting all of our milestone bonusses, which helped).
Things went a bit less smoothly on the other game, but even there the real crunch (working most saturdays and some sundays) was limited to the last 4 month of development. In my opinion, most of the difference can be attributed to better planning and management on the game I worked on. In my opinion, most of that overtime could still have been avoided, and was mainly caused by lack of focus and lack of experience of the team leads. We have since recognised this, and with improved planning and more people actually taking them seriously, I'm pretty confident we will be able to conclude our next projects with minimal crunch time.
Most importantly, none of this overwork was actually enforced by management. The _second_ anybody mentions mandatory saturdays, I'm back to a more cosy, if somewhat more boring, job in telecoms. And I'm not the only one; it would simply be inconceivable for management to request 80 hour weeks for any extended period of time. Now, this is still the games industry (I did take a pay cut when I got this job), and it still is very intense (I've had to put basically all my hobbies on hold for the past few years), but sofar I'm very happy with it. This goes for most of the people I work with, all of them love their work, and are more than willing to put in a bit of overwork to make the product better; just as long as the motivation and drive remains a positive one.
And finally, I am convinced that this really works; it simply doesn't make sense for a programmer to work more than 50 hours a week. Beyond that, his (yes, we hardly have any girls working in production) productivity just doesn't increase anymore. It comes down to a choice between two models:
1 - The simple one: make an unrealistic schedule (or none at all) and force/yell/scare everybody to work incredible hours for the duration of the project to try to meet the deadline, with little attention being paid to morale or sensible "proffesional" practices.
2 - The harder one: have competent management in place that takes scheduling seriously, pays lots of attention to the supporting professional aspects of software development (we have never thrown away our code-base at the end of a project, and although we aren't anywhere near what I would call "professional" software development, from what I've seen at other games companies we are still pretty far ahead), and try to use the inherent enthousiasm of the employees to maximum effect without wearing them down.
In pure economic terms, the two approaches might well work out the same, and if that's the case, I can see why a company as big as EA goes for the first approach, as it certainly is easier and more risk free, as long as you can keep your employees under enough pressure. But that doesn't mean it always has to be this way. It is still possible to have a pretty decent job i
If I wish to work somewhere that requires 80 hours a week, then I should be allowed to do so.
No, you should not. That is why most societies have established laws that govern what goes in a working environment.
Basicly, it comes down to resource efficiency, burnt out employees don't work very well. Instead they cost society/the company money when they need sick leave (or welfare in severe cases).
First problem is, you get an introductional boost in productivity in the first period of long hours work, but in the long run it is diminished below levels of what normal work hours would produce.
Second problem, the more severe, is manegement failing to make this connection. They can't see the very basic fact that overworked people don't work very well. "Huh? Too much work? But first five weeks of overtime increased production a lot. It's just you bastards getting lazy.".
Some country, or a large company, I think it was in france anyway, cut work time from 8 hours a day to 6. Lo and behold, production increased, workers were happier and sick leave were less than ever.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftem esse delendam
WAY back when (22 years ago) I worked for a mid sized electronics company that was playing overtime games with their electronics techs (same kind of games that are being played by EA). Well, I was with the company, oh, 6 months or so, when all the techs were called into the office. In the office was someone from the state labor relations board. It seems a couple of months BEFORE I started, someone had dropped a dime on the company to the state labor board. They didn't just fix the problem with that guys pay, but they went back something like 5 YEARS, and fixed EVERYONES pay, plus a penalty. They explained in the meeting what our rights were, gave us a phone number to call if there were any more problems, and watched our CEO had every one of us a check for what we were due
I'd say EA is skating on VERY thin ice - particularly with the clear $42/hr law in CA. If you get it to the right folks - they could end up owing all their developers back pay, with interest, and a penalty
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Some people are capable of working longer hours and, gasp, actually ENJOY that.
You are gasping because you can't believe what you are saying? Me neither. Seriously though, several people I know thought the same when they started their careers. Some got burnt out, some got sick and some quit in time. The human body/mind has its limits, the limits may vary, but 10 to 12 hours a day, five to six days a week is more than most can take for extended periods of time. You might be the exception, but then another problem will arise. Management will start using your long hours as an example for everyone to follow, which will hurt your coworkers not capable of the same.
The government has no right to tell anyone how long they may work.
So you say. I do not agree, and most goverments won't either. Using ideology for fact doesn't make it fact.
You want to work less? Fine, you do that.
I already do. I work 30 to 40 hours a week at times I see fit and make a decent living.
But let others who wish to work longer do so.
I am not in power to let people do this or do that, but I can argue against practices that I think is disadvantegous for society at large.
If working longer hours is hurting a company, then the free market will fix things by making that company less productive.
So you say. My guess is if working long hours is hurting a company, the company will solve it by letting the people hurt by the policy go when they can't cope with the workload any more. Replacing with new personel as they see fit. If they are working in a "glamorous" field like computer games, there is no shortage of willing fools. Again, it's a matter of ideology. I don't think "the free market" is a magic silver bullet.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftem esse delendam
By now, we've all read that cathartic LiveJournal entry (or the reposting here on slashdot) by an angry EA widow who has had her husband, her family life, and her own career co-opted by the hellish product development environment that has become the norm at Electronic Arts. Most of us in the business know, right down deep in our ulcers and migraines, exactly what she's talking about. Too many of us have been caught in "normal" development cycles that require overtime as a matter of course; and have been at the mercy of abusive managers who ratcheted us up to several months of 13-hour-a-day/7-day work weeks. Perversely, these managers always claim that this is what's required to make the schedule - and (the mendacity of this part is always breathtaking) to prevent our work hours from expanding even more in the future.
i ves/2004/11/11/643#more-643
These stories are nothing new to me. I spent my 20s living them - and my 30s figuring out how to avoid ever doing that again.
Let me begin by establishing my bona fides. I've been building software for more than 20 years. Fifteen of those years were in the games business; half of those years were spent at EA's Bay Area offices as an external developer and an employee. I've held just about every technical position from tool programmer to director of engineering. As a programmer I've worked by myself and on teams of almost a hundred engineers. As a manager at a Fortune 100 company (Adobe) and elsewhere, I ran teams of up to 25 people, working on up to five projects at once. I've managed multi-million dollar art-intensive games, single developers, and core technology teams responsible to as many as eight clients (all with different requirements and all on different shipping schedules). Over the course of my career, I've been "in charge" (i.e. the senior engineering or project manager) on more than a half-dozen published titles, and held up the technical direction or project management end on over two dozen more.
In all that time, for all those titles, no project I was in charge of has ever missed its ship date or overshot its budget.
Yet I absolutely refuse to work the kind of death march hours ea_spouse describes. And I have never, ever asked or allowed my employees to do so.
Her story - and others that have been shared in the industry-wide conversation that her post provoked - make it clear that EA's management believes, as a matter of institutional principle, that only way to make money at games software is to create tight schedules, and the only way to make a tight schedule is to work your employees harder.
Decades of software engineering research and best practices - and my own experience - prove conclusively that this belief is complete bullshit.
Read the rest at: http://enginesofmischief.com/blogs/ramblings/arch
What a jackass you are. The moronic opinions held by IT people, programmers and people like you about extreme overwork are proof that there's a difference between "training" and education.
That company is taking advantage of its employees fears and loyalties to destroy lives out of spite. Working people 80+ hours a week probably results in less work getting done than working 40 hour weeks anyway... these practices are about control & intimidation, not business.
The people running that company are living in a culture of fear and intimidation, where destroying marriages and turning 24 year olds into old men is a normal cost of business. That should not be acceptable in a civilized society.
Those people are empowered by idiots like you, who are too ignorant to see the forest for the trees or to give a shit about a fellow citizen and human being.
I'd venture to guess that you think that rape victims are assaulted because "they asked for it" too. Disgusting.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
"Yeah, there's a human side to business, and if you think your company is evil, then quit."
If you see Hitler coming to power and it scares you, don't lobby for a better government- move to Poland! Fucking whiner.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
As the management of Enron, Global Crossing and Worldcom have aptly demonstrated, the interests of corporate management do not always sync with the interests of the shareholders.
Nobody is shackled to their desk, but workers are mentally held down by fear, uncertainty and doubt.
These firms create an environment that makes the employee feel somewhat responsible for the situation that they are in. That's why $7/hr workers at Wal-Mart find themselves working inside of a locked store at 1AM for no pay.
I and maybe you possess skills that allow us to be mercenaries and move from job to job with little problem. The vast majority of people do not have that luxury and should not be subjected to coersive and manipulative treatment to feed their families.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK