"EA Employee mistreatment" - Live Journal.
by Stefan Lundmark · in General Discussion · 11/17/2004 (3:48 am) · 10 replies
#2
11/17/2004 (6:28 am)
Sounds about right...
#3
11/17/2004 (7:01 am)
Been through similar experiences myself. Only in my experience its not so much the developers at fault as the publishers. I guess working for EA which is both just makes it worse. 
#4
I think a few of these lawsuits and scares to the stockholders would do a bit to rectify matters. The thing is, you DON'T want a big union stepping in and making demands on everyone that is not only a publisher, but everyone the publisher must work with.
Think of the small, tiny studios. It's usually feast-or-famine there. So you get 40 hours (or less) of work there for a while, and then some normal 40-50 hour weeks, and then some pretty crazy 60+ hour workweeks while you get the product out the door. Truly voluntary work, not "voluntary" as in, "We won't tell you to do it, but remember we fire people who aren't putting their soul into it."
I wouldn't want to see that being dictated by a union. Nor do I want to see that willingness to put in the extra hours to make great stuff get abused and mandated by evil management.
11/17/2004 (8:07 am)
Unions would just be one more thing to suck the life out of game development in the U.S. I think a few of these lawsuits and scares to the stockholders would do a bit to rectify matters. The thing is, you DON'T want a big union stepping in and making demands on everyone that is not only a publisher, but everyone the publisher must work with.
Think of the small, tiny studios. It's usually feast-or-famine there. So you get 40 hours (or less) of work there for a while, and then some normal 40-50 hour weeks, and then some pretty crazy 60+ hour workweeks while you get the product out the door. Truly voluntary work, not "voluntary" as in, "We won't tell you to do it, but remember we fire people who aren't putting their soul into it."
I wouldn't want to see that being dictated by a union. Nor do I want to see that willingness to put in the extra hours to make great stuff get abused and mandated by evil management.
#5
11/17/2004 (8:31 am)
Maybe it's about time for a good ol' fashioned boycott? 
#6
I'm all for Unions. Especially for artists, who have been treated like second class citizens in the game industry since its beginning. You'll notice in the EA lawsuit, it's only the artists who are exempt from over-time. And EA's justification for this is outrageous.
Maintaining fairness and restoring equality to the work place would inspire the talent to really put their hearts into their work. When employees are getting short changed they are much less likely to come up with creative solutions. In the tiny studios the talent would probably have a stake in the company (if they don't, then they should)...so the extra hours make sense. The unions wouldn't keep people from working voluntarily as much as they want. They would just step in when someone was fired, and make sure everything was on the up and up.
It's the oldest and most consistent story...the more powerful an entity becomes, the more it looks at things from a financial level, and less from a personal or even moral level. Unions have been the most effective counter to this inevitable outcome.
If we want to breath life into the game industry...we should get the big publishers out...not fair treatment of talent.
11/17/2004 (9:20 am)
@Jay I'm all for Unions. Especially for artists, who have been treated like second class citizens in the game industry since its beginning. You'll notice in the EA lawsuit, it's only the artists who are exempt from over-time. And EA's justification for this is outrageous.
Maintaining fairness and restoring equality to the work place would inspire the talent to really put their hearts into their work. When employees are getting short changed they are much less likely to come up with creative solutions. In the tiny studios the talent would probably have a stake in the company (if they don't, then they should)...so the extra hours make sense. The unions wouldn't keep people from working voluntarily as much as they want. They would just step in when someone was fired, and make sure everything was on the up and up.
It's the oldest and most consistent story...the more powerful an entity becomes, the more it looks at things from a financial level, and less from a personal or even moral level. Unions have been the most effective counter to this inevitable outcome.
If we want to breath life into the game industry...we should get the big publishers out...not fair treatment of talent.
#7
Staffing up tends to exacerbate the problem as the additional employees add some organizational complexity (Brooks, in the 20th anniversary edition of MMM, says that adding people to a project can make it earlier, but the number of people varies non-linearly with schedule time -- meaning that any significant schedule progress requires an even more significant addition of staff). Basically, these projects are already on the rocks and ripe for case studies by Robert Glass. The only way out is by turning to the trinity of pragmatic engineering -- schedule, scope or quality. If a schedule is not locked down by contract, it is usually virtually so by marketing. In effect most companies are sliding schedules to the right, and then compressing the schedule to fit the original dates.
Mainstream software engineering has a lot more engineering discipline in place to control costs, because mainstream projects started hitting budget and schedule busting project sizes decades ago. This phenomena in games is embryonic, but since there isn't much crossover between games development and other software engineering, I'd hazard that the game industry is going to learn these lessons the hard way. In fact, I'd argue that the game industry is largely in crises now, and that the failure of many developers was due to mismanaging and underestimating the increasing engineering complexity required to develop AAA games -- it's just that the way contracts were structured, developers paid the highest cost for the mistaken estimates. Publishers then purchased the failed or failing developers, and then proceeded to make the exact same mistakes with projects in-house. My guess is that project cancellations will rise (even further), as internal teams spend significant amounts of money without getting anywhere.
The equivalent of something like a typical scale MMORPG is being developed with staffs and budgets that are way below what I'd expect in equivalently complex mainstream software, with far more aggressive schedules. The war stories from the game industry sound like mainstream software engineering two decades ago. The rate of technological change in the game industry further exacerbates all this.
But don't worry, in ten or fifteen years companies like EA will catch up to what is considered current software engineering practise.
11/17/2004 (10:18 am)
From my perspective, there's a lot of talk about increasing budgets and project size without discussing the implications for engineering complexity, which if Brooks Mythical Man Month and mainstream software engineering wisdom are to be credited, is non-linear. My guess is that many studios are making the mistake of increasing budgets and staffing linearly, while the actual complexity of the engineering problem is outpacing these estimates. To acheive what are fantastically unrealistic schedules and budgets, these companies demand uncompensated overtime from employees. It's insidious in software engineering because the work product is abstract, which masks the complexity from non-technical management.Staffing up tends to exacerbate the problem as the additional employees add some organizational complexity (Brooks, in the 20th anniversary edition of MMM, says that adding people to a project can make it earlier, but the number of people varies non-linearly with schedule time -- meaning that any significant schedule progress requires an even more significant addition of staff). Basically, these projects are already on the rocks and ripe for case studies by Robert Glass. The only way out is by turning to the trinity of pragmatic engineering -- schedule, scope or quality. If a schedule is not locked down by contract, it is usually virtually so by marketing. In effect most companies are sliding schedules to the right, and then compressing the schedule to fit the original dates.
Mainstream software engineering has a lot more engineering discipline in place to control costs, because mainstream projects started hitting budget and schedule busting project sizes decades ago. This phenomena in games is embryonic, but since there isn't much crossover between games development and other software engineering, I'd hazard that the game industry is going to learn these lessons the hard way. In fact, I'd argue that the game industry is largely in crises now, and that the failure of many developers was due to mismanaging and underestimating the increasing engineering complexity required to develop AAA games -- it's just that the way contracts were structured, developers paid the highest cost for the mistaken estimates. Publishers then purchased the failed or failing developers, and then proceeded to make the exact same mistakes with projects in-house. My guess is that project cancellations will rise (even further), as internal teams spend significant amounts of money without getting anywhere.
The equivalent of something like a typical scale MMORPG is being developed with staffs and budgets that are way below what I'd expect in equivalently complex mainstream software, with far more aggressive schedules. The war stories from the game industry sound like mainstream software engineering two decades ago. The rate of technological change in the game industry further exacerbates all this.
But don't worry, in ten or fifteen years companies like EA will catch up to what is considered current software engineering practise.
#8
@Weston
Just some clarification -- it's not the artists which are exempt from overtime laws, which is the basis of the lawsuit. A few years ago the high tech companies in many states and provinces convinced governments to pass laws exempting high tech workers and companies from many labour laws, such as overtime (there are typically others types of workers that also are in different ways exempt from standard laws). These laws usually apply to high tech workers at high tech companies -- the exemptions do no cover or are different for non-technical workers at high tech companies, or high tech workers at companies whose chief business is not itself technology. (Of course this varies between jurisdictions.)
The basis of the lawsuit (from my lay perspective) seems to be that EA applied the exemption to non-technical workers, and perhaps that EA is chiefly an entertainment company, and not a high tech company. That's why programmers, etc., aren't in the lawsuit -- what they are doing is legal in the case of programmers. If it was shown that EA did not qualify at all for the labour law exemptions, then programmers would also have a case against them.
11/17/2004 (10:18 am)
(Hit post size limit.)@Weston
Just some clarification -- it's not the artists which are exempt from overtime laws, which is the basis of the lawsuit. A few years ago the high tech companies in many states and provinces convinced governments to pass laws exempting high tech workers and companies from many labour laws, such as overtime (there are typically others types of workers that also are in different ways exempt from standard laws). These laws usually apply to high tech workers at high tech companies -- the exemptions do no cover or are different for non-technical workers at high tech companies, or high tech workers at companies whose chief business is not itself technology. (Of course this varies between jurisdictions.)
The basis of the lawsuit (from my lay perspective) seems to be that EA applied the exemption to non-technical workers, and perhaps that EA is chiefly an entertainment company, and not a high tech company. That's why programmers, etc., aren't in the lawsuit -- what they are doing is legal in the case of programmers. If it was shown that EA did not qualify at all for the labour law exemptions, then programmers would also have a case against them.
#9
Far too many people are willing to work these crazy hours to get into the industry. If you quit there are 10 more people willing to take your place and work those hours you complain about.
Also, game developers (and prospective game developers) need to get over the idea that working crunch time is a badge of honour.
11/17/2004 (11:34 am)
I don't think unions are the answer and I also don't believe EA (and companies like it) are the primary problem. Game development culture needs a boot to the head.Far too many people are willing to work these crazy hours to get into the industry. If you quit there are 10 more people willing to take your place and work those hours you complain about.
Also, game developers (and prospective game developers) need to get over the idea that working crunch time is a badge of honour.
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