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[Mecha Gandhi]

Quite a funny letter from the EA HR loop... http://news.spong.com/x?art=8061

Why does EA have to refer to their artists' "creativity" and their engineers' "skill" in inverted commas. It's almost as if they're being sarcastic...

If I worked for a company that was trying to make its employees feel more valued, and then I got sent this email, which basically emphasises that EA doesn't really know how to do that, I reckon I'd leave.

But I don't work for EA, so that's alright...

 

[boutrosinit]

That is rather funny.

 

[Teddman]

Yeah, just try and figure this one out:

We are looking at reclassifying some jobs to overtime eligible in the new Fiscal Year. We have resisted this in the past, not because we don’t want to pay overtime, but because we believe that the wage and hour laws have not kept pace with the kind of work done at technology companies, the kind of employees those companies attract and the kind of compensation packages their employees prefer. We consider our artists to be “creative” people and our engineers to be “skilled” professionals who relish flexibility but others use the outdated wage and hour laws to argue in favor of a workforce that is paid hourly like more traditional industries and conforming to set schedules. But we can’t wait for the legislative process to catch up so we’re forced to look at making some changes to exempt and non-exempt classifications beginning in April.

 

[Deg]

Could someone post the whole letter Spong isnt working for me.

 

[Folder]

Could someone post the whole letter Spong isnt working for me.

Hit f5 if it doesn't load. Just fiddling with servers.
Please, don't post whole thing verbatim!

 

[DSN2K]

Quite a funny letter from the EA HR loop... http://news.spong.com/x?art=8061

Why does EA have to refer to their artists' "creativity" and their engineers' "skill" in inverted commas. It's almost as if they're being sarcastic...

when their pumping shit out like Catwoman, MOHPA and goldeneye... what do you expect ?

 

[Deg]

EA are suppossed to be in top 100 companies to work for in the UK. When i read the list i thought some of the companies were quite suspicious to be there. Didnt think EA would be one of the ones that were suspicious.

 

[Folder]

EA are suppossed to be in top 100 companies to work for in the UK. When i read the list i thought some of the companies were quite suspicious to be there. Didnt think EA would be one of the ones that were suspicious.

People who respond to that are from the publishing arm.
Not development.

when their pumping shit out like Catwoman, MOHPA and goldeneye... what do you expect ?

It's not really about product quality. More about treating employees like slaves, forcing them to rush the shit out within unrealistic deadlines and then denying them promised bonus payments when the unrealistic deadline cannot be met.

Oh, and payrises at less that the inflation rate - What every employee wants: A real-terms pay cut!

Idiots.

 

[iapetus]

Please, don't post whole thing verbatim!

Sorry, you're asking people not to repost a private EA internal message that you've got hold of and posted?

Double standards much?

 

[gofreak]

I can't believe they refer to "creative" and "skill" like that. That's too funny :lol :lol

 

[Folder]

Sorry, you're asking people not to repost a private EA internal message that you've got hold of and posted?

Double standards much?

TOS?

\Cheap mode

Also, it's hardly the same thing.
We're waiting for EA to call now, just kinda staring at the phone waiting for it to ring.
Irk...

I can't believe they refer to "creative" and "skill" like that. That's too funny

Isn't it *shocking*?

 

[Sunski]

I can't believe they refer to "creative" and "skill" like that. That's too funny :lol :lol

"They" being "one man" in a company of "thousands".

 

[Brofist]

I bet Walmart sends out a similar email to it's employees hehe

 

[gofreak]

"They" being "one man" in a company of "thousands".

If you want to get really technical, I'd say that email was a collaborative effort, and not the sole thoughts of one person :rolleyes

And I didn't mean the entire company. I meant the hr-people/management who wrote and approved this email.

 

[Folder]

If you want to get really technical, I'd say that email was a collaborative effort, and not the sole thoughts of one person :rolleyes

And I didn't mean the entire company. I meant the hr-people/management who wrote and approved this email.

No shit.
This is big. EA needs to restore faith in it's dev teams.

 

[Mashing]

I hope this ultimately leads to EA's demise.

Edit: But that does suck for the employees, it's really the suits that I don't like at all. Their corporate side of EA.

 

[kaching]

From the looks of it, they place the words creative and skill in inverted quotes because they're referencing industry definitions for these terms as categories of worker related to wage laws.

 

[mashoutposse]

From the looks of it, they place the words creative and skill in inverted quotes because they're referencing industry definitions for these terms as categories of worker related to wage laws.

Beat me to it.

 

[Lhadatt]

The last few weeks of reading blogs and the media about EA culture and work practices have not been easy. I know personally how hard it is when so much of the news seems negative. We have purposefully not responded to web logs and the media because the best way to communicate is directly with you, our team members.

Translation: "Holy crap. They finally caught on. This is really bad PR. I guess I should do some damage control. We'll get crucified if we spoke publicly on this, so I'll spam the employees in the hope that they're naive enough to trust me."

As much as I don’t like what’s been said about our company and our industry, I recognize that at the heart of the matter is a core truth: the work is getting harder, the tasks are more complex and the hours needed to accomplish them have become a burden. We haven’t yet cracked the code on how to fully minimize the crunches in the development and production process. Net, there are things we just need to fix. And the solutions don’t apply to just our studios -- the people who market, sell, distribute and support the great games that our Studios create, all share a demanding workload.

Translation: "Profit outweighs quality product, and the hours we make you shmucks work should prove that. We can't take two years to develop one title when our shareholders demand instant profits at stupidly low risks, so we have to dumb down the quality of our titles while simultaniously cranking them out as quickly as possible. The rest of the industry supply chain wants quality product so they can sell-through more units -- well, we are just going to have to change that, won't we?"

Three weeks ago we issued our bi-annual Talk Back Survey and more than 80 percent of you participated – much higher than the norm for a company our size. That tells me you care and are committed to making EA better. In the next 30 days we’ll have the survey results and we will share them openly with you by the middle of January.

Translation: "Woah. We got a lot of responses. We didn't really mean for you to fill out that survey, it was just something to make you think we care. We're taking some time to 'tabulate the results' -- we're really just fudging them, but the wait will make you think we're really working on it."

The Studios will be moving to a consistent application of the Renderware Platform. We bought Criterion because we believe there is no better technology platform (25% of all games in our industry are being built on RW). Having a standardized technology approach will save us from having to re-invent the wheel over and over. It will save time and effort we used to spend navigating technology issues.

Every member of the Studio will have gone through Pre-Production Training by the end of December (Tiburon will be going through their training in January when they move into their new facility). We understand the toll taken on our teams when we change directions late in the process. We are putting more teeth in our preproduction discipline to ensure that we more fully define and agree (at all levels) on what the features of the game will be before we scale up teams.

We’ve started a Development Process Improvement Project to get smarter and improve efficiency. Just as we have revamped the Pre-Production process, we are now creating a Product Development Map that will provide earlier decision-making (on SKUS and game features), improve our consistency of creative direction, and lessen the number of late in the process changes, firedrills, and crunches. We will be rolling these changes out over the next year.

Translation: "We're going to neuter our technology in order to cut down on the time spent innovating. Innovation cuts into profits. We would rather have a bland technological spec that works cross-platform than try to actually put out some effort to make the best games possible. We want to halt innovation at the drawing board, so you pesky developers don't get any wacky notions about 'new features' or 'exciting gameplay mechanics' that will increase development time. You are part of an assembly line, not a development team. The quicker you get that into your head, the quicker your subjugation will be."

We are looking at reclassifying some jobs to overtime eligible in the new Fiscal Year. We have resisted this in the past, not because we don’t want to pay overtime, but because we believe that the wage and hour laws have not kept pace with the kind of work done at technology companies, the kind of employees those companies attract and the kind of compensation packages their employees prefer.

Translation: "Since the labor laws of most of the civilized world don't allow us to work our employees 18 hours a day without paying overtime, we have neglected to properly classify our development positions as they should be, opting instead to attempt to create our own version of reality in which slave labor is the norm."

We consider our artists to be “creative” people and our engineers to be “skilled” professionals who relish flexibility but others use the outdated wage and hour laws to argue in favor of a workforce that is paid hourly like more traditional industries and conforming to set schedules.

Translation: "We hate properly compensating our people because it cuts into profits. We don't like paying overtime on top of our already low salaries, so I shall attempt to equate employees' requests for overtime and regular 8-5 schedules to hourly compensation, like the sort used by contractors or Gamestop monkeys."

But we can’t wait for the legislative process to catch up so we’re forced to look at making some changes to exempt and non-exempt classifications beginning in April.

Translation: "We're feeling the heat, and if we don't promise to change some positions to more proper classifications soon, Uncle Sam will catch on. This will suddenly become a problem several times more expensive than the reviews for Goldeneye and the bad PR from our employee exploitation."

So, there are things in the works short-term, longer-term, along with those ideas that will come from you over the next few months.

Translation: "We are so screwed. You should see HR, they're running around like chickens with their heads cut off."

Second, we’re doing something that no one has ever done before: No entertainment software company has ever scaled to this size. We take it for granted sometimes, but it’s important to recognize this fact. Every day is a learning day with new competitors, new consumers, new people working on bigger teams – and all of this amid rapidly changing technology. We experiment, we learn from our mistakes, we adapt and we grow.

Translation: "We're too big. How the hell did we get this large? One part of the company doesn't know what the other part is doing. Our competitors are outpacing us so quickly we don't even know what they've got going on until it's ready to hit the market. Thank God for Madden -- we can shove that down consumers' throats every year with a few well-placed paid reviews and TV commercials."

Most important: we recognize that this doesn’t get fixed with one email or in one month. It’s an on-going process of communication and change.

Translation: "Nothing's changing. You are still going to be overworked, you will not get overtime, and your manager is still going to be a PHB. You are doomed. Resign yourself to your fate, slave."

And while I realize that the issue today is how we work – I think we should all remember that there are also a lot of great benefits to working at EA that are not offered at other companies.

Translation: "You get to work in LA! How happy for you."

With some smart thinking and specific actions we will fix these issues and become stronger as a company.

Translation: "Do the smart thing and STFU, otherwise you're fired. Aw hell, you're fired anyway."

Thanks for taking time to read this.

Translation: "Go to hell, developers. You know we'll just replace you with some 24-year old brat who will work for peanuts."

 

[Unison]

"Creative" and "Skilled" are in quotes like that because they want people to be paid as professionals and not as hourly employees. They are comparing game programmers to actors or doctors by doing that. No sarcasm is intended (though I could see why some would infer it :lol ).

 

[Folder]

Translation: "Holy crap. They finally caught on. This is really bad PR. I guess I should do some damage control. We'll get crucified if we spoke publicly on this, so I'll spam the employees in the hope that they're naive enough to trust me."


Translation: "Profit outweighs quality product, and the hours we make you shmucks work should prove that. We can't take two years to develop one title when our shareholders demand instant profits at stupidly low risks, so we have to dumb down the quality of our titles while simultaniously cranking them out as quickly as possible. The rest of the industry supply chain wants quality product so they can sell-through more units -- well, we are just going to have to change that, won't we?"


Translation: "Woah. We got a lot of responses. We didn't really mean for you to fill out that survey, it was just something to make you think we care. We're taking some time to 'tabulate the results' -- we're really just fudging them, but the wait will make you think we're really working on it."


Translation: "We're going to neuter our technology in order to cut down on the time spent innovating. Innovation cuts into profits. We would rather have a bland technological spec that works cross-platform than try to actually put out some effort to make the best games possible. We want to halt innovation at the drawing board, so you pesky developers don't get any wacky notions about 'new features' or 'exciting gameplay mechanics' that will increase development time. You are part of an assembly line, not a development team. The quicker you get that into your head, the quicker your subjugation will be."


Translation: "Since the labor laws of most of the civilized world don't allow us to work our employees 18 hours a day without paying overtime, we have neglected to properly classify our development positions as they should be, opting instead to attempt to create our own version of reality in which slave labor is the norm."


Translation: "We hate properly compensating our people because it cuts into profits. We don't like paying overtime on top of our already low salaries, so I shall attempt to equate employees' requests for overtime and regular 8-5 schedules to hourly compensation, like the sort used by contractors or Gamestop monkeys."


Translation: "We're feeling the heat, and if we don't promise to change some positions to more proper classifications soon, Uncle Sam will catch on. This will suddenly become a problem several times more expensive than the reviews for Goldeneye and the bad PR from our employee exploitation."


Translation: "We are so screwed. You should see HR, they're running around like chickens with their heads cut off."


Translation: "We're too big. How the hell did we get this large? One part of the company doesn't know what the other part is doing. Our competitors are outpacing us so quickly we don't even know what they've got going on until it's ready to hit the market. Thank God for Madden -- we can shove that down consumers' throats every year with a few well-placed paid reviews and TV commercials."


Translation: "Nothing's changing. You are still going to be overworked, you will not get overtime, and your manager is still going to be a PHB. You are doomed. Resign yourself to your fate, slave."


Translation: "You get to work in LA! How happy for you."


Translation: "Do the smart thing and STFU, otherwise you're fired. Aw hell, you're fired anyway."


Translation: "Go to hell, developers. You know we'll just replace you with some 24-year old brat who will work for peanuts."

Genius prize GET!

 

[mashoutposse]

Actions speak far louder than blog text and forum posts. The people who complain should put their money where their mouthes are and resign. Most people leave positions that they feel don't offer adequate compensation for their time; if they're not leaving, then it should be assumed that the situation is far more bearable than they're letting on.

They probably also realize that there are many gaming industry hopefuls waiting at the gates who would be enthused to serve as their replacements.

 

[Azih]

Actions speak far louder than blog text and forum posts. The people who complain should put their money where their mouthes are and resign. Most people leave positions that they feel don't offer adequate compensation for their time; if they're not leaving, then it should be assumed that the situation is far more bearable than they're letting on.

They probably also realize that there are many gaming industry hopefuls waiting at the gates who would be enthused to serve as their replacements.

Uhuh, and where did you miss the insanely huge turnover rate at EA and their propenisty for hiring programmers fresh out off college who are not only green and naive, but also desperate for some sort of experience on their resume?

 

[mashoutposse]

Do you have a link to some sort of article or statistic? I honestly didn't know about the large turnover rate.

 

[nathkenn]

it's not super easy to find a job either and when you have thousands upon thousands of dollars of college debt, that also doesnt help

 

[Mecha Gandhi]

They probably also realize that there are many gaming industry hopefuls waiting at the gates who would be enthused to serve as their replacements.

Indeed, we do live in a free market economy.

Burn them commie bastards...

bunch of money-hating tree huggers :lol

 

[Duckhuntdog]

*shrug*

Andrew Rollings in his book Game Architecture and Design broke down developers or more specifically, companies into two groups: Software Developers and Software Factories.

EA is a software factory. Bascially a software factory isn't about innovation, re-inventing the wheel, so to speak, But more about creation and reuse. They have software platforms, in this case renderware that are compartmental:things can be plugged in and pulled out easily and as needed.

That is what EA does. That's the big difference between a software developer and and softare factory. Developers can only put out a small number of games in any given time. Factories churn out multiple games in any given time.

Naturally creativity will happen more at developers, it just gets in the way at the factory. But you still have to realize that at the end of the day, the factory is the one that will probably make all the money.

 

[mashoutposse]

*shrug*

Andrew Rollings in his book Game Architecture and Design broke down developers or more specifically, companies into two groups: Software Developers and Software Factories.

EA is a software factory. Bascially a software factory isn't about innovation, re-inventing the wheel, so to speak, But more about creation and reuse. They have software platforms, in this case renderware that are compartmental:things can be plugged in and pulled out easily and as needed.

That is what EA does. That's the big difference between a software developer and and softare factory. Developers can only put out a small number of games in any given time. Factories churn out multiple games in any given time.

Naturally creativity will happen more at developers, it just gets in the way at the factory. But you still have to realize that at the end of the day, the factory is the one that will probably make all the money.

Pretty good insight into the differences between these companies. I don't think that extensive usage of middleware deals a fatal blow to creativity and innovation. Actually, it can be argued that "factory-like" development procedures actually facilitate those things. Less time spent reinventing the wheel = more time developing innovative gameplay concepts. Look at Ratchet and Clank and GTA:SA.

I mean, what if I had to make a hammer every time I wanted to build furniture? What if it was necessary to manually put together a guitar before actually getting down to making music?

 

[Folder]

Actions speak far louder than blog text and forum posts. The people who complain should put their money where their mouthes are and resign. Most people leave positions that they feel don't offer adequate compensation for their time; if they're not leaving, then it should be assumed that the situation is far more bearable than they're letting on.

They probably also realize that there are many gaming industry hopefuls waiting at the gates who would be enthused to serve as their replacements.

Worst post ever.

 

[Roland Hood]

Every company's HR dept eventually issues a memo like that - survey's, job reclassification, 'bear with us as we make the difficult transition to a leaner organization'...

Same freaks, different circus.

 

[kaching]

EA as slave driver is spong's C-

 

[mashoutposse]

Worst post ever.

Not my fault that you choose to side with some whiny mofos. I bet they don't work as hard as the employees of, say, Polyphony Digital, Rockstar North, or the old AM2.

These guys don't seem to be looking at the big picture. Think about the doors that are opened to you when you can say, "I was part of the 60-man team that created Grand Theft Auto, a series which has generated over $1 billion in revenue over the past three years." If you can market yourself with any sort of competence, you could probably find the backing to eventually start your own studio with that statement alone (and promptly work the back-breaking schedules that you used to complain about). Practically all professionals go through a period where you have to put in your work to prove yourself and build up an impressive resume. I don't know of many successes that complained as loudly as these guys.

 

[Folder]

Not my fault that you choose to side with some whiny mofos. I bet they don't work as hard as the employees of, say, Polyphony Digital, Rockstar North, or the old AM2.

These guys don't seem to be looking at the big picture. Think about the doors that are opened to you when you can say, "I was part of the 60-man team that created Grand Theft Auto, a series which has generated over $1 billion in revenue over the past three years." If you can market yourself with any sort of competence, you could probably find the backing to eventually start your own studio with that statement alone (and promptly work the back-breaking schedules that you used to complain about). Practically all professionals go through a period where you have to put in your work to prove yourself and build up an impressive resume. I don't know of many successes that complained as loudly as these guys.

Worst retort ever.

 

[mashoutposse]

Worst retort ever.

Would-be investment bankers have to spend years as financial analysts working ridiculous hours with intense pressure almost the entire time. Medical students have to suffer through 4-5 years of residency before they become doctors, where staying at the hospital for 24-36 hours straight isn't outside of the realm of possibility.

The ones that stick it out develop lucrative careers and businesses, while the ones who complain usually end up burnt out and move on to other things (oft times a downgrade). While the end goal is certainly less defined in the gaming industry, that doesn't mean that their futures don't hold a comparable amount of potential.

And I still contend that EA employees on average may not even be the hardest working in the industry.

 

[garrickk]

Would-be investment bankers have to spend years as financial analysts working ridiculous hours with intense pressure almost the entire time. Medical students have to suffer through 4-5 years of residency before they become doctors, where staying at the hospital for 24-36 hours straight isn't outside of the realm of possibility.

The ones that stick it out develop lucrative careers and businesses, while the ones who complain usually end up burnt out and move on to other things (oft times a downgrade). While the end goal is certainly less defined in the gaming industry, that doesn't mean that their futures don't hold a comparable amount of potential.

And I still contend that EA employees on average may not even be the hardest working in the industry.

Well, the over worked medical students end up needlessly killing THOUSANDS of people a year due to exhaustion. And yes, many industries usually have an "apprentice" stage where you get shat on.

However, people should always feel obligated to bitch about their job. Whine, complain, angle for a promotion, try and take more money from your bosses christmas bonus. That's part of your job. Unionize when you can, then watch the Union turn on the employees and company. This is work! Keep complaining about it or the theives at the top will run away with everything.

 

[Azih]

Demonising the workers, nice one mashout, EA devs should be HONOURED to work 18 hour days, crunching for months on end, those lazy slacker bastards.