As their marketing moniker says "Challenge Everything" - including EA.
I was just over at Roy Osheroves site and I came across this blog post linking to this article about life as the spouse of someone working at Electronic Arts California. It's a long article, so let me summarise it right here. A guy lost his job after the small indie games developer he worked for went under. He promptly landed a new job over at Electronic Arts. At EA things seemed nice on the surface but then the project managers enforced a mini crunch to avoid a big crunch at the end of the project. Hours were increased to 10 hours a day, mandatory. This was then increased to 10 hours a day, six days a week, before finally it was escalated to a mandatory 14 hours a day, seven days a week. Because of a California employment law amendment, EA feel they don't have to pay these guys overtime, they don't have to give them comp time (time off in lieu of hours worked) or any other thankyou. However, the California employment law in question exempts certain categories of individuals from mandatory overtime (including programmers) IF they are paid an annual salary of more than $90,000 dollars. As the article's author points out, and I can vouch, games programmers at EA aren't paid anywhere near that figure, not even anywhere near half that figure. I was offered a job of tools developer/producer at a satellite development team of EA about 5 or 6 years ago. The money was appalling, and when I started to hear lots of noise from people about the hours that team were working and working conditions in general I pulled out of the deal on the morning I was due to start.
I've got a lot of contacts within, and experience in the games industry and I know that the EA story is true. In fact, it's been some time since I've been close to a games development team and I had hoped that the maturing of the industry and software development practices in general would have put an end to this form of enforced hard labour. It sickens me to learn that it hasn't. What also sickens me is that there is an attitude within the games industry that makes this kind of treatment, and these kind of working conditions, self perpetuating. It's summed up nicely by one particular asshole who posted a response comment to the original article.
Long hours is nothing new. I am a programmer @ well know fps gaming house. We work on average 15 hours a day including weekends. I'm sorry to say it but there is no getting away from this reality - if you wanna work in the gaming industy you have to "suck it down".
Hey think of it like this - get that office with a window & you can gaze down on your red in the parkinglot :-).
This is complete and utter bullshit. Excuse my language from this point on, but this kind of attitude really pisses me off. There's one reason why games publishers do this kind of thing - and that's money. If you get your team to work 2 to 2.5 times harder than any normal human would be expected to, you effectively save 2 to 2.5 times the salary costs. Normal hours could be worked by calculating an effective team size and hiring to meet it at the start of the project (granted added bodies mid project does not lead to faster delivery). In EA's case, it seems as well that the enforced hours and work regime were actually factored into the original project plan since at not time in that particular project did the team slip deadlines, or beat them. They were always bang on track.
There's been a lot of research into how developers develop, and how to run software projects, and the games industry as a whole seems intent on ignoring this. While the technologies they work with are cutting edge and far more advanced than anything you'll ever find in mainstream development, their development practices remain firmly fixed in the mid 80s. Just because we the bedroom coders that started this industry chose to work ourselves to death in our homes to get the industry on its feet does not mean that the industry today needs to kill people to emulate that. THere are far far better ways to develop great software, great working environments, and happy employees without this kind of physical and mental abuse.
My decision then is to not buy an EA game from this point forward. I'm not advocating that this is something we should do globally since if revenues drop at EA you can imagine that the situation will only get worse. For my part though I can't in all good conscious contribute to the financial growth of a company that treats it's staff like slaves. I will start again though after the lawyers get involved and bring the inevitable lawsuit against that company. No-one deserves to be treated the way EA treat people, and EA executives need to be sent that message loud and clear.
10:13:28 AM 
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