EA scandal(Is anyone surprised?)

[Ned]

Originally posted by 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.

Partly true.

There is also the competition from India and other places driving down programmer costs. EA may have to work these folks all those hours to get their average cost down to the Indian level.

[chequita guevara]

No, they don't have to, they want to. So they can squeeze more profit from them. EA is hugely profitable. They aren't hurting from competition.

[Ted Striker]

yup

[Ned]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
No, they don't have to, they want to. So they can squeeze more profit from them. EA is hugely profitable. They aren't hurting from competition.

You are right. http://money.excite.com/jsp/rs/summa...NDEX=0&type=QT

So, they are just plain evil folks.

Satisfied?

[Adagio]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
They should unionize and strike.

It's not that easy. My mother used to work at a place where they squeezed everything from their workers, but the management were so stupid so they didn't get full effect of all their machines. But instead of using basic knowledge (their "problem" was so simple a 10-year old should figure it out) to fix their problems they decided to make all their workers work overtime all the time and often they forced their workers to work the night-shift, which most people hated*and often the workers didn't get anything extra for it

The reason they didn't strike was because most where afraid of loosing their job. My mother was one of the few who wouldn't loose her job because of a strike because she kept fixing their problems by telling her bosses on how things works and what to do about their problems.



*There were a few people who prefered to work the night-shift, but the management didn't want to make this people work the night-shift all the time even though they wanted to and all other workers also wanted them to do it (since they didn't want to be picked to do it themselfes)

[Ned]

Originally posted by Adagio


It's not that easy. My mother used to work at a place where they squeezed everything from their workers, but the management were so stupid so they didn't get full effect of all their machines. But instead of using basic knowledge (their "problem" was so simple a 10-year old should figure it out) to fix their problems they decided to make all their workers work overtime all the time and often they forced their workers to work the night-shift, which most people hated*and often the workers didn't get anything extra for it

The reason they didn't strike was because most where afraid of loosing their job. My mother was one of the few who wouldn't loose her job because of a strike because she kept fixing their problems by telling her bosses on how things works and what to do about their problems.



*There were a few people who prefered to work the night-shift, but the management didn't want to make this people work the night-shift all the time even though they wanted to and all other workers also wanted them to do it (since they didn't want to be picked to do it themselfes)

Re fixing the machines: a good engineer will operate the manufacturing process to see whether there are bugs or bottlenecks in the process. I found this out first had during a stike where I had to work the lines. I found a lot of areas which caused slowdowns that could be easily fixed with a few small design changes.

[Adagio]

Yeah, but the problem was those managers didn't know that, even though my mother told them countless of times...

The problem was very simple:

They have one machine that can make 3 different "things". It takes about half an hour to change the machine from doing one thing to another. In this example let's just say that they had an order to ship a little less than one days work of each of these things in 3 days. Sounds like no problems here, right? Apparently not, since the administration wants them to do 1/3 of "thing A" on day 1, then change the machine so it does 1/3 of "thing B" and the rest of the day is spent on making "thing C". At this time 1 ½ hour is spent "changing" the machine, so they haven't been able to finish 1/3 of "thing C", so in the end they're late

But hey, at least it's going in the right direction. At the time my mother just started it was more like 1/6th of a production they would finish before "changing" the machine