EA: The Human Story [Nov. 10th, 2004|12:01 am]
http://www.livejournal.com/users/ea_spouse/
My significant other works for Electronic Arts, and I'm what you might call a disgruntled spouse.

EA's bright and shiny new corporate trademark is "Challenge Everything." Where this applies is not exactly clear. Churning out one licensed football game after another doesn't sound like challenging much of anything to me; it sounds like a money farm. To any EA executive that happens to read this, I have a good challenge for you: how about safe and sane labor practices for the people on whose backs you walk for your millions?

I am retaining some anonymity here because I have no illusions about what the consequences would be for my family if I was explicit. However, I also feel no impetus to shy away from sharing our story, because I know that it is too common to stick out among those of the thousands of engineers, artists, and designers that EA employs.

Our adventures with Electronic Arts began less than a year ago. The small game studio that my partner worked for collapsed as a result of foul play on the part of a big publisher -- another common story. Electronic Arts offered a job, the salary was right and the benefits were good, so my SO took it. I remember that they asked him in one of the interviews: "how do you feel about working long hours?" It's just a part of the game industry -- few studios can avoid a crunch as deadlines loom, so we thought nothing of it. When asked for specifics about what "working long hours" meant, the interviewers coughed and glossed on to the next question; now we know why.

Within weeks production had accelerated into a 'mild' crunch: eight hours six days a week. Not bad. Months remained until any real crunch would start, and the team was told that this "pre-crunch" was to prevent a big crunch toward the end; at this point any other need for a crunch seemed unlikely, as the project was dead on schedule. I don't know how many of the developers bought EA's explanation for the extended hours; we were new and naive so we did. The producers even set a deadline; they gave a specific date for the end of the crunch, which was still months away from the title's shipping date, so it seemed safe. That date came and went. And went, and went. When the next news came it was not about a reprieve; it was another acceleration: twelve hours six days a week, 9am to 10pm.

Weeks passed. Again the producers had given a termination date on this crunch that again they failed. Throughout this period the project remained on schedule. The long hours started to take its toll on the team; people grew irritable and some started to get ill. People dropped out in droves for a couple of days at a time, but then the team seemed to reach equilibrium again and they plowed ahead. The managers stopped even talking about a day when the hours would go back to normal.

Now, it seems, is the "real" crunch, the one that the producers of this title so wisely prepared their team for by running them into the ground ahead of time. The current mandatory hours are 9am to 10pm -- seven days a week -- with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behavior (at 6:30pm). This averages out to an eighty-five hour work week. Complaints that these once more extended hours combined with the team's existing fatigue would result in a greater number of mistakes made and an even greater amount of wasted energy were ignored.

The stress is taking its toll. After a certain number of hours spent working the eyes start to lose focus; after a certain number of weeks with only one day off fatigue starts to accrue and accumulate exponentially. There is a reason why there are two days in a weekend -- bad things happen to one's physical, emotional, and mental health if these days are cut short. The team is rapidly beginning to introduce as many flaws as they are removing.

And the kicker: for the honor of this treatment EA salaried employees receive a) no overtime; b) no compensation time! ('comp' time is the equalization of time off for overtime -- any hours spent during a crunch accrue into days off after the product has shipped); c) no additional sick or vacation leave. The time just goes away. Additionally, EA recently announced that, although in the past they have offered essentially a type of comp time in the form of a few weeks off at the end of a project, they no longer wish to do this, and employees shouldn't expect it. Further, since the production of various games is scattered, there was a concern on the part of the employees that developers would leave one crunch only to join another. EA's response was that they would attempt to minimize this, but would make no guarantees. This is unthinkable; they are pushing the team to individual physical health limits, and literally giving them nothing for it. Comp time is a staple in this industry, but EA as a corporation wishes to "minimize" this reprieve. One would think that the proper way to minimize comp time is to avoid crunch, but this brutal crunch has been on for months, and nary a whisper about any compensation leave, nor indeed of any end of this treatment.

This crunch also differs from crunch time in a smaller studio in that it was not an emergency effort to save a project from failure. Every step of the way, the project remained on schedule. Crunching neither accelerated this nor slowed it down; its effect on the actual product was not measurable. The extended hours were deliberate and planned; the management knew what they were doing as they did it. The love of my life comes home late at night complaining of a headache that will not go away and a chronically upset stomach, and my happy supportive smile is running out.

No one works in the game industry unless they love what they do. No one on that team is interested in producing an inferior product. My heart bleeds for this team precisely BECAUSE they are brilliant, talented individuals out to create something great. They are and were more than willing to work hard for the success of the title. But that good will has only been met with abuse. Amazingly, Electronic Arts was listed #91 on Fortune magazine's "100 Best Companies to Work For" in 2003.

EA's attitude toward this -- which is actually a part of company policy, it now appears -- has been (in an anonymous quotation that I've heard repeated by multiple managers), "If they don't like it, they can work someplace else." Put up or shut up and leave: this is the core of EA's Human Resources policy. The concept of ethics or compassion or even intelligence with regard to getting the most out of one's workforce never enters the equation: if they don't want to sacrifice their lives and their health and their talent so that a multibillion dollar corporation can continue its Godzilla-stomp through the game industry, they can work someplace else.

But can they?

The EA Mambo, paired with other giants such as Vivendi, Sony, and Microsoft, is rapidly either crushing or absorbing the vast majority of the business in game development. A few standalone studios that made their fortunes in previous eras -- Blizzard, Bioware, and Id come to mind -- manage to still survive, but 2004 saw the collapse of dozens of small game studios, no longer able to acquire contracts in the face of rapid and massive consolidation of game publishing companies. This is an epidemic hardly unfamiliar to anyone working in the industry. Though, of course, it is always the option of talent to go outside the industry, perhaps venturing into the booming commercial software development arena. (Read my tired attempt at sarcasm.)

To put some of this in perspective, I myself consider some figures. If EA truly believes that it needs to push its employees this hard -- I actually believe that they don't, and that it is a skewed operations perspective alone that results in the severity of their crunching, coupled with a certain expected amount of the inefficiency involved in running an enterprise as large as theirs -- the solution therefore should be to hire more engineers, or artists, or designers, as the case may be. Never should it be an option to punish one's workforce with ninety hour weeks; in any other industry the company in question would find itself sued out of business so fast its stock wouldn't even have time to tank. In its first weekend, Madden 2005 grossed $65 million. EA's annual revenue is approximately $2.5 billion. This company is not strapped for cash; their labor practices are inexcusable.

The interesting thing about this is an assumption that most of the employees seem to be operating under. Whenever the subject of hours come up, inevitably, it seems, someone mentions 'exemption'. They refer to a California law that supposedly exempts businesses from having to pay overtime to certain 'specialty' employees, including software programmers. This is Senate Bill 88. However, Senate Bill 88 specifically does not apply to the entertainment industry -- television, motion picture, and theater industries are specifically mentioned. Further, even in software, there is a pay minimum on the exemption: those exempt must be paid at least $90,000 annually. I can assure you that the majority of EA employees are in fact not in this pay bracket; ergo, these practices are not only unethical, they are illegal.

I look at our situation and I ask 'us': why do you stay? And the answer is that in all likelihood we won't; and in all likelihood if we had known that this would be the result of working for EA, we would have stayed far away in the first place. But all along the way there were deceptions, there were promises, there were assurances -- there was a big fancy office building with an expensive fish tank -- all of which in the end look like an elaborate scheme to keep a crop of employees on the project just long enough to get it shipped. And then if they need to, they hire in a new batch, fresh and ready to hear more promises that will not be kept; EA's turnover rate in engineering is approximately 50%. This is how EA works. So now we know, now we can move on, right? That seems to be what happens to everyone else. But it's not enough. Because in the end, regardless of what happens with our particular situation, this kind of "business" isn't right, and people need to know about it, which is why I write this today.

If I could get EA CEO Larry Probst on the phone, there are a few things I would ask him. "What's your salary?" would be merely a point of curiosity. The main thing I want to know is, Larry: you do realize what you're doing to your people, right? And you do realize that they ARE people, with physical limits, emotional lives, and families, right? Voices and talents and senses of humor and all that? That when you keep our husbands and wives and children in the office for ninety hours a week, sending them home exhausted and numb and frustrated with their lives, it's not just them you're hurting, but everyone around them, everyone who loves them? When you make your profit calculations and your cost analyses, you know that a great measure of that cost is being paid in raw human dignity, right?

Right?


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"Eric" responds to pho list:

For what it's worth - it's the same in advertising and graphic design.

Our firm was pulling the long hours as well, employees - as salaried - were regularly working overtime in spurts to meet those crunch deadlines, that being said, the employees eventually expressed a mild revolt towards certain accounts/clients that habitually forced the OT due to in most cases their own (client side) lack of organization.

We implemented two measures:
1. We put in a time clock, (Imagine that sort of totalitarianism in a creative setting) but it's what the employees wanted. This way they were given pay-per-hour immediate reward for the work done. No more "salaried" designers.
2. Client side work was re-evaluated through a matrix that included the unrealistic OT demands the said client put on staffing. Clients that failed to meet a passing grade of 17 or better out of 25 points were phased out of our firms client mix.



Results:
1 Time clock was well received and was very effective at actually spotlighting those employees who abused daytime hours - then worked late because they had to.
2. Actual Pay after taxes etc is now much less than the frequent bonuses given upon project closures. Management would in a year hand out approx. 15% in additional bonus to salary plus $500-$1500 in movie, electronics superstore or mall gift cards per employee. Now there is little to motivate those perks from management as the reward is given day by day. I feel the reward is also less appreciated - or better - less recognized as a) it is small amounts per week, and b) the government typically keeps half the OT paycheck.
3. The dismissing of "nusance" client work resulted in a dramatic loss of business that is only now after year beginning to recover. SO it follows OT dropped.
4. Other clients experienced/expressed a work to rule attitude from the firm. Anecdotally they felt they had been picked on to better manage their own work, they "wholistically" felt that our firms job was to deliver work within reason as they required, they felt that the advertising business is always going to experience those crunch times and that to remain a supplier - we'd better get used to it.
5, Incremental pay hikes are now standard with industry practice, although the competition typically still does not pay for overtime.

At the end of it all, high tech and entertainment firms need to have happy and content creative employees, the actualization of hourly pay to salaried pay can only be made when all else is equal, top companies are finding it more and more difficult to satisfy high base pay grids PLUS employee pressure for performance bonuses, it seems "a cake and eat it too" attitude has developed where employees only hear what they "don't have" and forget to see what they do.

I would be curious to know how EA average per job description salaries measure against regionally adjusted and like positions.

What other perks did the employees receive.

I am not familiar with the internal workings of EA but I have seen many a company forced to outsource talent as a result of unrealistic employee expectations in white, blue or sweatshirt collar sectors. As the walls are now gone and data transfer allows for an anywhere employee base, I would reconsider forcing the issue if it's a weak one. Clients have moved help desks to India, or small town middle anyCountry to avoid the high costs of metropolitan employee base. For now thats the trend and it too is driven by the bottom line. Passive - all is me - employees will find themselves joining that ever lengthening unemployment line.

Just a thought,

Eric.

PS, I do understand that corporations look at other countries cheaper labour as a plus, "woo hoo look at me - I saved our corporation XXX dollars and laid off three thousand programmers"... Looks good for the managers bonus but the long term effect is that those 3,000 eating sleeping breathing consumers are no longer out there buying DVD players, groceries and entertainment, those folks spent money every day that in one way or another lead to somebody purchasing say "an EA game", if those games don't get purchased, EA is dying too. I apologize for the MacroEconomic stretch but it's the way I see it.

What's the spouse going to do if "honey" loses his/her job?

Pay well and be fair, check the industry bar, and talk with the staff - it's worth the effort. It'll be a shame if this one person acts as catalyst for something that is irrational.

END

The thing about a sink-hole economy is that if someone doesn't want to work 18-hour days, there are 20 other people who will.

Maybe next week, we can study physics instead of business math.

Prehaps I should say something about EA.

I don't work for EA and am not associated with them in any manner other than as a customer. Make that ex-customer. I refuse to buy another or their games ever again.

At one time I would buy maybe 1 or 2 games a month. Then one day I found my computer infected with a spyware called cws. Extremely difficult to remove from the computer and depending on the version can be rightly called a malware. At the time I couldn't figure out where I got it. The second time I installed the game was when I caught on. I figured it was that one game. Each time required a format of the drive to get it out.

Then I tried one more. Only this one was truely a malware. Browser hijacker with 1100 hidden tool bars and 1200 websites to load trojans, spyware by the hundreds, keyloggers, worms, all sorts of good stuff. I got a worm that infected my entire home network and all computers. Formatting, partitioning, installing the OS again would not remove it. I lost the license to install xp on my computers on two of them. Both install discs came with the computers and micro$uck$ has blackballed both registerations.

This one malware has caused more troubles than it was every worth for the game. All the games were purchased.

As long as companies think it is alright to put such in their programs they will do with out my money.

I too am the victim of one of those corporation managers who point to lost employees as money savings. I don't envy those that are still working. Corporations are getting ever more bolder. The one I was working for was willing violating wage labor laws. Anyone willing to even speak against the practice, such as I, was eligable for the next termination oppurtunity that came up.

Many things are happening in the corporate world that word isn't getting out about. Anything that saves a buck, takes a buck from the employee and puts in their pocket they are all for. The public isn't hearing about it either, not if the employee wants to keep working.

THESE GUYS ARE THE CREATORS.. THE "POOR ARTISTS"..

i want to ask.. where is the copyright law to protect them? COME ON CONGRESS!

Tom: Thanks for posting this. I'll spread it around - especially to the high school/college kids.
Wet1: It sounds like you speak from a lot of personal experience. So you agree with what ea_spouse had to say...
How long has it been since you've purchased an EA game? Are they still spending a lot of time programming all the hidden spyware/malware in their games?
Do the college kids who are spending $18-36k a year for their degrees know what the industry is all about? Do they even have a clue?
My husband is involved in construction. There is a choice: employee or subcontractor. As an employee, you take no risk. You are paid by the hour (actually for the whole day even if you can't get the day in) every week. As a sub, you gamble. You assume risk. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Sometimes you win big time.
The scenario described in the article sounds like a sweatshop. The engineers, artists and designers are employees - but they are SALARIED employees. And as such, they aren't on the clock. What an abused loophole!

I agree with awehr. They are the creators - like the songwriters who had to pump out so many songs per week for a salary. (Wasn't Kenny Loggins one?)
The RIAA, MPAA, and BSA always try to put a spin on their "fiscal terrorism" against consumers by talking about the poor artists who suffer from "piracy". It is such hypocrisy. Laws are passed FOR corporations by legislators who are compensated BY corporations.
Didn't that spyware bill (sponsored by Mary Bono - CA) get passed? Does EA know about it?

All the more reason for me to feel smug as a networker. I can enjoy a skills shortage, and you cant offshore someone whose job requires physical access to the equipment. If I do my job right, noone other then my immediate superior and coworkers even realises im there.

The thing I don't think people realize about the Tech and computer career field is that they are constantly trying to get down to less and less people. That's what the softwares are made for, the new faster smarter computers, etc. People always hear that they are so many computer and tech jobs, when in reality every company wants to get it so they only have to have 1 tech guy (or girl.) Its a career field designed to shorten over time.

I don't understand it...

Why allow this to happen? What a lot of the upper management doesn't understand is "emotion"

So you hit them where it hurts the most. Their wallet. If I remember correctly, EA Games tried to sue so that Call of Duty would not be made. The people there were former employees of EA (all 18-30 of them)

So that little mantra of "work here or leave" is bunk.

But I can tell ya, the reason that Blizzard(Starcraft), id(Doom), or Steam (Half-Life) don't work so hard and make it so that their games, though long anticipated, so worthwhile to its fans is BECAUSE of the fact that people are allowed to tinker on the code, making their own games.

Someone like EA, who works on a console like the PS2 usually has only profit in mind. I'll admit, the PS2 is a fun system, with a brevy of games like the Nintendo consoles. But what happens to the games after a year? Most just slip under the radar.

Azurre, I can say that someone will always need a techie or computer scientist of some sort. The main thing is that you can have all the graphics and such in the world but if there's no one there to manipulate it, it's so much junk.

to wet1: how do you know that it was a ea game that did this to you. i looked on google because your situation seemed "weird" to say the least. i have found NOTHING online connecting ea and CWS. while i am not absolving them of possible guilt, how do you KNOW that this was them.

Well, lets see.

1) The cws showed the same time as the install, not once but twice.

2) With the fresh formatting and reinstall of an OS, I was particulary sensitive to what I was doing, installing tattletales the second time so that I would know when this occurred and installing them first before any other softwares.

3) The name EA is all over the cd as the maker of the game. Since it came wrapped in plastic and vaccum sealed, who else has the chance?

4) When uninstalling something in control panel, add remove programs, pay close attention to the right side when you highlite some software to be removed. It tells you how often a software is used. Mostly it says nothing, rarely used, often used, or frequently used. If it says frequently used and you haven't used it then something else did.

I own the same game and there is no CWS associated with it.

EA has too much to lose to put something as obvious as CWS in their software. There's already so many tools out there designed specifically to get CWS off of your computer with ease (i.e. shredder).

Very familar with cws shredder, it removes 80% of the cws variants. It is the other 20% that it doesn't do any good with.

It is for that purpose that sites such as silentrunning.org, merljin, and a few others exist. If and when you get a dose of the stronger newer stuff, you will find that cws shredder has absolutely no effect on the removal of it. Wasn't aware that I mentioned any title of any game but only the maker.

A look at the silentrunning.org will tell you why it is so difficult to remove. Doesn't show up in most registry editiors, doesn't show up in hijack this till you find the right name of the file, after locating the correct name you find you can not delete it. Every time it installs, it is with a random name or attached to some file you should have on your computer. You may not change the home page address of about:blank for as soon as you leave the page where you changed it, it is altered back to what it was. Has a lot of cute tricks.

Wow. I wasn't aware of newer and worse versions, but I guess it shouldn't really be surprising. My computer just got overrun with crap too (thanks, roomate)

I still find it hard to believe that EA would do something so stupid.