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EA Reconsiders Overtime Position
bippy writes "An internal memo leaked from EA to its employees says that the company plans to make more employees elgible for overtime. Rusty Rueff, senior vice president of human resources, bemoans the bad press and begs forgiveness: "As much as I don't like what's been said about our company and our industry, I recognize that at the heart of the matter is a core truth." GamesIndustry.biz has commentary on the story as well.
Can someone tell me why there are so many articles about EA? What is this, the message board for one tech company?
It's about time they changed their tune and started paying developers what they're worth.
No sir. Not gonna happen. Absolutely not. I assure you.
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Wheee,
-- RLJ
You're finally learning that if you treat your employees right, they won't ruin your reputation.
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
This reads more like a PR stunt than anything else. Expect work conditions to be more of the same at EA. The same, constant, broken promises.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
We are looking at reclassifying some jobs to overtime eligible in the new Fiscal Year. We have resisted this in the past, not because we don't want to pay overtime, but because we believe that the wage and hour laws have not kept pace with the kind of work done at technology companies
In other words, we didn't want to pay overtime.
Gah. Dil-bert!
Congrats Slashdotters, you changed the world. All the publicity this got, I'm sure Slashdot did it's fair share.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
What's the big deal?
Most large companies have saleried employees that get no overtime.
Try working for the government some time.
Now we'll only have a fifa game every two years!
Umm in that case, hire more people
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May not be so bad after all.. give the Republicans some credit. Without overtime pay, maybe, just maybe, American workers will just say no to overtime because they no longer have the lure of extra pay. Also, prices of goods will go down since paying employees overtime is expensive. Don't tell me you never heard someone say they worked overtime for extra cash. If they didn't have an incentive would they still work the same number of hours? I wouldn't think so. And I think that's a good thing considering workers in the U.S. work too fucking long.
EA renames Saturday to Monday Reloaded and Sunday to Monday Extended Edition Director's Cut..
It wouldn't take a Class Action lawsuit to get management to recognize that their actions is causing their product to suffer through abusing their staff. So much managerial bullshit, all about profit. If they actually have to pay their employees overtime, that would cut into profits. We can't have that!!!
Whoops, just kidding, the memo linked there is wrong; GamesIndustry.biz was apparently hoaxed into putting an EA memo on its site that wasn't actually written by EA. EA has no plans to clean up its act and no plans to compensate its workers. Hope this clears things up.
Apologies to M
I agree. This is likely total PR bullshit.
I work for a Fortune 500 software maker (non-games), and we get promises like this all the time. In fact, I was just talking to a co-worker who was promised that they were eliminating overtime this season. Last year, he worked Saturdays during the crunch. This year, it's been Saturday and Sundays. And this is a totally seasonal job, very predictable. This is not a company pushing to meet some artificial marketing-inflicted deadline.
The bottom line is that big companies will continue to find new and creative ways to milk productivity from people at the lowest cost possible. The game industry is no different than any other industry.
the company plans to make more employees elgible for overtime
This is great, I mean i thought that anything over 40 hours is automatically considered as over-time unless they were contracted but this is good, i mean EA is now coming on in really strong this could be considered as their bonus eh?! Hell I bet those CEOs doesn't do anything but own them and makes a lot of money while the low wage people works their asses off and makes EA happens, and they are the poeple that earns this overtime wages.
May
I'm actually surprised that EA was concerned enough to even go as far as sending out a memo. Most companies that demand the hours like what's been said about EA wouldn't even go that far...
I'm almost wondering if that memo wasn't purposefully released as a PR move...
And what if EA is truly sincere about changing? How much different from this "PR stunt" would their response be?
They're damned if they do, damned if they don't.
Like EA, Wal-mart took great pains to deny its workers overtime (or promotion, if you happen to be female), and like EA they were eventually called out on it. Unlike EA, they are maintaining that it is necessary to their business model of offering a gallon jar of pickles for $3 that they not deviate from paying minimum wage. And if the employees don't get the store cleaned up in their allotted time slot, well then they better not object to working the overtime for free.
So, really, props to EA for admitting they were wrong. Publicity stunt or no, they've done something not every company is willing to do and should be lauded for that.
Balderdash. What's wrong with paying someone more for more work? There's nothing in the hourly wage model that requires set schedules. The only argument I can read into this is, "well, it's just not done," or "hourly pay is just old-fashioned."
It sounds to me like not wanting to pay overtime is exactly why they've resisted classifying people as "eligible" for overtime.
Well, I think work is work, whether it's on an assembly line or writing software, and it takes time that a lot of people would use for something else, if they didn't need to earn a living. That's why they call it work, and not fun.
Time's the most valuable commodity we can give somebody else, because once it's given, it's gone for good. I don't think it's asking too much to be compensated proportionately for it.
Surely I'm missing something here. What is it?
It's about time these slave drivers started paying for the long hours that they require. We have a branch office of EA here in Orlando and they are notorious for hiring young and cheap talent that are foaming at the mouth to work on games. They then turn around and take advantage of them, by working them long hours, for low pay, no overtime etc. All because these kids are too excited to see that they are getting screwed. I talked to the local shop here once, as I used to design simulator software for the naval jet fighters (f-14 and f-18) and felt I might enjoy a switch to games. I did some really interesting stuff that the game engines where just getting around to and they where like well we pay 30 to 40K for experienced developers even the military simulation industry which is notorious for being cheap is not this cheap. Rusty I say pay them back pay if you want forgiveness.
I see this as a common problem throughout the tech industry, it just seems to be more pronounced than most at EA. The upper management creates a flawed schedule, without enough time or resources to do all of the required tasks. When it becomes apparent that the schedule will be missed, everyone goes into crunch mode, working ungodly hours to get the product out the door. The project is saved, but all of the developers have ulcers. Since the management didn't have to pay the developers for the extra hours they worked, there is not cost to the scheduling mistake, and make the same mistakes on the next project (unless they intentionally lowball the schedule, because they know they won't be the one's paying for it). If the developers received overtime, there would be a cost to the error, and it would be less likely to happen the next time.
Sometimes I doubt your committment to SparkleMotion!
No... this tells me your hacked off about working conditions and want to tell management to kiss it.
In the next 30 days we'll have the survey results and we will share them openly with you by the middle of January.
No... in the next 30 days you need to hire some more employees so that people don't revolt against you and throw old copies of Madden football at the office. Oh and let the fat guy keep his Swingline.... for gosh sakes the Bostch jams when he is stapling his TPS reports.
It might be that programmers who work their trade out of love of problem solving are to blame for this. I know many people, myself included, have put in voluntary overtime just for the joy of completing a project, or just being naturally engaged in your work. They say if you love your job, you'll never work a day in your life. You don't even ask to be compensated in times like this. You just love what you are doing. At various times in the games industry, very creative work was being done, and it just may be that these carefree problem-solvers created an unrealistic expectation for all the others around them.
It's like the woman at the office who's husband sends flowers to every day. All the other women in the office adore this unseen male, but be sure that all the men in the office hate this guy for making them look bad.
Seems that everyone goes about their job (and love, for that matter) in different ways. Over-management and over-regulation do strange things to the human spirit.
The penal system can't hold all the people that do it. Fill in your own blank.
This doesn't take responsibility for anything really, and it doesn't solve the problem. Sure, they can classify a 'few' positions for overtime between now and when they owe all their employees that and back OT thanks to the class action.
Whatever it takes to help them churn out the next ShaqFu.
the work is getting harder, the tasks are more complex and the hours needed to accomplish them have become a burden
It's total garbage and doesn't show the first sign of understanding of what the problem really is and how working more unreasonable hours doesn't fix it.
Notice how this guy responds to the charges of whipping his employees by talking about process and efficiency? Clearly,
the only thing these employees should do is sue the bastards into the ground.
Heh. There are more appropriate measures, but they all lead to lengthy jail time.
[i]"As much as I don't like what's been said about our company and our industry, I recognize that at the heart of the matter is a core truth."[/i] Well Duh!
We will be all whining when they move their development to India. I hope you enjoy Madden Cricket 2007. That said, I would gladly work 70 hours a week to be in the credits of a video game.
First of all, an absolute cap at 80 hours a week under any conditions would make sense, since you are only fooling yourself if you think you are productive working even longer hours, and allow an 80 hour work week for 1 week maximum, cap it at 60 the rest of the time. If they can't meet their deliverables under these conditions, then it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that they need more staff, or have an unreasonable delivery schedule.
My rights don't need management.
"They're damned if they do, damned if they don't."
More like "they're damned until they ACTUALLY do - often". EA has been tilted so heavily toward the "damned if they don't" side of being upfront and fair, it's going to take a lot of "do's" to earn folks' trust again.
And this would be a great way to start.
On reading this I'm sorely tempted to write to Rusty and outline to him in very precise and specific terms exactly why I think the company he works for gives capitalism a bad name. I wouldn't actually do it for the purposes of being purely vindictive, either. I don't necessarily want EA destroyed, because I really value the work of some of the assimilated companies. (Maxis, Origin)
What I *do* want however is for them to get a clue in a very big way, particularly as far as MMORPGs are concerned. UO is still headed for the gurgler and gaining speed, and The Sims Online has become an online sex pests' paradise, when the game was not originally intended for anything even remotely like that.
Electronic Arts needs radical reform...at the core ideological level. That article on here a few weeks back by the college professor showed me that...when he talked about EA's execs thinking of the company as being simply a vendor of boxes. If they don't get that reform, then they *will* sink. It won't happen overnight perhaps, but it will gradually happen. They need to start innovating again, and they need to prevent the soulless bean-counters from being in charge. There is more to games...and life itself...than *just* money...and if you don't realise that, eventually you'll get to a point where you're not making money either.
I thought no-overtime non-comp work was illegal for entertainment companies.
If they're working over their salaried time then they are required by law to recieve overtime or comp.
Direct away from face when opening.
Don't get me wrong - companies *do* abuse people when the company has sufficient power. Unions do provide protection to those workers, but it's not a panacea.
In the software development realm, some programmers are 100x more productive than others. Many times there are more than 2x productivity differences between workers.
When you move to unionized protection for the workforce, you are essentially mandating compensation for producers to be normalized. Even though you might be 5x more productive than your cube neighbor, your compensation will not reflect that value difference.
When you're talking about manual production activities - assembly line manufacturing, product delivery (bread suppliers) etc - it makes perfect sense because each breaed delivery person has a maximum capacity that he can accomplish, and the variance in production can easily be normalized and compensation level can more easily be established.
In this industry, do you really want to have collective bargaining where the people who are the most productive derive the least benefit from exercising their talents? If you can accomplish more in 2 hours than your coworkers, should you need to put in a full workday to be compensated the same as they are?
I'm not convinced that the traditional model of collective bargaining is a great solution to this problem.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
So, we can expect in the short term an increase in the cost of EA products maybe. What's this mean for their stock price? I dare not speculate, but those in the know can figure it out. What will the stock holders think of it? Will _THEY_ embrase the shift? Time will tell, but this could be a turning point for some, and perhaps set a trend for others.
Since these EA stories started to break I just can't shake the image in my head of John Madden chained to a recording studio being made to work long hours into the night recording "Boom!" over and over again to get it just right.
i bet you write tax software....
;)
come on admit it
I work for a fairly large organization of 10,000+ people. I think the assumption at this point is that any internal e-mail by upper management will make its way to the local paper if the topic is interesting enough. So I wouldn't consider it a leak.
Also keep in mind that the goals of the HR department and other management may be different. Often HR is looking out for employes, while other management may have other goals.
I could easily spend ten minutes writing up a memo to circulate claiming that my personal work standards are being raised, that I am going to volunteer more hours at the job, and that I will never be late. While the memo might make my boss get some warm and fuzzy feelings, the memo itself doesen't do anything. I am not going to work more hours, nor am I going to raise my work standards, and I can all but guarantee I'll occasionally be late. It's just a memo, as for the changes...wait for it, wait for it...
The republican government wants to set the clock back to the 1920's. H1B's, overtime exemptions, offshoring, etc. is eating into white collar careers and nobody on slashdot seems to give a flying fuck. If we don't organize politically, big companies and their deep-pocket lobbyists will sell our souls to the lowest bidder.
And don't give me that crap about working harder and getting 200 certificates instead of just 100. We are in the cross-hairs of corporation desire for cheaper, more docile labor. Globalism is making brains into a cheap commodity and turning white collar work into the same species as blue collar. We are not different from them anymore, except they learned how to obtain at least some political power. We are still willing carpets.
WAKE UP Techies! Unite or Parish!
Table-ized A.I.
Like someone else said, this looks like a total smokescreen. It doesn't take responsibility for _anything_ much less acknowledge the real problems at EA.
I used to work for Newport News Shipbuilding a few years ago and they had a problem where some people working in an Engineering division were being paid salary and were overtime exempt and others were hourly workers. The salaried workers complained to management about the inequality so the CEO came up with a solution. He fired all the salaried workers and hired them back at a much lower hourly rate when they begged. Ain't corporate America great?
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
The sad thing is that paying overtime won't cut into EA's profits, it will cut into customers' wallets. The next game will be $59.99 new instead of $49.99, and this trend might push across the board. I hope and pray that you are right, that EA will take the hit internally, but I think they will try to push the extra cost onto consumers instead. At that point it is up to us to tell EA, via our purchasing power, that we won't shell out that much for every game they create.
Gee, how many times have we (the trench workers) seen stuff like this before. After reading the memo and the ea_spouse posting, there was an all too fimilar 'ping' in my gut.
The EA management team should be paraded around the town square a whipped with wet noodles (or harsher) , pelted with whatever gum can be pried off the sidewalk, and humiliated in what ever manner seen fit. It is completely true that the ones that make the big salaries don't give much of a care about those minions below pumped for the bulk of the grunt work.
True, we (the worker geeks) used to be the cool ones a few years back. But that was then and now, it's back to the same 'ol same 'ol where the execs once again have the spotlight, the workers know their place, and the economy favors mostly those on top.
Frankly, I'm not much of an game player and will make it a point to specifically not buy EA games anymore - for myself or anyone else.
The leaked memo needs to go much further and pretty much include everyone in overtime rules. The fact that some will be looked at leads to a bunch of magic hand waving while the practices continue. EA's made a boat load of cash and should share the wealth with those who are probably most responsible for it.
But alas, the top execs and management need to maintain their pecking order and paychecks so their lifestyles can continue. Such is the way of things.
My advice to EA employees: stage a mass demonstration or walk out - organize! It's no fair that you get crap from all the hard work while others reap the real benefits.
I really hope the class action yields some cash for those who deserve and more bad press for EA and in fact, the rest of the software industry where this happens more than not. This type of work is not sustainable and we Americans need to stand up for better jobs and better working conditions (gee, that sounds historically fimiliar). Otherwise, companies will take everything they can, including your life.
Is that "Net," typo one of those captchas to narrow down which division might leak such a thing?
A family member of mine works an "entry level" position as an Investment Banker for the big-name firm in Manhattan. Considering she works 90+ hours per week, she's not really being paid a whole lot, but she's gaining a hell of a lot of experience. Over Thanksgiving, I asked her how she liked working so much. She said that it was stressful, but exciting. Being someone who also works a fair amount (no but-you're-posting-on-/. cracks please) it didn't bother me. A lot of family members said she was being exploited etc. Her response?
"If I complained and didn't work as much, they have 20,000 applicants to fill about 50 positions available."
That's just the reality of the marketplace today. Even if our economy was doing really well, this would still be the case. It's capitalism. If you want less hours and less stress, there's a lot of options for you out there. I support EA in allowing them to work people as much as they want, as long as they are upfront about it. And since I'm not an employee at EA, I cannot say how truth- or untruthful they have been.
What I don't condone are actions of places like Wal-Mart that ask you to stay an extra hour or so "off the clock" to help out clean some aisles.
I don't support mistreating workers, but that doesn't mean I'm opposed to companies having positions where you work 80-hr week jobs.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
And what if EA is truly sincere about changing? How much different from this "PR stunt" would their response be?
The changes would have happened first, instead of being "announced." Their employees shouldn't have been treated like shit in the first place.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
To all employees of EA:
We apologize for your poor treatment and lack of overtime pay. You guys deserve better. In fact, you deserve more than anything we can give you, so we've decided to lay off every employee and move the operation overseas. Thanks for your continued committment, and don't forget to buy our up-and-coming game: Command & Conquer: Managers.
Thanks, and have a nice day!
-Rusty Rueff
Does anyone else feel like this is still a cop-out? If I were in the position of these developers, I would be dissapointed. I'd much rather prefer working 40-60 hours a week rather than working 80 and receiving overtime. Even if they get paid overtime, their lives and families are still going to suffer because of the insane hours EA makes them work. Extra money really isn't much good if you don't have free time to enjoy it.
That letter literally stunk of double talk. It will be the same conditions as usual. This is nothing more than typical PR.
We had a something like this when I worked at Wolfram Research. The head HR droid was whining to the local paper about being unable to hire "qualified developers", and the story ended up in one ofthe prominent sections.
The next day a programmer who interviewed there wrote a very enlightening editorial that did a nasty slam dunk on Wolfram. I forget what it said word for word, but the final sentence was along the lines of "...in terms of salary, Wolfram isn't paying their programmers enough. I interviewed there and they tied for lowest. I went elsewhere."
Needless to say that editorial was prominently displayed throughout the company. Very amusing.
Often HR is looking out for employes, while other management may have other goals.
No, the purpose of the HR department is to minimize the chances of the company being sued. Any benefit to the employees is mostly a side effect of that primary goal.
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
It's interesting that the first memo I've seen leaked from the company is one that tries to portray EA as a loving, caring company. This is obviously they're way of responding to all the recent criticism.
In the end, actions speak louder than words, and EA's treatment of its employees in unconscionable.
I agree with you, 100%.
the company plans to make more employees elgible for overtime.
Probably by giving pink slips to anyone who complains, thereby allowing them to find jobs somewhere else where overtime is a possibility.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I don't think they care as much about the programmers as the gamers. A lot of game buyers read Slashdot. A lot of people with influence to change which games are bought by friends read Slashdot. If Slashdot says "boycott EA", EA has problems.
On another note, anyone want to give testimonial about a game company that treats its employees with respect?
How about Bioware? I love their games, so I hope they treat their programmers well. Besides, I'm canadian too.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Here's a livejournal entry about working at EA, and it's pretty revealing.
Also, I worked in Austin for Origin Games, until EA slowly strangled the company to death, so I'm no fan of EA either (although their Hockey on Sega was the bomb in the day)
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
They'd go work at some company doing some menial programming tasks (like pumping out basic business apps), making decent dollars, but work they can easily do in their sleep. Spend 30 hours of the work week working on games for open source or for profit, get the paying work done in the other 10 hours, and still have plenty of other hours to continue working on your games or doing real life stuff.
I think you're missing his point at least.
I think in essence he is saying his people aren't "clock punchers". Laborers punch a clock and he doesn't consider his people laborers. I would be insulted if someone whose job function is little more than to be a pair of hands. And I grew up in a factory town (Flint, Michigan).
So I see his point there. Even though it has clearly been passed through a few lawyers to CYA.
However, in the end, I think perhaps his position is wrong, and slashdot is right. These people are essentially laborers. And since the company is already using them as such, I think they should be paid as hourly workers too.
I'm sure glad I don't have to punch in and out when I go to lunch or have to run an errand on work time.
"We've started a Development Process Improvement Project to get smarter and improve efficiency".
Sounds like Lumberg is phoning in the "Consultants."
The next memo will undoubtedly be littered with "Ask yourself, Is this good for the company?"
Buzzwords, manager-speak and bullshit.
Nothing will change.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Working 80 hours a week is detrimental to your health. The real problem is that people put the value of money over their own life. That's the failure that capitalism has succumbed to. Without some good controls over how people are treated within the system, capitalism can do some really horrible things to people. Sure, turning tricks can make a lot of money for women and gay street hustlers, but would you want your sister, mother or daughter doing that? It's the same thing.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Just like Blizzard was on the brink of bankrupcy after many in slashdot called for a boycott. Most EA games seem designed not to appeal to the average Slashdot reader. The hundreds of thousands of joes that buy madden 20XX will buy next year's game anyway.
If you're in the USA, there's an easier way to make lots of money. Marry a successful guy, then after he buys and house and nice car, etc. get divorced. More often than not, you'll get at least half his shit, even if the only work you did was lie on your back and let him stick his dick in your pussy! (after making him take you out and treat you nice) Can you believe that? What a deal!
This was intentionally leaked. No exec. writes an internal memo that long with that tone. This is an unofficial press release.
What I don't know I just fake...
I work for a mission-based healthcare organization, so perhaps I'm not as cynical as some. The folks in HR in my organization work on things like getting employee benefits (we have some great ones), employee discounts at local businesses, and advocating for employees when they have complaints against their manager.
I built a job application for our Intranet and one of the things people quickly noticed was a difference between how much people were paid in one region compared to another. Some folks in management got pretty excited when the issue was raised, but I think that employees and HR worked things out to equalize salaries for similar positions. It's nice to be able to point to that "mission thing" as opposed to always focusing on the bottom line.
This memo doesn't do anything to change the LAWSUIT that is prompting these reactionary measures.
Don't call off the dogs. Keep the lawsuit pressing. The heat has yet to be totally turned up, and cracks in the armor are already showing.
Ok, how about we talk about how good closed source business models are and how we should promote those companies here.
I'll do a two page report on the Xbox and everyone else can get a crack at that new walkman that Apple came out with. I hear its really the bees knees and worth every penny.
Then we can go in details about the perversions of American Apparel founder Dov Charney and feel good about plunking 30$ for a plain AA t-shirt.
at a former employer. Company policy required managers to be present any time their employees were working overtime. As you can guess, we had to get management permission to work overtime, which was granted only when it was really needed. An interesting side effect is that our managers became very good at estimating the time needed for a project, and we were almost never late - with or without overtime.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I'd take a different view of that sort of thing if it were the norm for a large percentage of workers for their entire careers. But we're talking about (with both game developers and Wall Street trainees) people going into an ultra-competitive situation, knowing full well what it's going to involve and that it's something they're going to do for a few years before moving to a less insane track.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
That is exacty why regulations on how long an employer can demand that you work. Her comment is a typical example how corporations uses fear to keep employees overworked and underpaid. If anyone had told me that i had to work 7 days a week, 80-100 hour workweeks, I would have broken out in hysterical laughter, turned around and walked out along with a comment in the line of "Fuck you and this shitty company!"
Other civilized countries have regulations in place that protect the workers from beeing exploited like this. USA - land of the free... LOL Land of the salary slave, is a better moniker.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
The best is to give employees a choice: get a salary pay with no overtime but with stock options and bonuses, OR get an hourly pay with straight overtime but no bonuses. Then they negotiate how many hours an employee wants to work per month, and go from there. The key is to not make any political differences between those on salary and those on hourly, those who work 160 hours a month and those who work 320 (of course, a critical task may be given to the employee who's willing to put in more time to ensure it's done on schedule).
This way, each employee chooses the form of compensation they're most comfortable with and everybody's happy. The problem is that today, especially in USA, employment laws and the ligitation atmosphere make this choice non-trivial. The employee has to be careful with health benefits, sick-leave, etc., etc.
"It's about time they changed their tune and started paying developers what they're worth."
What's the going rate for Love?
BTW, this memo looked as if it were written by Ike Turner asking Tina Turner to stay and that "he'll change, baby".
That's precisely what is dragging computer science from a Profession to a Job. It's happening across the board in many professions, in the name of competition.
I'm not opposed to competition - but what is the cost to our society? What kind of productivity can be achieved with longer hours in the long term?
I think employee turnover in the workplace is driving the cost of the work higher, and the quality is lower. The cost in terms of healthcare and family stability are getting higher. We are constantly chastising those that are qualified but unwilling to sacrifice as "loosers."
Raising our health costs and burning out our workforces 20 years prematurely will lead to Socialism - exactly the opposite of the intended goal of a more competitive, capitalist workforce.
This is just my speculation.
Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Programmers who want no more compensation than to have their name in the credits are exactly what we are looking for!
EA-HR Department
I'm glad she's happy. I guess she thinks she's lucky to be there, and I might agree with her. To me, though, being a lucky idiot doesn't make up for being an idiot. I'd be a real idiot to put up with a 90 hour week.
If you want less hours and less stress, there's a lot of options for you out there.
Some of them pay more per hour actually worked, too.
See what I've been reading.
You're startin to sound like those commie-lovin old Europeean types. Whatch yer step boyah..
All jokes aside, some people here really think like this. What's a super power to do...?
Frankly, I've thought about this - being in the tech industry - quite a bit and the only conclusion I've come up with is:
Innovate
The biz guys do have one thing right, labor - equal or better than we can provide here - is cheap overseas. Business is all about making money and part of making money is keeping costs in check.
However, the real problem we have nowadays is that management and execs make wayyyy too much money. It's completely out of balance. Sure, a CEO is great and smart, but I'm sorry, I don't see any need for that guy to make 10x the amount of a programmer with a CS degree. Or, in fact, any programmer who brings some serious contribution to the organization.
A good documentary to see is The Corporation. Has some good history as to what corps are and why things are they way they are.
who is somewhat to the right of Mr. Burns. This is just more spin and boulderdash.
The _best_ 3D pr0n -> http://www.hookup3d.com
"Two employees is 'more'!"
That is perhaps the best way to describe this situation, and many others.
It is easy to decry the apparent greed of lawyers, but at the end of the day, sometimes the only thing that you can use is the courts. A lot of times justice isn't served, but often enough that there is hope.
Mod parent up!
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
The first regulations against child labor did not come to pass in 19th century England just because of pressure from below: it was a group of ethically-motivated factory owners themselves that ultimately pushed it through.
Why?
Because they wanted to end the practice themselves, but knew that they could not do so unilaterally and remain competitive. Unless the entire industry was required to abide by certain standards of behavior, those who did not would enjoy too great a competitive advantage - their costs would be lower, their goods would be cheaper to produce, their output greater, etc.
We see this in an industry where EA is acquiring most of its competitors - its unethical practices work, enabling it to keep costs low, forcing down the price for games of that level of complexity.
There have been too many holes cut in labor regulations in this industry, partially because of skillful scare-mongering by industry lobbyists and partially because of the passivity and timidity of the workers involved. Unionization may help, but I think that regulation is even more important: enforce existing labor laws without the loopholes, and a lot of these problems would go away.
Middle Class, this is how your corporate masters view you. UNIONIZE!!!
Paying people overtime is not the panacea to all their woes.
:)
True story: I once worked for a company whose name I won't mention. I won't even mention the particular business they were in, because clearly there are people here smart enough to find me, look at my resume, and extrapolate
They had a bunch of people who were classified as hourly and eligible for overtime, including the bottom-tier IT developers. They also required everyone to work 50 hours a week (ten hours a day). A naive person at this point my say "hey, cool, overtime pay!"
Except that if you _know_ you're going to be paying someone for ten hours of overtime a week, you can work back from what you want to pay them per year and offer them a new hourly wage.
In other words, if your average receptionist gets paid $10/hr, his yearly salary would be $20,800. But if you know you want to pay your receptionist $20,800 AND force them to work ten hours of overtime per week, you plug it into your favourite worksheet and find out all you need to do is offer them $7.27/hr -- and then, lo and behold, you end up STILL paying them $20,800/yr, AND forcing them to work overtime.
It's easy to extrapolate this to a game developer -- pulling numbers out of my ass here for a moment, assuming your game developer gets paid $80K/yr and you want to not pay them more AND make them work 80 hours a week AND give them overtime, you figure out how many hours this ends up translating to (40 + 40*1.5 = 100) in a week, multiply this by the number of weeks (52), giving you 5200 hours in a year, and simply offer the programmer $15.38/hr. The beautiful thing, of course, is that if you _do_ manage to cut down on overtime (as you undoubtedly will once you start paying for it), then you'll end up saving even more -- and the programmer ends up with less than $80K/yr in her pocket.
So what's the lesson here? Well, my opinion -- and it'll end up being somewhat off-topic for this particular discussion -- is that it's awefully hard to regulate ethics. In the end, you've got to put in a real mess of laws to compensate for the fact that some entities are just going to try to screw everyone they're in business with. In general, with smart enough people (and EA has a bunch of smart people, including in management), whatever laws you'll put in, there'll be a bunch of ways to go around them -- it's the old "technical solution for a social problem" issue. The real answer is to find a company that will treat you fairly and with whom you don't have to have an adversarial relationship. I know that, given this economy and given especially this sector (game development), this is easier said than done. As someone whose partners have had to endure "I'm sorry, I've got a server catastrophe -- you won't see me for three days," I sympathize with those developers and their spouses.
Can this action be even called "leaking"? It's more like "publishing".
I don't support mistreating workers, but that doesn't mean I'm opposed to companies having positions where you work 80-hr week jobs.
Therefore you support mistreating workers. You can't have it both ways.
My grandfather worked in the textile mills in Lawrence, MA, circa 1905. You worked every day for 12 hours including Saturday, and you worked hard, and if you were sick and didn't show up or you didn't work as hard as you were supposed to, then they fired you, and there were a zillion immigrants standing outside shivering waiting to take your job.
You got paid by how much cloth you wove. If your loom broke, you sat there idle, thinking about how you were going to put food on the table that evening if the loom fixer didn't come by in time.
The foreman would actually walk up and down the line of weavers and put his hand on their backs to see who was sweating and who wasn't, and God forbid you weren't a sweaty bastard like the rest of the slaves, because you were gone instantly.
I have a problem with this. So should you. There is nothing conceptually different between the Lawrence mills and the environment people are describing at EA. Just wait for EA to open its "Bangalore technology center," if it hasn't done so already and I missed it.
That's why there are labor laws. That's why unions were formed. If you let businesses make people work like slaves, pretty soon everyone will be working like slaves, and then we'll all be slaves.
So it has to be stopped, and this HR asshole can whine all he wants about EA "discovering" that it is understaffing its projects and overworking its employees (after developing how many games, now? Come on. What a crock of shit). Anyone who didn't know whose side HR is on should read this guy's memo carefully. He promises nothing. He pretends surprise. He cajoles. He soothes. He's worried about the process. He's got great ideas for the future. The labor laws on the books are obsolete, and just don't apply to EA or other high tech jobs. Because high tech "creative" people are special. They need to work 80 hours a week. California should recognize this. It's a good thing, not a bad thing.
Yeah right. The guy makes me puke, as does every other HR asshole I've ever worked with, both in senior management and as a programming grunt.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
SCO called, they want their space back
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The end result will be taking the gamming industry and moving it to India.
So evenutally the entire tech industry will be based in India.
Didn't Henry Ford increase his employees wages so that they could buy his cars?
In this case, it doesn't matter where products are manufactured as long as the share holders get a better than 10% return on thier invesment.
So when does this merry go-round eventually come to a crashing halt?
We are looking at reclassifying some jobs to overtime eligible in the new Fiscal Year.
We have no concrete plans to do anything at this time, but we do plan to talk among ourselves about it, and we're making sure you know we're planning on talking about it so that your hopes are raised without any actual promises of anybody getting overtime pay.
We have resisted this in the past, not because we don't want to pay overtime,
Government regulators held a gun to our head and told us we couldn't even though we really, really wanted to.
but because we believe that the wage and hour laws have not kept pace with the kind of work done at technology companies
OK, even you won't buy something that stupid. The truth is we knowingly broke the law because we thought it should not apply to us.
the kind of employees those companies attract and the kind of compensation packages their employees prefer
We hire young naive idealists and milk them for all they are worth. When they wise up, well, there's a sucker born every minute.
We consider our artists to be "creative" people and our engineers to be "skilled" professionals who relish flexibility
Clarification: by "flexibility" we don't mean that you will get to choose when to work -- it means that we know you value management's flexibility to choose for you.
but others use the outdated wage and hour laws to argue in favor of a workforce that is paid hourly like more traditional industries and conforming to set schedules.
We haven't figured out how to control project schedules. Learning how to do this is harder than getting the laws changed so we can put the onus for delivering poorly planned projects on you
OK, I'm not a huge fan of unions, but they're looking better every minute.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It seems that EA is producing an entertainment type product. Perhaps an entertainment union will help organize the employees. I for one am boycotting EA games until I hear that they treat their employees better. I saw that URBZ game and almost puked to think how poorly EA treated their employees.
For those who don't know - and for those that do, here's a refresher: Marx's Labor Theory of Value, though much critiqued in recent times, purports the value of product is a product of the various types of labor and resources that go into producing it. Typically, if one wants to lower the value of that product to make it more competitive, labor must be "squeezed". For more information, and a bit more lengthy description, click here. In relation to the issues of EA, as if EA were the only tech company with practices like these, it is obvious that programmers are the labor being squeezed. What makes the case interesting however is that as the economy becomes more competitive sections of labor that formerly considered themselves insulated from the squeeze are now feeling it. In many industries, the value of products reflects more the marketing costs than the actual production costs. I'm not sure about the specifics of EA games, but I'm willing to wager that they spend more money on marketing (NFL endorsements, advertising, packaging, etc.) than paying their developers and production staff. In the 1990's, we were warned about this happening. As more kids were guided into technology jobs - being told it's the way of the future - some bright individuals saw that eventually the high demand would bottom out. We still need programmers today, that's for sure, but just not at the incredible rate we did in say 1995. We have too many programmers for them to be a valuable labor commodity any more. Sorry, that's the truth. Next in line though to lose the value of their labor is likely to be the marketing guys. Not the football players or NFL execs, but the guys who decide which football players and what color to use on the damn box. Business schools are booming with students looking to fill these positions. Students enrolling in CS classes fortunately has leveled off, but students enrolling in business classes continues to climb. After all, you can't make much money doing CS, philosophy, psychology, or very many other disciplines. With marketing guys and business guys starting to be squeezed as well, unless something can be done to unite all labor, we will continue to see wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer individuals. In the US, the middle class is shrinking. Not because they are being paid less outright, but because there are fewer positions that pay what they should and the pay rates do not always reflect inflation and the pressing tax burden. Whether we like it or not, unless the labor movement can be revived, the average man will continue to see less value for his toil. EA is just one small example. In the immortal words of Malcolm X and many before him: "It's the chicken coming home to roost." Perhaps if the fortunate and privileged helped labor back in the past, their could it could have been a chickening coming home to roast instead.
The problem isn't if employees are exempt or not but about EA abusing them; it appears to be about EA not compensating their employees fairly and demanding insane work weeks.
Bill
Oh, come, come, come. Without a monster or two, it's hardly a quest... merely a gaggle of friends wandering about. - Owl
The problem isn't overtime. The problem is not getting paid for it. If workers were constantly getting paid 1.5x for each hour over 40 a week the higher ups in EA would be fixing their scheduling and manpower shortages in a hurry. As it stands they are under no obligation to pay any more for 35 hours a week than 95 hours a week so why not squeeze as many hours as they can?
The reward for working hard should be compsensation not more work. If the higher ups aren't willing to be liberial with "comp time" or project bonuses then expect some unhappy workers. Killing morale does not help the company at all.
EA Games is sure a bunch of nice, and mis-understood people. The president is a great guy, and it has only now come to his attention that there are massive and (possible illegal?) employee exploitation practices going on at his company. But since he is such a great person and he knows about the problem now, he will get to the bottom of things, and remove the evil middle managers that implimented such policies.
While his statements aren't this silly, I really doubt that he was unaware of the problem. This seems like a spin move to disrupt employee solidarity and the possible class action lawsuit that is being organized. It's exactly what I would do to try to drive a pre-emptive wedge in their ranks and avoid a costly lawsuit.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
hah...like a boycot meant anything. I would think it's more that thier last money maker was Diablo 2 expansion pack which at least to me was a pretty piss poor expansion pack for a barely revamped game that I call more of an expansion pack at full game price with some pretty movies inbetween missions. But now they have WOW. Time will tell if it bombs too since they haven't had an original idea in years (hell they barely made it out alive with Starcraft over the Alien's and Preditor similarity).
with maybe a few weeks a year of up to 60 hours with paid overtime?
If we supposedly live in the most prosperous nation on earth why do we insist on treating ourselves like animals?
"But we can't wait for the legislative process to catch up so we're forced to look at making some changes to exempt and non-exempt classifications beginning in April."
WTF? Sounds like more EA promises. "It'll be okay guys, we just have to make it till April!"... Then April comes along finally but there's a delay or some other made up BS.
-Kevin Reems
You overestimate our importance. The vast majority of game buyers don't read Slashdot and probably couldn't even spell the URL.
A Slashdot boycott of EA would last until their next release, then everyone would just lap it up like always.
Mod parent up. Of course, though, we are animals. But we don't treat ourselves as well as dolphins - and nowhere near as well as bonobos. Upshot is that the long-hour, being seen paradigm is a cancer on society.
accomplish more in 2 hours than the next guy does all day, and then spend the rest of the day posting to /.
poof--instant normalization of productivity
I've got a better idea then: Slashdot's Daily Electronic Arts Appreciation Feature. Every day, Slashdot posts a link to some announcement, screenshot, or demo on the EA web site to show our appreciation for all the blood, sweat, and tears EA employees put into their work. When their employees cease producing an extraordinary amount of blood swat and tears, we'll stop Appreciating them.
And either I have to sit around all day to make my mndatory 8 hours or I have to be punished and have to work harder than everyone else.
I'd love it if I could just do by 2 hours a day (equivalent to 8 for most) and bloody well go home.
I'm not too sure about your analysis. You may be right in that we have too many programmers now, although by the labor theory of value that means that the EA products aren't worth as much as they were. The labor theory of values is more prescriptive than descriptive in any case. A different perspective is needed to look at these situations.
I'd say this: the reason that unfair labor practices are possible is that capital is inherently more mobile than labor. It's the disparity in mobility that creates issues. Furthermore I can day trade my capital from one end of the globe to another if I wish with very little disruption, but moving my labor to the next state once a year is hugely disruptive.
Discounting social impact, labor is devalued when it is moved around. If I invest my money in company A, change my mind and invest in company B a month later, and then a month later invest in company C, nobody looks askance at my capital. My buck is as green as anyone else's. If I move my labor around, things are quite different, and I probably want to hide this on my resume.
Another example is environmental impact. I can operate a gold mine, take my profits out, contaminate everything in sight with arsenic and then move my capital out before the shit hits the fan. If the net prsent value of the increased income generation I get exceeds the cost of liquidating my company, it's economically rational to do so.
Yet another example is the difference between big capital and small capital. A half million dollar business (say an auto body shop) tends to be tied to a particular location. It can't pick up and move across the world. A billion dollar business can. Walmart had a strategy that exploited this throughout the 90s. Move the big box into town, kill the mom and pops, close the store and force everybody to drive to a megabox in the next county.
States also exploit this differential when they give tax incentives to big employers. Small businesses don't get them, in effect tax burden is shifted to the guys who can't move away.
Capital needs mobility to operate efficiently. However, efficient movement of capital is not the only value in society, which is why some reasonable level of regulation is needed for labor and environmental practices.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Say, genius, how can you verify what someone says they're going to do?
Oh come on! HR departments manage the resource of humans. That's not to say that they are there to piss off the plebes, but HR's loyalty is to the company not the employee.
I work down the street from an EA building and I can't believe those lucky jerks. They have a mini soccer field and a basketball field next to their little building (which is always being used). I can see a gym inside the building. I often see them dressed up as knights doing sword battles.
The only thing I have not yet seen is any work getting done. These guys have no right to complain. If they don't like it that much, I am willing to trade jobs with them.
I"m not sure that much has been 'distorted'. If you're to believe the reports from the workers at EA, even something as basic as comp time has been eliminated.
Forget the stock options and hourly wage stuff. If I have to work 70 hours a week for 3 months straight, could I not get a few extra weeks paid time off when the crunch is done? Again, per EA accounts, they get shifted from one extended crunch project to the next with no time off in between. You don't *need* labor laws and hourly wage calculations to know that the right thing to do would be to let people rest up, if only so they perform better on the next spurt of 3 months/70hours a week.
creation science book
You get to make games, isn't that enough. You should be glad to work 100hr/week. You know how many starving children in Africa and India would take your job in a heart beat? Well not my heart, since it's a chunk of coal. You better get back to work or I'll fire all you whining cry babies.
I think the employees should team up and leave. This way, they can start their own damn company.
Maybe it might be beneficial for some of us and/or all of us to give investor relations at EA a call. Maybe ask them how this negative press is going to effect their sales and the current stock prices. and wouldn't you know they have a website. http://investor.ea.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=88189&p=iro l-contact
enjoy,
Lothar
snatch the pebble from my hand grasshopper........
The most telling part of that memo from a gamer's standpoint:
"The Studios will be moving to a consistent application of the Renderware Platform. We bought Criterion because we believe there is no better technology platform (25% of all games in our industry are being built on RW). Having a standardized technology approach will save us from having to re-invent the wheel over and over. It will save time and effort we used to spend navigating technology issues."
Oh BOY! Now EA games will be EVEN MORE SIMILAR than ever before!!! The message to the devs is "Hey, look, you get to spend less time on every game, because we're going to make a templater for everything."
The message to gamers: "We're making everything, similar and cheaper, and there will be little to no innovation. We will continue to charge you full price, however, becuase what you are actually buying is the quality of EA's brand name."
This holiday season, I'm calling for a boycott of EA products. If someone on your list wants a basketball game for their console, buy them ESPN 2K5. It's HALF the price of NBA Live 2005, and it's BETTER. Same goes for the NFL, NCAA and titles. If you want things to change, you gotta hit people in the pocketbook.
If EA's answer to keeping developers happier is making the games EVEN WORSE so they can spit them out at the same pace, I'm making this boycott permanent.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
Conveniently "leaked memo" my ass.
This is so obviously written with the intent to be distributed on sites such as slashdot.
The game is you write this, "leak" it out to many popular tech/biz news sites who pick it up, then the general idea is your image seems to show "you care about your employees" after all.
I will put money on the fact that 5 years from now EA's hiring/firing/burn out policies for employees with their college recruitiment EA faires and all that remain identical to how they were a month ago. This is simply a save face PR technique and I am expecting more of this convenient leaks or similiar items to show up in the next few months.
This is a classic textbook strategy straight from Political Strategies of Domestic Relations, and when your as big as EA, you use the same political strategies as goverments.
if it's true that we are responsible for our quality of life, there never would have been a labor movement -- because people chose to die in coal mines, children chose to work adult hours instead of attending school, people chose to be exploited. while enjoying your weekend, remember that someone's back had to be broken for you to get it.
and oh what fun-filled, satisfying work do you do, crank? does it require much skill? a lot of hours? at least a four-year degree? does it pay well?
Out comes my 2600. Hours of fun being the square guy in Adventure.
This is completely incorrect. The purpose served by the HR department in any large corporation is to protect the company from its employees. Now, sometimes this goal is best served by preventing abuses which may lead to lawsuits, but never forget that at core, HR is there to serve the company not the employees.
40 hour work weeks (36, like in France, would be even better), and no "ifs" and "buts". Mandatory for every hi-tech company in the US. Severely punishable if not implemented.
"We consider our artists to be "creative" people and our engineers to be "skilled" professionals who relish flexibility"
Whenever I read something like this I can't help wondering who the author thinks he's going to convince. Being forced to work 80 hours a week, for weeks or even months at a time, does not provide me with flexibility to be relished. Flexibility is being given the choice to work those extra hours, if I want to, and get compensated in time and/or money at a later date.
Or perhaps he was just making an irrelevant observation and missed a bit off the end:
"We consider our artists to be "creative" people and our engineers to be "skilled" professionals who relish flexibility. However, we're not going to give it to them."
Or maybe even:
"We consider our artists to be "creative" people and our engineers to be "skilled" professionals who relish the flexibility granted to their managers to make them work double time for no extra pay".
Really, though, who's his intended audience? A particularly demented judge? Anyone who understands IT or the business universe in general knows that this is verbal diarrhoea. I doubt that his employees will be saying "What, I'm flexible? Well, fuck me; I never realised that! No problems here, then."
A worker who puts in 80 hours a week under duress is going to suffer terrible harm from retaining the job. That case doesn't always apply. A worker putting 80 hours a week because the work is "wonderful, but stressful" generally won't. That worker is being paid to have fun at work -- not having work extorted from him or her.
(That doesn't mean that workaholics won't also suffer harm, but only that they don't suffer the same kind of harm. Workaholics are at greater risk of family problems and the associated health threats due to those, as well as to rapid declines after retirement. They do pay a price; it's just different.)
We have overtime laws to protect both sets of workers. If an employer abuses its position to extort its workers as EA has, then it should cost the employer money. Period. There's no justification for any excuses.
I used to work for a bank - and we'd hear 10 times per year memos that said all of this: We were doing such a great job and had to try harder because we weren't doing a great job and the bank was lagging and earnings were now up 25% to $1Billion and why we were doing so good and our bonus was cut.
I Need a Web Bot / Form Automation / Web Site Tracking Expert
Reply to: anon-51022854@craigslist.org
Date: 2004-12-03, 7:18AM PST
If you are very good at this type of thing I have a job for you. I need a program that will monitor multiple web pages of the same format. When a button presents itself, I need it "pressed" immediately and I need to be alerted with a sound. This is the minimum I need. We can talk about more automation. I have had a few programmers who were VERY confident to begin with, fail at this job. I need somebody who can set this up for me quick and at a competetive rate. If this is you, email me. If you are not an expert, forget it!
------ cut here ------- cut here -------
no comment is necessary
Geez, I' ve got to get some work done, but this caught my eye and I just can't let this PR piece go uncommented:
...through carefully crafted PR "leaks"
...there are things we just need to fix. And the solutions dont apply to just our studios the people who market, sell, distribute and support the great games that our Studios create, all share a demanding workload.
...blah blah blah...
The last few weeks of reading blogs and the media about EA culture and work practices have not been easy. I know personally how hard it is when so much of the news seems negative.
Yeah, cause it means that HR has to put in our full 40 hours just to answer all the emails from you and the boss about how we're not keeping a better lid on this stuff.
We have purposefully not responded to web logs and the media because the best way to communicate is directly with you, our team members.
As much as I dont like whats been said about our company and our industry, I recognize that at the heart of the matter is a core truth: the work is getting harder, the tasks are more complex and the hours needed to accomplish them have become a burden. We havent yet cracked the code on how to fully minimize the crunches in the development and production process.
Okay, lets stop right here. This is a company with vast resources and development history. They can't get one guy to go back and look at the last few years and tell them how many man-hours it's going to take to develop the next game? I'm not talking down to the minute - they're clearly under-staffed by about 40-70% if the reports are true. You can't get me a WAG within 10% and hire-up? I call bullshit in the biggest way. Only the most incompetent manager would underestimate time this badly when they have a known track record.
Classic avoidance of the issue by peer pressure. "Everybody else is working overtime, it's the industry standard...get used to it." It's the standard because nobody is willing stand up and put a stop to the pre-industrial-revolution working conditions.
Three weeks ago we issued our bi-annual Talk Back Survey and more than 80 percent of you participated much higher than the norm for a company our size. That tells me you care and are committed to making EA better.
Human nature predicts that the majority of people will only speak up when they are dissatified, and want change. If things are going well, there's no need to cause a commotion. Looking at the turn out in elections is a prime example of this phenominon.
In the next 30 days well have the survey results and we will share them openly with you by the middle of January.
What, no raw data? Thirty days is a long time to tally the multiple choice - how bout a sneak preview?
Your feedback in the Talk Back Survey will help us make changes in the coming year, but were not waiting some changes are already in the works in the Studios. Here are just a few:
Nothing but some techincal changes here. Good, but unless you're going to admit that such a large company is randomly re-developing things so badly as to waste hoards of man-hours, I'm going to say that this is band-aid stuff that'll (maybe) take an hour off the typical workweek if you keep the product the same. In reality, it will just allow more work to be done in the existing time, and expectations of output to rise. With all the productivity software out there, we should be working 12 hour weeks, based on what was done thirty years ago.
We are looking at reclassifying some jobs to overtime eligible in the new Fiscal Year.
Sounds good, but this is just consideration...not the actual reclassification. They'll probably decide what they have is good.
We have resisted this in the past, not because we dont want to pay overtime, but because we believe that the wage and hour laws have not kept pace with the kind of work done at technology
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I think SOMEONE is exaggerating. America, especially when it comes to corporate responsibilty, is a paradise. A paradise where everything is cheap, easy to manufacture, and made with 100% American pride. The rest of the world is ENVIOUS of the way employees are treated here, why else do you think we keep giving all these illegals jobs here? The want a slic of the American prosperity. America is a great place to work, you get all the benefits, all the respect, and the sure knowledge that things are getting better for the working man every day around here.
(SHUDDUP AND GET BACK TO WORK)
I'm thinking its probably an effort to placate the masses, so to speak. Make empty promises about improving the work environment to make the workers complacent.
It's important that the employees stick to their guns and not be satisfied with empty processes.
In many cases, it's not even that you do these things because you love your job so much. How many times have you seen a star employee bitch endlessly about his job but still work all weekend to get a project done?
It works this way: You're working obsessively, doing long hours into the evenings and weekends. Ergo, you have very little free time. Sustaining a relationship on this kind of schedule can be difficult. You're tired all the time, you just want to go home and rest. You amuse yourself by ordering fancy gadgets from Amazon and having them shipped to the office, but this only works to a certain extent. Ultimately, the only thing that left to give you those subtle little endorphin rewards is completion of tasks.
Its an oroborous cycle: Your life becomes so structured around work that success at work is your main goal, because it's the only option left to you to feel the sense of fulfillment that the human organism naturally wants to feel. It's not that you love your job so much. It's that you've made yourself addicted to it, like the rat in a box that stops eating when given the option of taking cocaine.
I know whereof I speak, because I've been there. I'm a little older now and very thankful that I was able to wise up and get my head straight about the realities of the modern workplace.
Breakfast served all day!
The wonderful myth of productivity strikes again.
/..
In the software industry, I've seen only two kinds of productivity.
One was to measuring mindnumbing repetitive tasks, all alike. Here the highest productivity was usually reached by people having perfected the art of doing it as sloppy as possible producing results just barely above inacceptable. Fortunately those tasks have been mostly been outsourced or automatised.
All other productivity is is just empty management speak to make one feel superior to the guy in the next chair. Companies are paying their employees not for results but for the priviledge to make them jump through hoops at the discretion of management. This is for the simple reason, that management is usally totally clueless and incapable of setting useful goal leading to desirable results.
Under these rules, the most productive employee is the one who manages to escape all the senseless, misguided or futile assignement and wastes the minimum amount of time at work killing time on
It's not news that EA is concerned about its reputation and is trying to find a way to clean up its image.
It'll be news if and when EA actually does something to correct its atrocious labor practices. It'll be news if and when EA decides to throw down the gauntlet and challenge the rest of the industry to clean up its act by instituting truly fair compensation for its employees. It'll be news if EA decides to adopt software development methodologies that promote the timely development of high quality products without requiring employees to work insane hours.
But the idea that EA is staring slack-jawed as its reputation (and, I hope, it's profitability) vanishes down the toilet is not news. It's not even interesting.
So. Does this mean that EA employees will no longer be forced to work seventy and eighty hour seven day weeks?
Hollywood: The place good stories go to die.
Life at goldman really isnt so bad. Sollie is much more notorious for being a sweatshop.
My friend is an entry level at goldman and he's steady 7-6. Given salaries in the industry... I can't see how anyone would complain. The 100+ at sollie, however, can be crazy. [or so I've heard]
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
"Ahh, I'm going to have to go ahead and ask you to come in on Sunday, too..."
Your boss isn't by any chance named Lumbergh is he?
Sometimes my arms bend back.
It contains so many insightful points.
...
We haven't yet cracked the code on how to fully minimize the crunches in the development and production process.
"Cracked the code??" How about hiring more people instead of making your employees work 80-hour weeks?
Having a standardized technology approach will save us from having to re-invent the wheel over and over.
Or, you could hire more people instead of making your employees work 80-hour weeks.
We've started a Development Process Improvement Project to get smarter and improve efficiency.
Or, you could hire more people instead of
The award for management doublespeak goes to this paragraph:
We are looking at reclassifying some jobs to overtime eligible in the new Fiscal Year. We have resisted this in the past, not because we don't want to pay overtime, but because we believe that the wage and hour laws have not kept pace with the kind of work done at technology companies, the kind of employees those companies attract and the kind of compensation packages their employees prefer. We consider our artists to be "creative" people and our engineers to be "skilled" professionals who relish flexibility but others use the outdated wage and hour laws to argue in favor of a workforce that is paid hourly like more traditional industries and conforming to set schedules.
It isn't that they don't want to pay overtime, they just think creative and skilled professionals relish the flexibility of being required to work 80 hours/week with no overtime.
My brain asplode. I feel truly sorry for anybody who thinks they have to work for EA.
So that guy doesn't make 100x what our worst producers do, but here's what does happen:
:)
1. He makes ~2-2.5x what the low producer does
2. He gets selected for the interesting problems (And gets to say - I don't want to work on that project.)
3. He is highly regarded by his peers for being sharp - in many cases that's worth more than money. (At least to geeks it can be.)
4. Management gives much greater latitude in terms of work hours - because they know that they can count on that person when the chips are down.
Finally, it's important to note that many times our techies are led down the primrose path of believing that technical prowess is the most important measure of achievement.
As a result I know a couple of really sharp developers in our organization who are treated scornfully by management. These people are brilliant, but their attitude and approach make them distasteful to everyone else who "doesn't get it" because they are "stupid" and management people are "idiots."
People skills are critical to success, unless you're a genius on the order of John Carmack. People skills are directly related to compensation - far more than technical skills - this is why people think that their bosses are morons and all management types are idiots. The world measures on a different scale than geeks do. Unions won't fix that.
Thanks for inviting me to post more on slashdot!
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
When I talk in terms of production, I'm looking at 'business problems solved' not 'lines of code written.'
The top producers tend to think differently about the nature of problems than the low producers.
They also write more effective code, and do a better job of unit testing than the low producers. They have more creative ideas that can be easily implemented than do the low producers.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Easy... Let's say EA "leaks" another memo that says everyone involved in Product X (anything from Madden 2006 to Earth and Beyond Reborn) will be compensated according to common practice (ie salary for the first 40 hours, 1.5x 41-60 hours, 2x 61-80 hours). Product X is released, and ironically, the programmers are all cheering and happy (and say so) about either their huge paychecks, or that there wasn't any crunching involved. It's not that hard.
I suspect that one of these choices is incorrect. Correct.
"That's just the reality of the marketplace today. Even if our economy was doing really well, this would still be the case. It's capitalism."
Therefore, pure Capitalism is unethical. I am all for a tempered Capitalism, but this ruthless demand-says-we-can-work-you-to-death culture only helps a small number individuals and is ultimately damaging to our society as a whole.
-If
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
The brainiac developers I work with - who also happen to be socially challenged - are well compensated and are highly regarded by management, because like you say they are counted on during crunch time.
That said... I've seen imposters to the brainiac developer also succeed with management even though they are also socially challenged BUT have the kiss ass part down pat.
Then of course, are the grunts in the trenches. Highly compensated, also can be counted on to do the maintenance work, BUT are NOT highly regarded by management - other than they know they can count on them to FIX the brainiacs NUMEROUS bugs.
Just as people are turning to fair trade coffee/tea, we need employees of gaming companies that treat their employees well to let us gamers know who their companies are. I for one would like to support companies that treat their employees humanely. We can use our collective wallets to influence things.
"This wouldn't happen if we had a union."
I didn't personally go through it, but my Dad did. 25+ years with Eastern Air Lines. He was an A&P Mechanic, and later he was a supervisor so he saw *BOTH* sides of the story.
Unions can be just as nasty and worse than the companies themselves and the politics are worse.
As a supervisor my father had alcholics on the payroll and couldn't fire them. In fact they went to a two week de-tox company paid. A month later they were back to a six-pack a day, and showing up drunk.
As a employee he had to argue with Management in order to get things done the right way.
In the end, the union went on strike so a couple of hot dogs in charge of the union could think they were as powerful as the head of the company. The result most folks went without jobs the company folded and the union is now next to nothing in comparison.
My father was smart enough to see the writing on the wall and get out (2 days before the strike!!), others lost 50% of the retirement benefits for retiring two days later.
I don't see either Management or Unions as my friend. I have to look out for myself. The politics in IT can be brutal too, depending on the company. Its not that easy to just ditch a IT career and go into ditch digging just because your having to work 60-70 hrs a week. It's definitely not fair when Management's incompotence is at fault, but it's not always especially for those of us that acutally have responsibilities (such as wife, children, etc).
I wish you luck with your union, but the grass isn't always greener on the other side.
The tyranny owners exploiting their workers!
EA's stock closed up 4.8% today at its highest value since late July at $52.80. Seems like the investors don't believe EA will actually blow the company profits on their developers either :)
hey, as long as we don't have to listen to Blood Sweat and Tears, I'm cool with it
Civil disobedience isn't just an act of illegality that happens to be popular. It's an act of educational confrontation. You want the public to squirm as they see dogs set on peaceful protesters. You want them to be uncomfortable when their neighbors and relatives are jailed for acs of conscience.
Secretly violating the law to line your pocket doesn't qualify. Civil disobedience is public defiance of injustice. Acts of private venality don't qualify.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
EA Pretends to Reconsider Overtime Position As Long As the Labor Board's Watching
My new
perhaps it was leaked so that if they renege on their promise, employees can jump on their ass even harder?
Why would someone work excess hours at EA or an iBanking firm for little or no pay? The same reason many people (Although ostensibly not me with my Liberal Arts Degree) go to college: to increase future pay. Senior developers at EA make 500K in base salary (not including benefits and promos) and iBankers make much much more. This is why they readily "have 20,000 applicants to fill about 50 positions" and why Nintendo can demand a starting programmer to be paid 4MM Yen a year... because some people would like to retire at 42 as millionaires. And the great part of it is if you don't want such a lifestyle, there are plenty of other options available.
Good idea. Cut down productivity to match the French. Maybe we can turn our economy all the way into a third world slagheap.
How many developers would give their eye teeth, work 80 hour weeks, and take a cut in pay in order to work at a game vendor? Would you? Everybody and his dog wants to work in this environment. Naturally the pay is low. It's like working in Hollywood. There is a long line of people who would be happy to help on a big movie project for a fraction of what they'd expect working the same hours at a bank, insurance company, or flipping burgers. Why are we surprised that you don't get a fat paycheck writing games? Obviously a rotten employer deserves everybody's contempt, but if they're rotten enough people will quit and go work somewhere else. The system is self-correcting. It's not like they're working in a mine or a steel mill for the only employer in town. This is a luxury, boutique industry, and most people working in it are tickled pink to be getting paid ANYTHING rather than doing it for free.
JMHO
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
Kotaku
I am now a member of UAW Local 1970, Unit 4. I don't want to be. But my beloved company was non-responsive to the fucking missives of a bunch of fucking malcontents (by the way, forgive the harsh language; this is an emotion topic for me), so "we" voted on 01-Sep-04 to be "represented" by the UAW. I love my company, but I truly BLAME my company for having let it happen. If it had been just a little bit more responsive -- like EA -- then maybe, just maybe, I wouldn't have to suffer the FUCKING HUMILIATION of being a member of the FUCKING UAW.
Really, I apologize for the language -- some things raise SUCH an emotional charge that it's impossible to avoid such expressions.
Did I not mention it before? We're NOT blue collar workers. We're engineers. At least the 40% of use who voted AGAINST the FUCKING UAW are engineers. The other 60%? Who knows.
There's not a lot of content yet, but it's a pretty-looking site: visit www.uawsucks.org. I hope to express my RAGE at the FUCKING UAW for having inserted itself in the fine field of a working profession. Ford -- what the hell happened? Why couldn't fight off this bloody shame by being more open?
--Jim (me)
> HR operates on a set of three principals not unlike those of
> Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics.
That's basically it. I've learned from experience, never assume that the HR person is working in your interest if 1 and 2 are involved.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Just out of sheer, morbid curiosity.....would you have any company run under strict leadership of nothing BUT the employees? If so, who would you elect other than yourself?
I still can't get the screen shots of Castle Wolfenstein for the Apple IIe out of my head.
No wonder you're posting AC
I still can't get the screen shots of Castle Wolfenstein for the Apple IIe out of my head.
In other news, 99% of Ukraine's population turned out to vote and all voted for one guy.
Yeah, except we're throwing away our current proven internal tools and engines in favor of untested ones that don't meet our needs without major retooling. No extra development and training time has been alloted for this transition, which means we get to work even harder to get us to the same quality of games we had last year.This pain would have been somewhat acceptable if it really got us to that promised technology platform, but it already has been decided that the current version of Renderware isn't going to support the PS3. And with the next major release of Renderware rumored to be completely rearchitected from scratch, guess what? We get to do this all over again next year when the PS3 shows up.
Just went to that. It was actually pretty interesting but useless because us grunts aren't going to be doing the preproduction and scheduling. Maybe, but the top level management doesn't pay the cost of this so I expect little change in the future.I've got an idea. If Rusty had actually promised to base his salary and options based on employee satisfaction, maybe he'll sound a little more sincere.
Yup, except they aren't going to be doing that to the games already in production for ship this year. The damage has already been done.You just hit on the single biggest reason I'm not sure I can ever bring myself to work for someone on salaried pay again!
Employers (and even your own co-workers) tend to form false ideas about your work ethic based on not seeing you coming in or leaving close enough to the "standard times" (8AM to 6PM or so). When your boss is doing the 8-5 shift him/herself, how's he/she to know you actually stayed until 8 or 9PM finishing up something? Sure, you can tell him/her about it - but if you're regularly working non-traditional hours, people start getting suspicious. You might be working twice as hard as most of your peers - but it doesn't matter. They start to see your reports of working those hours as " a bunch of B.S." after a while, and get mad that you're not physically present during some of the time they're in the building.
If I'm on a salary, and not doing work that requires my physical presence between specific hours, I *demand* to have flexibility in how I put in my time. (EG. If I get the tasks done, don't worry about how long I'm there!) It rarely works like that, though, in reality. So I feel much more comfortable either working as more of a contractor, or for hourly wages where my time is clearly documented someplace.
"We consider our artists to be creative people and our engineers to be skilled professionals who relish flexibility but others use the outdated wage and hour laws to argue in favor of a workforce that is paid hourly like more traditional industries and conforming to set schedules"
Wow, talk about petty and cheap. Flexibility is one thing, but expecting employees to live for their work with no adaquate compensation is what's far outdated.
I thought I read in Wired some time ago that EA is now a bigger financial entity than Disney. If that's so, now I know how they did it: Cheap labour.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
it was brilliant really. By discouraging people from identifying with the people who make the games and instead encouraging them to identify with the publisher (Atari, EA, etc), you make it easy to replace programmers without alienating your fanbase or risking costly employee defections. After all, John Carmack can more or less decide his working conditions, but who (besides /. gaming geeks) knows the people behind FarCry, or Painkiller, or Morrowind or Arcanum? Who would follow these people to thier next gig that wasn't a sequal?
To be fair, there's some 'bad apples' who've made a name for themselves (John Romero, Derek Smart). But there's still remarkably little credit given to the poeple making our games (Shigiru Miyamoto and Hideo Kojima not withstanding, and the don't work for EA). What gaming programmers need is something like the Director's Guild to get people thinking about them as individuals and not just teams working for EA.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This is simply EA trying to make a bad situation look good. They are employing industry standard enterprise level forward looking marketing position PR crap.
The simple fact is, they are sorry that the information leaked out, and they got caught. They would NEVER think about remedial action until it affected their overall position and bottom line.
I want to see EA DIE! I long to see their stock plummet, their games sit gathering dust on store shelves, and their execs haunting the employment office. I want to see product returns from stores exceeding shipments. I want to see this cockroach crushed under the heels of pure outrage over thier excesses.
Get the message all of you greedy bullshit ridden exploiters of the honest desires of young programmers. You run a sweat shop, pure and simple, and it's time for your business, and your business model, to join T-Rex and all the other dinosaurs in the slime pits of extinction.
MOD PARENT UP
So painfully true.
If you want less hours and less stress, there's a lot of options for you out there.
Some of them pay more per hour actually worked, too.
Dude, the woman in the anecdote is working as an investment banker with a big name firm. In about five years, she'll be making enough to buy you and me several times over. I imagine putting their employees through these long hours is how the partners filter out those with real drive, versus those just looking for a paycheck.
In the long run, her "pay per hour" is going to be astronomical. I'd say that's worth putting up with some shitty hours at the start of your career.
Something someone once said to me seems appropriate to pass on: if you only think in terms of dollars per hour, that's all you'll ever make. You have to look at the big picture if you want the big bucks.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Surely, as mature individuals who have graduated from college/university/whatever, workplaces can't *possibly* be like elementary school, where we take attendance and have to suck-up to the teachers, can it?
by lowering yourself to some level you degrade your rights as a human being just to "make it" into your profession. That's not any way to make a living, in my opinion.
It's funny, that you think earning 50k a year is a "degradation of your rights as a human being".
I'd rather not have to suck the cocks of five people so I could get an interview with some other guy when I could just look elsewhere for another job where I wouldn't have to do that.
"Sucking Cocks" isn't the same as working long hours. I can assure you that if it involved sucking cocks I wouldn't participate. Do you equate working overtime with sucking cocks for a living? Your perception of what is an abusive work enviornment is very strange to me. Almost every profession has it's version of "paying dues'. Ever see what a doctor goes through during their residency? Are they sucking cocks? If a cop has to work a night shift for his first 2 years, is he sucking cocks? At what point does working overtime become sucking cocks to you?
First part: I'd rather make $20k a year working and being treated like a human being rather than make $50k being treated like a workhorse and getting an equivalent $10 per hour wage at either job. If you can't get that in your head (that the actual wage vs wage difference is what matters, not the salary difference) then no matter what I say you're going to keep arguing with me. Is it worth it to be expected to work 80 hours a week and have the illusion of being "rich" with your $50k a year or is it better to live a fufilling life off of the general $20k you get (more or less based on your hours and getting paid 1.5 overtime) where you have time for a wife, a family, and fun?
Second part: Wow. I like how you twisted my comment around to pull an irrelevant comparison to doctors and policement to try and make your point sound more pallateable. Your first sentence is right: my metaphorical sucking cocks doesn't equal working long hours. It equals doing something degrading to get ahead, and in the EA programming world that means working long hours. My point is that these just-out-of-college students are metaphorically sucking cock by letting themselves be worked to the bone with no complaint or even expect it to happen, the exact same way an aspiring actor might literally suck cock to get an interview or whatnot so he could potentially be a third-tier character in a movie and not complain about it or even expect to always have to do that no matter where they work in Hollywood. That's my point: that degrading yourself to get a job you potentially start a trend of accepting that degradation until you believe it's commonplace and you don't complain about it, which is a problem! It should not be commonplace whatsoever, but according to you, you'd give anything to work on a game, so would you suck cocks? Would you work 120 hour weeks? Because the 70 hours as stated in your original post, at EA, is relatively low compared to everyone else who works there, with some people getting up to 120 hours: 3 times the average full-time workweek and 48 hours less than literally working a full week with no sleep.
And to debunk your examples: the doctor who's going through his residency, the policeman who's always working nights: they're being paid properly for their time, whereas the programmers are not.
That's a common misconception.
No, its not. You need time to physically and mentally relax. It doesn't matter if you love your job, you're an average person working regular 80 weeks you will suffer for it eventually.
...because you have some seriously screwed up priorities. Take this case for example. Woman gets crushed on a conveyor belt and dies in a factory, because management hid the off switch and a supervisor refused to shut it down. Now, do you think the husbands first thought was, "well, I could sue, but that would mean giving money to laywers. Scratch that!" Would you have thought the same, or, "I'm gonna take these fuckers for ever last cent for killing my wife."
Any class action suit (like the one against the RIAA) results in a check for six dollars (I got one) for the injured party and millions for the lawyers.
WHO CARES! Its that much money out of the hands of people who screwed consumers over and putting it into the hands of those who have not. Give the money to charity, Bill Gates, or some Columbian drug lord. The point of these lawsuites is also to punish the guilty party and so they don't dare do it again. It wasn't "the lawyers got millions and you got six bucks", its "the lawyers got millions, you got six bucks, you will save money off future purchases, and the record industry will be taken to the cleaners if they price fix again".
Get rid of the lawyers, and yeah, there'll be fewer lawyers getting big settlements. Know what'll happen to the money? It'll stay right in the hands of the people who screwed you over, who will quite happily keep screwing you over to make a buck.
The greatest trick in the world was not done by the devil, convincing people he didn't exist. The greatest trick was giving the "common man" the idea that standing up for himself by suing (frequently your only option with little to no government regulation and where corporations have all the rights of individuals and none of the responsibilities) is a bad thing because it might put money in the hands of lawyers. And twits like you have bought it hook, line and sinker.
First part: I'd rather make $20k a year working and being treated like a human being rather than make $50k being treated like a workhorse and getting an equivalent $10 per hour wage at either job.
But if your 50k a year job is going to lead to 80k or 100k in 2-5 years, but the 20k a year job is going nowhere, you don't think it is worth it?
If you can't get that in your head (that the actual wage vs wage difference is what matters, not the salary difference) then no matter what I say you're going to keep arguing with me.
No, I understand what you are saying as far as how much you make an hour. What I am saying is simply sometimes the sacrifices are worth it.
Is it worth it to be expected to work 80 hours a week and have the illusion of being "rich" with your $50k a year
Who says 50k a year is rich. Now you are twisting my comments around. I would say it is worth it to work 40 hours a week with a one month crunch time where you work 60-80 hours a week if it's going to take you where you want to go with your career. Maybe we just have different values and different work ethics.
or is it better to live a fufilling life off of the general $20k you get (more or less based on your hours and getting paid 1.5 overtime)
Who says you will have a more fufilling life? If you ENJOY working overtime at a job you like I'd say it's better than not working overtime at a job you don't like.
where you have time for a wife, a family, and fun?
Dude, nobody forces you to work for EA or in the video game industry.
Second part: Wow. I like how you twisted my comment around to pull an irrelevant comparison to doctors and policement to try and make your point sound more pallateable.
It wasn't twisted at all.
Your first sentence is right: my metaphorical sucking cocks doesn't equal working long hours. It equals doing something degrading to get ahead,
Dude, it's a shitty metaphor. Working long hours is not degrading, and even if in your twisted mind it is...it's no where as degrading as sucking cocks to get ahead. You made an extremist statement to hold up a weak arguement.
and in the EA programming world that means working long hours. My point is that these just-out-of-college students are metaphorically sucking cock by letting themselves be worked to the bone with no complaint or even expect it to happen,
It's not even close to the same thing. If they don't like it, there is a simple recourse. Quit.
Just don't bitch so much that it leads to the whole industry getting outsourced, because some of us Americans do have a good work ethic.
the exact same way an aspiring actor might literally suck cock to get an interview or whatnot so he could potentially be a third-tier character in a movie and not complain about it or even expect to always have to do that no matter where they work in Hollywood.
Is this common practice? Once again, I'd say sucking cock is a bit more degrading than working overtime writing code. Of course, I can't speak from experence. I've only worked overtime. Maybe you have done both and you can fill me in?
That's my point: that degrading yourself to get a job you potentially start a trend of accepting that degradation until you believe it's commonplace and you don't complain about it, which is a problem!
You really do believe that working anything more than a 40 hour work week is degradation don't you? I think that is sad.
It should not be commonplace whatsoever, but according to you, you'd give anything to work on a game, so would you suck cocks?
My exact comments were that "I would give up a lot professionally to work on a game released by EA or another major vendor" and that I would "gladly work 70 hours a week" for such a job. I never said the words "give anything". Once again you are distoring reality (and people) to conform to your nar
HR does nothing for the benefit of a company's employees. Nothing. They are agents of management, they are your enemies, and anything you say to them orally or in writing will be given to management to be used against you. This includes requests for "workplace improvement", suggestion boxes, and exit interviews. Do not give them anything.