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Electronic Arts Facing Possible Class Action Lawsuit
As a follow-up to yesterday's story about a frustrated EA employee's spouse, several readers wrote in to report that EA is now facing a possible class action lawsuit from disgruntled employees. Besides the Gamespot coverage, Kotaku has a discussion of it as well. To add to the "frustrated EA worker" momentum, a former employee named Joe Straitiff has posted about his experiences as well. From his post: "So I'm posting under my real name -- you have to stand up to this type of thing or it will continue. And every company will become EA so that can compete... Remember, you can't spell ExploitAtion without EA."
FORM A UNION It worked for GM workers who faced similar situations back in 1937. Stick together and they can't stop you...but then again, in this world where everybody is out for themselves, you've probably screwed.
I'm sure a lot of talented Eastern European, Indian, and Chinese developers wouldn't mind being exploited by EA.
Yes, but even in a right to work state, which is what you're referring to, firing an employee in a manner that appears to be retaliation for complaining about illegal working conditions is legally very risky. Federal law punishes employers for a number of labor law violations, such as overtime pay, and the punishment is much more severe when they try to retaliate against the complaining employee. Contrary to what many people believe, salaried employees are entitled to overtime in many situations. Only if they are truly in management, with direct reports and a certain amount of autonomy over their job situations, are they fully exempt from overtime. EA had better be careful if they want to avoid a nasty legal mess, and it may be too late for them.
While I don't have much against a free market, this is clearly abuse. We take skilled workers, and treat them like shit. People that are great programmers, talented minds, etc. We run them through the dirt and then don't even have the common courtesy to give them overtime.
My father is a construction worker. 5 or 6 years ago, his company started pulling the same thing. He would go in at 8am, and not get home until 10pm or 11pm each night. Sometimes on Saturdays. They did, however, get overtime.
A month of this went by. People were tired. They were cranky. Accidents happened at work all the time, usually involving equipment damage or damage to whatever they were working on. They just didn't get much done in a 14 hour day.
Thankfully, the management saw what was going on and when that job was completed later that month, everyone was given a big bonus, an apology, and promises that they weren't going to set their 'completion dates' that low again.
It was depressing to watch my dad come in, after a 12 or 14 hour day, eat, shower, and go to bed, knowing that in a few hours, he'd have to be right back at work for another 12 to 14 hours. It was barely worth it in my opinion, even with overtime.
EA's shit should be a warning to other companies of what not to do.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Last night I was scanning EA's site trying to find a contact address of some sort so I could ask them to publicly address the message from the employee's spouce. I never found an address, but a lawsuit is more likely to get a serious response anyhow.
EA was one of the best companies that made games for the C64. However, as a gamer, I would have no problem boycotting them now, until they start treating their human resources like people. I would assume this sort of thing is how they destroyed Origin Systems. In any case, I don't need games developed in a sweat shop.
From now on...I prefer contract working...If I had to go direct, I'd push for hourly pay...if you get caught in this salaried thing...they'll kill you.
I'm not a pro-union guy. They just seem to corrupt themselves, and start to operate only for their own benefit. You gotta be a good negotiator for yourself. I find that works best these days. You gotta look out for yourself, your company certainly is not.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The problem isn't (just) that EA was unfair to a lot of people in the past, it's that it continues to lie and manipulate new people into the same trap -- because as long as people ship a title before quitting, what does EA care? There are always more people who want to work there.
What EA is doing is illegal, and they are pursuing it as a deliberate and continuing policy. This isn't just a couple employees who are upset because they had a bad experience and want to win money with a lawsuit, and individual employees quitting won't change things, since that is already factored into EA's strategy.
I am the man with no sig!
Exempted Programmers in california are required $45/hr pay or higher. So EA is obviously paying above ~$94k a year. We aren't talking about low paid employees. I'm sure if they quit, EA would have no problems filling someone at the salary range.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Wrong.
At Walmart for example everyone is considered a manager which means they no longer get time and half after 40 hours a week.
Its also great since they can not fire more employee's and overwork the ones they have without penalty.
http://saveie6.com/
EA keeps bringing in new people by lying to them, and then running them into the ground.
As long as the consumers keep buying products from them and workers keep applying for their jobs, they have absolutely no incentives to quit their practice. Any geek gamers out there willing to boycott EA's products until they change their ways?
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
Even assuming your defeatest attitude is right, the workers are correct to exercise their rights. What's the point of having a job if it destroys your health and personal life? Not to mention the fact that the illegal and immoral practices the workers are just now fighting against result in (according to yesterday's article by an EA employee's spouse) 50% turnover, meaning the average worker has a 50-50 chance of leaving the company anyway. In short: the current conditions arn't tenable; ridding the US of such labour practices, either by offshoring or improvement, is necessary.
I am never going to buy their games ever again!
Oh wait, I use Linux...
StarTux
I used to work for the Mouse, and though the pay was low, they at least had good OT rules. Did I say good? Make that GREAT! For example, if you worked more than 8 hours on a shift, they gave you time and a half. Also, anything over 40 hours a week was time and a half. If you had shifts less than 8 hours apart, the second was time and a half. If you had 3 such shift, less than 8 hours between each, the thrid was double time! and any other following were too! I knew guys that were hourly for about $10-11/hour, and were pulling in 70k a year becasue they'd pull a really long week or two, and then take a week almost off. I never could do it, and they didn't force us to work me than maybe 50 hours a week unless we wanted to, but it was cool how their rules worked. And the free access to the parks... yum :)
William George
I've said it once, and I'll say it again:
The technology sector is ripe for unionization.
While I wouldn't expect ongoing litigation to be much of a distraction to them (that's why you hire lawyers), a negative ruling against them could be catastrophic. A court-ordered redesign of their personnel and software development practices would present a huge risk to keeping the pipeline of products flowing to the market. Even if they cleaned house and brought in new managers, it would take time to get things back up to speed.
In the fast-paced computer gaming world, a year or two lost to restructuring could leave them behind the competition for quite a while...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Anyone remember the deal with the Sonic on the Saturn game?
One guy ended up in hospital for over work on that game and it never saw the light of dawn let alone day.
Yet everyone whines when game X is delayed because they want it NOW!
Well maybe we should start showing these people (I'm looking at you Duke Nukem forever fans!), what people go through so we can get our 5 minutes of kicks.
I like muppets.
While I agree that the conditions imposed are/were arduous, and I myself have endured employment by an equally demanding employer, I'm curious about the rights of a salary worker to demand overtime. As much as we enjoy deriding doctors and lawyers, many of them work 80-90 hour weeks, albeit usually for substantially more money than the average programmer. If you agree to be paid on salary, and you agree that time worked in excess of 40 hours per week is acceptable when your employer deems necessary, then can you still complain that you have to work overtime without compensation? I guess I'm a little fuzzy on labor laws in the US.. Perhaps someone can elaborate.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
As long as the consumers keep buying products from them and workers keep applying for their jobs, they have absolutely no incentives to quit their practice.
Uh... they would have an incentive if they started getting sued left, right and centre.
If they were lying to employees, that would be (breaking) a verbal contract, right? (I am assuming the US allows verbal contracts, assuming they can be proven).
If one employee is lied to, they're going to have a hard time proving it. If it is happening repeatedly and systematically to many employees, the case against EA would become stronger.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Exactly. This is the basic thing which people refuse to see, because seeing it would be too horrible for them to contemplate:
In many industries, free enterprise is now dead.
The entry costs have risen far too high and the established businesses are so well-grounded that no new entrant has any hope of competing - or at least, they might have a slender hope, but nobody's going to invest the required amount on the basis of a slender hope.
Some argue that free enterprise exists as long as they have the "right" to start a business, or are "free" to do so. But the freedom to do something that is sure to fail and have negative consequences is not freedom at all. If it was, any US citizen would be "free" to shoot people, because they CAN pull the trigger on the gun; it's just a bad idea and will have negative consequences.
Socialism may have been a horrible failure but its final criticism of capitalism stands: that the capitalist process inevitably results in something like this happening eventually, and when it does the system basically becomes a socialism anyway except the corrupt people running it are a bunch of corporation heads instead of a government with accountability. So capitalism was never a sustainable choice: it was always socialism now or socialism later.
EA has a terrible reputation within the industry for treating it's people like shit.
Theres a HUGE difference between treating your employees like shit and literally robbing them of their compensation by annoucing towards the end of the project that their comp time for the overtime they've already put in is void.
Let the lawsuit go on. This goes beyond some "wah my life sucks" complaint, this is basically theft. If you could arrest a corporation, it should be thrown in jail to think about what its done.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Nope, under a libertarian society there would be so much extra money from the decreased taxation that the economy would be massive, with plenty of jobs for anyone who wanted one. That allows for the freedom to pick your employer. Also, corporate revenues would be much higher without paying 50% or more to tax, so they could afford to higher more people etc...
I'm not saying it would work out like that, but it sounds a damn site better than what we have now.
Also, if I wasn't paying 50% of my paycheck to taxes, I could afford to actually have a savings account to see me through periods of unemployment.
If I had 50k in the bank, I'd feel alot better about saying "screw this, I'm going to find something better".
Also products would be much cheaper with the lower taxes, we would see prices lowered, families able to live comforably on 30k per year etc...
Utopia? Thats the general idea.
Will never work you say?
It did once, way back when this country was first started.
What was it that caused the US to become the most powerful economic force in the world in under 100 years?
Legislation? Democracy?
No... it was a simple tenent that had never been tried before anywhere:
Hands off.
The libertarians aren't trying to do anything "new" or "radical". They are simply trying to get the nation to go back to a system that worked phenomenally well. It is proven. It works. There is no question. The fact that the US is the powerful nation that it is today is absolute proof of that.
Legislation and taxation and welfare states are what destroy nations time and time again. Again, history shows us this unequivicably. Rome to the USSR.
Concepts such as those that the Libertarians hold are the only thing that can save this nation, and save us from the types of abuses that you see going on at EA.
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
Understand that the USA isn't strictly a free market economy. There's entirely too much governmental meddling going on, some of it good, most of it bad. There are a hell of a lot of ways to abuse the system and get away with it, and few people know better ways to do it than fat cat PHBs who have been practicing it for decades.
The people hailing free market are right, it does work. It's just that the reality of the world's economy isn't strictly free market, so while the idea is a good one, the implementations leave a lot to be desired.
Their best bet in this case is a class action lawsuit (which they will easily win, because the kinds of abuse they are taking cannot be legally invalidated away by signing any number of waivers) and a tech labor union to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future.
The amount of sheer power an IT labor union would wield is terrifying to think about. Anyone who has worked in system administration and programming can testify to exactly how fragile computers and networks are, and how quickly they crumble without constant management. Take away that management for even a day and the company is taking a real risk that a single problem can sink them. Take it away for a week or two, and the network is gone. Oops. Good luck hiring replacements... any network of sufficient complexity requires a significant lead time to acclimate a newcomer, regardless of how good the documentation is (and docs are typically incomplete).
Yeah, a tech union would be a heavyweight. Now if someone can just figure out how to make it work where people shift jobs, careers, and states every few years... that's a tough decentralization problem.
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
To the authors of Excuse me sir, but could you please evolve?, Libertarianism at its worst, and the post beginning with uhm... you realize that not everyone has the luxuary of quitting a job.:
Do you expect to have the right to decide who you want to work for, and to leave one employer for another if, for instance, they offer more money or more desirable conditions?
If so, then why do you think that a business should not be able to choose who it will employ, and for what salary and under what conditions?
The freedom to choose your means of livelihood brings with it responsbility for your livelihood. No one is responsible for you but you.
Actually, I have another question: Why does it seem that lefties are more apt/willing to resort to really nasty, personal insults when characterizing their enemies? I don't see people calling you folks "animals" just because you espouse a hive/pack mentality rather than believing in individualism. Why is the reverse OK?
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
i worked for origin when it closed down and was offered a nice healthy raise and bonus to move out to redwood shores, and turned it down for just this reason. i won't say austin is perfect but it sure is more laid back...and EA is basically nuts.
for a gaming company, their corporate bio page has nothing but management graduates.
i don't find it surprising now.
I've worked 60 and 70 hour weeks in the game industry. It was fun, challenging, and rewarding. However I wasn't working for EA and I didn't have to deal with antagonistic, lying, demanding bosses.
Within the game developer's community it is well known that EA is Evil Co. I haven't worked there but I've talked to people who have. I'm glad to see their reputation catching up with them.
I hope the class action lawsuit goes through and EA has to pay out.
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
You got that right. From '93 to '98 I worked at Motorola. For some of you who don't remember, let me set the stage: the WWW was in its infancy. At the company, we had just gotten access to it, and we had Mosaic. Intranets didn't really exist yet,and I was actually on the team that helped create it in our department. (I actually got an award for it, which is kind of funny now) We were on Solaris servers, 10 users per server. So we each had "web space", and people created web pages. It was kind of cool because it was new, people were putting information out there for the whole department to use.
On my page, I had lots of work related stuff, but I also had a small collection of engineer jokes. Nothing dirty at all, just dork humor. And so it went for a few years. One day I was called into Human Resources, and my manager was there. Neither of us knew what was going on. It turned out I was being written up for using corporate resources for non work related activities. My manager stood behind me, and fought for me. He explained that my web page was internal, and that it had mostly work related things on it. There was nothing offensive on it. As it turned out, some other people in the company had discovered the intranet, and found my jokes. They were looking at them, and their supervisor got pissed because they were goofing off. So they called HR. I wasn't even informed, and asked to take the material down, and neither was my manager. I was just written up for it, and it was considered a serious infraction. All we were able to do was argue it down from a class 1 infraction to a class 2. That meant that one more infraction could result in termination. I got a little livid with the HR person, and asked her if she had ever used her email for something non-work related, even saying hi to a family member. She didn't want to answer me, and I pressed her and kept asking. She finally admitted that she had. I asked if she was going to write herself up, and my manager stepped in at that point and ended the meeting.
I left Motorola about 3 months later. There were other factors, but I have to admit that the HR interaction helped me to realize that I didn't want to be there anymore.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Now mind you, my management team is not in the U.S. ... hmmmm...
Just don't buy EA sports games. They have a marketing lock on the video game industries. Their sports games overall don't compared to Sega ESPN games in cost or quality. The only reason why Madden is a success is the 15+ years of football game monopoly. They are slipping away every year.
EA's best games coame from small-mid size company acquisitions. Electronic Arts themselves are just martketers. Like SCO is to lawyers. The real product comes some where else, and the company is just abusing the hell out of all the developers with their over-achieving marketing tactics.
It's true, American work more hours and get less vacation time than other industrialized nation--two weeks less than the Japanese.
A non-scientific analysis of how fewer work hours might not be as bad for productivity as we thought can be found here. (note: this link is only authoritative for those who view interesting thing of the day as having authority).
I'd suggest you don't use Slashdot as your only news source, or you will suffer permanent brain damage.
Actually, yes, it's even more expensive in this part of California (I am typing in Redwood Shores at the moment) than in Manhattan.
Gas, which is required because we're not on a small island, is ~$2.50/gal (50 cents more than the national average), and the typical house price here tops $800,000. We're not talking about mansions; most of these sub-million-dollar "houses" are condos. A $4,000/month mortgage payment is typical. $100,000+ is not the extreme salary it sounds like. (Knowing the industry and the area, I doubt he made much more than $100,000, muchless $999,999.)
No, no one's forcing us to live here, but this is where the work is.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
I've been writing software for fifteen years, and games for ten. I've worked on a major 3D game title (albeit not in the critical path to development) and have voluntarily stayed at my desk for 12-18 hours a day, seven days a week, for 2-3 months at a stretch. I am no stranger to hard work.
But my game development time was spent in a small team, three coders and two artists, funded out of our own pockets and creating our own 3D engine from scratch.
Game programming is not special. It's not fundamentally different from any other area of software design. Do you intend to claim that 80-hour work weeks are the norm in the game programming industry? I have half a dozen friends working at variously-sized game development houses in the bay area who will dispute that claim.
If EA is so mismanaged, and their employees so underproductive, that they are throwing their teams into 85-hour-work-week crunch mode for upwards of HALF the project's development time, then there is something very, very wrong at EA. They need to come up with more realistic schedules for their projects, or find more productive coders, or find managers who have a clue about software design, or learn to reuse code, or SOMETHING.
OTOH, it sounds to me like EA is WELL managed. They've cottoned to the idea that more productive teams means smaller teams and a shorter development cycle. By setting aggressive schedules, they're insisting on a level of productivity from their employees that is unattainable to the employee of average skill and intelligence. So they ramp the hours up, ever more, in order to fit the overly-aggressive schedule they've devised.
Now, if there is no incentive against EA -- or any company -- employing such a practice, why don't all of our employers go that route? How would you like to live in a world where every job keeps you at the desk from 8am to 10pm, seven days a week? If all employers have been obliged to adopt the same grueling labor practices in order to compete, then you no longer CAN leave your job -- any other job you find, will be just as bad.
The problem with letting the market do what it will is this: optimal efficiency is achieved through destructive means. The greatest profit can be had by he who is able to create the most externalities and therefore seat others with the cost of his operations, while taking the gains for himself. This is true in the mining industry, it's true in the petroleum industry, and it's true in the software industry. If you don't impose SOME regulation, then a rational entity will always choose to maximize its own gain regardless of others' losses.
The goal of labor legislation should be the same as the goal of environmental legislation: to close the loop, to provide a feedback path that curbs the number and magnitude of the externalities that businesses can create, and holds them accountable for the negative consequences of their actions in situations where they are not already fiscally responsible for those consequences.
That one of the big problems in game development is the stranglehold that the big 3 have on the consoles. It looks like their certification process is long and expensive, and might be truly arduous for a smaller company, with a good game, to pass. So you need to be part of a larger development house if you want to release games for the consoles...
What if some of these disgruntled software engineers team up with some hardware engineers and come up with a more open x-box like console. I'd guess that it would have to be more expensive than MS's, but that the games could sell for a little bit less. (Make a profit on everything, rather than having the console as a loss leader for the games.)
You'd still have a certification process - you want quality games - but it would be "at cost", with the theory being that you want to entice as many talented developers to develop for your console as possible. And you wouldn't discourage "non-certified" games, you'd just make it known that they haven't been tested, and they can't put your trademark on the game to certify it passes the quality measurement.
And you'd purposefully tout it's open and programmable - with free tools - interface as features of the console - again, trying to get as many developers working for the console as possible. (Rather than needing an expensive developers kit to develop with.)
You'd probably need to use BSD or Linux as the operating system to keep costs to a minimum. You'd need to convince N-videa, ATI, or one of the up-and-coming 3D card manufacturers to open source their video card drivers...there would be a few other licencing hurdles to leap - like the DVD and/or blue ray one.
You MIGHT even want to come up with some form of online service, similar to MS's. You pay one monthly bill. You get access to all the games that have an online component. I'd imagine patches and other "large" things like demos and what not could have a bittorrent download - build into the console, the trickiest thing would be building a quality network that doesn't get bogged down...
Or maybe this is all a pipe-dream and there is no competing with the large corporations and their marketing expertise...
True... a few years ago this factor got Scott Adams accused of being a (possibly unwitting) tool of "The Man". The guy's point was that, since Dilbert hit the scene, a lot of energy that disgruntled workers might have spent organizing, fighting for change, or storming the executive offices with torches and pitchforks got redirected into simply making fun of the evil practices, and sighing "it's like this everywhere; what can you do?"
(from parent):
Executives that I have seen tend to work a lot - it's a dirtier job than many realize. You're expected to be married to the company. However, they do also have incentive, in that they actually have a chance to cash in on this.In my opinion, the best place (as a grunt) to draw the line is at the standard, 40 hours. If it can't get done in 40 hours, it doesn't need to get done. So far (for some reason) I have yet to get fired for holding this viewpoint. Try it! Just like the vague promises of rewards are unlikely to materialize, so are the vague threats against job security. It's not like you'll actually have better job security if you bust your butt. Really.
So let's name some names of the EA managers and executives who are dishing it out. The following are my opinions. If you don't agree, then tell me what you think and let's debate. If you've worked for EA, please post your own opinions about these and other people who you think are responsible for fucking up.
I'm extremely disappointed with how Lucy Bradshaw ran Maxis into the ground as General Manager. In public and in person, she appears to have a very nice agreeable personality. But she has consistently dropped balls, strung people along, made promises she had no intention of keeping, ignored phone messages and emails and attempts to contact her through her administrative assistant, claimed memory lapses in spite of repeated reminders and follow-ups. Lucy Bradshaw gets an F- for communication.
If Lucy reads this, she might be able to figure out who I am, because she knows the sordid history of what she's failed to do, since I've told her what I think, although she won't acknowledge she did anything wrong. She just ignores anything she chooses to, and pretends the communication never happened whenever convenient. I'm quite disappointed in Lucy Bradshaw, and she knows it.
I have mixed feelings about Luc Barthelet. He's brilliant and has tried to do some great stuff, but in the long run he just makes promises to employees and fans he has no way to keep, and doesn't follow through with what he says he will do. He talks the talk, but only walks the first few easy steps of the walk, which is better than some, but certainly not what anyone would expect from someone in his position. I could understand if he were a lowly engineer, but as vice president he should use his responsibility to make good on all his promises, instead of just making more promises he can't keep.
Also, Luc has a charming way of doing the end-run around managers and dropping in on the engineers, then dumping a bunch of work in their lap that he would like them to do for him. When a vice president of the company stops by your cube and asks you to do something, you're compelled to do it, even if your manager would rather you work on more important stuff, and HR would rather fire you for not doing exactly what your manager told you to do, because you're also working on Luc's tasks. The jilted managers who were left out of the loop don't give you any credit for doing favors for Luc, and Luc gets disappointed with you if you don't prioritize his latest whims, yet takes credit for anything you do that he suggests, even if somebody else already thought of the obvious idea years ago. Luc is not as original as he thinks he is, because of his position people humor him and pretend he's the one with all the great original ideas, even when he's just parroting something Will Wright said three years before. So if Luc drops in at your cube with some suggestions, you're fucked no matter what you do.
Luc is a dilettante. He should be teaching academic classes at some technical university instead of running a game company. He likes to do the fun easy part, and make grandious promises, and pretend to be a user advocate, but he won't put in the hard hours, stick around for the long grind, or stand up for the fans and players when it really counts. He would rather tell people what to do without taking any the responsibility of leadership. Like an Enron executive, he prefers to have a chauffeur drive him to work while he dabbles on his laptop in Mathematica, but he doesn't like to actually do any work once he gets there. It's all just a big social game to him. Although I must admit Luc was very effective at play testing The Sims, because all it required was playing games all day, bitching about bugs, and making outrageous feature requests. But any 15-year-old kid could fill that job, and live like a king on a 10th of Luc's salary. I once had hope that Luc would knock some heads togethe
The hell they don't! If managers didn't do anything, then they wouldn't exist. Maybe you can't decipher what it is they do, but that doesn't mean their contribution is worthless.
Managers are extremely important in that they can take a more high-level view of activities, make stategic (not tactical) decisions, ensure important work gets done, set priorities, etc. Their jobs are just different than yours.
btw...I agree with the "over worked" premise that the former EA employees have presented. The problem is that this is a society issue and not one that is specific to EA. I've been studying the "over worked American" for a couple years and I can tell you that the issue is not exclusive to the IT or gaming industries. As long as we Americans strive to live in excess we will work in excess.
There is much truth in this. The happiest, most content people I've met were near-homeless, lived check to check and had next to nothing in material wealth. The reason they were happy was because they didn't want anything more. At the risk of sounding Marxist, the consumerist BUY IT NOW society plays right into the exploiters' hands.
Don't unions collectively bargain for pay rates? Yes they do.
Unions protect the employees by making employee termination much more difficult to the employer. Again it depends on what is negotiated. My boss shouldn't be able to fire me for the wrong reasons. Public safety concerns are is one of the right reasons to fire someone. Even if there are union rules to require a process before firing someone, if there is a real safety concern then someone can be taken off the job until an investigation can be completed. It makes a little bit more work in 1% of firings.
Unions typically prohibit companies from hiring non-union employees. Yes, unions frequently make paying union dues a condition of employment -- which is fair since you are benefiting from the pay, working conditions and medical insurance that the union has fought for. You should also view this as requiring a minimum level of competency -- since many professions are not adequately regulated by the government, it is important to make sure that endanger people on the job. Whether you're pouring a concrete foundation or dispensing drugs, mistakes can kill.
Unions see overtime as potential for another worker rather than an opportunity for current union members to pick up additional income. That's not true for many unions. Nurses regularly work overtime. The unions help make sure that not working overtime is an choice. What is far more common is for companies to replace one full-time worker with two part-timers so they don't have to pay benefits.
I'd like to share a few stories... I used to work for a software consulting company that specialized in the telecom industry. When the telcos hit hard times a couple of years ago, we suddenly had a lot less projects. Of course there were layoffs and pay cuts. Then we caught a break. We had a telco partner who had a relationship with a large cell phone company. We wrote a small client-server app for them, so people could get account usage, etc. directly on their phone over HTTP. Soon we landed a deal to do a game for this company.
It wasn't long before we had many more games projects than telco projects. Of course they paid way less than the telco projects, but could be cranked out quickly. We split the company into two divisions, mobile and telco. We hired a guy with experience in the game industry to run the mobile division. We started bringing in all the usual types you need for games beyond just programmers, like artists and producers. Meanwhile our telco division survived the tough times, and about two years ago started to turn things around.
Everything seemed really great for our company, but there was trouble on the horizon. I started to notice a huge turnover in our mobile division. People were constantly leaving and being replaced with new people. I sat down and talked with one of my colleagues who used to work with me on telco projects, but now was a technical lead for games. He explained to me the game programming culture.
First I should talk about the programming culture I was used to. I think it was pretty typical for software: people worked pretty much whatever hours they needed to work, as long as they got their work done and were available for necesarry meetings. I managed several programmers, and I had one who would usually be in around 11 AM and work until about 8 PM. I had another who was in around 8 AM and would work until 6 PM. People usually worked longer hours near milestones, such as releases, customer demos, etc. If somebody got behind on their work for whatever reason, it was up to them to get back on track. That might mean long hours, or weekends, or whatever.
The game culture seemed to be much different. People tended to work very long hours, often there until after 10 PM on most nights, and often on weekends. They also tended to be much younger programmers, typically straight out of college. Most of our telco programmers were much more experienced. Not surprisingly, the game programmers were poorly paid. I would estimate that our telco programmers were paid about 40% higher than our game programmers. So our game director had a very simple system. Hire young programmers. Pay them very little. Work them incredibly hard until they burn out. Repeat.
And it worked. Our game division was and is very succesful. Our telco division grew as well. At some point, the president of our company must have compared the two divisions and decided that what worked for one would work for the other. We had several new projects last year and were severely undermanned for the projects. New people were hired for them, but they were young and inexperienced. Problems arose and the more senior people took up the slack because of professional pride. Things shipped on time, profits swelled. New projects were added, and the same pattern became apparent. So what happened? All three of our tech leads resigned within a month, after being with the company for five years on average. The president of the company tried to replace the technical leadeship, but after trying for a month or so, instead shut down the telco division to concentrate on games.
Is there a moral to the story or even a point? I don't know. I thought that the game programming culture that I witnessed was crazy and unsustainable. Then I read about this EA business, and it sounds like it is indeed sustainable. Of course offshoring is a big fear here in Silicon Valley, but it looks like game programmers have little to worry about. Their work winds up being very cheap when you look at the amount of money they earn compared to the number of hours they work. Will more sophisticated gaming systems require more skilled game programmers that will command more money? I don't know enough about game programming to say. I'm just glad I'm not a game programmer.
Buy more! Don't worry about the cost, just use this card! Don't worry about those credit card bills, just refinance your house! Don't worry about that mortgage payment, just work more! The 50" plasma screen is worth it! Trust us! ...and so on...
Our standard of living has increased, but at what cost? We can get dvd players for $30, but you have to buy a new one every six months. Would it possibly be better to pay twice or three times that but have something that lasts? What about the jobs that had to be sent overseas to make that player so cheap? Would we be better off paying a little more yet having fewer unemployed?Hard to say, there's lot of variables, but it seems to me that noone in any kind of position of power is even looking at these questions. Everyone is stuck in short term thinking.
Gotta get the numbers up for the next quarterly report, worry about the long term later. Problem is, later never comes. There's always another market cycle to optimise.Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
Don't get me wrong, unions on the whole have done a lot to improve everyone's working lives that could never have happened without them. However, do you aspire to information work that is akin to factory work, or construction, or truck driving? That's what an IT workers' union will turn our budding profession into.
I personally want to see our gig rise to the level of doctor, lawyer, professor, etc. I want to do meaningful, creative work. Not cookie-cutter, templatized, stoop-labor.
If you never make mistakes, it's probably because you're not doing anything.
The solution lies somewhere in the middle: labour involvement in management. The "Union Rep" is actually a member of upper management, how communicates the state of the company accurately to the employees, and carries grievances right to the upper levels of management, and the Board of Directors. Lack of involvement breeds apathy. Eventually you have a business staffed by noobs who don't know what the fuck they are doing, or by burned out veterans who do but couldn't care less. Any company who manages the balance between employee and company needs will do better than EA. The problem is, there were almost none out there in the early days of game development. I worked for one of the oldest game companies in the world before they went down, and it was obvious that they were even more incompetent than EA. The early companies crunched and gouged their people to make their start, and kept on doing it. Others just didn't have the urge to build an empire like EA. Now EA is too big to break easily, and it uses that clout to break up better companies before they can become large enough to be a threat.
Unfortunately, you can hear this same tune in virtually every industry now. Wal-Mart, for example, will open a store in a neighborhood and slash prices to the point that even they don't make any money on it. Once all the local retailers have gone bankrupt, they close the store, having a proviso on the original lease that the space cannot be rented out for retail purposes for a decade or two. The huge box stands empty (there is almost nothing else you can do with it), the contractor who built it loses his shirt, everyone is forced to go to the Wal-Mart across town, which now sells its goods at regular or inflated prices, because it no longer has any competition. And thousands of people are thrown out of work--or forced to work at Wal-Mart for low pay, because the job situation is so desparate. So the behaviour of a company like EA should come as no surprise--it amounts to pretty much the same thing.
First, to address your concerns about managers with large mortgage payments, golf outings, and office sex on fine Italian leather, well...it really is hard to mask your jealousy. If you're jealous, say so. But it seems to me that all these statements are drawn from stereotypes, and very few actual experiences.
Let me explain something to you about management that will address your ridiculous comment about how we don't need managers.
Large numbers of employees don't organize themselves, and when they do, there tends to be leaders that rise the top and direct everybody. Guess what these people are called? MANAGERS! They come in all different shapes and forms, and while I don't disagree there are some truly horrendous examples (especially at EA), management is absolutely crucial for business. People need to handle HR, finance, shareholders, customers, distributors, marketing, etc. And while I'm sure you think marketers are "t3h evil" and that a CEO just spends his days galavanting around the country in his lear jet, you obviously have no real understanding of business otherwise you would recognize how necessary it is to have marketers to make your product that you slave over sell, or how necessary it is to have a charismatic public face to address the media, shareholders, and customers when the shit hits the fan.
But aside from your obvious jealousy (although based on false notions of what management actually does), and your complete lack of knowledge of what makes a business work, what irks me the most about your post is that you think you are a better person than the people above you. Ever wonder why there's such a disconnect between management and programmers? I'll give you a hint, its not just because some managers don't give respect to programmers. It works both ways you know. You reap what you sow.
Mods, this is not flamebait, this post is addressing a common misconception around here about management and what they do. I'm sure every manager on here read the parent and just wanted to fire him. I know if I had someone working for me with that attitude (assuming I'm adulterous, irresponsible, and don't do work) well, they'd be gone the second I found out about it.
Get off your bloody high horse and realize that a good portion of management works just as hard as you do. They just do it in different ways. Pissed off that they golf too much? Bet you didn't know that they were doing all that golfing just to win over a venture capitalist to get more funding for your project, or that they don't even like golf.
Remember folks, the grass is always greener, and you always remember the bad as opposed to the good, and in this case EA is definitely guilty as charged, but for the love of god, this stereotype of management has got to go. I mean, you don't like it when they stereotype programmers right? Two wrongs don't make a right.
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It turns out we were both right and both wrong. Although both youth and middle-age suicides are bad and getting worse, the highest number comes from the elderly, which is surprising considering they are only 19% of the population (2004 statistics)
Anyways, an excerpt on the youth rates:
"The latest NPA data confirm that suicide by elementary- and middle-school students is a serious social problem. The suicide rate for this group rose by a massive 57.6%, representing a total of 93 innocent lives lost, 34 more than in 2002. Among high-school students there was also a sharp rise of 29.3%. In total, 225 young lives were lost in this category. There was also an increase in the number of college students killing themselves. The overall suicide rate among people aged 19 or younger rose by 22%."
And generally:
"Based on provisional data for 2003, Japanese male and female suicide rates per 100,000 people are now roughly 40.2 for men and 14.9 for women, approaching levels normally witnessed in countries suffering severe economic hardships such as Russia, Latvia or Lithuania."
Anyways, here's another source for more up to date statistics.
Actually, its mostly in the commercial sector... I work for a military contract, close to the customer, and I have reasonable hours... the customer even cares about my health. Work far away from the military's sight, and it's a different story...
Now, when I worked for a commercial company that will not be named, employees only got pregnant when the went back to India, because that is the only time they got to sleep with their spouses... (as for us Americans, well...)