DarrenBarefoot.com

Someone died at EA about a month or two ago.
He came down with pneumonia and due to their corporate standard he ignored the warnings from his co-workers to go home. He stayed and he ended up dying from his illness.
I’ve heard of other people playing networked games during O.T. hours, to make it look like they’re working late.

But, it really comes to proper planning and RnD, if things go wrong it shouldn’t be the developers paying for it.

Kinda sad, because if they fight this and attain a union, whats stopping their CEO’s from relocating their studio to India.

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About 4 years ago, the provincial government changed the Employment Standards Act. As a result, high tech employees are no longer entitled to overtime, compensation time, standard work weeks, breaks, minimum daily pay, or 32 consecutive hours free from work each week, etc. They can work really weird split shifts. Of course, the Act exclusion only applies to certain high tech companies AND certain employees within those companies. But plenty of companies misinterpret or misapply the rules. I know of one company where someone used an anonymous comments box to ask why the company was enforcing these rules when fewer than 50% of employees qualified as tech workers and when they were pushing them on people who worked in sales, marketing, HR, customer service, etc. The company sent out a bulletin saying that this was all garbage. People tried posting copies of the rules in the lunch room, but they were removed. Lots of companies do the same thing. People can say “no”, but it takes a lot of energy to find a new job or re-train when you’re working 12- to 15-hour days, and you can’t always quit, if you’ve got a mortgage, student loans, kids, or other commitments. And that’s what employers count on.

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Interesting. But it’s not much different in the Ad word - working silly hours. I’m in an interactive agency and it’s the pre-Christmas season and it’s just nuts. Sad thing, if company a doesn’t do it, company b will. Bad cycle.

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Arwen: That’s why I’m saying that the gaming industry should move to the same model. Accept that long hours, high pay and killer deadlines are the norm. Accept that industry worked are going to work, say, 4-6 months on, and then take 1 or 2 months off. Enough people are willing to do it in the film industry, so why would games be any different?

Paul: I have worked a bit in the gaming industry over the past seven years or so. I interned at Radical Entertainment for a couple months back in 1998, and I did several writing contracts for Black Box Games (now part of EA) in 2000 and 2001. So, I’m not a long-time employee or anything, but I’ve got some firsthand experience.

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Dean:
Since I only have access to third-hand information and I’m not a lawyer, I can’t say that EA is violating the Employment Standards Act. However, from what I understand of the ESA, companies can only make you work unpaid overtime if they give you a truncated work week at some other time within the agreement. So you could work 50 hours this week and 30 next week, for example.

Personally, I think a lot of companies — in gaming and in general high tech — rely on workers to put in long hours, so that the companies don’t have to hire more people. Get four employees to work an extra two hours a day, and you don’t need to hire a fifth person. I think a lot of companies do this on purpose. (Of course, if said employees are playing pool or networked Doom for 3 hours a day, then that’s their own problem.)
Another high tech industry exploit is the line about needing to hire foreign workers. I did an article for a magazine a few years ago, and discovered that the skills shortage was not so much about a shortage of skilled tech workers as a shortage of employers willing to pay market rates. :)

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I worked at EA for 4 months (a co-op term), during “crunch time”, and quite liked it. I wouldn’t mind going back for a few years. It’s definitely not a job for a 35 year old with kids and such, but I’m only 23. I really enjoyed what I was doing there, and never watched the clock (which I’ve done for other jobs).

That said, I’d support unionization of the employees there. People DO work too much, and although some teams get a lot of time off when the project is done, a lot of people just get transfered to a different team, so there’s no break at all. That’s just not right - EA makes approximately 1 bazillion dollars a year, so I’m sure they could manage a bit of overtime pay.

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I have to take issue with one or your statements: “For my money, there’s something kind of ingenuine that this guy’s partner is writing this piece.”

As the spouse of someone who works at EA, I can vouch for everything in the original article. I can think of 8 people off hand immediately that have quit from my husband’s current project within the past 6-8 months; is that 50%, I don’t know, but it’s a lot from a single team.

My husband hasn’t had a day off since early October. Yes, that means he’s worked straight for at least 4 weeks. That’s not just working 7 days a week, that’s being worked like a slave.

He’s gotten home around 2am for the past week and a half. Before that he was working from 9am until 10:30pm (6-7 days a week, only occasionally getting a Sunday off), for the past 3 months. [sarcasm]That wasn’t too awful.[/sarcasm] We haven’t been able to go out to dinner or a movie or do anything remotely resembling time together since early summer.

So yeah. His wife wrote this piece. You know why? Because her husband, like mine, is at the complete edge of mental exhaustion. He’s probably so exhausted he can barely form a coherant sentence, never mind writing something as moving and important as what she wrote.

Like her, I’m pissed as hell. We have a right to be. Our husbands have the right to work in the gaming industry (which they really want to do, so being told “Get a new job” isn’t very helpful) without being pushed to a point that damages their health, their families, or their marriages.

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Sure, on the grand scale of the world, it’s not that important. That doesn’t mean it should be ignored or just brushed aside as a minor problem.

And frankly, I disagree with your notion that if my husband doesn’t like it, he should just leave. That’s just shuffling the problem onto the next poor schmuck that gets hired. There needs to be change in the industry — for that to happen, people first need to realize that there is a problem, and that others are on the same side of the issue — and then get the world at large aware of the problem. That’s why the original post is important. Not to you, perhaps. Not to poor starving people in China. But to those people who are trying to affect change in this industry, it is.

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Darren ~ Since I don’t think anyone has directly replied to your film industry suggestion: I think it’s a fabulous idea. A lot of film folks are unionized, though: I don’t know the history of the industry very well, but I wonder in the absence of unions how you’d get the employers & government to play along.

EA or anyone else, in terms of profit margin, would be idiots enough to willingly make the change over, though. As it is, all that they have to do is point to software developers that are sending R&D to India. Why pay $50,000 to a developer for a 6 month contract and one game if you can pay her $50,000 for a year, get unlimited overtime, and switch her from game to game?

Although I absolutely know that in the world as a whole, the white collar folks at EA (and other gaming companies) have it pretty good, we’re privileged enough in the western world to imagine the culture we live in without the forces of necessity breathing down our necks. I hope we would work at making the rest of the world a better place to live in, rather than our slice of the world crummier. Thailand, for example, has a rep for sexually exploiting young girls: but I don’t think that should have any bearing on how we deal with sexual harrassment in the workplace. I am not sure how the global referrant applies to the relative importance in our (Canadian) workplaces, or how minimizing the trends of worker usage in our labour market helps the third world in any way.

BC provincial legislation supports this use of tech workers: it doesn’t put any caps on overtime, allow for recognition of stat holidays, or MINIMUM DAILY PAY for the tech sector. If you look at how the legislation reads, you’ll see that a “technology professional” could mean the BCIT lab grad, not just the University grad. Once in a while is one thing, but there’s nothing to prevent it being all the time, everyday.

All that said, there is a cachet in Gaming that allows for exploitation, and a culture of Asperger’s that sometimes questions the need for outside life. The culture will change when the (skilled) workforce tells the employers, “no”. If they won’t, we’ll have to leave gaming to 20 somethings and Asperger’s folks, and if our culture keeps buying their goods, then our culture deserves what it gets.

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Evan’s article is terrific.

I work in the consulting industry, and I have had to make an active choice and sacrifice earning potential to avoid working for firms where “crunch mode” is the norm.

There are so many people out there who are parroting the whole “work/life balance” line, but why is it always the middle managers who are bold-faced hypocrites about it?

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