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?
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Anonymous
November 11 2004, 21:32:20 UTC 15 years ago
Chairman, Chief Exec. Officer $ 1.45M $ 22.78M
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! I got an idea. Quit the f*cking company.
Anonymous
November 11 2004, 21:40:20 UTC 15 years ago
Try it yourself under those conditions.
Dim-knob.
Yet another CEO in training
Anonymous
15 years ago
Anonymous
15 years ago
Me too!
Anonymous
November 11 2004, 21:36:24 UTC 15 years ago
Your story is all too true. My SO also works for EA and my mother often ask, "How do they (EA) expect to get anything out of their employees when they work 12 hours a day for a week straight?" Recently, he had a 23 1/2 hour shift and returned to work within 8 hours---that was the ultimate Labor law violation. I come from a strong labor union family and my mentor is a labor law professor. Common labor laws are being broken at EA on a weekly basis, particularly near the holiday season.
How are the employees, whether temporary or permanent supposed to speak up when they are coaxed with the state of the art gym, Jamba Juice splurges, and late night catering? If anyone complains, they are easily replaced. So many young men want to work in video game industry. The CEO of EA was recently named one of the CEOs who is "worth his weight in gold". Seems to me like he could afford to reorganize the work schedule to be more humane.
Re: Me too!
November 11 2004, 21:51:47 UTC 15 years ago
Re: Me too!
15 years ago
Anonymous
November 11 2004, 21:37:34 UTC 15 years ago
Three years ago, I worked for another video game company, just a contract as a beta tester. My contract stated "full time hours", and verbally in my interview, this was described as a 40-hour work week, with "some longer days". Fine. I wanted the job, and I could be "flexible".
Well, within a couple of weeks, this became a 50-hour work week, then a 60-hour work week. I was told that I should "know better" and that this is the norm for the industry. "Didn't you research the company?" "Researching" this kind of thing is like a question you can only pose if you already know the answer.
My father died while I was at this company - and I was given some slack because of that, and managed to keep my hours down to between 40-50 hours a week while the other testers and staff practically lived on-site. But I could also demonstrate that my workload (actual number of bugs reported and verified fixed) and efficiency at 40 hours a week was more than double that of the next-best performing tester who "worked" 60+ hour weeks.
It doesn't help things that here in British Columbia, some people in the industry successfully lobbied the provincial government to make "hi-tech" industries exempt from many of the labour laws that govern "normal jobs". Supposedly, this was supposed to make people in the industry "more creative". Yeah.
Apparently, after I left, I had people on the team pulling to get me hired full-time. But because I put my foot down about my hours - and eventually succeeded, it was suggested that I wouldn't be much of a "team player". No loss, I really don't think I could go through that again, and I'd probably have to have another death in the family to get a break cut for me in terms of work hours.
yep
Anonymous
November 11 2004, 21:38:15 UTC 15 years ago
But i read the article, and the whole time I was just laughing. Kind of laughing at the misery of it all. I'm an animator who has worked for about 3 different studios at this point- never EA though. The last project that I was on was.. ready for this? 100+ hours, 7 days a week, for a good 2 months straight. It was the worst thing i've ever had to deal with. And i lost 3 months of my life (the month before the 100 hours was only 80!).
It's funny because the blame can be put on so many people for it. Alot of what happens, if whoever hires you for Game "X", gives you an insane schedule to work with. Like, yeah we need this game done in 3 months. Or something stupid like that, and then, as the gruntwork game designers (or artist in this case) you get to just take a deep breath and deal with it.
With EA, they're also a publishing company too, so they're pretty much unable to avoid any blame whatsoever. With the game i worked on, it was for THQ. But they were just the publisher. We did the game, and they just set the timeline of death.
Thats the root of the problem though. I really had to comment about this post because you said "hiring more people to avoid crunch time" would be the answer. Actually, thats not always the case. With the game I worked on, all the extra artists other than myself and ONE other guy, were totally unreliable. And you know what? ONE of them actually screwed us completely with that "8 hours a day only" attitude, and what happened was that he didn't do his job- a month worth of work, and it got slammed on MY back to cover at the last second. Because he refused to work like the rest of us, we all got burned even harder, because the sad fact of the matter is: Unless someone contests the schedule from day 1, you're stuck with it. You make the game, or you get fired. It's that simple. Well, it should have been anyway, Mr. 8 hours is still happily unemployed.
If i sound like i'm saying shut up and work the overtime, thats not my intent. It's just dangerous because it doesn't help. It just makes the crunch time even WORSE. The producer from EA said it best: Bad management. And Accepting rediculous schedules that don't even give room if problems occur. Let alone the fact it makes no sense ANYWAY. And in games especially, you run into tons of problems. The worst part is that there is no give from the higher ups on this. if you don't deliver their game when you say, giving the excuse of working long hours, won't even get you a shift in the deadline. They just don't give a shit, it's very heartless. And I know lots of people in the industry now.. it's you hear the same thing over and over. In fact, alot of them laugh at you when you complain. Plenty of my industry friends would laugh at this EA post and say, like I did "Thats nothing!" But does that make any of it RIGHT? Of course not.
I'm 23 years old and have only been in the industry 3 years now, but I've barely been on a single project that didn't have a crunch time. Maybe like.. 3. If that. And for me, it all comes down to totally unrealistic schedules.
Though last project came down to totally incompetant coworkers.
My friends and family are always telling me 'you don't have to work those hours" But no one gets it. If i don't work it, someone else will. In then instead of some guy putting in 60 hours a week, suddenly he's covering for ME who isn't, and now he's up to 80. And so on.
If you want to stop the crunches, strike at the root. The publishing companies who usually know you'll take whatever you can get, and don't give the slightest damn if the schedule they give you is totally unreasonable. When a deal is made, you deliver, or you die. Period.
And management. it all comes from the top down. As my old boss used to say:
"Shit rolls downhill"
If you feel like reading my helltrip, feel free:
http://natehorsfallmain.homestead.com/Incred_Summary.html
And best of luck to you, your SO, and everyone else (because there are thousands of us) suffering the crunch.
Re: yep
November 11 2004, 21:59:22 UTC 15 years ago
November 11 2004, 21:42:44 UTC 15 years ago
What’s really scary is that it will all come crashing down. It can’t keep going on like this for ever.
Damn, I was having a good day.
Anonymous
November 14 2004, 03:36:41 UTC 15 years ago
We need to find some solutions before this happens. I think that's the whole point of this, isn't it?
November 11 2004, 21:48:37 UTC 15 years ago
"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?" wtf? Can we get an "on" in their?
Also, do you say spouse and give no gender hints because you guys are a homosexual couple? But mind you, I'm not reading any of the other comments to find the answers to these questions.
November 11 2004, 21:50:17 UTC 15 years ago
Anonymous
15 years ago
15 years ago
November 11 2004, 21:49:13 UTC 15 years ago
The reason this sort of thing happens is because, in general, employees are too afraid of losing their own jobs to fight illegal practices like this. This kind of thing will not stop if you don't make a concentrated effort to stop it.
Consult a lawyer. Look into a class-action lawsuit. If they're as blatantly breaking the law as they seem to be, I really think you should do something about it. Going up to them as an individual employee likely won't have much impact, but I suspect companies like that are far more afraid of lawyers than their own employees.
November 11 2004, 21:50:39 UTC 15 years ago
15 years ago
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Why so afraid?
Anonymous
15 years ago
November 11 2004, 21:49:44 UTC 15 years ago
November 11 2004, 21:56:41 UTC 15 years ago
Anonymous
15 years ago
Anonymous
15 years ago
15 years ago
15 years ago
damn
November 11 2004, 21:52:02 UTC 15 years ago
Re: damn
Anonymous
November 12 2004, 01:31:19 UTC 15 years ago
stupid dumb e.a.
Anonymous
November 11 2004, 21:56:30 UTC 15 years ago
after the game was released, with critical bugs he found and notified management of included, it still sucked and is getting horrible reviews. right now, my friend has been released and is sitting at home on a strict green tea and carbohydrate regimen to regrow fatigued bone marrow.
thanks e.a. thanks alot.
Re: stupid dumb e.a.
Anonymous
November 11 2004, 22:04:18 UTC 15 years ago
Re: stupid dumb e.a.
15 years ago
Re: stupid dumb e.a.
15 years ago
just another EA widow
Anonymous
November 11 2004, 21:59:18 UTC 15 years ago
Re: just another EA widow
November 11 2004, 22:01:36 UTC 15 years ago
Re: just another EA widow
14 years ago
November 11 2004, 22:00:47 UTC 15 years ago
But, given the current economic and political climate, I wouldn't be surprised if many of EA production jobs aren't shipped overseas...
November 11 2004, 22:03:02 UTC 15 years ago
Common practice put to the extreme
Anonymous
November 11 2004, 22:07:12 UTC 15 years ago
Communist Tactics
Anonymous
November 11 2004, 22:07:43 UTC 15 years ago
The (deadline / fashist onslaught) is near! Keep up the frontal assault, or (the company / Mother Russia ) will fall. Remember, your families, will die if you don't work harder.
Towarishtch / Project Manager Yhukov
Typical...
Anonymous
November 11 2004, 22:11:03 UTC 15 years ago
Re: Typical...
December 17 2004, 22:07:54 UTC 14 years ago
unionjosh@local16.org
josh
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