Want to work at EA?

[Roac]

Anyway I learned then and there, the industry tends to stifle creativity, and most of these companies are just copying other hits.

I hear complaints along these lines a lot.  It's easy to be the backseat driver and make that type of criticism, and far harder when you're the one having to put up your money for a project that no one has tried before, and with the knowledge that most "innovative" projects wind up failures.  Innovation is a very expensive proposition.

[AlteredOne]

I hear complaints along these lines a lot.  It's easy to be the backseat driver and make that type of criticism, and far harder when you're the one having to put up your money for a project that no one has tried before, and with the knowledge that most "innovative" projects wind up failures.  Innovation is a very expensive proposition.

Yep in that particular case, I'm playing backseat driver with the knowledge that the company failed.  But of course, there can be a million financial reasons for a company to fold, even when they have great ideas and employees.  It seems like the gaming industry is rapidly becoming like Hollywood, with a similar executive culture.  

Sequels are seen as sure-fire moneymakers, witness EA with endlessly updated sports franchises, FIFA soccer anyone.  EA's sports dominance is especially ingenious, because it is driven by simple turnover of real-life sports talent.  Every year you need a new title with all the new teams, and you don't even need a ton of new coding.  Just keep those databases updated with stats for all the players, and add a few new graphics, music and audio commentary in each release.  Mega money!

[schild]

HELLO, MCFLYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY. That's not what Koboshi was saying at all. Or at least what he meant.

He's willing to work the shit hours for shit pay to get the experience required to get the good jobs. These EA employees are bitching instead of walking away. They are qualified professionals and like their job enough that they don't want to quit but they're willing to sue the pants off their company. Everyone outside of the gaming industry KNOWS about the death march, goes in applying knowing about the death march and expects nothing less than stupid hours for just under what the pay should be (or very under in my case). I don't bitch about my hours. Some days I only see my bed and my desk. There's nothing in between. And shit, I don't even get benefits.

Basically - he's right. These fuckers diamond shoes don't fit and they want new ones.

[AlteredOne]

HELLO, MCFLYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY. That's not what Koboshi was saying at all. Or at least what he meant.  He's willing to work the shit hours for shit pay to get the experience required to get the good jobs. These EA employees are bitching instead of walking away.

Yes it's cool that he's willing to work his ass off to get started.  But it's my impression that some of these stories involve relatively senior staff (i.e. the guy from Maxis), with years of experience and families.  Is the answer always, "Just walk away and find another job," or should workers expect to earn some flexibility, once they've paid their dues?

[schild]

If you don't like what's happening, demand better pay and walk away. Low level people are a dime a dozen. If high level, experienced people started walking away - things would change. Drastically.

[koboshi]

Simply put if you're one of these

34% said that games were only one of many career options for them

Then get the fuck out of the way and make room for those who plan on making games their whole life and don't think of this as just another paycheck. To those who are still crying about the state of the industry, get a loan, make a company, and only hire seasoned professionals (applicants must have 3 shipped titles in as many years) like everyone else does! Every good career starts with shit work and yours is no exception, but if you’re still at a company that "abuses" you after 5 years, you don't need a career counselor you need a battered women's support group. "He only forces me to do overtime because he loves me!"

Was I being unclear? Did I mince words? Seriously did any of you read my last paragraph!  Yes its hard a nasty job market out there but if you are hireing lawyers maybe its time to conceder other companies.  If you’re such a valuable member of your team leave and make the right kind of company, or shop your ass around.  I mean shit, if your too over worked to do that they have people who do it for you!

Thanks go to Schild for getting what I was saying.  To the rest of you, you can all take your A for effort and shove it!  The truth of the matter is that despite the bitching and moaning of the plague of scab workers all the evidence I have seen in my struggle is to the contrary, that there are little to no low level positions available.

Oh and Alteredone, FUCK YOU for comparing yourself to sweatshop workers. It's that kind of shit that has me so pissed off, if for no other reason that you get FULL FUCKING HEALTH AND DENTAL AND A 401K!  If worse comes to worse you wont starve so stifle that injured sparrow crap.

Just say what you really mean, "I don’t want to work this hard", to which I respond, "I do!"  For the living wage instead of the minimum wage, for the free games, for the health coverage that doesn’t involve dialing 911 for an appointment, for the pride of pointing to a game and saying I made that and the respect that brings, for the chance that in 10 or 20 years I might be able to say "I have an idea" and have people listen, for the chance to look on at speculation thread and chuckle at what they think is coming, for the ability to never again have to ashamedly explain that I am only doing this until I get a 'real job', and finally and most importantly, for the love of the fucking game!

[Dark Vengeance]

If you don't like what's happening, demand better pay and walk away. Low level people are a dime a dozen. If high level, experienced people started walking away - things would change. Drastically.

Yeah, you'd get promoted! /rimshot

Bring the noise.
Cheers............

[AlteredOne]

Oh and Alteredone, FUCK YOU for comparing yourself to sweatshop workers. It's that kind of shit that has me so pissed off, if for no other reason that you get FULL FUCKING HEALTH AND DENTAL AND A 401K!  If worse comes to worse you wont starve so stifle that injured sparrow crap.

Hold your horses.  I'm not comparing either you or me to a sweatshop worker.  I was simply saying that plenty of countries treat workers like dirt, and Americans try to be better than that.  And don't assume that you automagically get "Full health and dental and a 401k" if you work in the industry.  Schild is talking about working with no benefits.  

You seriously think that every senior person can just waltz out and start their own company?  It takes a budget of millions to make today's game titles, which is why the gaming industry is coming to be dominated by huge companies like EA.  This seems to be your idea -- if you're senior and you feel exploited, just leave.  Fine, this works for some people.  But why force good people out, just because they have trouble working the same hours as a 20-year-old?

Isn't it perfectly conceivable that you could be a 35-year-old guy with a great resume, with a new family, and you need a little flexibility to manage all your responsibilities?  In many companies, companies encourage employees to have children.  Why should the game industry be so different?

[Dark Vengeance]

In many companies, companies encourage employees to have children.  Why should the game industry be so different?

Because this is the gaming industry, and the guys with the suits and MBAs think you guys never get laid, and are just pissed about missing Star Trek.

Bring the noise.
Cheers..............

[Roac]

In many companies, companies encourage employees to have children. Why should the game industry be so different?

Because they can get away with it.  Almost every Comp. Sci. graduate wants to make video games for a living.  Yet, the percent of the workforce who are actually doing that is vanishingly small.  The jobs just don't exist.  So, supply and demand.  Game companies don't have to care.  That doesn't mean some won't, but there's no market pressure to.

Remember that job environment is just one more level upon which companies can compete for employees; employees generally like "pro-family" environments, because most employees are older than 21, and have or are thinking about a family.

[Margalis]

The vast majority of game programmers are not high level workers. Even team leads are often not really high level with regards to the entire company.

Plus, if they leave, where do they go? Would you hire a guy to work for you when he left his last job because it was too much work, when your company expects those same sort of hours?

[schild]

Plus, if they leave, where do they go? Would you hire a guy to work for you when he left his last job because it was too much work, when your company expects those same sort of hours?

He'd go to a company that pays their people for the time they spend working. Here's the thing, I have no problem working long hours for little pay if I enjoy what I do. But if I had a family and other priorities - I'd expect a fat fucking paycheck for leaving them at home to rot.

[Merusk]

Plus, if they leave, where do they go? Would you hire a guy to work for you when he left his last job because it was too much work, when your company expects those same sort of hours?

He'd go to a company that pays their people for the time they spend working. Here's the thing, I have no problem working long hours for little pay if I enjoy what I do. But if I had a family and other priorities - I'd expect a fat fucking paycheck for leaving them at home to rot.

And then you're right back on the street looking for a job because people like koboshi and your current self are more than willing to do the job for less pay and a worse schedule.

Face it, y'all are on a suck it up and ignore the family or lose the job career path. Accept that, plus that even if you ignore the family if you aren't stellar you're expendable and enjoy the ride as much as you can.

[HaemishM]

Let's not forget that the game industry only has two doors for entry.

1) Know someone, or 2) Be willing to work Q&A for a long goddamn time despite whatever resume positives you have.

If you don't have 1, you damn well better get 2. Because I don't know of any game companies that hire programmers out of school to do anything other than the shittiest testing possible.

[Comstar]

I thought intern's was the other commen way? CRS has one doing thier new buildings, and another one redoing nearly all the sounds.

Working at a game company would be a dream for me, but I wouldn't be able to understand the whole "you work for hours on end and not get paid for it" bit. I always thought people get paid for working, even in dream jobs or locations.

[Shmtur]

And then you're right back on the street looking for a job because people like koboshi and your current self are more than willing to do the job for less pay and a worse schedule.

Face it, y'all are on a suck it up and ignore the family or lose the job career path. Accept that, plus that even if you ignore the family if you aren't stellar you're expendable and enjoy the ride as much as you can.

Wow, what a shitty attitude.  Workers aren't expendable assets - if EA (and others) continue to treat workers this way, there will be a backlash, period.  Lawsuits, strikes, organization of a union - whatever.  And the workers will be completely 100% right to do it.

They don't have to just accept it that the hours at the job they want to work at suck when those hours are worse than what you'd expect at just about any other profession, especially when combined with worse pay and sometimes a complete lack of benefits to boot.  That's not a problem with the workers, it's a problem with the company.

A squadron of inexperienced people wanting that job doesn't make it ok to treat the people currently there like shit.

[AlteredOne]

I always thought people get paid for working, even in dream jobs or locations.

For comparison purposes, I think the movie industry may be the closest thing  to gaming now.  They are both "dream jobs" which put out product on a scheduled cycle with a high budget.  In fact the budgets are very similar to movies now, for big gaming titles. Game programmers are probably comparable to movie film/technical/audio/editing crew, for payscale and so forth.  Difference is, most of those motion picture folks are unionized.  And of course, the lion's share of the profits go to the studios in both cases.  The other big difference is the lack of actors for gaming, although even that's changing with lots of games using big-name voice actors.

[Aenovae]

Let's not forget that the game industry only has two doors for entry.

1) Know someone, or 2) Be willing to work Q&A for a long goddamn time despite whatever resume positives you have.

If you don't have 1, you damn well better get 2. Because I don't know of any game companies that hire programmers out of school to do anything other than the shittiest testing possible.

This is totally false.  Activision, for example, is desperately hiring every programmer, artist, and designer they can get their hands on right now.  They have over 100 programmer positions unfilled.  90% of the people I know in the industry were hired out-of-the-blue, without knowing anyone on the inside.

It's true that it is hard to get into the industry, but that's because game companies don't hire any chump with a degree and an idea.  As long as you have a useful degree and are not a moron, you're guaranteed a plush job at giant, non-game corporations that just need bodies.  These are the jobs where you sit in a cubicle and read web sites half the day.  THESE jobs are the ones that are easy to get for the educated person.  But that ease does not apply to the game industry - hence the "it's hard to get in, and there are so few openings" illusion.

In reality, most game companies are deperate for developers.  REAL developers, even entry-level.  They want programmers who spend half their free time working on personal projects and the other half playing games.  They want artists who make pretty things in MAX and Photoshop whenever they have free time.  They want designers who make major contributions to the mod community and play every game they can get their hands on.

Game companies don't give two shits if you have a comp sci degree or if you have "lots of great ideas for games" or if you have a fancy art school degree.  All they care about is evidence that you can actually PRODUCE WORK.

Of course, all advertised openings demand "two years experience necessary," but in reality game companies regularly and often hire entry level applicants - directly into programmer, designer, and artist positions.  The trick is that you need to have a real portfolio - something that only 1% of applicants actually have.

[SirBruce]

It's hard for a designer to have a "real portfolio" when game companies don't want to look at it because they don't want to be sued for stealing your designs.

Bruce

[Pineapple]

It's hard for a designer to have a "real portfolio" when game companies don't want to look at it because they don't want to be sued for stealing your designs.

Bruce

I'm betting 9 out of 10 hires in designer/programmer/artist positions are someone the hiring person knows. A buddy.

I'm betting the other 1 out of 10 is someone referred to them through a friend, a buddy of a buddy.

True that they also need to have some sort of skill, but the game company people know plenty with experience and skill. That's who their friends are.

Plenty of them are out of work too apparently. That would make it hard to break in as a new person.

Not even mentioning the stories of shitty pay, horrible overtime, and common layoffs. I have leard it is somewhat the same way within the movie industry for non-union people.

[Paelos]

Dear Lord, why put up with any of that. Take an IT job at a small business or something.

[Miguel]

You guys need to approach this topic as a beancounter would, then it all becomes clear why things are the way they are:  the mathmatics and logic of business are exceedingly simple!

Profit = Income - Expenses

As a beancounter, my job is to make Profit as high as possible.  I have two ways of doing this:

A.   I need to maximize my income
B.   I need to minimize my expenses

Income: to maximize income, I have to sell everything I produce at the highest possible price.  Since price points are relatively fixed (I can't charge $250 for my game, lest nobody would buy it),  the only way to increase income is to sell more units.

The only way to sell units is to have them produced and available to sell.  This means I need to get the product into the market as quickly as possible.  Unfinished products and late products do not generate income.  Allowing projects to slip directly lowers income.  This is bad. to be avoided at all costs.

Expenses: I need to make my expenses as low as possible.  Hiring half as many people and making them work twice as hard makes my expenses less.  This is good.  Giving out the bare minimum of perks and benefits makes expenses less.  This is good as well.  Making salaries as low as possible makes expenses less.  This is good.  Giving people comp time or overtime pay increases expenses.  This is bad.  Time off for vacation cannot be legally avoided.

[Pineapple]

You guys need to approach this topic as a beancounter would...

Try to factor in company morale, work environment, loyalty.

You cant put a mathematical number on those, which is why beancounters miss them. However they are essential elements in a successful business, if you are talking long term.

This is why I hate beancounters. No offense to you personally, but really. Do not see me as a number on a chart, and you might be suprised at what I can do for you.

Look at all the projects and companies driven into the ground as failures, and you will see beancounters behind it scratching their heads and wondering what happened. That and bad management.

Again, please dont take personal offense. There's just two ways of looking at it.

[HaemishM]

Objectivist theory

Thank you, Ayn Rand.

[sidereal]

The Miguel model misses two major externalities:
1. Units sold.  This is the result of product quality and marketing.  Product quality is a direct result of treating employees well.
2. Turnover costs.  Particularly the loss of institutional knowledge.

Any beancounter who doesn't factor those two numbers in is an embarassment to the bean counting profession.

One barometer is whether your company drives unit sales primarily with product quality or primarily with marketing.  Larger and publically owned companies tend to go with marketing, because it is safe and calculable.  Generally, with a medium-quality product, you can turn x$ spent on advertising into y sales with predictability.  If you rely on quality, you might get 10y if it's a great game and you might get 0 if it sucks.  Large companies and companies with shareholders are risk averse.  They'll take y over a gamble between 0 and 10y.

In general, that means they would prefer to spend just enough money to make sure their product is mediocre, not terrible, and then use marketing to drive sales.  And it means one of the major incentives for keeping employees happy goes away, leaving only reduction of turnover costs.

I'm guessing that that model largely drives why big companies like EA destroy their employees and seem to make a ton of money anyway.  They hypersell mediocre games built on the back of replaceable employees.

And it means if you want to be treated well, pick a company that sells games based on its reputation for quality games.


Edit for a follow-up:  If you don't like that model, the most effective way to get rid of it is to reduce the correlation between marketing and sales as much as possible.  Early, independent, hype-free game reviews.  Get them out of bed with the developers.  If the model was changed such that quality was the only thing driving sales, not pre-release hype and media blitzes, publishers would demand better games, and developers would have to treat their employees better.

[Miguel]

Sorry I should have been clear.

I'm not a bean counter, nor do I agree with anything that I wrote above, but I understand how they think.  Acknowledgement is not advocacy.  I have worked with countless beancounters, and in general they tend to either discredit or outright ignore anything that cannot be tabulated on an Excel spreadsheet.  This is just simple fact.

However benefits, work hours, man hours/weeks, vacation, salaries, timelines, deadlines, head counts, etc, all CAN be tabulated on a spreadsheet.

Hence this is why those parameters are the ones that are tweaked when the corporate machine wants to twist something to their advantage.

[SirBruce]

This story won't die... now the New York Times is looking into it.

I welcome the attention, but sadly, this is par for the coruse in Silicon Valley.  If the rules are going to be changed, it needs to go beyond just EA and games.

Bruce

[geldonyetich]

The thing that really bothers me the most about this is that crushing impact to creativity that working people this hard has.   Zombified wage slaves who can barely drag themselves into work to plot down some buggy code do not good games make.   Energetic, well rested people make better games because their creativity has not been destroyed by their workload.

There's a real plague infecting some corperate thinkers, and that is that they want everything now.   They won't spend time making a quality product or treating their workers well to assure they have a decent QoL.  It's all about getting everything now now now, because if they don't, their competitors will.

Capitalism's a mess sometimes.  It's enough to make a hardcore gamer foster downright Marxist thinking.

Me, I'd love to work in the game industry, because I love games.   I could even pass up a family, as many game developers do.   However, if being chained to a desk for 80 hours a week and being told to live and breath games or be fired is all I have to look forward to, it's hardly a bright future.   Game development is an attractive field because of it's potential for creative expression, not because of the resulting medium.

Frankly, I'm wondering what my odds are of succeeding as an indy developer.   If bigger companies are working their coders to death, my odds of producing a quality product that can knock gamer's socks off really improve.    Only issue is, I'm not likely to be able to compete so far as content is concerned, and games are becoming more and more content-inclusive all the time.   However, the possibility is not eliminated that game mechanic alone can overcome this.

[Righ]

Me, I'd love to work in the game industry, because I love games.

If you are your own boss, you will do 100% of the work generating 100% of the income, the government and other leeches will chop off a decent amount of that, and you can use the rest. If you are somebody else's boss, you can cut part of their income off for your own purposes, before the leeches devalue it further. Spend money on benefits and you can further decrease the wages you offer staff. This is the price of employment.

You want to go into business as a development company. It can be done, but you will want to put yourself in the position of the employer boss if you want to succeed. You need to have people at least doing other "menial" tasks so that the "talent" (yourself presumably) will have the environment to create product. Those people will need to be employed, and you will have to profit from them (get better value from them than your competitors do from their counterparts) Forgive me for saying so, but I don't think that you've adjusted to the mindset required to be an employer.

You could easily work for yourself as a sole contractor. Don't live under the illusion that you will be coding any of your own designs any time soon. To be a freelance software architect, you have to have more than a name for yourself. You need citations, or at least references that pass as such.

[geldonyetich]

I was thinking more along the lines of a small time indy developer gig.   Richard Garriot and a few of his friends were able to get their start distributing their games via sneakerware for awhile.   A bit later, ID Software made a name for itself starting with a string of shareware titles such as Commander Keen.   It's not undoable in this day and age, but the rules of changed.  

Content is my primary contern, as the modern game these days requires that a great deal be generated.   Counterstrike and Day of Defeat are two of the more recent examples of how people get their start in the gaming industry through labors of love.   They didn't develop the engine, but they were allowed to use a pre-existing codebase to develop a product that Valve ultimately came back and bought from them.   Raven Software got it's start developing games that ran on the Doom engine.   Basically, they got around the hurdle of all the content that needed generating by using pre-existing engines and development tools to make it easier.   Though, I imagine it still wasn't a cake walk.

Do my skills fit the bills yet?  Nope, far from it.   All I've got is over 20 years of computer game playing experience to fuel my idea game designs and a mismatched pocket full of unprfoessional Java and C++ experience.     I'd need to practice long and hard at something I enjoy to get even nearly the skills needed to program professionally.    The best I can look forward to in the immediate future is putting together something as simple as a NWN Module or, if I really wanted to buckle down, some rudimentary Half Life 2 mods using the distributed SDK.    Even a text-based Roguelike game would suffice.   If nothing else, my efforts would prove a nice portfolio for potential game developer employers.

Supporting myself is unlikely something I could do from indy game development alone.   The guy who started Natural Selection manages to support himself from donations, and Natural Selection is Big.   Even if my games were OMG awesome, I doubt I'd be able to generate sufficient publicity to get people to actually play them over the din of the overhyped.   However, it'd make for a fun hobby in addition to a Real Job (tm).

Plus, you'll notice, very few of these guys did it alone.   Another hurdle I'd run into is getting adequettely skilled and commited with people who actually want to commit time to my brainchild games.   That's a considerable social hurdle for me.

So yeah, I put a little thought into this.    Willpower, per usual, is the main hurdle I'm up against.   There's a million and one things that would prevent me from being successful in an already overtaxxed industry, but naysaying doesn't get labors of love made.

[daveNYC]

The Miguel model misses two major externalities:
1. Units sold.  This is the result of product quality and marketing.  Product quality is a direct result of treating employees well.
2. Turnover costs.  Particularly the loss of institutional knowledge.

#2 is overrated.  EA can probably get away with using the lowest of the low to update the 200X sports titles, put the medeocre people to work making Sims expansions, and the core group of 5-10 people who they pay good money working on actual new games.

Our company had some high turnover back in 1998-2000, it had an impact, but not much of one.  The young'uns left, but there was a core of three older coders who were able to pick up the slack.  Our production schedule is probably a little more sane than EAs is.

[plangent]

Sometimes, I wish my title was "not worthy of the pig".

It should be.  Nothing against you, it's just that Porco Rosso is way too fucking cool for anyone here to measure up.

[Roac]

I was thinking more along the lines of a small time indy developer gig. Richard Garriot and a few of his friends were able to get their start distributing their games via sneakerware for awhile.

That was when games could be produced by one guy.  Pick some downright rotten game off the shelf; you're looking at a good 20 people and a couple years at least to get that produced, at least.  Some games more.

[HaemishM]

The Miguel model misses two major externalities:
1. Units sold.  This is the result of product quality and marketing.  Product quality is a direct result of treating employees well.
2. Turnover costs.  Particularly the loss of institutional knowledge.

#2 is overrated.  EA can probably get away with using the lowest of the low to update the 200X sports titles, put the medeocre people to work making Sims expansions, and the core group of 5-10 people who they pay good money working on actual new games.

Actually, they don't even need that core group of 5-10 people, they just find indy developers like DICE, offer them enough money to make hats out of 100's and then buy them up once they make a hit or leave them high and dry if their game isn't a hit. Absorb enough workers to get by when you eventually close down the indy shops, rinse and repeat.

[Dark Vengeance]

#2 is overrated.  EA can probably get away with using the lowest of the low to update the 200X sports titles, put the medeocre people to work making Sims expansions, and the core group of 5-10 people who they pay good money working on actual new games.

Despite popular belief, the EA Sports titles see a lot more change than just a roster update. Some good examples include the Tiger Woods series, NASCAR series, Fight Night, and even Madden.

Now you aren't going to get anything breathtakingly dramatic, because the sports themselves don't really change all that much...but they've put some serious work into each new title, especially over the last few years.

Bring the noise.
Cheers..............