Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Anyways EA has 4400 employees worldwide, so I'm not suprised they have disputes every now an then.
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.
The saddest part is that EA games is a publisher, not even the development powerhouse it used to be. It makes literally ONLY EA-sports games. 9 out of 10 of the other games are acquired via merger or buy outs.
For a company that has 5000 employees and engineer only 5 sports title a year, basketball football hockey baseball nascar. All EA does is hire $400,000 salary lawyers to slap EA logos on other company's work.
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.
I work at EA and can (anonymously, at least) vouch for claims like this. After the first wave of lawsuits and the EASpouse publicity, EA immediately set out with an attempted rectification of thier employment practices by distributing an employee satisfaction survey and openly claiming about thier search for ways to reward hard working employees.
I can't say they aren't actually trying to end this negative situation, but it's obvious from our point of view that they're attempts are fueled by the desire to quell the bad press and save face, as opposed to actually compensating overworked employees and resolving the issues.
Obviously the company sees the issue differently than the press and public, and is trying to rectify issues for the wrong reasons. (i.e. Cure bad press, not employee hardship). I believe they will only put forth the effort enough to stop thier people from complaining publicly, before returning to the tyrancy and money-mongering.
One of the biggest problems in the software industry, speaking as someone who's been here for a modest amount of time (6 years, since my sophomore year of college, full-time), is that management sets unrealistic timelines. If more upstream design was done (sorry, reading Code Complete for the 2nd time) then they could develop more realistic schedules. Enough with the 90% floating requirements, enough late-schedule additions. Engineer for quality from inception, and they could come out with better games on realistic schedules with happy, healthy employees who will be a value added in the sheer amount of innovation they can bring to the table when all aspects of their lives are balanced (for some, this is an impossibility, and businesses take advantage of this neurotic behavior, which I think is unethical).
...this is really something that is ripe for legistation to deal with esspecially because its legistation that has caused the problem in the first place. The only reason this stuff has come up is because laws exist that allow EA and other companies to deny overtime.
I have not seen overtime where I work since the bubble burst. Before that they did give it to me and others who by law they didn't have to; however they had exemptions in out company policy (which still exist) which allowed for overtime on critical approved projects. Since the bubble burst those exemptions never get invoked. Its really to bad because pervious to the change I would regualrly work 55 hour weeks (I unfortunately couldn't collect overtime until 50 hours because of my pay status) Now I go home at 40 since on my pay scale thats the minum number of hours.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
"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???
Best quote from the article:
Their case argues that EA's engineers "do not perform work that is original or creative,"
EA games have no orignality or creativity? Say it ain't so!
If you read the article, you can see that the law they are trying to dispute is only applied to programmers who make $41 an hour or more. If you add that up, it means these programmers make at least $91,840 a year.
Now if you are a programmer, (I am) I'm sure you work some overtime during crunch time. Do you get overtime for it? I know I don't, it's expected that I work until the job is done. Do you make $91,840? I don't think too many programmers are making 91k nowadays.
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.
But when a new verson of Madden Football comes out, most gamers with jobs end up going more than 24 hours without sleep, too. Seems to me that all QA should be done by sleep-depraved zombies, to simulate real-world conditions.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
If you need to hire someone that won't be a crybaby when you make them work long hours for tons of money, hire me. Programming 100+ hours a week for good money is infinitely better than unemployment.
I'll be waiting for your call.
Thanks,
DoktorSeven
This is a sig. Deal with it.
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.
The whole industry needs an overhaul, and quick.
Since this has turned into a complain-fest, it's my turn. I know programmers have it bad, but what about the QA department? I work at a company (see below) that does not pay its QA Leads OT. This wouldn't be that big a deal if we got paid a descent salary to start with or maybe had some perks. During Crunch-time last year, I worked 25 days in a row (12-hour days, mind you) and didn't get so much as a "thank you", much less proper compensation. It got to the point that my testers where making more than me a week.
At least at EA, they have such perks as a free employee gym, free meals if you have to work OT, employee soccer/basketball fields, etc. At THQ (supposedly the second biggest publisher), we don't even have a freaking game/break room to relax in. It boggles my mind that a company that makes 600 million dollars a year can't afford to pay OT to those who deserve it. I'm not a greedy guy, but pay us what we are owed, before you are forced to.
Ahhh, I feel a bit better now that I got to vent.
the 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.
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.
Um, a doctor?
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?