Slashdot Mirror
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
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 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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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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