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.'"

Comments

If the EA suits were paying ANY attention at all..

[Moryath]

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.

Employers Need to Be Smart

[computertheque]

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.

Re:Employers Need to Be Smart

[Phisbut]

In the real world, you miss the holiday season and you are screwed.

Year after year, the holiday season seems to comer earlier. Companies always want to get their product out before their competitor, so now, 'holiday season' begins in september.

Quoting Gabe from Penny Arcade :

What in the hell is wrong with the videogame industry? If they spread these games out over the course of a year I'd probably buy every one of them. As it stands now, I'll end up having to rent 90% of these.

In the movie industry you have a few big summer blockbusters, but decent movies come out year round. Imagine if every single movie worth watching came out in July. Imagine if you had to spend five hundred dollars in one month just to see the movies you were interested in. People wouldn't stand for that. Why is it that the videogame industry is able to get away with this bullshit?

I'm not even talking about October and November here. 99% of all the games worth playing in a given year come out in the space of three months. THAT IS F***ING RIDICULOUS!

Employment Opportunities!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Part of the problem

[DrZombie]

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).

Re:Part of the problem

[jbolden]

There is a myth that corporate America does a good job using resources. Most companies are a waste of this nation's economic capital, and have terrible rates of return (when the earnings statements are looked at either long term or with a sceptical eye since fraud is now a major problem). In the 1960s when companies were far less concerned about getting the most out of each employee but rather built institutional structures to create productivity large business was so effective that there was a great deal of fear that small business wouldn't exist at all. And that's with employees having 2 hour lunches where they drank and an 8 hour work day. Today the structures aren't in place everyone works 60 hours a week and gets and gets nothing done.

Re:Part of the problem

[Psychochild]

There's a further problem in the games industry in that you can't really schedule for "fun". We're still trying to understand this mysterious beast from a logical point of view. Or, to put it another way, there's no test harness for "fun factor". You can plan out the game with a high degree of detail, implement everything on schedule and under budget, but if the game isn't fun it doesn't matter. Yet, the money people hate to think that all that work went for nothing, so they usually want a game to ship by the deadline no matter what state it's in. That's why you sometimes see games that are absolutely unplayable and obviously not finished; the developers weren't able to get the game to a "fun" state before the money dried up.

This gets worse when you have business people willing to exploit the eagerness of people developing games. I eagerly worked 60-80 hours at 3DO working on one project I enjoyed (the project I bought from 3DO after they closed it down, Meridian 59), but I hated working even 50 hour weeks on another game that only had a 6 month development cycle. Usually the managers just say, "Hey, you're making games. Suck it up and have fun!" if you complain about the hours. It doesn't help that many people have a completely misguided idea of what it's like to make games (even without the bullshit you have to tolerate at large companies); they don't realize that making games is different than playing games.

Enough of a rant for now. Some thoughts from someone who has seen the inside of the beast.

Have fun,

You got that right...

[tc]

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!

$91840 salary + overtime?

[JavaLord]

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.

Re:$91840 salary + overtime?

[nick_davison]

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.

Re:The Saddest Part

[Alban]

SSX
Def Jam
Need for Speed
The sims
Medal of Honor (for better or for worse)
Command and Conquer
LotR RPG
LotR RTS
LotR hack'n'slash (two towers + rotk)
Goldeneye
Harry Potter
Nascaar racing

to name just a few, are all sports games and are all developped internally at EA.

As for 5 sports games a year, your count is quite inexact (btw the 'street' games are totally different from their 'serious' counterpart, both from gameplay and art perspectives - you should try them and stop talking out of your ass):

- Madden
- FIFA
- NBA
- MVP
- Fight Night
- Tiger Woods Golf
- NHL
- FIFA Street
- NBA Street (if you haven't tried vol'3 you are missing something)
- NFL Street

Re:If the EA suits were paying ANY attention at al

[JFMulder]

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.

QA

[Anonymous Coward]

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.