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."

Comments

Factually False...

[myrdred]

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.

Re:Factually False...

[elysian1]

Not exactly. Apple's stock price has gone up considerably over the past six months. It's stock price closed at $55.50 on Friday but six onths ago, it was $27-28. If we consider that the article was written during spring semester of 2004, the lastest that would be would be late May to early June, 2004 which is about 6 months ago. At that time, Apple was probably worth $11-12 billion. Another intersting note, EA's stock has gone down a bit since six months ago. It's worth around $14.5 billion now.

Re:You don't get the hostility?

[bob beta]

How about the fact that they are breaking the law by improperly classifying employees as exempt and therefore not paying them their due overtime?

. . .

but we are talking about taking action. Boycotts, Letters to editors, Letters to company chiefs.

If they are breaking the law, why are you advocating 'underground' fighting methods. Get them prosecuted.

Then the issue can be resolved, i.e. the laws can be repealed, or enforced. Why go to mob-rule tactics immediately?

Or are they not breaking the law, and that was just an excercise in rhetoric?

Re:I feel that the professor let his students down

[paranoidia]

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.

Re:The way to hurt EA?

[c0dedude]

They use damn child labor and sweatshops for their garments, you think this'll bug them?