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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."
well .. i think, based on timing and wild speculation, that it's possible that the whole spouse story could have been engineered by the attorneys trying to file a class action lawsuit against EA. The ensuing negative publicity would serve as "encouragement" to make EA try to settle the lawsuit.
.. I'm just saying it's possible and we shouldnt be lemmings and believe stuff just cause it "feels better" to trust something without looking at it in a skeptical manner as well.
I am not saying it was a planned strategic move
Well, you answered your own question. That's how capitalism works. If the marketplace starts demanding employer-friendly companies, that's what EA's going to have to do.
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.
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Treating employees badly is one thing. Breaking the law is another. EA's attitude to overtime isn't strictly legal, though it's no different from many other companies.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
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.
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
But I don't feel like Im saving the world or even making a dent in any of these companies :)
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
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
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You need to learn more about how BitTorrent works. There isn't much point in BitTorrenting a 288,930 byte file; just mirror it. Tracker overhead will eat any advantage you think you're gaining.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do I think this is a valuable document? Hell no. Its basically free and highly valuable advertising for EA on how to make more cogs for their machine. It might also be an attempt to address the disturbing questions being asked by potential hires in light of all this newfound bad publicity.
I happen to have interned at EA as an dev a few years ago and I know exactly what goes on there. The reasons for increasing college hires are obvious and have been mentioned already: why hire older folk with wives and lives when you can get smart, young, exploitable, eager-beaver new grads who will work until their eyeballs bleed for a spot on the credits? The fact that Randy and profs like him are trying to tailor academic programs towards what EA wants is icing on the cake and (to me) a disturbing trend. Many departments get donations from industrial affiliates; I would bet that EA's donatations to his program are handsome.
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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.
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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
I agree with your point that EA's employees (from what I've seen) generally know what they're getting into.
I work at EA's Orlando studio (Tiburon) and I currently have no complaints about how I'm treated. It was made clear to me that milestones and the end of a cycle will probably be "crunch time" at the time of my hiring. It's also been made clear to me throughout my time at EA that EVERYONE KNOWS crunch time is bad. No one's doing it on purpose. Management does not enjoy high turnover, for obvious reasons that many people have undoubtedly stated above.
Crunching at the end of a cycle usually lasts about 6 weeks, and only goes to 7 days a week if we're in serious trouble.
In exchange for my crunching, I get a week off as soon as we ship, on top of my normal vacation. I get a great health plan, 401k, stock options, stock purchase program. I get to not show up until 10am. I get to watch TV and play games at my desk without getting any flack (unless I were to do so ALL day). I get to work with some ridiculously smart people on a great team that wants to do something new and cool every year. And as I've always wanted, I get to work on video games.
Maybe it's just the way I'm put together, but I'll take ten and a half months of great perks and great coworkers in exchange for really pouring in the hours for the last 6 weeks. I may not *always* enjoy this -- once I have kids I may not be willing to put in these kinds of hours, but for now the scale is balanced for me. I've had several coworkers who were hired, worked a couple of months, and realized it wasn't for them. I've had coworkers who have done it for several years and then decided to try something less stressful. In all cases, there's been no ill will.
Admittedly, things at my studio seem to be better than at some in EA, and I believe my team is the best at my studio. But this is largely because we've had enormous communication with our managers about how to improve the production process and reduce crunch. It's not easy to change the accepted "way of doing things" at a company as big as EA, but we're slowly improving our processes.
And one more thing for some of you commenters out there: you can't have it both ways. You can either say EA employees are useless dumbasses who can't make a good game to save their life, or you can say they're good people trying their best under the thumb of evil management. But saying "those poor employees" out of one side of your mouth and "those crappy games" out of the other is just hypocritical.
Not that I agree with either sentiment, clearly.
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?
This is exactly what it is. I worked as a slave for the notorious Church of Scientology when I was "just out of college" and swore I'd never do that kind of thing again because I was just being used by the higher ups to make themselves rich.
The same exploitation exists at EA with the difference that you get paid, however, outside of that it is the same manipulation, backstabbing, and diabolical exploitation of suckers who will work endless hours without additional pay because they believe in the cause.
I greatly respect true paragons in their field, but I despise cheaters. Richard Nixon won his election by cheating. EA gets its massive profits by cheating also. Any corporation that worked its employees twice as long for the same pay is not really productive. It's cheating.
The reason laws are necessary to prevent this sort of thing is because it gives bad management a way to "seem" good. Instead of using ingenuity (the American way) to increase production, they use pur brute force. This is pathetic, especially from a technology company.
Limiting people to working 8 hours a day by law basically says, "If you cannot be profitable with people working 8 hours a day, don't go into business in the first place". This would require entrepreneurs to structure their ventures appropriately.
Can you get productive work out of people after they have worked a full 8 hours? Ask yourself this, "Would you want a surgeon operating on you after he'd just performed an 8 hour surgery before yours?
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.
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.