I find that I'm far more productive when I enjoy what I'm working on. Being a far more productive employee makes you a more valuable one and gives you more leverage to negotiate a larger salary later on.
I find that salary is fairly negotiable, whereas the job you do and the people you work with are hard to change.
I find it funny how their Vancouver studio has hired 5 times as many people over the last 6 months as were fired from the LA studio, and there was no mention of it.
Perhaps this is EA waking up? Rogue Agent was a very uninspired game, maybe they were cutting the genuine fat from that studio. I have no idea, but someone has to offer a different perspective on this issue. To be realistic, I very much doubt that the blame for Rogue Agents lukewarm success can be evenly distributed across 60 heads.
I'm not supprised by this. This is a horrible day that will scar those 60 in LA for many months to come, possibly causing breakups, bankruptcy, and depression, but in the corporate world, it's Wednesday.
Dirty Silver Spoon?
on
NYT on EA Games
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· Score: 3, Informative
I work for EA as a programmer.
It's not as bad as some people here think. If you're working 80 hour weeks, I guarantee that you're either volunteering your time, a spineless moron, or in the process of looking for another job/quitting.
This isn't just a problem at EA. This sort of stuff happens everywhere else in the games/IT industry, it's just easy to sling mud at EA because their a large evil corporation. The guys at Id software work the exact same schedules and I can assure you that they're not all millionaires.
There are much shittier jobs to have. This is really a non-issue. Anyone who's thinking of quitting their cushy IT job, try working a 12 hour day on a construction site. When you pull a 14 hour day at EA, you're not mining coal or assembling BBQ's. You get free meals, video game machines abound, a beautiful lounge area. It's not a bad place to be at all for 14 hours a day.
That being said. I work at the Vancouver studio, and I have to say that I'm not really feeling all this EA negativity. I work normal hours (40 - 50 a week), my project is on schedule, and I'm very passionate about the game I'm working on. I may be a special case, but this just isn't seeming to affect me? Any other EAC slashdoters care to comment?
I think that a lot of this negativity is just sensationalism. I programmed games as a hobby many years before I started doing it proffessionaly, and I knew exactly what I was getting myself into. There are a LOT of people who are extremely happy with their jobs in the games industry.
Everyone here seems to think every large company except for Google is evil and controlled by the devil and hungry for souls and dollars.
I am a programmer for EA. From what I've seen the managers at EA take overtime very seriously, encouraging people to leave when they (the managers) do, and when there is overtime, the managers are always there with the troops to make them as comfy as possible.
I absolutely love my job at EA. I've worked as a construction worker, tree planter, telemarketer, tech support rep, retail sales rep, and a parking garage attendant; There are a LOT of shittier places to work than EA.
People who don't like their job at EA probably just hate the games industry in general. The problem of overtime isn't a problem with EA specifically, it's a problem with the games industry in general. You think the guys at Id or Valve don't work the insane hours we do at EA? Hell, the probably work longer hours. Painting the picture of EA as a meat grinding faceless corporation is a cliche here on slashdot. Thats what the games industry is. When a marine is shot, you don't hear people blaming the marine corps do you? People get shot in wars! People work long hours in the games industry!
90 hour weeks are insane, and I'm not defending any company that would put that upon their employees and I certainly wouldn't disagree with someones decision to leave a company they were unhappy at, for any reason.
EA is probably one the cushiest places to work in the games industry. I'm sure cushier places exist but they are most certainly not the norm. If anything, EA sheilds you from the games industry. They allow you to work, and have the money to do everything in their power to ensure you're working at your maximum potential.
Peoples experiences may vary, but I think everyone should remember that an individuals experience at a company is defined by the interaction of the individuals around you. My experience at EA has been a dream so far, simply because of the professionalism of my team/management. A lot of people in my studio have come from all over the industry, and say that of all the places they've worked, EA is the most sane. If you want to work in games, EA is your best bet. If someone had a shitty experience at EA, well that's no more likely to have happened than at any other game development house.
As stated earlier, I've worked for much more soul crusing companies. Think a 12 hour day is long? Try a 14 hour day planting trees. No games room, free lunch, and $1200 chair. Think crushing bugs is tedious? Try reading a sales pitch to 800 people telling you to fuck off over the phone. Think the pay sucks? Try working scab labour flagging traffic for 10 hours a day at $12/hour. I've done all of the above, and anything they've thrown at me in the games industry is a walk in the park, and should be for anyone else who can appreciate how lucky they are.
There are a LOT of shittier jobs to be doing, and a LOT of shittier companies to work for. The idea of an entire corporation that agrees and works to march people to madness for money is rediculously biased. Remember that a corporation is a collection of people just like me and you, and your experience is only as good as the people around you. EA hires the best people, which explains my awesome experience so far.
Lets fight the forest fire before we complain about lit matches.
I'm a long time C/C++ coder, mostly working on games or other real-time apps. Right now, I code in Java (J2ME for cell phones), and after some hiccups, I have to say, I really really like coding in Java. Syntactically, it's beautiful. Code is easy to read, it's super easy to dive into a project and just start working. Eclipse is great to work in, and the MIDP and CLDC libraries are very well designed.
Popping into a big C++ project (a moder day AAA game for instance) means spending about a week or so of JUST surfing the source tree to find out where everything is and how everything pieces together. In Java, I spend next to no time at all surfing source trees. I can just dive in, and work. A lot of teams get bogged down making engine code work with game code, which means a lot of refactoring.
Example? When Maxis was working on Sims Online, they spent a large portion of their time (and budget) refactoring nearly 1 million lines of code from the previous team (who had left because of the EA buyout IIRC). At it's peak, they had around 50 engineers refactoring it.
The only reason game developers aren't using Java, is because it's slow, and not suited for games at all. The speed improvements in 1.5 still mean absolutely nothing to anyone who is looking to push hardware as far as possible.
For many years I've been praying for a natively compiled Java that has a built in assembler (a lot of intense code still uses assembly for access to processor extensions), some of syntactic rules as Java (all classes in their own file, no multiple inheritance, which I'm still not 100% sure was the right idea).
I'm stuck using Java for my current project, but in the future, I hope to God that D takes off and becomes the generally accepted successor to C++.
Perhaps the developers should really look to the games industry and listen to what they have to say, since their one of the only software industries that are pretty much exclusively compiled only (C/C++ onle).
A 3D GUI only becomes as useable as a 2D one when you use a comfortable 3D input device to work it. Until a mainstream 3D input devices comes around, and possibly stereoscopic displays, you won't be able to navigate in a 3D desktop as easily.
It should be noted here that there is a difference between a true 3D desktop, and a desktop that uses cheezy 3D graphics to have windows slide around and crap..
This is coming from a game programming point of view, but I think it applies to all facets of software development. Programming sucks these days because of the communities it has created.
I'm not going to be a Yancy and specify where these points aren't applicable. Take what you read here with a grain of salt, but I guarantee you can apply one of these to an experience you've had.
- Zealot Trolls.Answering someone's question with a code solution that contains even the pettiest OO fault, even if it has nothing to do with OOP, will get you nothing but a bunch of OOP zealots on your ass, saying 'WRONG! That shouldn't be public' or 'WRONG. The destructor should be virtual' or 'WRONG. Should pass by reference'. You get the point. There are more and more trolls on boards these days looking to stroke their ego by posting extremely minor corrections to mostly correct solutions.
- Wheel Engineers. Stop making 3D engines. Stop making WinSock networking wrappers. Stop making ray-tracers. Stop making things that have been done 1000x before unless a)It's for fun/educational purposes. b) You're going to do something someone else hasn't. Even if there's _one_ thing in your coding project that someone hasn't done before, it's definitly worth it to create. Red-Faction was the last game IMO that added anything new to the world of 3D engines, other than 'taking advantage of x graphics card feature'. Physics is another area to inovate with game engines. Please Stop Re-Inveting The Wheel and giving it some cheezy name.
- Meatless Code. Anyone who has worked with the 3DS Max SDK knows what I'm talking about. Important data is fragmented everywhere, and accessed in 10 different ways. You spend more time reading the API docs than you do programming. I was reading through some ASP.net code the other day, and it took 45 lines to update a table with an SQL command. I read through it, and it could be done with 5 narrow lines of perl code. With C++, you could probably spend a solid two weeks writting generic 'manager' code that does absolutely nothing. Programmers need to learn to draw the line between 'productive' code and 'silly' code. Having a DataObjectFactoryCreatorManager class for 'ping' program, is a bit silly.
If I could do the world a favour, it would be to send all coders a letter that simply said "You are not the best. Live with it.". If I read another reply to a simple question with some dork awkwardly throwing in that he's "A 20 year C programmer who wrote a compiler on a TSK-110ZaxonBeta when I was 11". No one cares about your background unless they ask, or it's relevant.
Other than that, programming is fine. Except for Java.
Most applications don't need super slick, academically correct code to run these days. Napster was basically just a GUI on top of a IRC client. There was nothing incredible going on there, and the important point is that there Didn't Have To Be. It got it's job done.
You're confusing your feelings of 'programming sucks' with 'now we have to let ALL the kids into the tree-fort'. Most of what's changed with the programming world is that now PHB's and the average joe understands it, and can more effectively use the computer as a tool, much like us geeks could back in the 80's.
There's not one telemarketer in existence who _enjoys_ their job.
I very recently got a job at a telesurvey place (not quite marketing, I take political surveys, but it's just as scummy, and infringes on the same things).
Why did I take it?
I simply needed money VERY badly, and it was the only place that was hiring. The call center where I work is full of broke ass students who are just trying to pay their way through university, broke ass single mothers who need a second job to keep off welfare, and raise their kids with a bit of dignity, people who need money for their drug habbit (I'm dead serious) or people new to the country, and can't find a job where the employer doesn't care about their lose grasp on the english language.
I've never been on an immigrant filled raft bound for North America, but I'm sure that the atmosphere is similar to that of a call center. People are generally not happy with their current situation, but everyone pulls together to try and get through. A common discussion topics : "What I'm going to do once I get the hell out of here", "How I got stuck here", "What I say when people ask me where I work", "What high-tech company I got laid off from". Call centers are ALWAYS hiring, and if they weren't around, my broke student ass would be whored out to 1000 fat chicks for $50 a piece, or 50 really fat chicks for $1000 a piece. EVERYONE here is a few months of bad luck away from being on the other end of that phone.
Yelling at a telemarketer will do nothing. I've heard the finest forms of poetic profanity, and I'm yet to be shaken by even the most elaborate of rants. Telemarketers have a VERY fixed, boring, repetative work flow, and as a survival instinct, are able to put themselves into a trance. Anyone who's worked at a call center for more than a few months is able to put themselves in this trance while they're on the phone. The only way to snap a telemarketer out of their 'tele-trance' is to do something that is unexpected. If you really want to affect a telemarketer, something along the lines of "Wouldn't you rather be on welfare than selling your dignity for $8/hour?", or simply say "Down on your luck, huh buddy?". Say something very brief, that sounds like pitty, and I guarantee whatever you say after that will ring in their head for the rest of the day.
Getting on a do-not-call list, is not as easy as simply requesting it. When I went through training, I was blown away when I heard this. If people say "Put my on your DNC call list.*click*" we don't put them on the do not call list. ONLY if they are persistant, and very adament about being never called again are we to add them to the list. There was quite a bit of rumbling when the trainer told us this, and a LOT of people had big morale objections to this practice.
Most people that I talked to are very actively looking for other jobs. Another conversation topic around the lunch room, is people who've left and found other jobs, and how lucky they are, and how happy we'd be if the same good fortune found us. I hope to only be there for maybe another few weeks, and find a job ANYWHERE else that will fit my schedule, and pay for my college.
Telemarketers usually work 2 jobs, are not with their families at dinner time, get paid very poorly to be yelled at and verbally assaulted, are embarassed when asked what they do, and usually stuck between a rock and a hard place in their lives. While we do deserve all of the above, bear in mind that you read about rapists, suicide bombers, mass murders, and drunk drivers every day in the paper and think/do nothing of it, but when someone calls you during dinner, you're up in arms.
Telemarketing places should be put out of business for the same reason cocaine is illegal. Removing the temptation to work there will, in the long run, save many people from the embarasment and hell that is working at a telemarketing place, and save people from having a chapter in their life that they're not too proud of.
1000's of people will loose their jobs, but I'd say only about 1/4 will be genuinly dissapointed. It'd be that boot to the ass, that would force a lot of people to get their life together.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow.
The entire industry could ride a school bus to work every day.
I find that I'm far more productive when I enjoy what I'm working on. Being a far more productive employee makes you a more valuable one and gives you more leverage to negotiate a larger salary later on.
I find that salary is fairly negotiable, whereas the job you do and the people you work with are hard to change.
I find it funny how their Vancouver studio has hired 5 times as many people over the last 6 months as were fired from the LA studio, and there was no mention of it.
Perhaps this is EA waking up? Rogue Agent was a very uninspired game, maybe they were cutting the genuine fat from that studio. I have no idea, but someone has to offer a different perspective on this issue. To be realistic, I very much doubt that the blame for Rogue Agents lukewarm success can be evenly distributed across 60 heads.
I'm not supprised by this. This is a horrible day that will scar those 60 in LA for many months to come, possibly causing breakups, bankruptcy, and depression, but in the corporate world, it's Wednesday.
I work for EA as a programmer.
It's not as bad as some people here think. If you're working 80 hour weeks, I guarantee that you're either volunteering your time, a spineless moron, or in the process of looking for another job/quitting.
This isn't just a problem at EA. This sort of stuff happens everywhere else in the games/IT industry, it's just easy to sling mud at EA because their a large evil corporation. The guys at Id software work the exact same schedules and I can assure you that they're not all millionaires.
There are much shittier jobs to have. This is really a non-issue. Anyone who's thinking of quitting their cushy IT job, try working a 12 hour day on a construction site. When you pull a 14 hour day at EA, you're not mining coal or assembling BBQ's. You get free meals, video game machines abound, a beautiful lounge area. It's not a bad place to be at all for 14 hours a day.
That being said. I work at the Vancouver studio, and I have to say that I'm not really feeling all this EA negativity. I work normal hours (40 - 50 a week), my project is on schedule, and I'm very passionate about the game I'm working on. I may be a special case, but this just isn't seeming to affect me? Any other EAC slashdoters care to comment?
I think that a lot of this negativity is just sensationalism. I programmed games as a hobby many years before I started doing it proffessionaly, and I knew exactly what I was getting myself into. There are a LOT of people who are extremely happy with their jobs in the games industry.
Everyone here seems to think every large company except for Google is evil and controlled by the devil and hungry for souls and dollars.
I am a programmer for EA. From what I've seen the managers at EA take overtime very seriously, encouraging people to leave when they (the managers) do, and when there is overtime, the managers are always there with the troops to make them as comfy as possible.
I absolutely love my job at EA. I've worked as a construction worker, tree planter, telemarketer, tech support rep, retail sales rep, and a parking garage attendant; There are a LOT of shittier places to work than EA.
People who don't like their job at EA probably just hate the games industry in general. The problem of overtime isn't a problem with EA specifically, it's a problem with the games industry in general. You think the guys at Id or Valve don't work the insane hours we do at EA? Hell, the probably work longer hours. Painting the picture of EA as a meat grinding faceless corporation is a cliche here on slashdot. Thats what the games industry is. When a marine is shot, you don't hear people blaming the marine corps do you? People get shot in wars! People work long hours in the games industry!
90 hour weeks are insane, and I'm not defending any company that would put that upon their employees and I certainly wouldn't disagree with someones decision to leave a company they were unhappy at, for any reason.
EA is probably one the cushiest places to work in the games industry. I'm sure cushier places exist but they are most certainly not the norm. If anything, EA sheilds you from the games industry. They allow you to work, and have the money to do everything in their power to ensure you're working at your maximum potential.
Peoples experiences may vary, but I think everyone should remember that an individuals experience at a company is defined by the interaction of the individuals around you. My experience at EA has been a dream so far, simply because of the professionalism of my team/management. A lot of people in my studio have come from all over the industry, and say that of all the places they've worked, EA is the most sane. If you want to work in games, EA is your best bet. If someone had a shitty experience at EA, well that's no more likely to have happened than at any other game development house.
As stated earlier, I've worked for much more soul crusing companies. Think a 12 hour day is long? Try a 14 hour day planting trees. No games room, free lunch, and $1200 chair. Think crushing bugs is tedious? Try reading a sales pitch to 800 people telling you to fuck off over the phone. Think the pay sucks? Try working scab labour flagging traffic for 10 hours a day at $12/hour. I've done all of the above, and anything they've thrown at me in the games industry is a walk in the park, and should be for anyone else who can appreciate how lucky they are.
There are a LOT of shittier jobs to be doing, and a LOT of shittier companies to work for. The idea of an entire corporation that agrees and works to march people to madness for money is rediculously biased. Remember that a corporation is a collection of people just like me and you, and your experience is only as good as the people around you. EA hires the best people, which explains my awesome experience so far.
Lets fight the forest fire before we complain about lit matches.
The fact that it had nudity in almost every second scene AND I STILL TURNED IT OFF HALF WAY speaks volumes.
I'm a long time C/C++ coder, mostly working on games or other real-time apps. Right now, I code in Java (J2ME for cell phones), and after some hiccups, I have to say, I really really like coding in Java. Syntactically, it's beautiful. Code is easy to read, it's super easy to dive into a project and just start working. Eclipse is great to work in, and the MIDP and CLDC libraries are very well designed.
Popping into a big C++ project (a moder day AAA game for instance) means spending about a week or so of JUST surfing the source tree to find out where everything is and how everything pieces together. In Java, I spend next to no time at all surfing source trees. I can just dive in, and work. A lot of teams get bogged down making engine code work with game code, which means a lot of refactoring.
Example? When Maxis was working on Sims Online, they spent a large portion of their time (and budget) refactoring nearly 1 million lines of code from the previous team (who had left because of the EA buyout IIRC). At it's peak, they had around 50 engineers refactoring it.
The only reason game developers aren't using Java, is because it's slow, and not suited for games at all. The speed improvements in 1.5 still mean absolutely nothing to anyone who is looking to push hardware as far as possible.
For many years I've been praying for a natively compiled Java that has a built in assembler (a lot of intense code still uses assembly for access to processor extensions), some of syntactic rules as Java (all classes in their own file, no multiple inheritance, which I'm still not 100% sure was the right idea).
I'm stuck using Java for my current project, but in the future, I hope to God that D takes off and becomes the generally accepted successor to C++.
Perhaps the developers should really look to the games industry and listen to what they have to say, since their one of the only software industries that are pretty much exclusively compiled only (C/C++ onle).
A 3D GUI only becomes as useable as a 2D one when you use a comfortable 3D input device to work it. Until a mainstream 3D input devices comes around, and possibly stereoscopic displays, you won't be able to navigate in a 3D desktop as easily.
It should be noted here that there is a difference between a true 3D desktop, and a desktop that uses cheezy 3D graphics to have windows slide around and crap..
This is coming from a game programming point of view, but I think it applies to all facets of software development. Programming sucks these days because of the communities it has created.
I'm not going to be a Yancy and specify where these points aren't applicable. Take what you read here with a grain of salt, but I guarantee you can apply one of these to an experience you've had.
- Zealot Trolls.Answering someone's question with a code solution that contains even the pettiest OO fault, even if it has nothing to do with OOP, will get you nothing but a bunch of OOP zealots on your ass, saying 'WRONG! That shouldn't be public' or 'WRONG. The destructor should be virtual' or 'WRONG. Should pass by reference'. You get the point. There are more and more trolls on boards these days looking to stroke their ego by posting extremely minor corrections to mostly correct solutions.
- Wheel Engineers. Stop making 3D engines. Stop making WinSock networking wrappers. Stop making ray-tracers. Stop making things that have been done 1000x before unless a)It's for fun/educational purposes. b) You're going to do something someone else hasn't. Even if there's _one_ thing in your coding project that someone hasn't done before, it's definitly worth it to create. Red-Faction was the last game IMO that added anything new to the world of 3D engines, other than 'taking advantage of x graphics card feature'. Physics is another area to inovate with game engines. Please Stop Re-Inveting The Wheel and giving it some cheezy name.
- Meatless Code. Anyone who has worked with the 3DS Max SDK knows what I'm talking about. Important data is fragmented everywhere, and accessed in 10 different ways. You spend more time reading the API docs than you do programming. I was reading through some ASP.net code the other day, and it took 45 lines to update a table with an SQL command. I read through it, and it could be done with 5 narrow lines of perl code. With C++, you could probably spend a solid two weeks writting generic 'manager' code that does absolutely nothing. Programmers need to learn to draw the line between 'productive' code and 'silly' code. Having a DataObjectFactoryCreatorManager class for 'ping' program, is a bit silly.
If I could do the world a favour, it would be to send all coders a letter that simply said "You are not the best. Live with it.". If I read another reply to a simple question with some dork awkwardly throwing in that he's "A 20 year C programmer who wrote a compiler on a TSK-110ZaxonBeta when I was 11". No one cares about your background unless they ask, or it's relevant.
Other than that, programming is fine. Except for Java.
Most applications don't need super slick, academically correct code to run these days. Napster was basically just a GUI on top of a IRC client. There was nothing incredible going on there, and the important point is that there Didn't Have To Be. It got it's job done.
You're confusing your feelings of 'programming sucks' with 'now we have to let ALL the kids into the tree-fort'. Most of what's changed with the programming world is that now PHB's and the average joe understands it, and can more effectively use the computer as a tool, much like us geeks could back in the 80's.
There's not one telemarketer in existence who _enjoys_ their job.
I very recently got a job at a telesurvey place (not quite marketing, I take political surveys, but it's just as scummy, and infringes on the same things).
Why did I take it?
I simply needed money VERY badly, and it was the only place that was hiring. The call center where I work is full of broke ass students who are just trying to pay their way through university, broke ass single mothers who need a second job to keep off welfare, and raise their kids with a bit of dignity, people who need money for their drug habbit (I'm dead serious) or people new to the country, and can't find a job where the employer doesn't care about their lose grasp on the english language.
I've never been on an immigrant filled raft bound for North America, but I'm sure that the atmosphere is similar to that of a call center. People are generally not happy with their current situation, but everyone pulls together to try and get through. A common discussion topics : "What I'm going to do once I get the hell out of here", "How I got stuck here", "What I say when people ask me where I work", "What high-tech company I got laid off from". Call centers are ALWAYS hiring, and if they weren't around, my broke student ass would be whored out to 1000 fat chicks for $50 a piece, or 50 really fat chicks for $1000 a piece. EVERYONE here is a few months of bad luck away from being on the other end of that phone.
Yelling at a telemarketer will do nothing. I've heard the finest forms of poetic profanity, and I'm yet to be shaken by even the most elaborate of rants. Telemarketers have a VERY fixed, boring, repetative work flow, and as a survival instinct, are able to put themselves into a trance. Anyone who's worked at a call center for more than a few months is able to put themselves in this trance while they're on the phone. The only way to snap a telemarketer out of their 'tele-trance' is to do something that is unexpected. If you really want to affect a telemarketer, something along the lines of "Wouldn't you rather be on welfare than selling your dignity for $8/hour?", or simply say "Down on your luck, huh buddy?". Say something very brief, that sounds like pitty, and I guarantee whatever you say after that will ring in their head for the rest of the day.
Getting on a do-not-call list, is not as easy as simply requesting it. When I went through training, I was blown away when I heard this. If people say "Put my on your DNC call list.*click*" we don't put them on the do not call list. ONLY if they are persistant, and very adament about being never called again are we to add them to the list. There was quite a bit of rumbling when the trainer told us this, and a LOT of people had big morale objections to this practice.
Most people that I talked to are very actively looking for other jobs. Another conversation topic around the lunch room, is people who've left and found other jobs, and how lucky they are, and how happy we'd be if the same good fortune found us. I hope to only be there for maybe another few weeks, and find a job ANYWHERE else that will fit my schedule, and pay for my college.
Telemarketers usually work 2 jobs, are not with their families at dinner time, get paid very poorly to be yelled at and verbally assaulted, are embarassed when asked what they do, and usually stuck between a rock and a hard place in their lives. While we do deserve all of the above, bear in mind that you read about rapists, suicide bombers, mass murders, and drunk drivers every day in the paper and think/do nothing of it, but when someone calls you during dinner, you're up in arms.
Telemarketing places should be put out of business for the same reason cocaine is illegal. Removing the temptation to work there will, in the long run, save many people from the embarasment and hell that is working at a telemarketing place, and save people from having a chapter in their life that they're not too proud of.
1000's of people will loose their jobs, but I'd say only about 1/4 will be genuinly dissapointed. It'd be that boot to the ass, that would force a lot of people to get their life together.