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.

Comments

It's about time.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's about time they changed their tune and started paying developers what they're worth.

Re:It's about time.

[SnapShot]

This is the quote that burns me up: "[developers] relish flexibility".

This is supposed to imply that a salary-based schedule allows professionals a little flexibility in their work hours not like the poor blue-collar bastards that have to punch a clock.

Salary was supposed to mean that some weeks you work a little more, some weeks a little less, but in general you puting 40 hours a week. The entire concept of salary is meaningless if your continued employment depends upon you working 60+ hours a week.

Everyone, except

[chris_eineke]

the company plans to make more employees elgible for overtime.

Sorry if I'm cynic, but I doubt they will make more programmers elgible for payed overtime. Maybe the business kids, but the programmers?

No sir. Not gonna happen. Absolutely not. I assure you.

Re:Everyone, except

[Wm_K]

But I believe that's only when they earn more than $90k a year.

Re:Everyone, except

[chris_eineke]

On an interesting side-note:

I remember a representitive from EA visiting Carleton University to talk a little bit about game development and EA's corporate culture.

Do you know what the worst sin is when you work for EA?
Not shipping a sequel on time (for Summer/Christmas holidays or when a new season of NHL/NBA/NASCAR starts).

He stressed the fact that EA is not about creating new ideas, but relying on "tried and tested concepts". He said, if you want to work on experimental stuff you better join a independent game company, because EA is all about creating sequels to NBA,NHL,NFS,etc.

So don't expect them to come out with The Next Great Game anytime soon.

Re:Everyone, except

[chris_mahan]

some links for the google deficient:

from http://www.dir.ca.gov/IWC/WageOrderIndustries.htm

order number 4. That's the one posted in our breakroom.

http://www.dir.ca.gov/IWC/IWCArticle4.html

Look under 1 A 3 (h) and (i)

Enjoy.

behold...

[Rev.LoveJoy]

the tyranny of the majority!

Wheee,
-- RLJ

Hey EA...

[dethl]

You're finally learning that if you treat your employees right, they won't ruin your reputation.

re: hey EA...

[ed.han]

actually, that's got me thinking about who leaked the memo:

1. ticked off developer who sees this as nothing but HRspeke for "we feel your pain" and expect this to amount to nothing more than a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
2. happy developer who wants people to know that EA is trying to address some serious problems.
3. EA's PR group.

ed

leaked? whatever.

[Karma Sucks]

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.

Double speaking money pinchers

[deletedaccount]

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!

Re:Double speaking money pinchers

[NardofDoom]

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

Translation: "You sit on your ass all day and hardly break a sweat. Why the hell do you need overtime? So what if you never see the light of day or your family?"

Repeat after me, people: "This wouldn't happen if we had a union."

Re:Double speaking money pinchers

[c_king]

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. "

More like,

"Not because we didn't want to pay overtime. Because we didn't have to pay overtime."

chyld

Re:Double speaking money pinchers

[rusty0101]

Not entirely correct. In several states, if you are hourly, and are paid more than some arbitrarily selcected rate, say $25 per hour, you do not get 'overtime' in the sense of time and a half for every hour over whatever period is in consideration, (8 per day, 40 per week.)

A significant fraction of games developers are earning more than this rate, so while they may get paid for the hours they work, they don't get 'overtime'.

A possibility is that EA is going to internally classify these jobs as eligable for 'Overtime' rates, of 1.5 times hourly rate per 'overtime' hour. The question then will be where they set the starting point for overtime hours. If they are exempt from state regulations relating to when overtime begins because of the pay rate, they could set the start at 12 hours per day, or 60 hours per week, and discourage developers from exceeding these limits.

-Rusty

Re:Double speaking money pinchers

[An Onerous Coward]

So? Seriously, why should that matter?

It's fine that so many kids just out of college are willing to put in absurd hours because they don't know any better. But by the time they actually figure out how to do their job well (and it will be a few years), they might have pesky distractions like families, hobbies, etc.

The wizened old geezer of thirty is going to have a certain level of comprehension that he lacked when he was twenty-four and fresh out of college. But the management, in its infinite wisdom, only looks at the hours put in, and figures that if they won't put in the same number of hours as the college grad, then it would be inefficient not to replace the geezer with the grad. Hence, the geezer's choice is between massive overwork his entire career, and taking his hard-won knowledge and exiting the industry.

Hell, unionization would be a huge service to the game industry, but they're too focused on crunching out the next Mary Kate and Ashley crapware on an unrealistic deadline to notice.

Okay, that was funnier before Acclaim went under.

Utter BS

[amigoro]

From TFA: "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," Reuff admits in the memo. "The work is getting harder, the tasks are more complex and the hours needed to accomplish them have become a burden. We haven't yet cracked the code on how to fully minimize the crunches in the development and production process. Net, there are things we just need to fix."

Umm in that case, hire more people

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Re:Utter BS

[twiddlingbits]

Bingo! One of Murphy's Laws of Software Development States: "adding more programmers to a late project makes it later". Also read "The Mythical Man Month" and "Death March". Good software management is NOT easy, thats why there is so much poor management. Just telling the lead programmer he is now the project manager is not the way to do it. Technically EA does not have to pay OT or they would have been sued by now. What they MAY do is pay for the extra time but not at 1.5X and maybe not for everyone. It's mostly a PR stunt, they might do it for one project, get the heat off, and then go back to the old way.

Re:Fill me in

[Cecil]

The answer to your question has two parts:

This is games.slashdot.org.
EA is the only game company. Any supposed "other" game companies are either worthless, or EA just hasn't gotten around to acquiring them yet.

In other news..

[Anonymous Coward]

EA renames Saturday to Monday Reloaded and Sunday to Monday Extended Edition Director's Cut..

If EA was really concerned about its employees ...

[nemaispuke]

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!!!

Update

[Jumbo Jimbo]

(Fake) Update: 12/03 15:51 GMT by Jumbo Jimbo:

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

Re:leaked? whatever.

[PTBNL]

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.

Suprised...

[MysticalMatt517]

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...

Re:Fill me in

[Ignignot]

This is a perfect example of the power of press in action. This is how reporting is supposed to happen in the united states - find something wrong, and talk about it and raise such a furor over it that things get better. And since EA employs programmers and many slashdot readers are programmers, we should all keep ourselves informed.

Up next: Wal-mart

[BlueThunderArmy]

If only Wal-mart would be so responsible as to admit their mistakes.

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.

What's he getting at, anyway?

[Srass]

Quoth the memo:

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.

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?

Re:What's he getting at, anyway?

[Zhe Mappel]

You're missing nothing. The memo is a masterpiece of doublespeak.

EA is suggesting that because creative people traditionally work "flexible" (i.e., long/obsessive) schedules, EA doesn't need to pay them more for their time. That's crap, of course. Anyone who is self-employed has experienced long hours; but the rewards of self-employment aren't present when you sign your soul away to make NHL 2006 in an EA sweatshop.

There's a second audience for this memo, too: lawmakers. EA is begging the GOP to give it legislation that will protect its massive profits from the fair and just demands of its workforce. I bet they get it. This will be a useful lesson for the right wing kids--and for right wing adults--who are going to discover first-hand what they've voted for: their own economic exploitation.

Re:What's he getting at, anyway?

[ctr2sprt]

The best lies are the ones with a kernel of truth. Wage laws are outdated: they were designed mainly to combat early industrial problems where there was actual physical work involved.

The issue here - and I want to emphasize again that I am not endorsing EA's position, just trying to explain the aforementioned kernel of truth - is that overtime rules don't really apply well to our current economy. They are built with very fixed limits: for example, 80 or 90 hours in a two-week period. If an employee goes past that limit, his employer has to pay him OT... even if both parties are happy with alternate forms of compensation. This may seem odd, but the goal, back when the rules were made, was to discourage OT entirely.

But nowadays more and more employers are realizing the value of flex time. Not just daily flex time ("Come in whenever you want, as long as you work 8 hours") but weekly and even monthly flex time. Don't like working Fridays? Work 10-hour days instead. Like 4-day weekends? Put in 60 hours a week and you'll get two of 'em a month. That's a sort of flexibility which most labor laws don't allow. (Well, they clearly do allow it if you're tricky, but they aren't supposed to. So the fear is that legislatures will enforce the letter of the law and close up loopholes rather than reforming the law, which is what they should do.)

EA mentioned artists for a reason. Artists are notoriously, or perhaps stereotypically, unstructured. They are the poster children for flex time. If a fit of inspiration hits you and you work 120 hours in two weeks, well, you should be able to do that - and then your employer can give you two weeks off to get over the inevitable burnout.

I want to say it a third time because this sounds like I'm supporting what EA does: I am not. An important component of long-term flex time like I've been describing is compensation for the periods where you work unusually long hours. EA does not appear to be offering that compensation. That's a big problem. But, well... Just because EA is saying "Labor laws are broken" doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong. It just means they're poor advocates.

Re:What's he getting at, anyway?

[danzona]

First of all, the TPS report analogy is exactly backwards. Why would you pay 1.5 times as much for the 9th hour of report-writing as for the 8th

Because there are certain aspects of the employer's expenses - office space, health care benefits, unemployment insurance, paid holidys, etc - that are factored into the overall salary before the employee receives it. Working more hours will not earn more health care or a better office, so the overtime wage can reflect only the increase in value to the company.

Here is a trivially simple example:
Let's say that it costs the company $30,000 / year in benefits to to employ someone.
Let's say that an employee can produce 60,000 TPS reports / year.
Let's say that each TPS Report is worth $1 to the company.
In this example, the employer would be willing to pay someone $30,000 a year, or about $14.50 / hour.
Let's use 10 paid holidays and 2 weeks vacation. This works out to about 31 TPS reports per hour.
Imagine that the employer asks the employee to come into the office on Saturday and fill out 248 (31 * 8) TPS Reports. This would result in a gain for the company of $248. The employee would receive $174 (14.50 * 8 * 1.5).
This example shows why employers will often prefer to have their employees work overtime rather than hire extra work. The employer is able to pay 150% of the employee's usualy wage and come out ahead.

Now, about your painter - if she's been in the business for any length of time, she's pricing the painting based on how long it'll take her to do

That is not correct. In the absence of price controls on the work of painters, the artist will be able to charge what the market will bear. The artist will then decide whether or not to compete in that market. If the artist places a low premium on the time they spend working relative to their competitors, then they will be willing to put in more hours for the same pay.

Re:What's he getting at, anyway?

[snol]

when sympathetic groups do that, it's for some greater good, not for screwing people over.

Re:What's he getting at, anyway?

[scot4875]

Here's the short path he took to get from unfair overtime to GOP bad:

1) EA - takes advantage of 'outdated' laws to screw their employees
2) EA is lobbying the GOP for laws that will make it impossible for anyone to sue them for screwing their employees
3) GOP will probably pass such laws if given the chance, because we all know how pro-worker they are.

See? Short, easy path. Also, it wasn't so much as a "Down with republicans" rant, as it was an "I can't believe all these morons that think the GOP actually give a damn about them" rant.

--Jeremy

slave drivers

[FecesFlingingRhesus]

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.

Overtime is a good thing..

[trigeek]

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.

Volunteer labour

[Firiel]

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.

smoke screen

[Anubis333]

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.

He seems at a loss for how to fix the problem

[earthforce_1]

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.

Re:Reducing overtime pay..

[saintp]

So you're saying work your ass off for no pay or sit on your ass for no pay? Seems like an easy decision to me.

More like a choice between unpaid overtime and unionization. Workers aren't the powerless peons your comment makes them out to be.

EA will have to earn trust again

[MooseByte]

"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.

So tempting...

[petrus4]

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.

This wouldn't happen if we had a union

[anomaly]

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

Re:This wouldn't happen if we had a union

[SnapShot]

You have a point, but lets be honest.

Look around your cube farm and point to the best developer in your group. You know, the one that actually does 5 to 100 times more work than anyone else.

Now, go over to him and tell him your salary and ask him if he makes 5 to 100 times more than you do.

When he say, "no", feel free to laugh at him. Now explain to him that under a union he still wouldn't be making 5 to 100 times more than you, and therefore he should be glad that there isn't a union.

Now, go back to posting on slashdot.

Re:This wouldn't happen if we had a union

[lpp]

This argument only holds if productivity is how you are measured. In most cases, software developers who do as you suggest, accomplishing more in 2 hours than the next guy, do one of two things. They either work fewer hours, which penalizes them at review time for being "the guy who's never around" and also penalizes them if they are docked for not being there for a full 8 hours per day... OR ... they work just as many hours as the next guy, get more done, and get a few pats on the back, a little recognition, and possibly a slight increase in salary at review time, but not much else.

As a result, except for personal pride and professionalism, which ought to be enough, there really is no benefit to being that more productive person in most cases. And when crunch time happens, it happens to the whole team. And if a union can guarantee you get paid for those extra hours, then perhaps it can be of use in this industry.

Symptom of a larger disease...

[Kyrka]

This is just a side effect. If ALL software companies would put more emphasis on quality (including secure) code from the beginning, the costs of supporting this stuff would go down. When I say quality, I am referring to something you might get from a CS degree, not what DeVRY is hoanding out. Hence, the company perhaps wouldn't have swollen to its current size perhaps... or if they _HAD_ spent more time (and salary) on their staff, the public would likely have paid more for the "better" software. Assuming it is, at all, better is the gamble.

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.

It's in the game!

[smiley2billion]

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.

More business speak translations...

[PoderOmega]

I think we really need a business speak translator. He's my stab at it:

Most important: we recognize that this doesn't get fixed with one email or in one month. It's an on-going process of communication and change. And while I realize that the issue today is how we work - I think we should all remember that there are also a lot of great benefits to working at EA that are not offered at other companies. With some smart thinking and specific actions we will fix these issues and become stronger as a company.

Translation: Hopefully this memo has given you enough false hope we can string you along for the next year in the same conditions before I have to write another memo promising changes. EA does have the same benefits of other companies out there but since you don't have time to look (because you are working 80 hours a week for us) you will never know, so just assume you are lucky. We aren't fixing anything, if you want to work for a stronger company, stop complaining.

Re:Fill me in

[badasscat]

Why is EA in the news? For the same reason Vioxx is in the news. Some lawyers are trying to get the word out in order to find members of a class action. They're also trying to gin-up hatred for the company and sympathy for the "victims" in order to cash in on a big judgement against the company.

Jesus, talk about cynicism. I'm guessing you don't work in the tech industry or you'd know exactly why the EA story is a big story, and hint, it's not what you seem to believe.

The EA story is a big story because the problems at EA are endemic to the video game industry, and are at least somewhat prevalent in the IT industry as well. Employees who by law should not be treated as exempt are being treated as exempt. Being that this is a tech news site, and being that EA is such a large company, what happens at EA in this case could have a big impact on the tech industry in general. This is a chance to improve the quality of life for tech workers across the country.

That's the idealist response. The most cynical I'd ever get about this, though, would be to say that this is a large company that its employees believe are breaking the law, and it's always news when large companies break the law on a large-scale basis. Either way, it's news, and I hope this site continues to follow it.

More of the same

[Lysol]

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.

Re:leaked? whatever.

[The-Bus]

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.

Re:Fill me in

[boodaman]

You know, sometimes things are wrong and need to be corrected. Even when lawyers are involved.

How about not working your employees to death?

[Rycross]

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.

Re:Yeah and..

[Politburo]

That said, I would gladly work 70 hours a week to be in the credits of a video game.

It's people like you who are causing these problems. So many people fought extremely hard for 35-40 hour work weeks, and you're ready to throw it all away so your name is in a list of credits that 3 people will ever read.

Re:Yeah and..

[BinaryOpty]

That said, I would gladly work 70 hours a week to be in the credits of a video game.

Exactly what EA abuses to get its employees: they hire a whole bunch of bright eyes college graduates willing to do anything to get their name in some sort of gane, then they abuse their willingness to work and burn them out. Then when they quit, EA goes back to the farm and grabs the next bunch of grads and the cycle starts again. You can't just give up your rights just for your name to appear in a game: that's the problem. The overtime thing's just something that's fallen out of the working into the ground problem because at least they realize that if they're going to be raped of their stomach lining, they'd better at least be getting paid more for it. That's close to being a step in the right direction, but in my opinion it's a red herring.

What the industry should be doing is making realistic goals for their programming team. Everyone hates release date push backs, and the reason they exist is because of these conditions. If they started making realistic goals, then the teams would be more likely to reach them and possibly surpass them than they would be to get to the old, further out goal where they have to cruch down in the month before and then end up missing it anyway. Time management and project management are much, much more important topics than the stupid overtime topic.

Re:Finally.

[787style]

If getting a vice president to write an ineffectual memo that is considered "changing the world", then the world gets changed 100 times a second.

Re:Some?

[badasscat]

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.

That's what the employees believe, but labor laws are not so simple. EA has classified these employees as exempt from overtime status, which they're legally allowed to do under certain circumstances (for example, if an employee works on a contract or salary basis in a computer-related field, and is often asked to "use his or her own discretion and judgement" in the course of his/her work). Basically, exempt status in most states is intended to apply to management or learned professionals, not lower-level employees, but the wording is usually nebulous enough that most employers think they can apply it to most employees. Unfortunately for the company, though, the penalties for misapplying exempt status can be pretty severe. (The employees can be awarded both back pay and penalties, meaning a company like EA could potentially be out hundreds of millions of dollars.)

In the EA case, the employees in question have compared their jobs with identical jobs in other entertainment industries and found that in those other industries and within the same state (Callifornia) those same positions are not treated as exempt. These are in effect the "blue-collar" jobs at EA; the assembly-line type stuff. EA treats them as exempt under the computer-related occupation exemption, but according to that exemption you need to be "primarily engaged in intellectual or creative work that requires the exercise of discretion and independent judgment." (Emphasis added.) So this is actually a tough exemption to apply. You could really argue that it cannot be applied to almost anybody at a company like EA, because it's pretty likely that the look and feel of a game (and its related marketing) comes from just one or two product managers per product (who themselves brainstorm ideas with other departmental managers), with the rest of the product team simply following instructions. Even if you use your own discretion at your job some of the time, though (for example, a manager tells you to draw a character a certain way but leaves the particulars up to you), you would still not be exempt, because you are not primarily engaged in using your own discretion. You are still working with instructions provided by someone else.

I think this memo probably hurts EA's legal case. A position is either exempt or it isn't; there's no "well, we didn't think it was exempt, but now we do"... the fact is it's not up to them, it's up to the law, and if they're now deciding that the law says these positions are not exempt, then they owe all of those employees back pay and they owe the state penalties. I would imagine this memo will come up in court if no settlement is reached prior to that time.

"Leak?"... Hardly...

[monkeyfarm]

This was intentionally leaked. No exec. writes an internal memo that long with that tone. This is an unofficial press release.

I've seen the solution to this problem

[gillbates]

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.

Insightful!

[chriso11]

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!

Back to the future.

[Bozdune]

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.

Re:Back to the future.

[networkBoy]

Understanding HR:

HR operates on a set of three principals not unlike those of Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics.

1) HR must protect the company / corporate entity at all costs.
2) HR must protect the executives & managers of a company (in order of seniority) unless that conflicts with law 1.
3) HR must protect the companies employees unless that conflicts with law 1 or 2.

Hope this helps some of you out there, as I learned this from personal experience.
-nB

Re:Back to the future.

[Ovidius]

It doesn't matter how skilled you are as a laborer if there are a great many more laborers who are willing and able to do your job. Unskilled laborers are always in that situation, but if you are a game developer or investment banker, you still face the same buyers market as people with the skills to be hired are pouring out colleges much faster than they are being absorbed by the jobs market. So to that extent, the analogy to coal mining or textiles holds.

It's not like you could feed your family just by giving up on skilled labor and going to work in the "coal mines" of unskilled labor (fast food, I guess)! Then you'd be competing in an even larger pool of applicants.

Just because it's a cliche doesn't make it invalid. Coal miners are symbolic of a specific upheaval in labor-capital relations that was a part of industrial revolution. We're living through a new revolution now, one that's faster and global. So far, workers are losing, and if problems like this don't get solved, you should expect another upheaval that makes the wildcat cole miner strikes look like a tea party.

Key paragraph diassembled.

[hey!]

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. 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.

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.

Marx's Labor Theory of Value

[adjwilli]

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.

I'm not holding my beath

[battlemarch]

*cough* bullshit *cough*

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. 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.

I strongly suggest that they pick up a copy of The Employer's Legal Handbook, Fifth Edition. Actually, I suggest that some of the employees do that also.

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

Agreed!

[EXTomar]

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.

Cynical hat on

[TiggertheMad]

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.

Re:Fill me in

[wizbit]

You don't have to do tech work, you don't have to work at EA, you can take a lower-paying job and not work weekends.

True, and I tend to side with you on this one. But this is another case of an employer exploiting its workforce to a degree that's arguably criminal. Remember the genesis of labor unions was at a time where ungodly workdays and incredibly cruel punishment was seen as the norm, and often these people didn't have a choice, they were just happy to have a job. You'd think that the talent being hired at EA would be an exception, but the trap seems to be this idealism that game developers have about making games - the sort of rose-colored glasses mentality that comes from playing games all your life and getting to work on the next big one. EA's the big dog on the block, so it's no wonder they're recruiting people that will work themselves to the bone for them.

This is a step that's long overdue, it was a matter of time before some company pushed idealistic people like these game developers (or music industry interns, film students, etc) past their limits and undercompensated them for it. Argue what you want about how you would handle the situation, but I prefer to live in a country whose laws allow me to push back on an employer I feel is treating me badly rather than slink away and declare some kind of moral victory. EA would have continued this nonsense had we not seen the snowball effect from ea_spouse and others airing their grievances. They are well within their rights to do so and we shouldn't criticize them for it.

Re: EA cares? Who does?

[SpecBear]

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.

It's mobility, not value

[hey!]

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.

Re:So where's the apology? The backpay?

[CrosseyedPainless]

Say, genius, how can you verify what someone says they're going to do?

A good way to bring the heat on for EA

[THCLothar]

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

I swear this memo was written by my bank CEO

[Torontoman]

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.

Re:Fill me in

[coaxial]

So without huge payments to lawyers, some people would be better off and some people would be worse off.

No. A lot of people would be much worse off, and a few would be much better off. The reason corporations hate lawyers and class action lawsuites is because it enables the plebs to band togother and actually enforce the law. That's it. Courts find against you, if you broke the law. It may be civil law, but it's still the law.

The reason why money is involved, is because that's the only thing courts can deal with. If you go blind, the court can give back your sight, the can only give you money.

Since lawyers consume so much and produce nothing at all, it's not hard to argue that the people who do produce things would be better off, on average, without lawyers.

Produce nothing? They change someones behavior, and through extension society as a whole. Without lawyers, we'd be anarchy. Like it or not lawyers enforce the laws. (Yes, Kohath, the government is primaryly lawyers.)

You may think "yeah kill all the lawyers", but its a very sophmoric attitude.

This will not pass

[Overzeetop]

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:

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. ...through carefully crafted PR "leaks"

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. ...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.

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: ...blah blah blah...

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

Re:Fill me in

[coaxial]

You want both a high paying job and no extra hours, don't you? What make you feel you've earned it?

Well it's not the extra hours per se. It's the fact that the workers aren't being paid for those hours.

Yes, the EA workers should quit. Their not working 40 hours for $60k, their working two 40 hour jobs for $30k.

Broken promises?

[El Camino SS]

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)

Re:How about capping it at 40

[Overzeetop]

Hmmm...No. I don't suscribe to all that "stay late to look good" crap. If my job is done, or at least on schedule, I'm out of the office.

Now, if I'm underutilized in a small group, I will always ask if I can help out, and will gladly pitch in to get things done. But don't expect to see me reading /. and hitting alt-tab back to an application everytime someone walks by at 9pm just 'cause someone else is on a deadline.

(I should be speaking in past tense, as I work for myself now. When I'm busy, I work late. When I'm not, I go home and play with my kid.

High producers

[anomaly]

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

Re:Reducing overtime pay..

[saintp]

Actually, unpaid overtime is working your ass off for no pay. I don't see how that's hard to understand: you're working above and beyond what is considered normal (thus "your ass off") and not getting reimbursed for it (thus "for no pay"). I could understand if it was paid overtime, but, at best, you could claim that the choice was between sitting on your ass for no pay or working your ass off for gross underpayment, although, in the latter case, the actually divestment of ass comes during the unpaid period.

Hence, I stand by my original comment, although your head was evidently too far up your corporatist ass to understand it.

Not really

[hey!]

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.