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EA Faced With Another Employee Lawsuit
GamesIndustry.biz has the news that EA has been slapped with another employee-filed lawsuit. He's part of the engineering staff, and feels unfairly targeted by the "creative staff" laws in CA. From the article: "...in the midst of a storm of unwanted publicity about EA's employment practices, and provoked a response from the firm's vice president of human resources, Rusty Reuff, who admitted that '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.'"
they'd have realized by now that forcing the employees to work such long hours is part of the reason that their games are all complete crap.
Face it. After someone's been awake for more than 24 hours straight, their reaction time and mental abilities are worse off than if they had a 1.1 blood-alcohol content.
Force your employees where their sleep debt over the course of a week is above 24 hours, and imagine what you've got.
EA should take the hint. The gamers are getting tired of crappy games, the programmers can't program like that. Cut the crap on the programmers, let them get some decent rest, and your games will turn out better because they won't spend 90% of their time fixing all the bugs that were created because people were too fucking tired to code correctly.
There simply needs to be a point when people will stop accepting what has been going on in this industry.
Just because it seems that crunch sessions are always some part of a development cycle does not mean that it should be accepted. If anything, the continuous nature of it should lead to methods of prevention, such as allowing for a longer development time.
"Aren't engineers usually salaried workers anyways?"
/yr.
yeah, so picture this scenario: You're interviewing for the job position. They want to hire you and you negotiate your salary. Let's say you're used to making $35/hr. You do the math, and figure that 40hr/wk x $35 = $1400. Boils down to about $72,800
You figure that based on your experience, you may deserve more than that, but the living expenses aren't as high as at your old job, and you really want in on the games industry (and besides, the company is refusing to pay more than that). OK sounds good. You take the job.
Then reality hits. You find yourself working 60hr weeks consistently. Or 80hr weeks as some have claimed. You're now essentially being paid $17.50 an hour!! That's what a JR programmer might get. But you're not a JR programmer. You're an experienced SR.
So, looking back: If at the interview and salary negotiation stage of this scenario, you were offered $17.50/hr with the opportunity to work 80hrs/week (so that it works out to $72,800 a yr) would you have accepted the job???
...for being greedy immoral bastards, that's business. its OUR fault because we're the spineless consumers who keep buying their shit while bitching about it over and over and over. either get some balls and don't buy the 'latest & greatest' copy of last years garbage regurgitated or stop complaining that they put out shit all the time. you're feeding the system and they have NO REASON TO CHANGE. personally i don't buy any sports title whatsoever, and also avoid EA games like the plague, until either A) i can buy a dirt cheap import version of it, or B) buy it in the bargain bin a few months later. i'll pay top dollar for intelligent games/designs, but anythign these guys put out will have to go through by A/B filter above first.
sigs suck
Sure... Go ahead. Don't work overtime. You get "downsized" to make room for someone who will...
It sucks, but that's life.
"The amount of intelligence on this planet is a constant. The population is growing." -Cole's Axiom
We haven't yet cracked the code on how to fully minimize the crunches in the development and production process.
- From TFA
Maybe, just maybe, you should consider setting more realistic goals? Granted, they want to hit the market during the holiday rush, but then, add more programmers.
It sounds like EA is just trying to exist as a programming sweat shop, keep the minimum number of programmers to do the job, and push them to work ridiculous hours to make a deadline. While I don't want to see a law to stop this, I'd at least like to see a few good lawsuits take a ton of money from EA on this. Perhaps, fine them an amount equivilent to the net profit made from all the games which suffered from this sort of behavior, and divide it up between the people who worked under these conditions.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Bad press is the only problem here. If your job is such a hardship, go work for somebody else.
Most other software companies are nicer to their programmers than most computer game companies.
And if you absolutely must design games for a living, then keep in mind that there a lot more geeks trying to get into your industry than most others, so you are going to have to work a lot harder to set yourself apart. That's just the way it is. Not everybody listened to their guidance counselor's B.S. about looking for a career in something they consider to be fun.
Rather than replying to like 10 different posts shortly enough, I'll just write what I have to write pre-emptively.. ;)
There have been so many misconceptions flying around about all this for a few months now, that's it has gotten ridiculous. The things I wished people understood are:
a) This is NOT a problem specific to EA. It is a problem with many -- if not MOST -- game developers (in the U.S., especially). Game studios all over are plagued with these problems that everyone's been talking about. The IGDA has had a "Quality of Life" group for a while now, trying to work on these issues. So why does EA get mentioned the most? Simple, it's for the same reason that MS gets slammed the hardest when people talk about OS issues or software engineering hours, etc. etc... -- They're the biggest. By default, the biggest will always bear the brunt of the attack. The only reason this is an issue at all is BECAUSE it's pandemic of the game industry as a WHOLE.
2) These things aren't even true within all of EA! EA is a large company, and while there are some groups that have these problems, it's hardly all of them! That's just yet another misconception people have.
Personally, I am bothered by these issues, but because they are big problems facing the game industry as a whole, not just one company.
they'd have realized by now that forcing the employees to work such long hours is part of the reason that their games are all complete crap.
Well, sales figures say otherwise, and that's what's important to them.
Parent is a perfect example of why this problem won't go away.
"If your job is such a hardship, go work for somebody else."
I guess its the American way (lazy) to tuck your tail between your legs and move on to the next job, so to speak?
Whatever happend to fighting for what's right or fighting for a cause that you believe in? Why does everyone just give-up now a days? Because you are one person versus a large corporation? Maybe I'm too inspired by all these super-hero movies that have been coming out of the years... Or just naive. lolthe rest of them are all the kind of stuff EA does - boring, same old same old creations.
I don't give a shit about Madden now being the only "official" NFL game, if they can come back and actually make it worth playing, maybe I'll buy the next one. If not, I'll happily go right back to playing Tecmo Bowl.
Face it. EA does two things: rushed-out crappy mission packs/expansions, and rushed-out crappy football games that are exactly the same crappy gameplay as last year's but with the new year's roster and 10% more polygons on the fucking shoelaces.
Even the Lord of the Rings games were rushed, and suffered accordingly.
Do you make $91,840? I don't think too many programmers are making 91k nowadays.
It's irrelevant whether they earn $5, $50 or $500 an hour. The point is that they agreed to work a roughly (accepting some deviation) 40 hour week for a given amount of money. And then the employer abused the exempt laws to force double or triple those hours out of them.
It's entirely valid for EA to turn around and say, "OK, we're offering $20/hour with up to 40 hours overtime at time and a half each week". The problem is, they're not. They're hiring people under one belief and then abusing the system to change the terms of their contract after it's been signed.
I'd bet no EA interview has ever gone, "OK, we'd like to put an offer on the table. $91840 a year for 80 hour weeks nine months of the year and 120 hour weeks the other three".
Yes, the employees do have the right to just up and leave. That said, changing jobs, especially in an industry that deliberately pays advance royalties in order to keep you trapped, where job seeking can take several months, etc. means taking a hit of several, if not tens of, thousands of dollars. So, no, you can't just easily leave once you realise they've screwed you.
I know I don't, it's expected that I work until the job is done.
That's all well and good, when you're doing a job. When they deliberately give you the work of two people then say "oh, you're exempt, make up the extra job's worth out of hours", it stops being about getting your job done and becomes about management abusing the exempt system to avoid hiring the staff levels they need.
A little overtime here and there, with some understanding on the odd Friday when you need to leave early is utterly different to a company that's built around the assumption that everyone will be forced to do 80 hours a week as a norm and 120 when you'd be doing 60.
Programming is not an art, contrary to the desires of some. A computer is an objective machine of logic and precision. It knows only two states and everything follows from this plain, objective operation. It is hence a science of engineering, and not an art of creation to program it. Software engineers may be imaginative in their uses of code, but they are still using code to feed complex mathematical formula to a machine.
No penguins were harmed in the making of this post.
> So how you treat people doesn't matter, as long as they're willing to put up with it? Abuse is OK so long as nobody complains?
Now that I reread my post, it does sort of sound like I'm saying that. Not my intention at all.
Instead of "the company" I should have said "a 'profit at all cost' company like EA."
And it's bad for them to do this. It's very short-term thinking. It leads to high turnover and bad PR, both very very expensive over time.
Look at Google for a good counterexample. I know two people who work there, and they're both raving fans. They're paying top dollar, giving out bonuses like hotcakes, and people would kill to get in that door. They work you hard (very hard!) and don't pay overtime (AFAIK), but they treat you like an employee rather than "human capital." There's probably game development shops that are like this, too.
Keep your friends close.
Keep your enemies in a little jar on your desk.
Ha, those perks have you fooled. Those so-called perks are just tools of management to keep you at the building working longer. Most slaves (which is what they are) at these companies use these facilities or benefits and go straight back to work.
What ends up happening is that the company spends a minimal amount of money to make the perks available, but recoup that amount because the employees are working longer which more than pays for it. Instead of asking for perks, you should be getting either cash, better health benefits, documented time off or a good ol' 401K with matching funds.
Tell your asshat employer to put their money where their mouth is.