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A College Guide to EA
DesiVideoGamer writes "With all the recent news about EA, one of the professors at Carnegie Mellon University is giving a talk about EA after he visited the company for a semester. He also published a white paper about EA and what college grads should know about it. (pdf format) The paper talks a lot about the culture at EA and could indirectly explain the previous stories covered by Slashdot."
Its one company I would never work from the sounds of management over there.
http://saveie6.com/
The saddest part is, nothing's gonna change anytime soon. The same people that boycott Nike and Walmart won't buy, but nobody else will give a damn.
EA is there to make money, not take care of people. If they are treating their employees poorly who cares? If the game is good I'll buy it, if it's not I won't.
If the employees are treated poorly they should quit. That's how capitalism works, if all the good employees quit, or start demanding more and more money to make up for the poor working environment then EA will see that it's policies are not best for the bottom line and they will change. But why is everyone else up in arms? Let the employees and their employer deal with it as they should.
...blah blah blah. You know it's going to happen. The only question is whether SCO's legal counsel be heading up the lawsuit.
hmmm.. how many Desis are in EA?
I'm shocked they haven't responded yet.
And there's also an E and an A in Flamebait!
I suppose colleges are getting funky with their subject matter -- as there are topics covered that make little sense to me. A course in American Idol, for one. At least it's a just a talk and not an entire course.
On the other hand, it may be a decent business-oriented class to follow a relatively successful biz to see the things they got right/wrong along the way. Like a case-study in business...and people can even choose which ones they wish to follow with courses in EA, IBM, MS, GOOG, and maybe one that Aaron Spelling dude.
Let the corporate bosses with their lawyers and cash reserves slug it out with the plebs with their...uh...
Salary.... That's a big word and it's not there.
As a typical slashdot poster, I'm not supposed to have to even read the primary link before I spout off in the comments section. The submitter does the readin', I do the commentin'. That's tradition. Ergo I find it very disturbing when I can't even fathom what the summary's about without following secondary links. That's just unacceptable, pardner.
Gotta love moderators.
"We grind employees until they quit" becomes "mediocre performers are not tolerated".
"We force everyone to work insane hours whether they like it or not" becomes "employees work long hours because they love the company".
What a fucking mistake. Back to filtering out the 0-level AC's and trolls. Has anyone actually read the fucking article? Has anyone read the first fucking page of the fucking article? What do I see in the first fucking 20 posts? EA had it coming and /. has something against EA! The fucking article, if you had even skimmed the first page, is relatively positive towards EA; saying in essence that:
1, they are huge and run a tight ship
2. most people there are pretty enthused about their job
and 3. EA fucking approved the goddamn article.
Read, you motherfuckers, READ!!!!!!!!!
I don't know about EA personally but I know when the company I worked for hired management from there things went down the tubes big time. Instead of having crunch at the end of the project they schedule monthly "little" crunches. The future of the project rides on blah blah blah we're not shipping for 2 years but crunch now anyhow blah blah blah.
So, the paper says that EA is going to staff itself with 75% new grads - that figures, as nobody else will work there, what with the current situation.
Some of the statemetns are laughable, though - rigid meritocracy? EA is strong in its management of people? People work long hours out of dedication? And here I thought it'd be an expose, or at least somewhat cynical...
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I have mod points to spare, so I'd rather have your discussion than your points.
I think one of the most insightful quotes in the whole read (which was absolutely fascinating by the way because of how neutral it tried to be) was this:
The video game business is very time sensitive; many titles are timed to ship in time for Christmas sales, sports titles are tied to the season opening of sports, and movie titles must release in time frames corresponding to the movies. Making an outstanding game, but delivering it late, is not as profitable as making an acceptable quality game on time. EAers talk about "maximum on-time quality."
I think that about sums up the business of making video games. Remember guys, they'd love a great game, but in the end, they don't really care as long as they get it out on time. Another interesting quote was:
"EA veterans say that the major reason games ship late is due to a lack of focus in the design vision: "games are usually late because the development team doesn't know what it is building."
While I'm all for encouraging small game developers and publishers to grow because more competition is good, I think this illustrates that there is a point when you become too large as a company to effectively produce games.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I'm one of those people who boycott Nike and Walmart and I'll probably boycott EA too.
In fact, you've almost convinced me to start pirating EA's games.
http://nyamenation.org/
Yeah, that is how capitalism works, and poor treatment of workers shouldn't be tolerated (by the consumers, or by the workers). But if you need a job, and jobs are hard to find, what do you do?
Back in the Old Days(TM) there were groups called Unions, groups of workers who decided they had been fucked by the bosses for long enough, and it was time to get some fairness.
People in my country fought and died for a fair go in the workplace, but recent government policy involving workplace agreements and enterprise bargaining have severely damaged the rights of workers.
If they are treating their employees poorly who cares?
That kind of attitude is exactly why those in power are able to continue exploiting people in the third world (and the second, and the first).
Hire only single, no-life, no-experience kids, who still believe that having more money than anybody else is the be-all-and-end-all of existence and will get them laid whenever they feel like it. Work yourselves into an early grave (with a very expensive funeral, with all the best trimmings).
Otherwise just shut the fuck up.
Just a recent EA story from me.
I've been looking for work, and I ended up at the EA website. I'm available for the next year, and they had a one year contract position in my area of expertise, so I applied. I didn't hear back from them for about a month. Then I got a call from EA for a "phone interview." We start going throught the questions, and they don't apply to the position that I applied for. They were all, "what part of the game do you want to make," and my response was "I didn't apply for a game development job" every time (I also provided answers that were related to what I really applied for). I eventually asked if she was calling in response to the job that I applied to. She said that EA was calling all "new grads" to find out about them, and that she didn't know about the job that I had applied to. Thanks for wasting my time EA, I'm obviously not a serious candidate to you.
The article states, on the first page, that EA is a huge company, bigger than Apple and Pixar combined. Then procceeds to give numbers, anual revenues of $3 Billion and Market Cap of 15 Billion. Uh-uh. Apple has an annual revenue of over 10 Billion, and market cap of 21 Billion.
See: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=AAPL
Considering the blatant lack of facts in such easy to check information, I'd take what the rest of the article says with a big grain of salt.
Article gets posted at 3.57 PM. Half an hour later, already 40 posts... Come on guys, it's a 26 page article.
http://chris-low.dyndns.org:6969/torrents/PauschAc ademicsFieldGuideToEA.pdf.torrent?ADAA8F351E795039 6A6FC2B3D7AF1C785533D3BF
Utilizing magnetic schemata since
If they are treating their employees poorly who cares?
Mmmmmm....libertarianism at it's best.
How about the fact that they are breaking the law by improperly classifying employees as exempt and therefore not paying them their due overtime? Is that acceptable to you?
How about the fact that this is getting so much press because in the free market - people also have free speech. No one's talking about burning down EA's headquarters - but we are talking about taking action. Boycotts, Letters to editors, Letters to company chiefs. It always pains me to see someone give the free market argument yet completely miss the free speech one.
You say if the company is treating their employees poorly that their employees should act. It appears that that's exactly what's happening.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
I know a lot of girls that work in the fashion industry. Fashion is a lot like games: considered very cool and desirable industry to work in, no matter how crappy the working conditions or salary are. There will always be a new crop of suckers to hire for shit wages and to squeeze free overtime from.
Do you work for EA's Ministry of Truth?
Personally after reading Pausch's document, it reads like he hasn't personally experienced working at EA, although under a residency, he doesn't seem to have experienced the same working conditions as the staff have mentioned (also as the class action might suggest). Although Pausch refers to the fact some staff are well rewarded and are 'vested', so do not have to work for the money, I think he wrongly jumps to the conclusion that all staff can reach this stage.
It is likely the staff are all paid on various levels and this is probably a large influence on them being vested and also to the level they are rewarded (this is quite obvious and its a shame Pausch overlooked this). Although he notes that "Anyone who has been at EA long enough and in a high enough capacity probably
doesn't need to work for the money, and they are called, "volunteers."", he concludes that people who stay there are still passionate about making games, yet doesn't expand on rewards to developers who are not in a "high enough capacity".
Although Pausch draws attention to the deadline issue repeatedly, he does not expand upon this and its naegative effects, I can only imagine the employees were presented to his as driven individuals and he himself did not match his working hours to experience the same kind of culture. Also I believe he did not look closely into the hours/length of time spent by staff. Nor did he look too closely at rewards based on overtime. This may have been negligence on his part (on behalf of his students) or EA may have misinformed him.
Personally i'd rather read stuff that comes from EA, even if its not people that really are EA. It at least sounds more honest, rather than PC stuff.
Wonder if he gets a finders fee per student.
IANAEAD
"Ea has stated the goal of filling up to 75% of open positions directly from universities"
Hmm, in wake of the recent outburst of events, I think the motivation for this move is clear.
That prof will be really happy to know how they used him (as naive as he appears) to lure people into their company to fuel their venture for more profit by cutting the amount of experienced workers who would actually have a leaverage on them.
some real morons have got mod points tonight
I know that EA is not exactly one of the nicest companies to work for (as we've all seen with all the bad press), but why is everyone focusing on EA? Rather than seeing this movement as a gateway to have discussions about all of the hundreds of companies that act the same way, people are just attacking EA. I think it's important to note that EA isn't the only company that acts like this- in fact, I think it summarizes a good percentage of the corporate world.
- dshaw
The only game I like by them is Burnout 3. That game kicks ass. All of their "churn-out-another-copy" games each year suck ass!!
I am so sick of hearing "Challenge Everything" when I start up B3. They only thing they know how to challenge is the paradigm of game making. And by challenge, I mean ruin.
When I read stories about how they treat their employees, who are fellow software developers, it makes me glad I am "evaluating" Burnout 3.
Randy Pausch:
Who's telling the truth? You decide.
Personally, I think Randy Pausch is a putz, and I'm speaking both as someone who has seen him lecture at CMU and who has friends that were advised by him.
-c
"If you are an idealist it doesn't matter what you do or what goes on around you, because it isn't real anyway."-R.P.W.
I mean, why do people care about textile industry giants (ab)using child workers - it's their job to make money, whether or not a couple of slaves die in the process is not of their concern, after all they can just quit ... starving to death is not a concern, at least you don't die from paint in your lungs..
Bah!
How could the professor not enlighten his students about the work schedule at EA, that from the previous two articles here is rather different than what might be expected? Several times, and in different ways, he states that you have to "work hard" and that EA is a "meritocracy" and that mediocre results will not be tolerated. That's all good, but your average CMU student is substantially brighter than most students (just an observation, I didn't go there) and probably feels that he would be able to excel at EA by working a normal, or maybe somewhat extended workweek.
I can well imagine that the student arriving at EA to the expectation that he will work 12/6 would feel blindsided. He does mention that there are "crunch times" before deadlines, but I would think that a little more elaboration on that topic would be appropriate for his students. The facts that crunch times seem to be scheduled even when projects are on track, that the extra hours are uncompensated by overtime pay, and that the ratio of "crunch time" to "down time" seems to be greater than one (based on admittedly biased, but believable comments here so far.)
It's got to be tough to be in his position -- appropriate jobs are hard to find for even the most qualified new graduates -- but presenting a balanced picture would be a good thing to do, IMHO.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
That is exactly why I'm not interested in working for them.
...that here at UCF, the EA is going to visit You!
Almost like the Sovier Russia joke, but not really.
In recent news from school and local paper: EA and the state of FL are dumping quite large amount of money to create new degree and faciltate training for the future "sweatshop personel". I wonder how is that going to work out for UCF since all the juicy news about EA popping up all over the place.
Solution; work in the fashion industry. The money will still be shit, but you'll be surrounded by cute girls.
Converse isn't very desirable, sadly; black t-shirts with metal band/futurama cartoons and a beer-belly aren't what a refugee from the fashion industry would be looking for, I'd guess.
A lot of americans think that Americans can use workers around the world, treat they poorly, and say "That's how capitalism work :)". (False smile)
I have exactly the same problem. Although I am not a poor man, I still cannot afford to spend $100 on a shirt made here in Australia under Australian working conditions. That is, if I could even find such a piece of apparel.
That's not even counting the toaster, the modem, the TV ... the list goes on.
This paper reminds me very much the Navy/Army recruitment pitch.
The guy wants to teach a master-level course tailored so that the graduates can go and apply for EA positions right away. So, this guy goes to EA and 'studies' its management culture for half a year. Then he writes a paper how tough-but-fair the company is.
If there is something fishy you will not learn it from this propaganda - quite opposite, it would make you think that the *real* reason why you end up hating your rude slave-driving overlords is that you are not talented and focused enough to measure up to the highest standards of this "ruthless meritocracy".
The value of this white paper should increase - if they print it on a soft foldable sheets.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
Jesus Christ, that guy has his nose so far up EA's ass he knows what all the execs had for dinner last night. WTF is going on here? Man I thought my univerisity had some clueless corporate tools on staff. Can you say sellout? CMU should be ashamed. Preparing students is one thing, but they should be prepared for success, not being eaten alive. Notice how he doesn't actually talk about the work he did there? Something tells he spent his residency bullshitting with execs, not writing code 12 hours a day.
I can't remember the other answer. Some blathering about human rights.
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu.nyud.net:8090/user/tshah /PauschAcademicsFieldGuideToEA.pdf
New and improved without karma whoring!
I worked at EA for longer than this guy, and this is an absurdly positive spin on the environment there. There is a tremendous amount of cynicism due to layoffs, lots of dumb/underperforming people, bureaucracy/infighting/disrespect for management/etc.
I did not enjoy it.
Most of this rah-rah article can be disregarded. Its content had to be specifically approved by EA, and the author uses it primarily to promote his own curriculum.
But clearly the most telling piece is that Electronic Arts wishes to increase their hiring rate of college graduates from 10% to 75% of all open positions.
On page 14, the reasons given for this radical makeover of the workforce are that the college grads are more "malleable" and "idealistic". These grads also "draw lower salaries", and continuously replacing older workers with young ones means they do not have to "invest heavily in contuing education."
I think most of us reading this can decide if hiring 75% of your workforce with no previous job expierience is an attempt to:
a) Improve the quality of your products while promoting a family-friendly corporate culture; or
b) Find fresh meat that doesn't have the prior experience to understand that they are being mistreated, and that they do not deserve it.
EA has a very young energetic workforce..
In other words, turnoverrates are very high?
Allways found it interesting how the consulting firms made bad things sound like good ones while they introdused themselves to us (UNI grads)..
The only other way for them to start treating their employees in a reasonable manner is to start buying their competitors products and just stick to getting EA games off of Usenet.
Eventually, there will be enough of the old EA gurus around to pool together resources and start their own game company, then beat EA at their own game (pun intended).
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
- Doctor Who
Prisoner's Dilemma
I do attend Carnegie Mellon University and I can provide some response to your argument. I am an Electrical and Computer Engineering major with a minor in Computer Science. The culture at CMU can be compared to the corporate culture at EA: this school is TOUGH. Most students here overload after their first semester and find themselves taking up to 16 to 19 credits per semester. Over half of the current undergraduate ECE class will continue their education to recieve a master's in five years (an integrated program here). Computer Science majors find themselves working just as hard. This university has a tradition of conducting research that applies to industry and business. In turn, the culture here is just as competitive as a major corporation's. Most students I know have little time to do anything but finish their work. Working at a company like EA is just an extension of that. While I do not necessarily ascribe to the stigma of CMU, I watch my colleagues ascribe and thrive in it. The professor not telling his students of the "culture of EA" isn't a bad thing: it's normal here.
Professor Randy Pausch at CMU is himself known as somewhat of a slavedriver, among his graduate students. He's also among the most abrasive, "my way or the highway" professors at CMU (who, on average, are very competitive but also reasonable and laid back -- the department even has an official "reasonable person policy"). I'm not really surprised that it's he who is writing this kind of one-sided defense of EA's culture article.
It's obviously another valuable perspective, but it should be interpreted with an eye to the rather extreme personality of the guy writing it. He's not your average academic (or average corporate manager, for that matter). He's closer to Philip Greenspun in personality, for those of you who know him.
Posted as AC, but I'm someone with firsthand experience working with Professor Pausch.
Not sure if this works for Burnout 3, but for Battlefield 1942 I got rid of the intro video by rnaming its .bik file in the Movies directory. It's pretty annoying that they don't provide any hotkey or setting to get rid of it.
I agree that most of EA's games are just clones of previous titles. What I don't understand is, why do they have such serious cruncing among programmers if they are essentially creating a new copy of something they had before? The whole point of software development is that once you create something, you never have to create it again. I could understand burnout among artists, testers or game designers, but the developers are just rehashing the same old code, and have the experience from hundreds of big titles in similar genres at their disposal; they should have the easiest job.
The vast majority of business startups fail within the first 5 years. If you have just mortgaged your house on that bet - what do you do next?
Starting a business involves a lot more than having the skill and the will (you still gotta pay the bills).
I know the concept is that as a sallaried position; your lean times are supposed to make up for your fat time. But that's not the case. If there is a lean time big enough to compensate for the over time, then the company is already in trouble.
The last sallaried position I had, part of my compenstation was supposed to be proffit sharing (at the discression of the manager/owner). Those proffits didn't even come close to what I could have earned working a minimum wage job for the overtime I put in.
...these pasty, skinny, zit-faced little white boys who think tattoos and a foul-mouth is "tough"? And what's with the hands? There are lots of doctors who specialize in arthritis...they're in the phone book...why don't they call them?!
He pushed hard to weaken protection for employees and their right to recieve overtime pay. Plus his policies encourage outsourcing with tax breaks weakening the software industry as a whole. So, to an extent, it _is_ Bush's fault.
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just indirectly. When you buy used, you take a used copy out of the market, raising the value of both used and new copies of the game. If you really don't want to support them, pirate it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I might still have the jacket and flyer for EA's pinball construction set. It talked about how they were going to treat game programmers like rock stars, their names on boxes, household words, blah blah blah... I could just see the cycling from prima-donnas to peons waiting to happen.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
if all the good employees quit ... Let the employees and their employer deal with it as they should.
Assuming it's the leaf node employees who are getting the shaft, they have a problem.
If you imagine all of them quitting on Day N and moving across the street to NiceCo where they'll work 40-hour weeks or get comp. time then NiceCo becomes the new dominant game company.
Trouble is, the leaf node employees need skills besides coding to run a company. So they can't all leave en-mass, they have to trickle out and try to find jobs elswhere, relocate, etc.
A savvy entrepreneur would do just this - setup shop in the same town with some VC's behind them and start the big suck. It would take a couple years to get established in the market but I bet there are some awesome game ideas inside EA that have been shot down by management.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I'm not posting as AC... i just don't see how this can be read as anything but a puff piece. He's looking for support for his project and daggone if it doesn't sound like they're trying to structure a masters program that suits the needs of CA more than the needs of the students.
A masters program at a serious university is not supposed to be a pre-employment technology program. Hmm, this is really weird.
What the fuck is EA? Is this supposed to be common knowledge or something?
Didn't you mean democrat?
You don't get it.
These other people care more than you do. They know it. They also know they're smarter than you. They're so smart, they have it all figured out. Because they're better than you, they have the perogative to straighten out problems -- problems in other peoples' lives -- problems no one asked them to fix.
You just do what you're told. You're lucky your betters haven't put you in jail yet. Maybe tomorrow they will; today is self-admiration day.
and I don't see why people haven't realized this. Unions don't work when the employeer has the entire population of Earth to pick and choose scabs from. All it takes is the mere threat of moving away (a threat that can easily be backed up) to get your workers back in line. Modern building and transportation systems make dumping your workforce cheap and easy. Plus our society is increasingly modifing itself to streamline the process. How else do you think steel made in Korea and shipped to America can be that much cheaper?
/., so this doesn't apply to most :), but seriously, the problem isn't that we can't feed everyone, it's that we won't. People need to stop bringing children into a world they already know is an awful place. There's no excuse for that.
The really scary part is, in the past people struggling for better working conditions generated a lot of press. People died for the 40 hour work week. Now, the employeer just leaves. No loud protests, no beatings or deaths. Just a lot of poor, starving idiots. Marx predicted this would happen, but all anyone can remember about him is that Mao and Stalin used his books for rhetoric.
If you really want change, stop supplying capitalism with cannon fodder: Stop breeding you dumb asses! I know, this is
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Don't forget Democrat and Libertarian
Is anyone else wondering why CMU seems to have a program tailored to making future EA employees?
I've worked at several "dot.coms" with inexperienced and/or inflexible management. In each case, they rode the company into the ground "Slim Pickens style" rather than change their business model. The company that changes to benefit their long-term good vs ride people into the ground to make next quarter's numbers are vanishingly small.
Cheers,
An accurate bug database is crucial to the success of a game. One title I learned about had a 14,000 bug database entry; it is not uncommon to have thousands of "known shippable" bugs on a title, which are mostly obscure and unlikely to be seen by typical consumers.
That sounds about right. Of the few games I've installed from EA, they have been riddled with bugs. And this idea of "unlikely to be seen by typical consumers" is totally bogus. It seems more like it's likely to be tolerated by consumers. sad.
How I wish it were not so. Gobalism seems good at killing all kinds of things.
I'm not certain that breeding restrictions are the only/best way to combat this problem, but it probably wouldn't hurt. I work in a poor suburb in my town, and I see more children with with their own children than anywhere else in the metro area. People bring far too many children into exactly the kind of life that doesn't need more children.
This makes no sense. I work in IT for only 40 hour/week and make damn good money.
We organize all projects based on EIGHT HOUR work days and also pad project timelines by a couple of weeks. There have only been a couple of times where management came back and insisted on an earlier release date so that meant either working on a Saturday or doing 10-hour days that week (Mon - Fri).
How can a legitimate IT shop even put "Crunch Time" into the project plan? If those programmers are working 80 hours/week, then that means that the shop needs to double its staff ASAP. And why would anyone even want to work in a place like that? There are other IT jobs out there that pay the same salary. Think of it this way - by working 80 hour/weeks, their HOURLY rate is HALF of their stated salary. Talk about the "I live to work" syndrome.
Besides, the last EA game I bought was American McGee's Alice. Once they stopped releasing Rated M games, I stopped buying their crap.
If people think this is funny, check out more at:
maddox.xmission.com
Perhaps it is just too hard to find another stable and successful game company that doesn't have such an intense work schedule? EA sounds like par for the industry from what I've heard. (although an "average" game company isn't as consistently successful as EA - maybe that means something...)
Perhaps game companies exploit the strong desire of young employees to stay in the industry by working the heck out of them? i.e. it's just supply and demand?
Might be an interesting experiment for a game company to enforce a more standard business schedule... Joel Spolsky (joelonsoftware.com) did this for his software company - I think they lock the employees out after 6PM (?). Joel found you can be just as productive on a "normal" schedule because the reduced hours are compensated by increased focus and alertness. Plus you don't burn people out and raise the ire of government regulators. (Pixar does the same thing too)
That a lot of the 'facts' in the beginning aren't really facts? "One of EA's major strengths is in the management of people and process." "EA has a very young, energetic workforce." Don't these sounds more like..Opinions, perhaps?
So they want university grads because they can shape them easily and they don't have dangerous ideas like unionization. Great. And this prof is out there to produce fresh meat for the grinder.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
Challenge Everything, indeed.
This guy in his paper only talks about how to prepare guys to work at EA, just a question, weren't universities created to guide the people to exploit their potiential for their benefit?, since when you put people through college to be virtually slaved by other guys?, geez things have changed from the 60's a lot don't you think.
For me EA can go to hell, if consumers don't give them power they will have to surrend. I still remember those first EA's games that USED to be entertaining now is the same sport/driving games year after year and people keep buying them, really I have to congratulate EA for using the "upgrade" model Microsoft have used over time.
Stop bitching about EA, stop buying their products instead.
Universities use their graduate student in the exact same manner. Consumable parts.
It's considered OK for a university to adopt this philosophy, and they are all just a business like every other business out there. I see absolutely no reason why EA should work any different. Or AOL. Or Microsoft. Or SCO. Or Walmart. Or Best Buy. Or MGM. Or the CIA. Or the NSA. Or the Mafia.
Drink it, bitch. Drink it or I'll chuck your ass out and find someone who will.
I bet you the prof gets $5k per student 'referred' which is a damn good saving compared to paying recruiters a 30% salary fee (.3*50k) $15000 finders fee.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Enjoy...
WWJD? JWRTFM.
(From the PDF)
"Probably the most surprising thing I learned about EA is that its leaders, including its creative leaders, describe it as a packaged goods company like Proctor and Gamble or Nabisco."
This, in a nutshell, with extreme eloquence sums up EA's fundamental problem...and from the sounds of things it is very fundamental to them. There is no possible way that a company with this mentality can hope to run an MMORPG in particular...because a boxed product is the direct opposite of what an MMORPG is. A more appropriate conventional metaphor, or one which boomers would at least be more comfortable with, would be to think of an MMORPG as a virtual theme park or wildlife reserve. Expansion packs therefore, rather than being end products in themselves, should be thought of as visitor passes to previously roped off/undeveloped areas of the park. This analogy actually works very well with UO in particular...as using a client older than Age of Shadows for example after AoS's release meant that a person could not go to Malas or Ilshenar, for example.
If EA want to really break into the MMORPG space, (and they haven't substantially yet; UO is going downhill at a rate of knots, and The Sims Online is still well below target population) they're going to have to stop thinking purely in terms of being box-sellers, and start thinking in terms of being virtual park rangers. (or in the case of The Sims Online, even a virtual government)
An MMORPG is NOT something you can put in a box, throw out the door, and then heave a big sigh of relief because it's finished. They need continual maintenance, and if they are to do well they need continual maintenance by someone who actually has a clue about how to do it.
Even for single-player games however, this type of thinking is creatively barren and disastrously toxic. It might work fine for the annual regurgitation of a football game, (like Madden, and what Unreal Tournament sadly seems to be in danger of becoming) since football does not fundamentally change over time, (although on that score UT has absolutely no excuse) but with virtually any other genre, all it will ensure is that rehashes and regurgitations of the same tired old formulas get trucked out the door every year...Innovation comes to a standstill. I truly hope that for EA's sake they have in mind to change this philosophy, because they're signing their own commercial death certificate if they don't. Sure, it makes good commercial sense to go with the tried and true, (at least for maybe the first couple of sequels as far as games go) but there should I think be a dual approach. While you're assuring that the bills get paid today, you should also be focussed on staking out as much new creative territory as possible...because that's the only way to make sure that the bills also get paid tomorrow. Trying to get EA to put an emphasis on creativity is futile...They're a company, and their primary interest is to generate as high a margin as possible. But I wish we could encourage the company somehow to at least be halfway intelligent and forward-thinking when it comes to making money as well.
EVERY SINGLE PERSON who works at EA is working at EA because at one point in time, they wanted to.
I'm a CS grad, and most of my fellow CS grads, including myself, originally got into progtamming / CS because we wanted to do games.
Along the way there, EVERYONE knew that game developers worked long hours for little pay. Most of my friends then chose to follow another path. I wound up going into the Power Industry.
Even in spite of all the bad press EA has been getting (even though it's deserved), there are still tens of thousands of people who would sell their souls to work on an EA game.
No, that does not excuse the employee's mistreatment entirely. But you can't ignore that fact.
I've got one friend who ended up going into the Games Industry anyways, in spite of all the stories. Every once in a while we'll all get together and play the latest game he worked on. He gets bragging rights that none of the rest of us do. Everyone else writes business or industrial Apps. Nobody WE talk to gives a squirt of piss to see our latest creations, but everyone can't wait to see the newest game he churned out.
So in the end, I don't think it's fair to look at EA as this huge monolithic beast that's 100% evil, and all the poor poor employees as 100% victims. They knew what they were getting into when they applied (or at least they SHOULD'VE done their research). And now they're just getting what they should've expected.
Not everyone gets paid a huge salary and mega-benefits to work their dream jobs.
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
Excerpt:
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
I got a snapshot of it: The Front Gate Oh yes. Their motto here is "Work will make you free". Marvelous.
The idea of joining a union sounds great on the surface, but honestly - it hasn't worked so well for most people.
Think about it... When unions got started, it was in labor-heavy industries predominantly employing the physically tough, though not necessarily high I.Q.
When you get a bunch of big guys real upset with how they're being treated, and they're not statistically the most likely bunch to sit down and listen to reason - you've got a real problem on your hands. Therefore, their "collective bargaining power" was significant.
Look at what the unions have done for others, though, such as grocery store workers. Many times, after paying their union dues, they're coming out not so far from min. wage pay. Sure, if they stick with their dead-end job long enough, there's some sort of reward for them (maybe $12 to even $18/hr. or so for cashiers?). But what would these folks be earning if, instead, they treated these jobs as the dead-ends they really are, got more of an education, and tried for higher-paying jobs elsewhere? The grocery store workers went on strike around here not that long ago, and it seems to me - all they really got was stores installing more "self-checkout" lanes so they could get by with fewer employees.
I see the same thing happening if, say, software developers formed a union. You'd have a bunch of intelligent but relatively non-threatening people demanding pay that the industry wouldn't want to give out. The immigrants, younger folks who just want their first "real job" and other such people would take the positions, and the "union developers" would be sitting around unemployed or underemployed most of the time.
If they are breaking the law, why are you advocating 'underground' fighting methods. Get them prosecuted.
A class-action lawsuit is a civil procedure. One that is being taken by the employees of EA. Currently they're in the process of certifying the class.
Why go to mob-rule tactics immediately?
What kind of mob rule tactics are you speaking of? Do you consider informed purchasing decisions and letters to C's "mob rule"?
Then the issue can be resolved, i.e. the laws can be repealed, or enforced. Why go to mob-rule tactics immediately?
Dicarding the use of the term "mob-rule", why can't both tacks be taken simultaneously? The agenda here is to force EA to change their labor practices. As far as I'm concerned, any action that expedites EA's return to those standards should be used.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Don't believe everything you read. I once saw something saying Bush caused the Cubs to lose to the Marlins last year so that the oil companies could invade France (here is the source if you don't believe me).
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
I said what needs to be done, not what is going to be done. We're doomed. Get used to it. People are too selfish, greedy and dumb for there to be any hope. Maybe if it was two out of the three...
And, yes, reducing the number of people who have no place in society will improve society. People are most dangerous when they're poor, desparate and have nothing to do with themselves. This is where you get guys willing to crash planes into buildings from.
I'd love to see Chinese style forced birth control, but it's not going to happen. Capitalists aren't stupid. They want plenty of fodder for their factories. Remember WWII? Things sucked for workers until after it, and the only real reason things got better was we killed so many healthy, young males that there weren't enough to go around. Well, you can thank the Baby Boomers for fucking their way back to a surplus population, and the Capitalist Pigs are primed to take advantage of this.
Do I want Marxism? Hell no. You're never gonna get past the dictatorship of the Proles. Russia didn't, China didn't, and we won't. What I want are lots of individuals who consider the long term, broad based impact of their decisions. Or at least a few with the power and willingness to force the dumb to stop being so dumb. Instead, I get Vatican approved Sex manuals trying to encourage poor dumb fucks to have lots of kids. Thanks Jesus.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
My thought on this is to write letters not to EA, but to the sports bodies that license their names for EA.
If the likes of the NBA, NFL etc cancelled their contracts with EA over this I am sure EA would have to make drastic changes.
StarTux
you'll get the same male:female ratio in public relations or advertising.
the only men left in these industries are spineless or homos.
That's because people over 40 don't play games. Duh. They buy computers and they watch movies, but they don't play games. That's not a law, but it is a trend.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized!
I just wanted to let you in on a little insight about the professor who wrote this article, since I know him personally.
He teaches a class at CMU called Building Virtual Worlds, which I'm in. The class is a boot camp for the ETC (Entertainment Technology Center) majors to get them to learn how to work in groups under extreme time requirements. Students put easily 40-60, and usually up to 80 hours into this single class. When EA came, many of the students were talking about the crazy time requirements for there and how it was just like the BVW class.
But the Prof never really talks about EA in class or during discussions and doesn't try to influence anyone at all. It's more of a real world experience thing for him than a 'this is how it should be'. Even though the class is also really time intensive.
But this prof is also a brilliant guy for his ability to get people to really want to work really hard to create something. Grades don't really matter to him, just creating something new, different, and that pushes the limits of what's has never been done before.
"Grades don't really matter to him, just creating something new, different, and that pushes the limits of what's has never been done before. "
Believe me, you don't know him well enough.
22 percent of the workforce is female. This is both an accomplishment and a hinderance. Its pretty obvious that EA's policy is family unfriendly. Why else would they move toward new college grads, with a stated quota? I wonder what happens to a member of the 22 percent who becomes pregnant.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Sounds like exactly the kinda of snake oil that has no place at CMU, if CMU still wants to be taken seriously.
We kicked the last "corporate prep 'boot camp'" out of my school a couple of years ago. Utter bullshit. think again.
In his "Basic Facts about Video Games" section he states that retailers keep $17 of a $49 game, with the caveat that this is an "approximate breakdown." As a retailer, I can assure you that this is "approximately" DOUBLE the actual average amount a retailer receives, including co-op marketing funds. That said, there's a pretty big slice of pie missing--I wonder who ate it?
... pretty much every industry on the planet operates this way. So long as people continue to make price the highest criteria on their purchases, quantity will ALWAYS beat quality.
And that's what drives this kind of thing -- producing the most product for the least cost. So long as John Q. Public is willing to purchase a suboptimal product for $9.99 over an outstanding product for $12.00, this will be the state of affairs.
It's why Microsoft truly fears any sort of rational examination of Open Source software. If it were to be recognized by a significant fraction of the customer space that it is possible to perform the same function that they spend $$$ to do with Microsoft products, the party's over.
Ultimately this is what's driving the exodus of high-paying jobs to countries with replacement skills. The relative qualities of the workers doesn't really matter.
All that counts is where can a working product be delivered cheaper. And if the folks making the decisions can get a better product for less $$$, that's nice, BUT IT REALLY DOESN'T MATTER.
And all this IS simply a matter of free choice by the almost-sentient dominant species of this world. If we chose to make our purchases using ANY other criteria than price as the overwhelming driver, then the free market capitalistic system (I think I've covered all the bases) would home in on a different behavior.
You can make a case that our current economic systems result in banana republic style of governments, with 99% of the wealth concentrated in 1% of the population. The only reason nations have developed middle classes is that early on, the economic development was driven more by exploiting natural resources than by exploiting people, and there were sufficient natural resources to allow a middle class to thrive.
One could almost say that the development of human societies must go through an initial stage where people are exploited to collect resources, until a viable machine technology allows people to exploit natural resources with less effort, until finally intellectual activity is the high-cost component, and it is ruthlessly exploited.
Wonder how the top 1% will manage to exploit AI's?
"How could the professor not enlighten his students..."
"Please, Fry, I don't know how to teach! I'm a professor!"
Seriously, his job isn't to teach, it's to accumulate tenure. Who cares what the paper is about or the point of view it takes so long as it's a paper and his name is on it?
I agree, exactly the same has happened in my country during the industrial and post-industrial era. But I can't resist to nitpick.
Currently, there is no "second world" left, since that term was used to describe the communist part of the world. Yes, it can be argued that China is still left as a the forefront of communism, but anyone who has ever visited or researched China since 1990 realize that for all practical purposes, China is ultra-capitalistic. Also, when using the term third world as in "moving jobs to the third world", it usually implies jobs which are moved to... Right, China.
I'm currently enrolled at Shawnee State, and my degree title is something along the lines of "Game Design and Engineering Technology"
Its a degree specifically designed to make me look better to game companies. Truthfully, I don't want to work at one, but its some damn interesting classes, and hopefully I'll find a job in a industry similar to game design.
My courses consist of alot of CS classes, with a spattling of art, such as 3d animation, drawing classes, things like that. I have to take alot of physics classes (I would assume for writing physics engines and what not).
I am enjoying it very much, I actually switched to this major from Computer Engineering because I really disliked Electronics and similar classes, it just wasn't what I wanted to do with my life.
Hopefully I will be able to get a job doing what I want, preferably a tech job at a small company as a sysadmin, and with my art classes, I shouldn't be a half bad web designer and what not as well, as well as being able to write the occasional needed custom application.
Yvan eht nioj!
There are, unfortunately, tons of young CS grads and similarly skilled young people who would kill for the chance to work in the video game industry. This is why EA and many other game studios continue their practices of working their staff to death for less than stellar pay.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
No matter what the behaviour of the previous slashdotters might have been, and I do mean whatever - they might has well have set their boss' office on fire - management and HR failed when they blatently lied to him and said everything was ok up until he got yanked in for his 'last straw'. (c.f. previous slashdot post which I am too lazy to get a link for)
People at EA work long hours, in large part because of their great passion for making games.
Also, I just *have* to add to this comment. Nobody... *Nobody* works long hours because they have great passion for making games. In fact, a great passion for should be officially added to the dot-com buzz word dictionary. Any programmer who has a smidgen of real world experience - and this generally rules out most academics - knows that working overtime and long hours is a guaranteed way of killing any passion and productivity you might possess.
Any hours of sleep you skip are hours of sleep you borrow. They're not free. ever.
This academic reminds me of why I hate academia... complete lack of understanding of what real programming is. And a complete ass licking of major industry players to get a pay-cheque, contributing to the perspective that students are always wrong... I am sure he went in there, like a prof looking at his 'lowly' students, looking at these people getting reemed and thought to himself that they deserved it. Not giving any consideration to the fact that these are professional adults who do this for a living.
The arrogance of academia never ceases to amaze me.
Djikstra himself said it so well: "Computer science is as much about Computers as Astronomy is about telescopes".
The inverse corolary to that is: software engineering doesn't have much to do with algorithmics and pretty much any discipline tought in university. And unfortunately, academics are in no position to judge this.
EA's objective is to sell games and make profits. IF their profits increased by promoting the names of the designers then I'm sure they'd do it.
My guess is that they tried it, got zero benefit, and decided to devote that marketing budget to something that worked.
Let's face it, there are very very few game designers who have any mass following. To build up a following would require time, not something that is likely to be tolerated in a publicly quoted company these days.
As for peons. Um, well, I guess that is the truth. Working with brains and keyboards, instead of muscles and ploughs, does not, by definition, change your status. If your job involves working on someone else's ideas, with their tools, to their timeframe, then objectively aren't you a peon? Damn, am I?
They can't find work in their field (all jobs outsourced)
Why not?
For that to be true there would have to be ZERO jobs in that field (however you define that) in the country.
Usually when people claim this they mean they would have to move, or take lower pay than they think they're worth, else they aren't qualified (in a general sense) to work in that field anyway.
FWIW every new job I have ever had has involved me moving, from a minimum of 200 miles, to a maximum of 10000
I'm doing little more than guessing, but the game industry probably lives on the deadline. If they have to announce that a game will be late, they might miss the Christmas buying season and terrible things happen to your company stock when the next cash cow is stuck in the stall.
So, they'd rather pay for crunch time than have the game ship late.
You must be new here...
-=Lothsahn=-
No, the students already want to work hard to create something. For many, this is their first go at an industry they are interested in. I took the class, I didn't feel motivated by Randy at all. He came off like a used car salesman, providing flash and glitter on a specious vehicle. What he wants is the credit for your achievements. I put in the hours because I liked the work - and left the rest of my life to suffer. The class is definitely "real life". It all depends on what you're willing to sacrifice. One thing I pleasantly sacrificed was talking to Randy too often. He gave me an A anyway.
I'm not sure he's brilliant for providing an opportunity to do something in a classroom that people gather to do on their own. I know him personally as well, and in my experience, he's a slimy arrogant asshole who is completely ignorant on how to handle himself on a social level. Don't get me wrong, I loved the BVW (Building Virtual Words) class -it was the best class I ever took, but that was inspite of the professor.
I feel dirty even calling him professor. He didn't "teach" us anything. The students were the teachers in that class. The students were even the ones who graded each other! All Randy did was schedule the class and make the class official. I think that any one of the students who took the course could have done a far better job at teaching it.
I've also had the painful opportunity to work with Randy Pausch in other classes, and I only wish he was as uninvolved in those courses as he was in BVW. Some students praise this man because of BVW, but to those students I say take a step back and think about your praise. Is he actually "teaching" you anything? Or is he just reserving a room.
As for the crazy hours (which when I took the course he constantly belittled the reported hours and told the students that they weren't really putting in 60-80 hours of work on his class but closer to 20-30 hours if that), putting in 80 hours a week on a class is in fact crazy. I did it myself, and I'd do it again -but only for a class that I was passionate about. Those kind of hours should be more accepted in a classroom setting. You are putting your own money into your education and it's only good business to get as much out of it as you can. Eventually you will have to leave that academic environment and go out into the real world, and when you accept putting in 80 hours a week for your living, you accept 80 hour weeks for life. That's no life.
I don't care what you do, but when you're constantly putting in 80 hour weeks for your job, there's no amount of passion that will let you sustain that sort of work load for long. This is a lesson that Randy Pausch and EA must learn. For his students sake (as well as EA employees) I hope that they both learn this lesson soon.
I took 3 classes from Randy Pausch when I was an undergrad, before he went to CMU. Randy's classes were some of the coolest classes there were - he really liked what he was doing and it made me want to get up for a 9:30 class, something I rarely did in college.
That said, Randy's classes were *hard*. His projects were brutal. He told the students that his class was hard on day one at least 10 times to make sure that they got the point. Some people, this rubbed the wrong way. Some people like myself thrived on it. There was no "busy work" in his class but there was a ton of work.
Randy ran a VR/UI lab, and if you were a grad student who wanted to get into his research group, you got a manual for python (this was 10 years ago, python was not ubiquitous) and the VR system and were told "make something cool. You have 48 hours." If you were the type of person who could just grab a manual and make a really cool demo in 2 days you were set and that's Randy's type of person. If that type of thing turned you off you worked for another professor, no hard feelings.
If you're the type of person who did well in Randy's classes, or could cut it in Randy's research group, you probably would do well at EA. The stuff he was doing back when I knew him was way cool, but he expected a ton from people. Since they liked what they were doing, they usually delivered.
Just figured knowing something about the author of the paper could help put it in context.
-Fred
I went to CMU, I was in one of their Master's programmes targetted at industry, IT consulting in my specific case. I am posting AC because I will be free to tell things I would not otherwise be able to.
Let me tell you, high stakes activity, whether it be Wall Street or consulting or academia like at CMU is abrasive. No room for Mama's boys here, and certainly no one is going to tolerate you if you want time out for your optimum "Work-Life balance".
All deadlines I knew at CMU were crunch deadlines; you either swam or you sunk. Quite true, it could possibly burn you out at some point, but you signed up for it didn't you?
I've gone 60 hours without sleep at CMU trying to beat deadlines, until I learned that life was a lot easier if I micro managed my time. With a regular 14*7 schedule in place my work-life balance was much better than 21*3 + 10*4
CMU will push you hard, and if a CMU professor says it's going to be hard work, the students know the drill. The document was not intended for Slashdot, so stop complaining that it appears neutral. CMU does not prepare you for a soft career, and the students know it. Most employers who come to CMU are like EA. Ever worked on Wall Street? You'll be wishing you were in EA after a stint in a wall-street firm.
Ever seen a recruiting poster for the Army? Do they promise you a soft life? Can you complain if they send you out to get your head shot off? Why complain about CMU or this document then?
Unions were for groups of workers who, traditionally, were not very well educated and could not easily be expected to develop their own businesses, and were in jobs that involved manual labor that required very little skill.
...(you guessed it) Electronic Arts.
On the other hand, at technology companies that create things, the best thing to do is grab a group of colleagues and start your own business.
That is why Silicon Valley became successful.
In the 1950's, the co-inventor of the transistor, William Shockley, and winner of the Nobel Prize, was dissatisfied with his employer, Bell Labs in New Jersey, and headed back to his alma mater, Caltech (formally, "California Institute of Technology" in southern California), where he got in touch with a Caltech grad-school alumnus named Arnold Beckman, who had founded a measurement company called Beckman Instruments, and who offered to fund Shockley's future research and development in commercializing the transistor. (Because Bell Labs was a public monopoly, it may have been prevented from legally commercializing its work, just as another Bell Labs invention, Unix (TM) could not be commercialized. But that's just a guess). Because Shockley's aging mother was living in Palo Alto (in northern California), Shockely decided to move there, and Shockley Semicondutor Laboratory, a divison of Beckman Instruments, was founded.
Shockley personally recruited a bunch of research scientists to help him, but he proved to be a terrible manager, eccentric, and erratic. In other words, an a--h-le. He pissed them off so much that eight of them decided to leave and start their own company. These 8 men (derided later by Shockley as the "Traitorous Eight") sought venture capital funding from Sherman Fairchild, an East Coast guy who had founded a camera and instrumentation company.
Thus Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory begat Fairchild Semiconductor with 8 disgruntled employees.
But not all was happy at that company either. Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, two of the Traitorous Eight, would leave to form a little company called Intel. Jerry Sanders and other disgruntled employees would also leave Fairchild Semiconductor to forma a little company called Advanced Micro Devices.
After Intel successfully IPO'd, one of its employees, Mike Markkula, became quite wealthy in the process. He decided to pour money into a little project produced by two guys named Steve (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak) seeking funding, and thus created a little company called Apple Computer.
Another Traitorous Eight alumnus, Eugene Kleiner, left Fairchild to create a venture capital company which provided initial funding for about 300 technology firms -- little companies like AOL, Sun Microsystems (creators of Java) , Amazon.com (booksellers), and
There are hundreds of companies, if not thousands, that have spawned off in the Silicon Valley in this way, tracing their original ancestral roots to Arnold Beckman and William Shockely. Why? Because technical employees are smart enough to realize that their intellectual capital produces a company's success, and if the company doesn't like them, those employees can become the compeition. They don't need unions.
In many cases, unions are the antithesis of innovation and subject to abuse and corruption.
In California, the Longshoremans Union (which controls the unloading and loading of ship along the entire California Coast) refuses to modernize a
Everyone here seems to think every large company except for Google is evil and controlled by the devil and hungry for souls and dollars.
I am a programmer for EA. From what I've seen the managers at EA take overtime very seriously, encouraging people to leave when they (the managers) do, and when there is overtime, the managers are always there with the troops to make them as comfy as possible.
I absolutely love my job at EA. I've worked as a construction worker, tree planter, telemarketer, tech support rep, retail sales rep, and a parking garage attendant; There are a LOT of shittier places to work than EA.
People who don't like their job at EA probably just hate the games industry in general. The problem of overtime isn't a problem with EA specifically, it's a problem with the games industry in general. You think the guys at Id or Valve don't work the insane hours we do at EA? Hell, the probably work longer hours. Painting the picture of EA as a meat grinding faceless corporation is a cliche here on slashdot. Thats what the games industry is. When a marine is shot, you don't hear people blaming the marine corps do you? People get shot in wars! People work long hours in the games industry!
90 hour weeks are insane, and I'm not defending any company that would put that upon their employees and I certainly wouldn't disagree with someones decision to leave a company they were unhappy at, for any reason.
EA is probably one the cushiest places to work in the games industry. I'm sure cushier places exist but they are most certainly not the norm. If anything, EA sheilds you from the games industry. They allow you to work, and have the money to do everything in their power to ensure you're working at your maximum potential.
Peoples experiences may vary, but I think everyone should remember that an individuals experience at a company is defined by the interaction of the individuals around you. My experience at EA has been a dream so far, simply because of the professionalism of my team/management. A lot of people in my studio have come from all over the industry, and say that of all the places they've worked, EA is the most sane. If you want to work in games, EA is your best bet. If someone had a shitty experience at EA, well that's no more likely to have happened than at any other game development house.
As stated earlier, I've worked for much more soul crusing companies. Think a 12 hour day is long? Try a 14 hour day planting trees. No games room, free lunch, and $1200 chair. Think crushing bugs is tedious? Try reading a sales pitch to 800 people telling you to fuck off over the phone. Think the pay sucks? Try working scab labour flagging traffic for 10 hours a day at $12/hour. I've done all of the above, and anything they've thrown at me in the games industry is a walk in the park, and should be for anyone else who can appreciate how lucky they are.
There are a LOT of shittier jobs to be doing, and a LOT of shittier companies to work for. The idea of an entire corporation that agrees and works to march people to madness for money is rediculously biased. Remember that a corporation is a collection of people just like me and you, and your experience is only as good as the people around you. EA hires the best people, which explains my awesome experience so far.
Lets fight the forest fire before we complain about lit matches.
- Mr.Oreo
I am a Lead Programmer in the game industry. I expect quality work from my people. I don't care how brilliant my programmers are -- a programmer on hour 60 is not doing quality work. If an employee of mine is on hour 60, it is because I screwed up.
I don't care if this is someone's dream job. I don't care what they've heard about the industry. It doesn't give us the right to abuse them. That's ridiculous. These are human beings, and they deserve to be treated as such.
Simple. If you get rid of management, where do the people who worked for that manager go? They are sitting idle and a burden to everyone at that point.
/.'ers see through their bias, so I give up. Go back to reading Dilbert and purchasing "anti-establishment" t-shirts and posters.
This might be a radical idea to you, but...
You plan in advance. No, really.
You decide who everyone will be working under in future, and how the company will be organised after the manager(s) are rearranged/let go/whatever.
Or do you propose that *everyone* beneath a manager is sacked and rehired every time a manager is moved, or management structure changes?
I doubt it. So what on earth is the problem with restructuring management to (e.g.) make it more efficient *without* sacking every non-manager? You simply plan ahead.
The company is in the shit if a senior manager quits. Are they going to sack everyone?
You made an assertion and proclaimed it "simple common sense". No it isn't; to be that confident of something it has to be blindingly obviously true in every case ("Setting yourself on fire is a bad idea"). Your use of it is closer to the Einstein definition; if it was "simple common sense", how come I spotted the flaw in seconds?
And the fact that you cut a single job that is quite important to the business (despite what the common Slashdot groupthink is) and left many worker bees is completely pointless to cutting back in the first place. Managers are damn important to a business.
Just because *some* management is necessary (*that's* "simple common sense"), doesn't mean that *all* management is necessary. If it was necessary management, they wouldn't (or shouldn't) cut it. Doesn't mean to say that some businesses don't have unnecessary layers of management.
I might be totally wrong here, but does your argument stem from considering management more important than "workers" (i.e. non-management)? Being in a position of authority does not necessarily make someone more important. Of course, I don't dispute that (in any healthy company), a senior manager is more important than a bottom-of-the-hierarchy worker. On the other hand, management-for-the-sake-of-it may be able to be trimmed without affecting productivity, which suggests that they weren't important.
It depends how well set-up your company is.
I can't make
I suspect you're going to write-off this post as another anti-management rant. Actually, it was an anti-blind-assertion rant, but don't let that stop you complaining.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I really don't buy EA games, I just pirate them. This is not done as a sign of support for these poor programmers, no, this is done as a sign of my annoyance over the corporate brand-building fucktard, who decided that their retarded slogan "Challenge everything" deserves to be beaten into my brain by sheer repetition, probably in hopes that I would then become a lovely loyal EA-buying customer whore.
Fuck this, morons. As long as you make it impossible to avoid playing this annoying clip, I am not buying a single EA game. All other game developers have intros, publishers usually have them too, but
a) pressing Esc during startup allows you not to play these
b) their are not as fucking annoying
c) those companies are rather small and so I am not subjected to this crap for so many titles
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Many people believed that the collapse of Soviet Union meant that capitalism won forever (one of them was that retard Fuckuyama). This is blatantly wrong and it should be obvious to Americans. These are the very same problems that people faced in 1900s, 1910s and 1920s, it's just that it's not very common you are allowed to speak about it. Labour conditions were abysmal in many industries for many decades, EA is not really such a deviation.
The solutions to these problems are the same as ever. A temporary solution is the creation of a welfare state, a la Scandinavia, where the "national mission" is to make life fun and enjoyable for everyone by collecting enough in taxes and spending it generously (and smartly) on welfare. A better solution, the one which unfortunately was indefinitely postponed, but is inevitable anyway, is abandonment of all private property, which is the only way to destroy the alienation of people from the fruits of their labour, which is the only way to make people free.
Don't despair, it will come. We blew the chance we had in the USSR, but it will come "real soon now". Don't lose hope.
P.S. I intentionally didn't try to explain why it will come, because that's a wholly different (and very long) discussion.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
This so-called professor just pretty much repeated, verbatim, what the PR and HR depts at EA have been touting all along. He simply just wrapped it up in a nutshell and put a coat of Turtle Wax on it.
Hrmf.. It might as well have been one of the 3-inch ringbinders of PR policies and procedures (Vol. 1-100) published, instead of this guide that's full of sickly-sweetness that every PR PHB, peon, manager, and interirm aspires to.
It just makes me sick seeing this tome that he wrote. *trashes it and washes his hands.*
IMHO, Odds are that the students in his classes have to do to pass is simply parrot back to him what he is teaching.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
As far as I can tell, the value of going to a university is to learn theory --- you'll learn applications in industry anyways. If CMU sets up a curriculum, as the paper suggested, designed to teach students "Microsoft Project" "version control" and centered on "internship and/or co-op" programs, won't the students be better off going into industry, and learning all of these things there? They'll learn them just as quickly, and be paid (rather than paying) for it. The critical thing about a university education, to me, is learning fundamentals. So if I'm going into games, I'd like an in-depth knowledge of computer architectures (so I can better optimize my code), linear algebra (for all the 3d), physics, differential equations (physics engine), some control systems (making things work in the physics engine), AI (smart opponents), and so on. I'm not sure, but the curriculum CMU is implementing sound strictly worse than skipping college, and going straight for industry. You'll have an edge over the MIT theory people for the first 4 years, but then they'll know everything you do, but you won't know much of what they do.
Good management lets you predict how much time will be required, and set your deadlines and resourcing right.
So it's ironic to see Pausch documenting in detail such bad management practices, and then stressing how important "good management" is to EA.
Of course, exceptions happen, and unexpected things go wrong. And so inevitably long hours will be needed by some people sometimes. But a good manager who learns that people worked the weekend should be saying "Oh no, what went wrong?" and not "Great!".
Sean
Renderware is owned by EA. They can choose who uses it.
-jhp
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.