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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.
I'm shocked they haven't responded yet.
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.
"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".
"EA will see that it's policies are not best for the bottom line and they will change"
Perhaps this is how it SHOULD work. However, many people are martyred without result. Companies still have poor work environments -- they just go through the slave traders more. Does it hurt their pockets having to shuffle through employees? Sure. Does it hurt enough to admit they're wrong? I'm assuming you don't make it that far up in the corporate ladder without a boatload of pride...and it's a giant pill to swallow to admit being wrong.
Capitalism (read GREED) has its place...but the well-being of its peons are rarely in its best interest.
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!!!!!!!!!
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.
Your being upset with people expressing their views seems Soviet. If you were a true capitalist, you'd understand how public opinion functions as a lever in corporate behavior. If these stories prove true, EA may feel some heat from investors unhappy with their practices.
Chalk it up to the market.
See I've heard the exact opposite, though I'm not the one who sees the coin. I heard they actually get quarterly bonuses, which is pretty amazing considering the status quo.
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/
Capitalism is not greed. You would work for more money if you could too wouldnt you? Do you donate 100% of what you make (above a certain amount so u can pay rent and eat) to charity ?
.. the unemployed state is obviously shittier to them. So EA is actually giving them an IMPROVEMENT over their existing chances (being broke, not having ANY health insurance, being unable to feed kids ..how about THOSE conditions?).
.. then you'd have a point. But these are people making a free choice.
It's simple. DO NOT WORK FOR A COMPANY THAT TREATS YOU LIKE SHIT.
If you are unemployed because of it, that's your choice. EA isn't obligated to hire someone. If they didnt exist the job wouldnt be there in the first place.
If there is someone willing to work in the shitty conditions
It's called choice, freedom etc. If EA was deliberately lying or preventing employees from leaving against their will
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
It would appear you have never had to look for a job in an industry that's outsourcing its workers during a global economic downturn.
How is you new job in burger-flipping going for you? I understand you had no trouble switching from salting the fries at that chicken joint.
Well, mostly from what I've seen it is the employees and the family of employees that I have seen complaining.
However, there are cases where the customers do care, and in those cases, I imagine that the customers want both a good product and the people who make it to be treated well. They don't care if EA makes money or not. I know that an individual company's profits or lack thereof don't concern me at all (sure in the larger sense, in which I want a healthy economy and game industry they do, but on an individual company by company level they don't).
I don't really care if a company is making money or not. I want a good product at a low price, and I want it made under decent working conditions. Those things are hard to do and still stay in buisness? Too bad. No one ever said the demands of a customer are reasonable.
I mean, on a flamebait level I could say something like, "Boy those Nazis sure make good stuff. I heard they kill lots of people, but hey, that's not my concern," but that comparison does bring up the old point of "Do the ends justify the means?" Everyone has their own line that they think company practices may or may not cross and it is up to each of us to decide where that line is.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
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.
Somehow, I think many Slashdotters would love the policies of Margaret Thatcher. Hell, she's not quite dead yet, and she's newly widowed - why not marry the wizened old bastard?
Electronic Arts, like all other companies, is comprised of people. If their creation can behave in an utterly inhumane manner, operating only to increase some arbitrary numbers in a computer system somewhere, then what's the point? Why bother with any niceties whatsoever, as nobody else seems to do? Kick the employees when they're down, exploit their enthusiasm and just hope the latest product gets finished before they burn out and find some sort of work elsewhere. And, if they start demanding more reasonable hours, or even paid overtime, then just sack them or outsource the work to some even more badly exploited sods the other side of the world...
Screw the welfare state. If workers want to live, they should work for it. Screw free healthcare, screw any kind of regulation on how employers treat their employees - if they're so unhappy, they can go elsewhere, even if conditions there are just as bad - all brought on by the unending, mindless competition and lower costs demanded by the holy, almighty dollar. No need to be decent people, no need for random acts of kindness - after all, there's no such thing as society. All that counts is money.
Why should a company treat its employees well? Because it is an institution created by human beings.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
You are just naive if you think it is that simple. In an ideal world it would be, but as anybody knows, this is not an ideal world. Quiting a job is not just something you can do in a whim. You must make sure you have something to fallback on. Of course looking for another job between the 80 hour work week is no small task. EA also tends to employree fresh out of college kids with no experience, and when you are in that situation finding a job is more difficult than if you have experience in the field. Do you honestly think that every single mistreated employee there wants to stick around? Obviously there are other factors involved in how easy it is just just quit than if you want to.
Anyways, the reason this is an issue is EA is taking advantage of the fact that its employees have nowhere else to go, and are making it harder for them to find other jobs. EA realizes that for a lot of its employees it's either EA's way or no paycheck. This in and of itself is not neccessarily bad. There are many job markets that are saturated. The bad part is EA is exploiting this situation to treat the employees very poorly.
Capitalism is not perfect. The human factor remains, and treating people like slaves to make a few extra dollars is not ethical and in many situations not legal. It is our job as a society for all our sakes to make sure this kind of abuse does not happen.
EA is there to make money, not take care of people. If they are treating their employees poorly who cares?
Maybe you don't give a flying fuck as you push your cart around in Wal-Mart, but as someone who works in a technical industry I find this highly interesting. The labor market for educated and technical people is in the process of a major deterioration in this country and this is just one more symptom of America's slide toward the kind of economic system that existed in India- where you have a few rich people, and everyone else is poor and destitute. (They have a small middle class now, which grows at the expense of our own.)
If the game is good I'll buy it, if it's not I won't.
If the game is good I'll buy it, unless I see it was made by Electronic Arts. The leverage afforded to workers is mostly gone, and the only force affecting EA anymore is the power of consumers- which is largely ineffective anyway.
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.
Take off your rose colored glasses. Capitalism works that way only under certain conditions which are largely disappearing- labor and management need to have equity. If one gets an upper hand this idealized scenario breaks down.
Now that several billion desperate people have been dumped into our labor markets (added to the millions of geeks who have always wanted to program games), if the employees of EA quit for being worked 80 hours a week for X dollars they'll be replaced instantly by more desperate geeks worked 120 hours a week for X>>1 dollars. Or better yet, Chinese prisoners. It's getting to the point where almost everything I have was made in a Chinese prison.
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.
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.
Regular life in the real world disagrees with you. EA does have an ethical imperative to treat their workers fairly, humanely, and to put the lives of the employees before business. Only libertarians and high school juniors think that capitalism means, "Do whatever it takes to get money, and let the course of business take its toll." (Libertarianism is, by the way, the carrying out of fascism by other means; the one thing libertarianism precisely does not grant is liberty.)
The employees shouldn't have to quit if they're being if they're being treated poorly; government agencies, unions, and consumers should take proactive measures to stop the poor treatment. That may involve monetary fines, forced arbitration between an employees' union and the company, and if warranted criminal proceedings being taken against the company's officers. No, that isn't very laissez faire, but neither is real life.
Hehe. Gotcha! ;)
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 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.
There are no guarantees in life, and especially not in a specific job market in a specific country (probably doing a specific job in a specific niche area too). The lack of a job or getting laid-off is a wake-up call.
Want to be a slave to economic and management forces? Work for someone. Want independence? Become an entrepreneur. It really is that simple.
The only problem I see is certain people needing a crutch in life and crying when things turn sour. You should be thankful you had a steady hand-holding position for so long. Many people are not that fortunate.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
"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."
Maybe you don't understand that EA is trying to "cheat" the market forces by lying about what they expect from their employees (you can see my previous post for details). If you define capitalism by the absence of regulation, then maybe this is capitalism. If that is your definition of capitalism, then I would argue that this is not a system which ensures optimal economic growth.
We all know that capitalism has a number of flaws that need to be corrected by legislation (for example anti-trust laws). I consider it a flaw in the system when employees are not well informed about the expectations in their work - this can be corrected through legislation (just like it is not legal to lie about products that we buy).
An effective market economy relies on well informed citizens and corporations, whether this is information about products or jobs.
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.
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu.nyud.net:8090/user/tshah /PauschAcademicsFieldGuideToEA.pdf
New and improved without karma whoring!
Except the market hasn't demanded worker friendly environment, and shows no signs of going that way. EA doesn't have to worry about doing anything. A few people whining about it do not make a 'market influence.'
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
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.
Perfectionism and idealism does more harm than good. You're only hurting yourself with that attitude.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
Please, comparing having to work long hours in front of a computer screen in order to get a large paycheck to forced labor in the form of slavery is just absurd and insulting. You don't like your job, there is nothing stopping you from quitting and looking for a new job. That is not the case with slavery. Learn to appreciate the freedoms you have instead of whining everytime your boss asks you to sit at a desk for a few hours.
An overpaid job requiring short hours and virtually no manual labor is not a right of yours.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
I didn't say they did. I said if they did. And that's what's happening here. Some people care and hence are "up in arms" trying to get enough other people to care to influence the market.
Or are you one of those people who feels the fact that you were born to a middle class American family gives you a right to a 6 digit salary?
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
You belie your own point through your comparison to martyrdom--martyrdom is by its nature voluntary. Martyr's die because they choose to stick to their beliefs/goals against the society they're in. Likewise, non-martyrs choose otherwise. The emphasis in on choice. No one *has* to work at EA. There are plenty of lower-stress jobs out there.
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
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.
petty.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
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.
Only libertarians and high school juniors think. . .
Libertarianism is, by the way, the carrying out of fascism by other means
Wow. I guess now we know what only socialists and college freshmen think.
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
Well following your logic, who cares if all of their products are pirated? If I can copy it why shouldn't it? EA should build in better protection or lower prices to where its better for me to just buy the item instead of costs of copying myself/take the risk of copyright infringement. That's how capitalism works. People are there to take care of their own money, not EA. It's only illegal if you're caught/investigated. Just look at all the comments about how their (EA) practices border on the illegal (what is illegal is determined by the jury/judge/federal agency--just ask ABC re: Saving Private Ryan and Howard Stern). What goes for individuals holds true for companies in this case. Companies just have more money for brib...I mean compaign contributions.
Also this does impact people here. If EA is working their employees into the ground, it is very likely to affect the quality of their work. If I am going to drop 50 on a game, I don't want to worry if I am going to be frustrated due to bugs. So even if folks don't really care that they use slave labor, they may not drop their money on an EA product. And while that doesn't mean anything to you, it ought to mean something to EA. But maybe it won't if they feel the consumer really doesn't care.
Our founding fathers removed the guys in charge. Be American. Vote incumbents out.
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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I didnt mean to imply that you had. I was just adding to it.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
True
If your budget only allows you to purchase a finite number of games chances are that,
given the choice between game A, produced by workers who are treated humanly and Game B produced by starving Bangladeshi children chained to their computers,
you would choose, et Ceteris Paribus, product A.
Assuming limmited budget among the game consumer(1), we can start to imagine scenarios where you do not buy the game eventhough it is good, because you buy one that is just as good, but produced by under humane conditions.
What your rather rudimentary analysis of capitalism fail to grasp is that shareholders usually appoint managers to make decisions on their behalf, and these decisions are taken with the managers interests in mind. These are not necessarily equal to those of the shareholders, nor the wider society of which both you and I are part. Which is why those of us who think things through are up in arms (more or less).
(1) A reasonable assumption in most cases
Take off your rose colored glasses. Capitalism works that way only under certain conditions which are largely disappearing- labor and management need to have equity. If one gets an upper hand this idealized scenario breaks down.
But just as equally, the conditions upon which traditional labor and management structures are built upon are changing. There's a lot more competition in today's global marketplace, and a lot more market to be had. Technology frees the worker from having to be chained to one location (ie, a factory), working at a piece of capital-intensive equipments (such as a 200lb sheet metal press.) Today, you can have programmers and artists in far flung places, collaborating on projects without a surplus of management bozos.
If you're sick of working for a place like EA, and you have the drive, you can start your own company. I'm sure you can find some greedy bastard VCs who want a part of that 2.8 billion dollar market that EA has. Provide better perks and more reasonable hours than EA, deliver your product on time and in better shape, and set a new model of how the games industry should be.
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.
If you're sick of working for a place like EA, and you have the drive, you can start your own company.
s/drive/lawyers
TThat may involve monetary fines, forced arbitration between an employees' union and the company, and if warranted criminal proceedings being taken against the company's officers. No, that isn't very laissez faire, but neither is real life.
Imposing those kinds of fines and regulations in this global economy will just cause the corporation to setup shop elsewhere.
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.
So child labor is not a problem with you as long as the resulting product is good?
Both child labor and forcing people to work insane hours of unpaid overtime are against the law. The law is there to protect the weak (i.e. children and programmers with a family to support and a mortgage to pay) against the bullying of third- and first- world sweatshop owners.
In the first world laws against Child labor were enacted just a few short decades before laws against unpaid forced overtime were. Think about that before you accuse me of making a false comparison.
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.
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's fair...PROVIDED they know what they're getting into.
Probably.
I'm not really certain it's fair even then.
OTOH, hagiography is well known for creatively editing the experience of "martyrs". There's good evidence that many of them didn't voluntarily choose to be such, or know that they were getting into that situation. (There's also good evidence that some were just putting a good face on a bad situation. And that some really DID seek martyrdom.)
I don't think well of someone just because he's a martyr. A also don't think poorly of him for that reason. I look at the wider environment, and what his choices were.
If people are being deceptively put into abusive situations, anyone who intentionally cooperates in that is vile and evil. That's not free choice.
If people are being taken advantage of without concern for their well being, even if voluntarily, then the best I can say for their "seductors" is that they are amoral. And that's the best.
If people are being abused in their work environment, then those abusing them are (probably) unconvicted felons, and have no more morals or ethics than any other gangster. Just less fear of the police. The laws have been written specifically to make the crimes they are engaging in difficult to prove, and DAs are usually (nearly always) loathe to begin investigation.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Like hell it's not! Greed is the desire to get as much as you can regardless of how much you need or even how much is reasonable -- a cornerstone of capitalism. This is obviously a subjective term, in that you have to define "need" and "reasonable", but few people in the world would argue that anyone "needs" millions of dollars a year, and most people would label someone who makes millions a year but who wants even more as "greedy". Whether millions of dollars a year is "reasonable" depends on how it's acquired, and that is very relevant in the case of EA -- the people who are bringing in millions of dollars a year in EA are doing so at the expense of the health and well-being of everyone who is forced to work these "crunch time" periods.
What EA is doing isn't just greed, it's evil. Don't believe me? One of the definitions is "Causing ruin, injury, or pain; harmful". That exactly fits what's happening to the people EA overworks, and EA is doing so intentionally. And the reason? So that their executives can enjoy more of their million-dollar-plus compensation packages. Hmm...intentionally causing harm to others (the coders, in this case) in order to bring benefit to oneself? That's the very essence of evil.
I see. So you believe that the choice between working for a company that treats you like shit and having your whole family starve (due to being unemployed) is a reasonable one to have to make? What, are you one of the managers who works for EA or something? Because you have to be quite heartless to believe that such a choice is a reasonable one to have to make. All I can say is that if you really do believe that then I hope you wind up in that kind of position some day, just to teach you a lesson that you badly need to learn -- that the well-being of people matters, a lot, and to ignore that is to make things worse for everyone. I'd love to hear you try to explain to your wife that it's perfectly okay to be in a position of either working for a shit company where you don't see her and your kids for days or weeks at a time or starving. I'm sure she'll understand, right? If she's smart she'll divorce you for being a dumbass.
Well, so much for your understanding of capitalism, then. EA supplies something the market wants. If EA didn't exist then there would be a vacuum for that supply, and someone else would come in to fill it. In other words, the job would be there even if EA didn't exist. It doesn't automatically follow that this replacement company would treat their employees like slaves, either. They wouldn't have to -- EA chooses to, for whatever reasons (I happen to think that EA's executives are probably like you appear to be: evil, not giving a damn about anyone but themselves and willing to sacrifice everyone else around them to get what they want).
There's a difference between being obligated to hire someone (nobody is) and being obligated to treat them fairly and with respect once you hire them. You're not obligated to do the former, but you are obligated to do the latter. It's worse for almost everyone if you don't do the latter, so society at large has a big interest in making sure you do.
You ultimately have to decide who society should serve. Should it serve the few, wealthiest individuals within it at the expense of the rest, or should it serve everyone within it? Most reasonable people will say the latter. You obviously believe the former. If that's the case, then leave. The rest of us have no use for the likes of you.
Of course, in Real Life you might be quite a nice person and everything. But your words suggest otherwise.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
No one *has* to work at EA. There are plenty of lower-stress jobs out there.
Only problem is that many people want high paying AND low-stress jobs. I guess you don't have to be a mega-corp to be greedy.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
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
It means that I wouldn't be looking to give it up any time soon, so I could do things like feed my family.
the difference between working for a company that treats you like shit and not working at all is the difference between eating ramen for dinner and not eating dinner - or perhaps this will get across better - it's also the difference between being able to browse the 'net (ie read slashdot) and sitting in the dark in front of a cardboard box.
Challenge Everything, indeed.
but you're right - there is nothing stopping you from quitting your job if you don't like it. there is, however, something keeping you from getting a new job and thus being able to pay your bills - this something is called a shitty economy. maybe you've heard of it?
Well... the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
Concentrated power is dangerous, because power corrupts. Libertarians chose to address this issue by preventing the government from yielding too much power. But under capitalism, power might pool together in the hands of corporations, because power may be used to acquire more power. Of course, libertarians argue that the really bad stuff (murder, fraud, assault) would still be prevented by the government, so it would be okay. Furthermore, they argue that power isn't going to collect all that much, because at some point people are going to "go to another store" or something. Socialists, to contrast, aren't so sure.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
Nearly 50 grand right out of college to sit at a computer typing code? Actually I was saying (as opposed to implying) it is overpaid, not underpaid.
"there is, however, something keeping you from getting a new job and thus being able to pay your bills - this something is called a shitty economy. maybe you've heard of it?"
Are you saying that one of the lowest unemployment rates of all time (the fact that it is higher than during the .com boom means nothing) is a shitty economy?
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
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.
No, in the age of computers, slashdot should have a grammer checker option.
I suppose you sit there at the pub after work with your friends drinking 3 rounds of beers and say
"Bob, your grammer is non perfect , please get your act fixed"
2mins later the rest of the staff leave the pub and never invite you to their drinks again.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
If you really want to spend your life writing computer games that contribute virtually nothing to society, you are going to have to put up with the fact that you may not get as many benefits as you would get if you were more flexible with your demands.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
(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.
EA is there to make money, not take care of people.
EA has a responsibility to the community where it does business. Corporations, especially ones with eleven-figure market capitalizations should be good citizens, and part of that means providing the community with employment opportunities as well as quality products.
Nobody owes anybody a living, but they DO OWE everyone an opportunity to make a living.
If they are treating their employees poorly who cares?
Everyone should. When people lose jobs they lose their homes and savings. They lose their ability to raise families. Neighborhoods are damaged, which in turn damages the local economy, schools, tax revenues, government services, roads, utilities, retail businesses, vendors, construction companies and professional businesses.
Corporations aren't just about the shareholders.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
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.
If the game is good I'll buy it, unless I see it was made by Electronic Arts. The leverage afforded to workers is mostly gone, and the only force affecting EA anymore is the power of consumers- which is largely ineffective anyway.
You just have to be kidding, seriously. You really think what we read here reaches the slightest fraction of the general public? Even if it did, do you think people would really not buy the next Madden? The whole Nike issue went big on news channels all over the globe, yet no one stopped buying.
And how can power of consumers be ineffective? They're the ones bringing in the money!
Take off your rose colored glasses.
Mmm, there's definitely some subtlety here, but your view seems to be the tainted one. The goal is money, revenue, and the only thing stopping companies from doing whatever it takes to reduce product cost is law. No ethics, no human rights, not even religion. Now if EA manages to avoid being caught in their nastiness, the only thing an employee can do is quit. If working there is such slavery, then there must be some other better place. If there is not, well, fit in or go do something else. They will only change when they begin losing money. If Chinese prisons are doing it cheaply and legally, nothing wrong there.
The labor market for educated and technical people is in the process of a major deterioration (...)
True, and guess what, you're to blame. That's what happens when too many people get jiggy about IT startups, with their high paychecks and wonderland workplaces, and think there'll be room for everybody. Hit the history books, you'll see there's always some industry segment overcrowded.
It always boils down to what you can do. If you dislike their methods and can't find work elsewhere, either become someone they'd have to treat better, or go learn something else. Remember, even if government action were fast enough, they fund your government and will probably get far more politician support than you.
so, video games contribute nothing to society? as opposed to movies, music, pictures, entertainment, art? personally, i wouldnt want to live in a world where my only motivation factor is money; i enjoy other things in life.
The only problem I see is certain people needing a crutch in life
Oh, so now working two full-time jobs for one paycheck is a crutch? Ever notice business is ALWAYS BLAMELESS?
You should be thankful you had a steady hand-holding position for so long.
Oh, I'll see if I can make time to grovel before management next week.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Or are you one of those people who feels the fact that you were born to a middle class American family gives you a right to a 6 digit salary?
Or how about those who feel the fact they were hired in upper management gives them the right to take careers away from middle class families?
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Excerpt:
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
I know what both phrases mean, do you? Considering you seem to think "reductio ad absurdum" (also known as a "proof by contradictio"n) is a fallacy of some sort, it seems you don't.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Does it hurt enough to admit they're wrong? I'm assuming you don't make it that far up in the corporate ladder without a boatload of pride...and it's a giant pill to swallow to admit being wrong.
But what if they're not wrong? What if what they are doing is best for the bottom line? What if these employees are expendable? Would your head implode if the real world doesn't match your ideals?
But hey, you are free to have motivating factors other than money. Thats the beauty of capitalism, you can choose to place other factors at a higher priority. But then don't whine when you realize the tradeoffs.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
I got a snapshot of it: The Front Gate Oh yes. Their motto here is "Work will make you free". Marvelous.
isnt the unemployment rate calculated by those people who are recieving unemployment checks? they cut the length you can recieve those checks recently, down to something like 4 or 6 months. i know this because my father was laid off from his company, and spent about a year finding a new job. the last 6 months of that were without unemployment checks. cant say he was lazy about it either, as hes the most hardworking personi know of. went in to dozens of interviews, tried everything possible to get his unemployment extended. my point im asking, though, is are those numbers skewed now because they essentially cut those people who can recieve unemployment in half? ill have to look on the internet further, but i swear i saw that somewhere.
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.
eh... typo... : $
maybe you've never spent 16 solid hours coding, but i'd certainly ask for $50k to do that on a regular basis.
this may be the lowesty unemployment rate of all time - i don't know that for certain. what i do know, however is that it's fucking hard to get a job right now. i also know that the unemplyment rate is next to meaningless. the unemployment rate only counts those people who are actively searching for jobs and don't have them as unemployed. how many people have said "fuck it" and are living on social security? from the looks of my hometown - a buttload. the unemployment rate also does not reflect those people who work "under the table". my brother worked at a german restraunt that payed him in cash ever day so they didn't have to have another employee on the books.
the point of all this? don't spout the unemployment rate as a way to summarize the job market - it's not a good representation.
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.
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That means you are spoiled, not that you are underpaid. People do much harder work for much less money in this world.
"this may be the lowesty unemployment rate of all time"
Actually my phrase was "one of", not "the".
"what i do know, however is that it's fucking hard to get a job right now"
Should have tried it back when around 1/10th of those in the workforce.
"how many people have said "fuck it" and are living on social security?"
That generally requires someone to be eligible for ss first.
Also factor in how many more people are eligible to compete in the workforce now. It used to be women couldn't work, distance was a huge barrier, and those old people you mentioned would be lucky to live long enough and be healthy enough to still be working.
"the unemployment rate also does not reflect those people who work "under the table"."
How is that even remotely relevant?
Yes, the job market is competitive, but saying it is shitty is just plain ignorant.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Just because something will make you more money, it's not not always morally right, and it's not always legal. Either one of those things is going to cost you in bad morale, worker resentment, and bad press. Firing somebody for being too slow or whatever is one thing, fucking them over like ea_spouse wrote is another.
And from your logic and a lot of other peoples' logic, you seem to be saying that this is OK. It's not OK for a company to abuse people. It should either not hire them, it should fire them in a fair and efficient manner with full disclosure (after giving the person an explanation and a chance to fix the problems), and it should do its best to help people rather than screw them, or try to get a better idea of who it is hiring.
No, it's not OK. Would your head implode if you realized that sometimes, people do have legitimate gripes, never mind how desirable the job is? You hire somebody, you gotta be fair to 'em.
i am a soviet space shuttle
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 think you should learn a little about this free market we have going. Not everyone who holds an MBA or enjoys business is out to get you. They only get ahead of you because you're too ignorant to realize how they do it and YOU LET THEM. Or you're so brainwashed into thinking business is a "necessary evil" that you wish to take no part in your own future. The only involvment you want to have with a business is when you pick up your paycheck.
You think it's bad that EA hires fresh-faced grads eager to become slaves? I don't. If people are willing to become slaves then they deserve all that comes their way. Again, there is no "right" granted to you that guarantees your satisfaction (stable high-paying job) in life.
The Declaration of Independence says "the pursuit of Happiness" for a reason. I would never want my life planned from birth as many of you seem to want. Go to school, go to college, and get a stable high-paying job. Where is the pursuit in that? That arrangement has never been a guarantee; nor should it.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
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.
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
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'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that. Had to deploy a mutagenic virus against six worlds in order to get the 10,000,000 point "massive overkill" bonus and the special ending video. You were saying?
"Business is a good game -- lots of competition and minimum of rules. You keep score with money"
- Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari.
he only involvment you want to have with a business is when you pick up your paycheck.
Oh, I might be willing to buy a product from time to time. I could do with about 99.999999999% less advertising too.
You think it's bad that EA hires fresh-faced grads eager to become slaves?
No. I think it's bad when businesses expect to fill their plates three and four times at the free market buffet, then leave a dollar tip and take a nice thick shit on the new tablecloth before they leave.
See, we all live here. Just because I own a house doesn't give me the right to pile rhinoceros shit as high as possible in my front yard. Now I could argue I can do anything I want with my property, but the other people who live there also have the right not to have to walk past a buzzing mountain of shit every day.
Go to school, go to college, and get a stable high-paying job.
That's the "social agreement" we all made. It's why parents work four jobs to send their kids to college. We kept our part of the bargain. Businesses didn't. Ours is the first generation to have a worse standard of living than our parents.
That arrangement has never been a guarantee; nor should it.
Yeah, it should. If someone goes to medical school, or law school, or becomes an engineer, society should reward them. Otherwise we are making education worthless.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
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.
You really are dumb. Ever been to China ? Didn't think so.. the place is very much improved over the last ten years. I mean by an order of magnitude.
.. oh yeah that's right you're way too good for that. :)
That is true. China has undergone a boom at least partially fueled by its habit of providing slave labor in prisons to multinational corporations. If you don't trust newsmax (although I suspect you do) another link is here. They even stick factories in the middle of schools and have schoolkids make cheap stuff like fireworks.
I'm sorry you're pissed off that people who would have starved otherwise took your birthright "job". I guess you'll have to go work at the burger place
What do you have against people who work for a living?
Education is worthless itself. You have to put it to use. Maybe you're bitter that you have some fancy doctorate degree or something and it's not helping you obtain a steady career. There is no "social agreement" and you are incredibly ignorant of the way this society works. There are no hand-outs.
The thing that makes the US a great place to live is the one thing you are complaining about: freedom. Not everyone is going to please everyone else.
Advertising is crucial. Selling products is crucial. Welcome to capitalism.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
You can't treat your employees better than everyone else does. Shorter work weeks for salaried employees translates into higher wages. This will obviously hurt your ability to compete. (Compare this to the outsourcing situation.)
Your chain of reasoning appears sound, but the foundation is shaky. You're assuming that you can get more work for the same amount of money if you work your developers more - ie, that it is a linear relationship. By your logic, if you can prevent your employees from sleeping, eating, or going to the bathroom, you can get even more productivity out of them.
People are NOT machines. And even machines need downtime for maintenance or otherwise you're setting up disasters waiting to happen (as mechanics in the airline and train industries can attest).
My belief is that treating creative employees like machines isn't going to increase your profits in the long run, and is a questionable tactic even in the short run (like booking orders early to qualify them as sales for this quarter.) The cost of turnover is a major one, as you lose valued knowledge and experience, and you handicap the people left behind by forcing them to take time out of their schedules to bring new hires up to speed. This is how projects fall behind and get majorly fubared, and why documentation ends up being totally inadequate to deal with the situation.
Am I right? Until there's a major development house that can compete with EA on equal terms with a different way of staffing, I guess the jury is out.
Education is worthless itself.
Well, there you go. Can't argue with that.
Maybe you're bitter that you have some fancy doctorate degree or something and it's not helping you obtain a steady career.
Wow, a fancy doctorate degree? Is that like a fancy pair of shoes? Most of the people I know, including myself, have long since given up on a steady career.
No. I'm wondering exactly what the paragons of business plan on replacing education with, since they are so quick to replace everything else, including their neighbors. I suppose it will be very easy to advertise to people who can't read.
There is no "social agreement" and you are incredibly ignorant of the way this society works.
If there were no social agreement, there would be no education. Nobody has any reason to get an education at all if there is no social value to it. Right now, there is very little social value to education, which explains why 50% of the people in L.A. county, for example, are illiterate.
And I know exactly how this society works: tall dollars are all that matters.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
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.
Continue with that attitude. I guarantee you won't enjoy life one bit more.
I tire of your emotional hand-waving. I'm only going to say one more thing: you are the change you want to see in the world. You need to learn that you control your position in life. Not some arrogant boss who hates his job just as much as you seem to hate yours.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
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=-
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
Serious restructuring has to occur, but before you can let management go you must get rid of the people *below* the management level. It's simple common sense.
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
-- Albert Einstein
Seriously; why is it "common sense" to assume that you *must* get rid of the people below management level before you can restructure management?
It would be more "common sense" to assume that the reason high-level managerial positions aren't cut is because turkeys don't vote for Christmas.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Perfectionism and idealism, if you are *selfrightous*, will do harm indeed - especially to yourself. But if you apply common sence and what and how you feel the world, fairness, it is the best mix you can have in you.
It requires lot of work with yourself - learing from your mistakes, live in this cruel world with arms wide open. Of coarse, you can get many hits and you can hit back. But emotional honesty is always that somehting pays back.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Someone mod the parent up, it's spot on...
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.
Idealism is striving for an ideal. It is that simple, really. At some point you will realize that "good enough" is all you will ever achieve and that idealism is best left to your favorite deity. Any other "feeling" or "common sense" (which it's not) you have indicates that you're not an idealist or perfectionist to begin with. You only care if something is "good enough."
There is no room in business for either idealism or perfectionism. Both lead to arrogance and dictatorship-like organizations.
Of course, you seem to be bending or inferring a different notion, that is completely different from any known and accepted definition of either word all to put in your own two cents. Or perhaps you are really an idealist who is strugging with the notion that there actually is no ideal to be had at the end of the day and that everything you believe in is turning into a false hope; a mirage.
In any case, idealism and perfectionism are not the same as having standards. The latter I can empathize with; the former, there is no use for.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
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.
If the game is good I'll buy it, unless I see it was made by Electronic Arts.
It's a good thing you are ignorant of the conditions at every other developer...
Not everyone is heartless. Personally, I don't want a single person suffer from inhumane working conditions, I don't want people collapsing from stress, having heart attacks, losing loved ones because they don't have time for a relationship, only for me to receive another shiny game. If that's the price, I'd rather go outside and play frisbee, capitalism be damned. Who's with me?
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.
I took a number of logic classes along with plenty of mathematics classes (as one would expect from a math major with a minor in philosophy) and unlike you I actually paid attention in those classes. Your inability to identify logical arguments and fallacies makes your claims at the top of that post laughable.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
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.
Oh I agree, they all suck. But you can't boycott 100 companies at once, and expect to exert any pressure on any of them to stop abusing employees. But if you restrict your boycotting to the smaller subset of game companies which get press attention for employee abuse, you can at least exert some pressure on all of them to avoid press attention for abusing employees.
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
No. I think it's bad when businesses expect to fill their plates three and four times at the free market buffet, then leave a dollar tip and take a nice thick shit on the new tablecloth before they leave.
What has EA taken from you, or anyone else that wouldn't enter into contract with them? What? Have they stolen your wallet? Did an EA bulldozer run over your house? What have they taken from 'the buffet' which you claim to take share in (yourself or by proxie)? Nothing. Zip. They borrowed, or otherwise aquired funds in a legal (read: voluntary way), employed people who, every day, reaffirm their agreement with the terms of employment and churned out products that enrich peoples lifes. So, lets see: they made millions of customers happy and gave lots of people 'the dream job' and provided their families with income. How much have you done? Are you equally useful, by your own standards? I doubt it.
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
Thats life. If you are so much of a spoiled brat to think otherwise, sorry.
"Uh, it saves the employer about a third off the top since they don't have to pay taxes, Social Security, Medicare, minimum wage, insurance or workman's comp."
I meant how is that relevant to the unemployment rate genius.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Renderware is owned by EA. They can choose who uses it.
Sorry folks, but he's right. Working at EA isn't a base-level, "gotta have this job to survive" type of work a la McDonalds or Wal-Mart. People choose to work at EA. If you don't like the way things are run, go elsewhere.
-jhp
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.