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Old Dec 2nd, 2004, 12:16 AM        so you wanna get paid to make videogames huh
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EA: The Human Story [Nov. 10th, 2004|12:01 am]
My significant other works for Electronic Arts, and I'm what you might call a disgruntled spouse.

EA's bright and shiny new corporate trademark is "Challenge Everything." Where this applies is not exactly clear. Churning out one licensed football game after another doesn't sound like challenging much of anything to me; it sounds like a money farm. To any EA executive that happens to read this, I have a good challenge for you: how about safe and sane labor practices for the people on whose backs you walk for your millions?

I am retaining some anonymity here because I have no illusions about what the consequences would be for my family if I was explicit. However, I also feel no impetus to shy away from sharing our story, because I know that it is too common to stick out among those of the thousands of engineers, artists, and designers that EA employs.

Our adventures with Electronic Arts began less than a year ago. The small game studio that my partner worked for collapsed as a result of foul play on the part of a big publisher -- another common story. Electronic Arts offered a job, the salary was right and the benefits were good, so my SO took it. I remember that they asked him in one of the interviews: "how do you feel about working long hours?" It's just a part of the game industry -- few studios can avoid a crunch as deadlines loom, so we thought nothing of it. When asked for specifics about what "working long hours" meant, the interviewers coughed and glossed on to the next question; now we know why.

Within weeks production had accelerated into a 'mild' crunch: eight hours six days a week. Not bad. Months remained until any real crunch would start, and the team was told that this "pre-crunch" was to prevent a big crunch toward the end; at this point any other need for a crunch seemed unlikely, as the project was dead on schedule. I don't know how many of the developers bought EA's explanation for the extended hours; we were new and naive so we did. The producers even set a deadline; they gave a specific date for the end of the crunch, which was still months away from the title's shipping date, so it seemed safe. That date came and went. And went, and went. When the next news came it was not about a reprieve; it was another acceleration: twelve hours six days a week, 9am to 10pm.

Weeks passed. Again the producers had given a termination date on this crunch that again they failed. Throughout this period the project remained on schedule. The long hours started to take its toll on the team; people grew irritable and some started to get ill. People dropped out in droves for a couple of days at a time, but then the team seemed to reach equilibrium again and they plowed ahead. The managers stopped even talking about a day when the hours would go back to normal.

Now, it seems, is the "real" crunch, the one that the producers of this title so wisely prepared their team for by running them into the ground ahead of time. The current mandatory hours are 9am to 10pm -- seven days a week -- with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behavior (at 6:30pm). This averages out to an eighty-five hour work week. Complaints that these once more extended hours combined with the team's existing fatigue would result in a greater number of mistakes made and an even greater amount of wasted energy were ignored.

The stress is taking its toll. After a certain number of hours spent working the eyes start to lose focus; after a certain number of weeks with only one day off fatigue starts to accrue and accumulate exponentially. There is a reason why there are two days in a weekend -- bad things happen to one's physical, emotional, and mental health if these days are cut short. The team is rapidly beginning to introduce as many flaws as they are removing.

And the kicker: for the honor of this treatment EA salaried employees receive a) no overtime; b) no compensation time! ('comp' time is the equalization of time off for overtime -- any hours spent during a crunch accrue into days off after the product has shipped); c) no additional sick or vacation leave. The time just goes away. Additionally, EA recently announced that, although in the past they have offered essentially a type of comp time in the form of a few weeks off at the end of a project, they no longer wish to do this, and employees shouldn't expect it. Further, since the production of various games is scattered, there was a concern on the part of the employees that developers would leave one crunch only to join another. EA's response was that they would attempt to minimize this, but would make no guarantees. This is unthinkable; they are pushing the team to individual physical health limits, and literally giving them nothing for it. Comp time is a staple in this industry, but EA as a corporation wishes to "minimize" this reprieve. One would think that the proper way to minimize comp time is to avoid crunch, but this brutal crunch has been on for months, and nary a whisper about any compensation leave, nor indeed of any end of this treatment.

This crunch also differs from crunch time in a smaller studio in that it was not an emergency effort to save a project from failure. Every step of the way, the project remained on schedule. Crunching neither accelerated this nor slowed it down; its effect on the actual product was not measurable. The extended hours were deliberate and planned; the management knew what they were doing as they did it. The love of my life comes home late at night complaining of a headache that will not go away and a chronically upset stomach, and my happy supportive smile is running out.

No one works in the game industry unless they love what they do. No one on that team is interested in producing an inferior product. My heart bleeds for this team precisely BECAUSE they are brilliant, talented individuals out to create something great. They are and were more than willing to work hard for the success of the title. But that good will has only been met with abuse. Amazingly, Electronic Arts was listed #91 on Fortune magazine's "100 Best Companies to Work For" in 2003.

EA's attitude toward this -- which is actually a part of company policy, it now appears -- has been (in an anonymous quotation that I've heard repeated by multiple managers), "If they don't like it, they can work someplace else." Put up or shut up and leave: this is the core of EA's Human Resources policy. The concept of ethics or compassion or even intelligence with regard to getting the most out of one's workforce never enters the equation: if they don't want to sacrifice their lives and their health and their talent so that a multibillion dollar corporation can continue its Godzilla-stomp through the game industry, they can work someplace else.

But can they?

The EA Mambo, paired with other giants such as Vivendi, Sony, and Microsoft, is rapidly either crushing or absorbing the vast majority of the business in game development. A few standalone studios that made their fortunes in previous eras -- Blizzard, Bioware, and Id come to mind -- manage to still survive, but 2004 saw the collapse of dozens of small game studios, no longer able to acquire contracts in the face of rapid and massive consolidation of game publishing companies. This is an epidemic hardly unfamiliar to anyone working in the industry. Though, of course, it is always the option of talent to go outside the industry, perhaps venturing into the booming commercial software development arena. (Read my tired attempt at sarcasm.)

To put some of this in perspective, I myself consider some figures. If EA truly believes that it needs to push its employees this hard -- I actually believe that they don't, and that it is a skewed operations perspective alone that results in the severity of their crunching, coupled with a certain expected amount of the inefficiency involved in running an enterprise as large as theirs -- the solution therefore should be to hire more engineers, or artists, or designers, as the case may be. Never should it be an option to punish one's workforce with ninety hour weeks; in any other industry the company in question would find itself sued out of business so fast its stock wouldn't even have time to tank. In its first weekend, Madden 2005 grossed $65 million. EA's annual revenue is approximately $2.5 billion. This company is not strapped for cash; their labor practices are inexcusable.

The interesting thing about this is an assumption that most of the employees seem to be operating under. Whenever the subject of hours come up, inevitably, it seems, someone mentions 'exemption'. They refer to a California law that supposedly exempts businesses from having to pay overtime to certain 'specialty' employees, including software programmers. This is Senate Bill 88. However, Senate Bill 88 specifically does not apply to the entertainment industry -- television, motion picture, and theater industries are specifically mentioned. Further, even in software, there is a pay minimum on the exemption: those exempt must be paid at least $90,000 annually. I can assure you that the majority of EA employees are in fact not in this pay bracket; ergo, these practices are not only unethical, they are illegal.

I look at our situation and I ask 'us': why do you stay? And the answer is that in all likelihood we won't; and in all likelihood if we had known that this would be the result of working for EA, we would have stayed far away in the first place. But all along the way there were deceptions, there were promises, there were assurances -- there was a big fancy office building with an expensive fish tank -- all of which in the end look like an elaborate scheme to keep a crop of employees on the project just long enough to get it shipped. And then if they need to, they hire in a new batch, fresh and ready to hear more promises that will not be kept; EA's turnover rate in engineering is approximately 50%. This is how EA works. So now we know, now we can move on, right? That seems to be what happens to everyone else. But it's not enough. Because in the end, regardless of what happens with our particular situation, this kind of "business" isn't right, and people need to know about it, which is why I write this today.

If I could get EA CEO Larry Probst on the phone, there are a few things I would ask him. "What's your salary?" would be merely a point of curiosity. The main thing I want to know is, Larry: you do realize what you're doing to your people, right? And you do realize that they ARE people, with physical limits, emotional lives, and families, right? Voices and talents and senses of humor and all that? That when you keep our husbands and wives and children in the office for ninety hours a week, sending them home exhausted and numb and frustrated with their lives, it's not just them you're hurting, but everyone around them, everyone who loves them? When you make your profit calculations and your cost analyses, you know that a great measure of that cost is being paid in raw human dignity, right?

Right?


===

This article is offered under the Creative Commons deed. Please feel free to redistribute/link.
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Old Dec 2nd, 2004, 12:29 AM       
Why must American corperations crush everyone's hopes and dreams? The Bungee and Blizzard people seem so happy in some interviews... why can't the EA people be happy also?
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Old Dec 2nd, 2004, 12:44 AM       
They should go to work for 3D Realms. Those guys have no crunch time.
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Old Dec 2nd, 2004, 01:16 AM       
Someone said that their teacher worked for EA and got the same crap. I'm sick of big companies pushing us around
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Old Dec 2nd, 2004, 05:15 AM       
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Originally Posted by Dr. Boogie
They should go to work for 3D Realms. Those guys have no crunch time.


That's a pretty terrible story. You'd think a billion dollar company like EA would have better things to do than torture their employees with some screwed up concept of efficiency. And it doesn't just show disrespect for the employees, but for the product too - it's like they're considering the production of their games to be just factory work.
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Old Dec 2nd, 2004, 07:11 AM       


No shit, I have a tear in my eye.

That's the problem with big companies. The power can go to their heads and they want more and more, at any and all cost (just not to themselves personally).

If I actually played EA games, I would feel horribly guilty right about now.
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Old Dec 2nd, 2004, 08:12 AM       
speaking of which, doesn't buffalotom work at EA?
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Old Dec 2nd, 2004, 09:55 AM       
I think Vivendi bought Blizzard too. The smaller companies just can't surivive in today's market. Every "successful" copany has to follow the Wal-Mart model. Sucks.
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Old Dec 2nd, 2004, 12:18 PM       
Davidson somethingorother bought Blizzard.

Anyways, I've read these kinds of stories before, and I have no sympathy whatsoever for these people. They know what they are getting into ahead of time. The software development industry in general demands long hours. It is expected no matter what company you work for.

This overtime stuff is BS. You're on a SALARY. You don't get paid overtime when you're on a salary. This isn't some blue-collar unionized job with an hourly wage.

If people took the time to actually read their contracts instead of just signing them and thinking "OMG OMG OMG I GET TO WORK FOR EA AND MAKE THE NEXT BOND GAME " they would see that stuff like this is right in there.
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Old Dec 2nd, 2004, 12:31 PM       
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Originally Posted by AChimp
Davidson somethingorother bought Blizzard.

Anyways, I've read these kinds of stories before, and I have no sympathy whatsoever for these people. They know what they are getting into ahead of time. The software development industry in general demands long hours. It is expected no matter what company you work for.

This overtime stuff is BS. You're on a SALARY. You don't get paid overtime when you're on a salary. This isn't some blue-collar unionized job with an hourly wage.

If people took the time to actually read their contracts instead of just signing them and thinking "OMG OMG OMG I GET TO WORK FOR EA AND MAKE THE NEXT BOND GAME " they would see that stuff like this is right in there.
Dude, you don't know shit. It's not about overtime money. It's about having work-life balance, which EA says it is committed to, though they don't have concrete policies to ensure this balance exists. How the fuck can you enjoy your success as a video game programmer, when the company is death-marching you from project to project? Crunch time should only be used to put the final touches on a AAA product. It shouldn't be a general work practice, as EA uses it. Trust me, I know.
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Old Dec 2nd, 2004, 01:59 PM       
EA sucks :/

They already proved this with all the shitty games they keep makeing.
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Old Dec 2nd, 2004, 03:36 PM       
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Originally Posted by Buffalo Tom
Dude, you don't know shit. It's not about overtime money. It's about having work-life balance, which EA says it is committed to, though they don't have concrete policies to ensure this balance exists. How the fuck can you enjoy your success as a video game programmer, when the company is death-marching you from project to project? Crunch time should only be used to put the final touches on a AAA product. It shouldn't be a general work practice, as EA uses it. Trust me, I know.
Every blog entry that I read by some EA employee (or former EA employee) or their spouse always whines about the lack of overtime pay, as if somehow that would make it all better. This one was no different.

Everything I've heard about working in the game industry sucks. As far as I've been told, you can be working on the project that will sell a million copies in the first five minutes of release one day, and then come in the next morning to find out that the project has been canned. EA has dozens of projects going on at any given time; the ones that make it to the point of no return the fastest are the ones that get releases (regardless of their suck level) and that, in turn, makes the managers and dev leads in charge of it look better because, hey, they finished *their* project.

A large portion of developers a) don't have a family and b) don't have a girlfriend/wife either. It doesn't matter to them if they work 12 hours a day, because they have nothing else to do with their time anyways! Look around your office and I'm sure you'll see the kind of people that I'm talking about.

Bottom line is just what EA's HR department says. If you don't like it, you can work somewhere else. There's plenty of better companies out there.
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Old Dec 2nd, 2004, 04:20 PM       
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Every blog entry that I read by some EA employee (or former EA employee) or their spouse always whines about the lack of overtime pay, as if somehow that would make it all better. This one was no different.
Then you're not obviously reading the blogs I've read. It's not about overtime pay. It's about having crappy pre-production planning that results in re-working code when you're in the middle of the BETA PHASE, which in turn results in developers being required to put in crunch hours to fix a problem that would not have existed if proper design practices had been followed early in the project. It's about having INSANELY compressed development schedules, because you want to squeeze out as much money from a movie license as possible, which necessitate being in crunch for 12 MONTHS. It's about death-marching your people from project to project, to the point of BURNOUT AND EXHAUSTION, without a moment of respite so that they can regain some of the creative juices that make great, classic games.

Everybody in this industry understands that crunch is part of the business. That is one of the first things they tell you in the interview process. What I object to is that big companies use crunch as a standard work practice throughout the whole development schedule, instead of only being used in the last few weeks to get a project to a AAA level. I know people who were moved from project with a difficult crunch cycle to another with a similiar situation. That's just stupid if you're burning your best and brightest like that, and it's just not fair.

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Originally Posted by AChimp
A large portion of developers a) don't have a family and b) don't have a girlfriend/wife either. It doesn't matter to them if they work 12 hours a day, because they have nothing else to do with their time anyways! Look around your office and I'm sure you'll see the kind of people that I'm talking about.
I'll repeat what I said: you don't know shit. Almost every person on my team has a significant other and family they would love to see, and it is disheartening when you can't even spend time to have dinner with them. It creates low morale for your team that no amount of 'rah rah' speeches from executives will ever alleviate. You try being creative and productive when you're so demoralized like that.
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Old Dec 2nd, 2004, 04:54 PM       
i have never owned a EA game, and after reading this i never will.

but just to play the devil's ad-vo-cate, dont they do the same thing in japan? in fact, isnt all of japan's workforce like this?
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Old Dec 2nd, 2004, 05:12 PM       
Well they are japs, and they killed people in WWII, so they dont matter.
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Old Dec 2nd, 2004, 06:36 PM       
If working for EA is so bad and you're so demoralized, WHY CONTINUE WORKING FOR THEM? The amount of time that it takes to write a four page rant on your LiveJournal could be better spent updating your resume. Is it really worth it to work there if you have to put in 80 hour weeks non-stop?

For EA, it doesn't matter if their workers like it. There are slavering hordes of graduates who's sole reason for getting a CS degree was to write games. They'll never run out of people to hire.
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Old Dec 2nd, 2004, 08:04 PM       
Way to suck that hypothetical corporate cock, AChimp.

When you finally get out of University and enter the workforce I doubt you'll be so smug.
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Old Dec 2nd, 2004, 09:50 PM       
I've been working in the industry for a year now, and I get to talk to people from all parts of it.

It's not hard to find a job. No one should feel like they'll be out on the street if they leave EA, because as long as they know their stuff they'll find work. You just have to leave your GenX attitude at home and stop thinking that people owe you something. If you honestly feel like shit because you're working at EA, then QUIT. Allowing yourself to become a victim is useless.
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Old Dec 2nd, 2004, 09:50 PM       
Quote:
Originally Posted by AChimp
If working for EA is so bad and you're so demoralized, WHY CONTINUE WORKING FOR THEM? The amount of time that it takes to write a four page rant on your LiveJournal could be better spent updating your resume. Is it really worth it to work there if you have to put in 80 hour weeks non-stop?

For EA, it doesn't matter if their workers like it. There are slavering hordes of graduates who's sole reason for getting a CS degree was to write games. They'll never run out of people to hire.
Spoken like a person still living the insular life of a university student. Try moving on when you don't have the time to look for a job or update your resume because you're in crunch. Come back to me in a few years when you're struggling to juggle personal and professional commitments.
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Old Dec 2nd, 2004, 10:02 PM       
If you have time to post on I-Mockery during what I assume was a work day for you, then you have time to update your resume and search for a job online.

But seriously, has it been worth it for you to move to LA/SanFran (?) to work, especially since EA is such a shitty place to be? With the dollar improving, it's starting to look less lucrative to necessarily south.
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Old Dec 3rd, 2004, 12:13 AM       
Is updating your resume and finding a job online really as easy as posting on I-mockery?
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Old Dec 3rd, 2004, 12:17 AM       
1) Yes.

2) If you're working double normal hours and you could support yourself on the wages of a normal work week, you should be able to save enough money in two months to stop work and have two months to find another job.

3) And if you couldn't support yourself on your wages from normal hours, good fucking luck!
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Old Dec 3rd, 2004, 05:48 AM       
AChimp, you're simultaneously saying there's plenty of people wanting to get a job as a game designer, and at the same time that it's easy to find a job. There's plenty of competition in that field, which is probably the reason why EA can allow themselves to treat their workforce like little Korean kids.

"It's not hard to find a job." Seriously, that's nonsense. Designing a game and sifting through it to make sure it's functional is not like putting labels on bottles in a factory. If your employees actually have to use their head to do what they're doing, you shouldn't bully them into a state where they'll easily start to make mistakes. It's not like they're demanding a coffee machine in every office and golf carts to race through the halls with. Just that the boss doesn't make a sport out of tricking them into working the most hours for the standard pay.

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2) If you're working double normal hours and you could support yourself on the wages of a normal work week, you should be able to save enough money in two months to stop work and have two months to find another job.
As the letter said, they don't get paid overtime.
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Old Dec 3rd, 2004, 08:55 AM       
I'm not talking about "game designer" positions. I'm referring to the software developer positions; the people who take what the designers want and make it happen. Lots of people don't separate the two jobs. Even I didn't until I started working. Sure the developers come up with ideas and things go back and forth, but by and large, the designers design the game and the type of creativity the developers get to contribute is what goes under the hood. Especially in a large company with piles of programmers.

"Hey Bob! The new guy says that our game would be really cool if we had a plasma gun that shot purple balls of lightning and doubled as a flamethrower!"
"Holy shit! He's right. All our planning for the last few months was a waste of time. Let's get on that right away."

It just doesn't happen that way, and I shake my head when I talk to fellow students who think that they'll get their "dream job" doing that.

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Designing a game and sifting through it to make sure it's functional is not like putting labels on bottles in a factory.
That's QA's area of expertise. Developers make sure that the stuff works, yeah, and that the builds don't crash but we don't spend an entire day testing every little feature that we implement to the Nth degree. Code it, test it, integrate it and let QA tell you if there are any specific problems tomorrow, because a) they know more about how it's supposed to work than you do and b) they're not programmers, they don't think like programmers and they're better at noticing problems we tend to gloss over.
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Old Dec 3rd, 2004, 02:17 PM       
Regardless, a company should know how to treat the workers.
it's a trite saying, but it's true, "A happy worker is a productive worker" If you are in constant crunch time, and your working on code, you develop a bad attitude. The most I have done is video editing, nothing compared to the endless lines of code software engineers deal with, but even then, after a week of staring at the same video, tweaking it again and again, you start to loose paitence, and you develop a negetive moral. Which others pick up, and it lowers the productivity of the entire area.

For example, look at Ikea. Every college student/highschool student wants to work at that store. They give so many benifets and they make sure the employees are happy.
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