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NYT on EA Games
The New York Times has a story investigating the EA Games accusations that we reported on before. They use the phrase "toiling like galley slaves" to describe EA's programmers, and note that EA has a formal policy of hiring young, naive people who are willing to work long hours for low pay.
He graduated RIT with a 4.0 in CS and EA offered him 50k a year with a 7k bonus. They helped him move to Florida (hes from NY) and put him to work doing the layout for Madden 2k4. He hates it since the games are essentially assembly line made. He does very little coding since EA has their cross platform tools and spent most of his time aligning menu items. Last I heard he wanted out. I remember how excited he was to get a "game development" job and was crushed to find out how that means tweaking stupid crap. Now he wants completely out of the game industry.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
The complaints I've been told about involve being told there's a crunch period early on in the project, in order to reduce problems at the end, only the crunch time is extended indefinately. The point is that months of 80 hour weeks are written into the schedule at the beginning and continue even when the project is hitting all it's milestones. That's not working 50% and making up for it later, that's EA managment deciding they'd rather have burnt out employees doing a bad job for more hours.
If you raised wages, EA would have to use less programmers to get a given job done, produce inferior work or have to charge higher prices
Bullshit on a stick, newbie. EA had an operating profit of over $500M USD last year, and spent several hundred million dollars on marketing alone. You want to argue that globalization should fuck workers here? I think it should make life better for workers everywhere.
EA's financial status as of last year.
Sales $2.82 bil
Profits $.50 bil
Assets $3.34 bil
Market Value $13.28 bil
Employees 4,000
CEO Probst's compensation package
$1.45M in cash this year, $145M in stock options granted over his career. Stock options may look free, but they damn well aren't-- the difference comes out of the company's profits same as any other compensation.
So, EA games has 3,300 programmers. Hire another 1,650 at $60,000 a pop, and the wages cost you $100M a year. Adjust to ~$150M a year for benefits, and you're still taking up less than one third of EA's operating profits from last year.
Productivity goes up, and it costs you less than the money spent compensating the CEO in the last 10 years.
We can also compare it to EA Games' marketing budget, estimated at >$100M in the last quarter. Cut your marketing budget by 30%, and you can hire enough programmers for them to have normal lives and increase production.
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If you read the original sources of the article, you would see that "Crunch time" isn't so bad. Its when "Crunch time" consists of the beginning, middle, and end of the project and you're required to work 7 days a week 18 hour days the ENTIRE TIME.
If you read the original slashdot story, you would know that EA commits verbal fraud on new employees. They break the law, but they do so in a manner that makes it difficult to catch them.
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Sad to say, $697,000 is peanuts for a CEO salary these days. In 2003, the average CEO raked in $9.2m.
Lou Gerstner ended his time at IBM with $2m of salary plus $1.5m annual bonus plus $12.9m of restricted stock. The year before that he got no stock, but a bonus of $8m was probably some consolation.
Similarly, the CEO of Comcast got $2m salary last year, plus a $6m bonus and $12m in stock options.
In 2001, as Cisco's stock dropped 71% and they lost a billion dollars, their CEO continued to rake in $154m total compensation. Imagine how much he would have gotten if he had done a good job.
If minimum wage had increased by the same percentage as CEO pay in the last 15 years, flipping burgers at McDonalds would be paying $15 an hour.
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In economics, "search models suggest that all employers enjoy some monopsony power because workers require time to find better jobs." This article from the Economic History Network encyclopedia goes into more detail, including how the rate of exploitation will be the reciprocal of the elasticity of the labor supply. If the labor supply is elastic (and highly sensitive to wages) there won't be as much exploitation of workers, but if it's largely inelastic (as one might expect from the "naieve young programmer" demographic) then exploitation will be significant.
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I work for EA as a programmer.
It's not as bad as some people here think. If you're working 80 hour weeks, I guarantee that you're either volunteering your time, a spineless moron, or in the process of looking for another job/quitting.
This isn't just a problem at EA. This sort of stuff happens everywhere else in the games/IT industry, it's just easy to sling mud at EA because their a large evil corporation. The guys at Id software work the exact same schedules and I can assure you that they're not all millionaires.
There are much shittier jobs to have. This is really a non-issue. Anyone who's thinking of quitting their cushy IT job, try working a 12 hour day on a construction site. When you pull a 14 hour day at EA, you're not mining coal or assembling BBQ's. You get free meals, video game machines abound, a beautiful lounge area. It's not a bad place to be at all for 14 hours a day.
That being said. I work at the Vancouver studio, and I have to say that I'm not really feeling all this EA negativity. I work normal hours (40 - 50 a week), my project is on schedule, and I'm very passionate about the game I'm working on. I may be a special case, but this just isn't seeming to affect me? Any other EAC slashdoters care to comment?
I think that a lot of this negativity is just sensationalism. I programmed games as a hobby many years before I started doing it proffessionaly, and I knew exactly what I was getting myself into. There are a LOT of people who are extremely happy with their jobs in the games industry.
- Mr.Oreo