EA: The Human Story

If you make less than $90.000 in the gaming industy you are either delivering the mail, or an extremely bad negotiator.
Come on. You make moore than that! With all your stock options and stuff like that. I've seen on TV how former Microsoft employees now are retired, with millions on their Bankaccaunt.
I'm working for the Danish Postal service, making $50.000 a year. I'm working 7 hours and 24 minutes monday to friday. 6 weeks of vacation a year. If I work one hour overtime, i'm payed or get compensation time, double up!
So, if you're not satisfied with the long hours, you can come work with me, we have an open job.

- Jesper Henriksen

"If you make less than $90.000 in the gaming industy you are either delivering the mail, or an extremely bad negotiator."

Heh, I guess that means the majority of us are delivering the mail.

Come on, assumptions don't help any of us.

As for being extremely bad negotiators. That might be partially true, but what is even more true is that the studios and publishers in particular are the ones currently negotiationg from a position of strength. I am not exactly a supporter of Unions, but that is one of the things that they are said to equalize.

It's subjective and punative as to how EA treats their employees. Notice that the Upper Management people get paid quite handsomely for their services, whilst the middle and lower levels....you know, the ones that hold up the sides of the pyramid...get paid farkall.

Hypocracy is saying one thing and doing another. EA promises that you will be treated fairly and compensated for your work. Then they play the shell game, where what you signed on for has got to be under the next hat, or behind the next door, or at the next big money project.

you must be new to the working world.

I am currently a thirteen year-old computer enthusiast. My one main ambition in life was to become a programmer. Now I don't know if this will ever get read among the mess off comments on this post, but I will say it any way. I may now have to reconsider my goals in life, there is enough evil corporate mumbo-jumbo in America, and the world, today. I thought that the gaming industry would be one safe haven from it, but I suppose not. Look at Wal-Mar, they are using cheap child labor in china to make their products, we feel like that will not happen to us in the United States, one again, perhaps I am wrong. If there is so much corporate greed in the world in this era that even a company that I believed a company that was decant can not abide by the law of the state of California, even just by paying more, or by giving time off for many tedious hours spent making YOUR product that it is driving their employees to near insanity, I may flea this country to free myself from the horrible deeds that are aloud to go unchecked here!

If there are any readers of this message, feel free to e-mail me at zane_m777@hotmail.com (mailto:zane_m777@hotmail.com)

give up computers and get your ASS outside and
LIVE GOD DAMN IT!

My situation is similar to the above. I am older, but I am nonetheless a pre-college teenager that has always wanted to join the game development industry. I offer my condolences, and hope you extract some pride in knowing that due to your excellent article, I will never even consider working for EA Games.

don't consider working for ANY video game company.
It's the same situation at all of them!

Check this out:

http://www.mi6.co.uk/news/index/php?intemid=2004&catid=7

On Yahoo financial message boards, traders weigh in on EA's current barrage of lousy game reviews, including this:

". . . talent is being absolutely smothered under a layer of incompetence somewhere, which is a terrible shame . . ."

Oh, and because of EA's management failures, this trader recommends Strong Sell.

Sorry about the typo. This is the link:

http:www.mi6.co.uk/news/index/php?itemid=2004&catid=7

I don't mean to be rude, as I don't know you it could be easy for an anonymous flame mail here. If your partner doesn't like working at EA then quit. It sounds like the project was Sims 2.0 judging by the crunch time laid out in the original post. I too worked on Sims 2, in QA, and I racked up my highest number of hours in a 2 week period of 206 hours. I would also do it again if needed.

The reason is not because I am mashocistic, or because I need money. Its because I understand the cycle of products. The importance of shipping something like Sims 2. Which shipped 6 months late. That's two quarters that was missed due to bad planning on the production side of things. I only work the OT that is needed to ship a sucessful project.

I am currently working for another game company, and the hours are greatly reduced than that of EA, but at what cost? No one wants to stay past 8 hours ever, there is no sense of urgency to get anything done in one day, because you go home after 8, it will have to wait until tomorrow. The only OT I incurred has been an occasional 8 or 16 hour weekend, and not the same level that EA requests.

I will end my contract with this other company and seek employement again at EA. I will probably be temporary, as the people who are perm continue to whine about the place they work, and hour they hate it there. If all these people would just leave, they would see two things. The company survive with out them, and the young hungry talent pool that easily replaces them.

Any questions or comments, feel free to email me at intrepidsoul76@gmail.com

This comment is both funny and sad at the same time. The funny bit is the skewed vision of what's "normal". The sad bit is, he's not really wrong.

I am a coach for an Extreme Programming team. Extreme Programming, if you don't know, is an agile development methodology especially designed to deal with fluid or vague requirements. One of it's core practices is "sustainable pace". This used to be called "40 hour week".

The driver for this practice is the understanding that tired employees make mistakes at a drastically higher rate than fresh, rested employees. Overtime is not forbidden, but it is viewed for what it is: a symptom of poor planning. Generally, a developer would be discouraged from working overtime two weeks in a row.

What's interesting is how solidified the attitude that "software == overtime" has become. There are many anecdotes among XP practitioners of projects where the development team has been criticized for having no sense of urgency (sound familiar). As if urgency was a primary goal of the organization.

I have heard of extreme cases where XP was terminated in some organizations, despite producing good results, because of this. Ironically, projects in death march mode were viewed as good because people were obviously busy. They were working long hours. They showed commitment.

We've forgotten a few things in our industry:

1. The efficient use of programmer time is not generally a corporate goal. The sale of software is. Overtime for developers is neither normal or desirable.

2. A schedule is a guess. One of the primary anti-patterns of project management is allowing the schedule to become the project. When your schedule proves to be wrong there are a number of options including changing the delivery date, cutting scope, adding resources. There are pros and cons to each of these. Trying to compress the work by using massive amounts of overtime is probably one of the least desirable responses to scheduling error.

We allow ourselves to fall into this trap because we usually have an incorrect concept of what "done" means. To many developers, they are "done" a task when they check the code into the source repository. Using this definition of done, massive overtime looks pretty good since you've got people working longer hours and presumably checking in more code more often.

If we bothered to track re-work, however, the picture wouldn't be nearly so rosy. Tired developers make mistakes. Mistakes take time to correct. I would not be the least bit surprised to find that some of the projects in EA actually experienced NEGATIVE net advances towards the release goals in a week because of errors and rework.

EA feels they can get away with this due to the large "young, hungry talent pool" waiting to take the place of those that drop out. To a certain extent, they may be right as most game projects are "one offs". However, I can't help but feel that the loss of experience is part of the reason they find themselves in the overtime bind in the first place. Anyone with enough experience to know that the schedule was fubared to begin with would be gone.

It certainly sounds like a pretty hellish existance, but I don't think you have much of an alternative... There are some very, very good programmers overseas in India, et al... Even some of the best programmers there make only a 5th of what your spouse probably makes and since it's an entirely different work ethic there, they WILL work 90 hour weeks with no complaints... It won't be long until EA, and a lot of other major software makers figure out the proper managerial and quality control strategies to take some or all of their program production offshore to places like India... Not long from now, the place where most hardware is assembled will be China and most software will be made by Indians. I think you're going to have to come to grips with that... I would suggest he quit, move to a small community and try to make a living building software for mom/pop operations.

I wonder what you base this on? I have over 15 years of experience as a programmer and I know for a fact that there are some excellent programmers in India and there are also some extremely poor ones. Sure some programmers from India will work 90 hour weeks but if the result is garbage what is the point? Here is a true story. I worked for a very large software company on a medium sized project. Myself and two other experienced programmers created a detailed design where implementation would require 10 months of work. However, management insisted the project had to be completed in 5 months. The soultion was to outsource the development work to a team in India. The team consited of very nice and hard working people. The team worked in shifts 24 hours a day. Unfortunately the team consisted of inexperienced programmers. At the end of 5 months we received what was easily the most bug ridden, poorly written code I have ever seen in my career. So me and two other experienced programmers embarked on an effort to fix and clean up the code. We couldn't rewrite the code because this would be admitting to management failure (not to mention wasting the huge expense of outsourcing). Also the idea was to do a quickly clean up and ship within a month. Eight months later we finally shipped the product with barely acceptable quality. So at great expense we shipped the product in 13 months when we could have shipped a much better quality product in 10 months and at a much cheaper cost. So much for outsourcing to countries with better work ethics.

http://membres.lycos.fr/ubifree/react_e.htm

IT'S IN FRENCH.

Someone I am close to just received an internship with AE. Are they known for extending and forcing this sort of sweatshop torture onto unsuspecting students? Any experiences from anyone? How did they handle it? To say the least, this individual is not that interested in accepting the job that will most likely be offered at the end of the project. I am greatly concerned for this person in the meantime. Is this founded?

Why any programmer would want to join a union is beyond me. That's just plain stupid. It will kill healthy competition.

If you don't like your job as a game programmer, envy the people in charge, don't like your salary/bonus, etc.:

a) Quit.
b) QUIT.
c) QUIT and go find something more productive to do with your time. There are several programming jobs in the business sector. Lots of database maintenance jobs. Perfect 9 to 5 hours, no crunch time, that can be your dream job.
d) QUIT and stop all your bitching and moaning I'm sick of hearing about it. For that you don't belong in this industry.

Thank you for going away.

Out of curiosity, what aspects of a union would kill healthy competition? If you have a pair of companies, both of which have fifty unionized programmers working for them, making two similar games, wouldn't you agree that the better-conceptualized and planned project has a better chance of financial success?

Also picture a unionized company's programming team versus a non-unionized company's programming team. If we agree that the unionized team would be more likely to move forward with a detailed plan and schedule, with a few contingency plans built in, and folks worked 8 or 9 hour days, then proceeded to go home, they'd certainly be better rested and have more time to spend with their families and loved ones, which would allow them to concentrate more fully and contentedly on their work. If a team has to rush at the last second as many do now, well... you end up with things like Windows XP.

I'm very bewildered. I didn't think that asking for humane working conditions was such an unreasonable request in modern post-industrial society.

Just a heads up for everyone. Midway Games uses the exact same techniques as EA and described by ea_spouse. They hired a few of EA's middle managers (some of the worst people skills I have ever seen) and learned the process from them. Sad, it was once a good place to work. Avoid.

Let me know if you want to do something about it. unionjosh@hotmail.com

Josh Pastreich
IATSE Local 16