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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."
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.
"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.
well .. i think, based on timing and wild speculation, that it's possible that the whole spouse story could have been engineered by the attorneys trying to file a class action lawsuit against EA. The ensuing negative publicity would serve as "encouragement" to make EA try to settle the lawsuit.
.. I'm just saying it's possible and we shouldnt be lemmings and believe stuff just cause it "feels better" to trust something without looking at it in a skeptical manner as well.
I am not saying it was a planned strategic move
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!
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.
Do you work for EA's Ministry of Truth?
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.
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?
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.
Well, I go to Carnegie Mellon, and from what I have seen, this is not a class, but a lacture, which, from a student's standpoint, probably means that there will be free food in Baker Hall soon ... perhaps I will drop by and see what they have to say.
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
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.
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.
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.
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