EA: The
Human Story
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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