Slashdot Mirror
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.
I have mod points to spare, so I'd rather have your discussion than your points.
I think one of the most insightful quotes in the whole read (which was absolutely fascinating by the way because of how neutral it tried to be) was this:
The video game business is very time sensitive; many titles are timed to ship in time for Christmas sales, sports titles are tied to the season opening of sports, and movie titles must release in time frames corresponding to the movies. Making an outstanding game, but delivering it late, is not as profitable as making an acceptable quality game on time. EAers talk about "maximum on-time quality."
I think that about sums up the business of making video games. Remember guys, they'd love a great game, but in the end, they don't really care as long as they get it out on time. Another interesting quote was:
"EA veterans say that the major reason games ship late is due to a lack of focus in the design vision: "games are usually late because the development team doesn't know what it is building."
While I'm all for encouraging small game developers and publishers to grow because more competition is good, I think this illustrates that there is a point when you become too large as a company to effectively produce games.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I'm one of those people who boycott Nike and Walmart and I'll probably boycott EA too.
In fact, you've almost convinced me to start pirating EA's games.
http://nyamenation.org/
Yeah, that is how capitalism works, and poor treatment of workers shouldn't be tolerated (by the consumers, or by the workers). But if you need a job, and jobs are hard to find, what do you do?
Back in the Old Days(TM) there were groups called Unions, groups of workers who decided they had been fucked by the bosses for long enough, and it was time to get some fairness.
People in my country fought and died for a fair go in the workplace, but recent government policy involving workplace agreements and enterprise bargaining have severely damaged the rights of workers.
If they are treating their employees poorly who cares?
That kind of attitude is exactly why those in power are able to continue exploiting people in the third world (and the second, and the first).
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.
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
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.
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.
You need to learn more about how BitTorrent works. There isn't much point in BitTorrenting a 288,930 byte file; just mirror it. Tracker overhead will eat any advantage you think you're gaining.
I have exactly the same problem. Although I am not a poor man, I still cannot afford to spend $100 on a shirt made here in Australia under Australian working conditions. That is, if I could even find such a piece of apparel.
That's not even counting the toaster, the modem, the TV ... the list goes on.
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!
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.
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
Professor Randy Pausch at CMU is himself known as somewhat of a slavedriver, among his graduate students. He's also among the most abrasive, "my way or the highway" professors at CMU (who, on average, are very competitive but also reasonable and laid back -- the department even has an official "reasonable person policy"). I'm not really surprised that it's he who is writing this kind of one-sided defense of EA's culture article.
It's obviously another valuable perspective, but it should be interpreted with an eye to the rather extreme personality of the guy writing it. He's not your average academic (or average corporate manager, for that matter). He's closer to Philip Greenspun in personality, for those of you who know him.
Posted as AC, but I'm someone with firsthand experience working with Professor Pausch.
I know the concept is that as a sallaried position; your lean times are supposed to make up for your fat time. But that's not the case. If there is a lean time big enough to compensate for the over time, then the company is already in trouble.
The last sallaried position I had, part of my compenstation was supposed to be proffit sharing (at the discression of the manager/owner). Those proffits didn't even come close to what I could have earned working a minimum wage job for the overtime I put in.
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.
No, if you really don't want to support them, don't buy it and don't play it.
You look like nothing more than an opportunistic thief if you're willing to break the law and then justify it by saying "I'm trying to stick it to the man! If Blizzard wasn't such a bastard company, I would've bought the game instead of pirating it!" The bottom line is that if you don't want to support a company whose practices you don't approve of, don't use their products (which means, gasp, you have to suffer a bit because you don't have them).
I know I'm not going to be buying another EA game soon, but it's not hard for me because I don't like sports games and I've got more than enough versions of SimCity kicking around.
Schlock Mercenary
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
(From the PDF)
"Probably the most surprising thing I learned about EA is that its leaders, including its creative leaders, describe it as a packaged goods company like Proctor and Gamble or Nabisco."
This, in a nutshell, with extreme eloquence sums up EA's fundamental problem...and from the sounds of things it is very fundamental to them. There is no possible way that a company with this mentality can hope to run an MMORPG in particular...because a boxed product is the direct opposite of what an MMORPG is. A more appropriate conventional metaphor, or one which boomers would at least be more comfortable with, would be to think of an MMORPG as a virtual theme park or wildlife reserve. Expansion packs therefore, rather than being end products in themselves, should be thought of as visitor passes to previously roped off/undeveloped areas of the park. This analogy actually works very well with UO in particular...as using a client older than Age of Shadows for example after AoS's release meant that a person could not go to Malas or Ilshenar, for example.
If EA want to really break into the MMORPG space, (and they haven't substantially yet; UO is going downhill at a rate of knots, and The Sims Online is still well below target population) they're going to have to stop thinking purely in terms of being box-sellers, and start thinking in terms of being virtual park rangers. (or in the case of The Sims Online, even a virtual government)
An MMORPG is NOT something you can put in a box, throw out the door, and then heave a big sigh of relief because it's finished. They need continual maintenance, and if they are to do well they need continual maintenance by someone who actually has a clue about how to do it.
Even for single-player games however, this type of thinking is creatively barren and disastrously toxic. It might work fine for the annual regurgitation of a football game, (like Madden, and what Unreal Tournament sadly seems to be in danger of becoming) since football does not fundamentally change over time, (although on that score UT has absolutely no excuse) but with virtually any other genre, all it will ensure is that rehashes and regurgitations of the same tired old formulas get trucked out the door every year...Innovation comes to a standstill. I truly hope that for EA's sake they have in mind to change this philosophy, because they're signing their own commercial death certificate if they don't. Sure, it makes good commercial sense to go with the tried and true, (at least for maybe the first couple of sequels as far as games go) but there should I think be a dual approach. While you're assuring that the bills get paid today, you should also be focussed on staking out as much new creative territory as possible...because that's the only way to make sure that the bills also get paid tomorrow. Trying to get EA to put an emphasis on creativity is futile...They're a company, and their primary interest is to generate as high a margin as possible. But I wish we could encourage the company somehow to at least be halfway intelligent and forward-thinking when it comes to making money as well.
EVERY SINGLE PERSON who works at EA is working at EA because at one point in time, they wanted to.
I'm a CS grad, and most of my fellow CS grads, including myself, originally got into progtamming / CS because we wanted to do games.
Along the way there, EVERYONE knew that game developers worked long hours for little pay. Most of my friends then chose to follow another path. I wound up going into the Power Industry.
Even in spite of all the bad press EA has been getting (even though it's deserved), there are still tens of thousands of people who would sell their souls to work on an EA game.
No, that does not excuse the employee's mistreatment entirely. But you can't ignore that fact.
I've got one friend who ended up going into the Games Industry anyways, in spite of all the stories. Every once in a while we'll all get together and play the latest game he worked on. He gets bragging rights that none of the rest of us do. Everyone else writes business or industrial Apps. Nobody WE talk to gives a squirt of piss to see our latest creations, but everyone can't wait to see the newest game he churned out.
So in the end, I don't think it's fair to look at EA as this huge monolithic beast that's 100% evil, and all the poor poor employees as 100% victims. They knew what they were getting into when they applied (or at least they SHOULD'VE done their research). And now they're just getting what they should've expected.
Not everyone gets paid a huge salary and mega-benefits to work their dream jobs.
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
I got a snapshot of it: The Front Gate Oh yes. Their motto here is "Work will make you free". Marvelous.
I said what needs to be done, not what is going to be done. We're doomed. Get used to it. People are too selfish, greedy and dumb for there to be any hope. Maybe if it was two out of the three...
And, yes, reducing the number of people who have no place in society will improve society. People are most dangerous when they're poor, desparate and have nothing to do with themselves. This is where you get guys willing to crash planes into buildings from.
I'd love to see Chinese style forced birth control, but it's not going to happen. Capitalists aren't stupid. They want plenty of fodder for their factories. Remember WWII? Things sucked for workers until after it, and the only real reason things got better was we killed so many healthy, young males that there weren't enough to go around. Well, you can thank the Baby Boomers for fucking their way back to a surplus population, and the Capitalist Pigs are primed to take advantage of this.
Do I want Marxism? Hell no. You're never gonna get past the dictatorship of the Proles. Russia didn't, China didn't, and we won't. What I want are lots of individuals who consider the long term, broad based impact of their decisions. Or at least a few with the power and willingness to force the dumb to stop being so dumb. Instead, I get Vatican approved Sex manuals trying to encourage poor dumb fucks to have lots of kids. Thanks Jesus.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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 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.
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?
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.
You must be new here...
-=Lothsahn=-
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.
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.