EA scandal(Is anyone surprised?)

[monolith94]

I hope the bastards pay. Through.the.nose.

[Ned]

Prediction: The case settles and EA agrees to pay straight time for required overtime.

[johncmcleod]

What EA did is horrible, however, what these employees had to go through happens to people all over the world, and instead of programming they're doing hard manual labor. This will always happen in a system where those who are in control of production are motivated by profit.

Capitalism

[:) Smiley]

Part of the reason US companies would rather work one person 70 hours versus 2 people 35 hours is the large cost of benefits that companies provide, such as healthcare. Until we get a national healthcare system here, working hours and unemployment are going to keep rising.

[LDiCesare]

Part of the reason US companies would rather work one person 70 hours versus 2 people 35 hours is the large cost of benefits that companies provide, such as healthcare.

That shouldn't be an issue. In France, the sirms probably pay more to healthcare than in the States, but it's proportional to the salary, and then goes into a pool. If you employ 2x35h or 1x70, it costs the same.
There are some moronic laws that don't help, though. I know a bartender in Boston who once explained me he paid taxes based on the number of his employees. No matter that they were mostly students doing part time, so a 48h employee was in fact very much better than 3 16 hours employees (which was rather the norm). This encourages to make a high number of hours for absolutely no good reason. I don't know if these taxes are (were?) only in the Massachussets or something federal.

I also want to add that programmers don't have to work that long hours even the U.S (from what I know of my colleagues who program over there). It's the game market that seems to demand it, and I think it's in part due to the fact the managers are too young to know how to manage a project properly. Making extra hours is seen as "working hard", and that's generally seen as a good thing. But in fact wen programming, working when tired usually just loses time and increases the number of bugs. A good manager is one who gets the job done in time, but a praised manager is the one who managed to squeeze a lot of work out of his team, no matter that he did a worse job at keeping delays than the 'good' manager. That's a real problem in this field: Quantity is often preferred over quality because, especially in terms of management, it's easier to measure and see.

[MRT144]

i hear all this *****ing about EA's game quality, but are you seriously telling me that they shouldnt release madden every year? are you guys really idiots?

secondly, everyone has teh right to walk away from a job that they dont like. no one is forcing this on them.

[Alexander's Horse]

Dan is just saying out loud all the things he tells himself

I have worked long hours and I had led teams working long hours and I can tell you it is counter productive.

Over time illness and morale problems emerge and productivity drops. An employee putting in a good 8 or 9 hours a day, 5 days a week is better than an employee putting in 12 hours a day even 7 days a week over the long term.

Of course if you can replace losses, its not such a problem and this is what EA is exploiting. Lose a game developer? A 100 more apply to take their place.

When supply and demand for programmers gets into balance these work practices will be unsustainable because people will walk and won't be easy to replace. But as the article points out, with places like India and Russia coming online, that point may be a long way off.

[Proteus_MST]

Originally posted by Alexander's Horse
Over time illness and morale problems emerge and productivity drops. An employee putting in a good 8 or 9 hours a day, 5 days a week is better than an employee putting in 12 hours a day even 7 days a week over the long term.

Yeah,
that´s the Problem with overworking programmers.

It is easy for a programmer to create bugs,
much much easier to find and fix them.
If you let a programmer work 3 hours more a day
and it takes him 2 hours per day to fix the additional bugs he creates because of the stress being caused by regularly working overtime, it doesn´t sound to me like a efficient use of his abilities as programmer (and, if you pay the programmers regular wages for the time he works overtime, it would even be more costly than to hire more programmers at the start of the project [a thing, of course, which doesn´t apply to EA, as they obviously didn´t even pay the employees for the time they worked overtime ])

[DanS]

Originally posted by Alexander's Horse
Dan is just saying out loud all the things he tells himself

Are you kidding? I get 1.5x overtime and that's what I remind myself whenever I'm working late.

I've seen both sides of the coin. One case was managed well and we worked 80-90 hour weeks at crunch time. One case was managed poorly and we worked 90-100 hour weeks at crunch time. We put together a world-class package for the first and a less great package for the second. In neither instance was a 40-50 hour work week realistic.

In both instances, it took more than a half year to decompress after crunch time. However, there was a great deal of compensating satisfaction at a job well done in the first instance. As you may know, you store up stress during crunch time and deal with it during decompression. If the results of the crunch time are something you can be proud of, then that helps you decompress with less negative consequences.

The other thing to mention is that the amount of stress has a big impact on the effectiveness of your work. Working long hours increases stress. If the project is poorly managed or you have a co-worker who is screwing up and making your job more difficult, then the stress is increased drastically, and it becomes tough to cope with the total. Further, there are some instances when a 60 hour work week is quite doable and others when a 60 hour work week is a killer, for instance.

[Dinner]

In the US you normally get 1.5x for hours over 40 in a week and 2x if you work over 50 or if you work on a Sunday. At least that's the way it is for 8-5 jobs which work Monday through Friday.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by DanS
I'm inclined to leave this to the industry to figure out.

Of course you are.

[MarkG]

EA Los Angeles Cuts Staff in Restructuring

According to multiple reports, 60 developers at Electronic Arts' Los Angeles studio were let go today in a restructuring-related layoff. The staff members were pulled from the various projects at the LA offices, rather than being confined to one or two specific teams; Neil Young, overseer of the LA studio, was careful in his statement to dispel the rumor that the layoffs were related to sales performance of EA LA's GoldenEye title in late 2004.

"It has nothing to do with GoldenEye or titles we've shipped in the past and a lot more to do with where we want to take this studio in the future," said Young in a statement to consumer site 1UP.com. Instead, Young emphasized the need to reconsider the amount of staff employed as the overall company prepares for next-generation systems, such as the successor to the Xbox expected to be unveiled soon. "It's a studio-wide thing to reset the business fundamentals and get the studio to the next level."

Whether this return to "fundamentals" means the cutbacks at the LA offices will soon be replicated in EA's other studios such as Canada, Tiburon, and Redwood Shores, was left unsaid. However, the LA studios have hardly been gutted, with 320 staffers remaining to continue the EA Trax, EA Publishing, and EA mobile gaming divisions in addition to console development.

[chequita guevara]

They should unionize and strike.

[Ned]

Originally posted by johncmcleod
What EA did is horrible, however, what these employees had to go through happens to people all over the world, and instead of programming they're doing hard manual labor. This will always happen in a system where those who are in control of production are motivated by profit.

Capitalism

John, it also happens in Cuba.

[chequita guevara]

No it doesn't.