A College Guide to EA 464
DesiVideoGamer writes "With all the recent news about EA, one of the professors at Carnegie Mellon University is giving a talk about EA after he visited the company for a semester. He also published a white paper about EA and what college grads should know about it. (pdf format) The paper talks a lot about the culture at EA and could indirectly explain the previous stories covered by Slashdot."
Hmm EA has been getting alot of bad press here (Score:2, Insightful)
EA Sports... (Score:4, Insightful)
So much bad press about EA (Score:2, Insightful)
We're talking about Electronic Arts, right? (Score:2, Insightful)
On the other hand, it may be a decent business-oriented class to follow a relatively successful biz to see the things they got right/wrong along the way. Like a case-study in business...and people can even choose which ones they wish to follow with courses in EA, IBM, MS, GOOG, and maybe one that Aaron Spelling dude.
Yeah...that'll work... (Score:3, Insightful)
The word that's missing in the account (Score:2, Insightful)
I can see why EA approved this document... (Score:5, Insightful)
"We grind employees until they quit" becomes "mediocre performers are not tolerated".
"We force everyone to work insane hours whether they like it or not" becomes "employees work long hours because they love the company".
Re:I don't get the hostility (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps this is how it SHOULD work. However, many people are martyred without result. Companies still have poor work environments -- they just go through the slave traders more. Does it hurt their pockets having to shuffle through employees? Sure. Does it hurt enough to admit they're wrong? I'm assuming you don't make it that far up in the corporate ladder without a boatload of pride...and it's a giant pill to swallow to admit being wrong.
Capitalism (read GREED) has its place...but the well-being of its peons are rarely in its best interest.
I thought I'd surf at -1... (Score:4, Insightful)
1, they are huge and run a tight ship
2. most people there are pretty enthused about their job
and 3. EA fucking approved the goddamn article.
Read, you motherfuckers, READ!!!!!!!!!
Re:I don't get the hostility (Score:1, Insightful)
Chalk it up to the market.
Re:I don't get the hostility (Score:1, Insightful)
It's simple. DO NOT WORK FOR A COMPANY THAT TREATS YOU LIKE SHIT.
If you are unemployed because of it, that's your choice. EA isn't obligated to hire someone. If they didnt exist the job wouldnt be there in the first place.
If there is someone willing to work in the shitty conditions
It's called choice, freedom etc. If EA was deliberately lying or preventing employees from leaving against their will
Re:I can see why EA approved this document... (Score:2, Insightful)
Join a Union! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, that is how capitalism works, and poor treatment of workers shouldn't be tolerated (by the consumers, or by the workers). But if you need a job, and jobs are hard to find, what do you do?
Back in the Old Days(TM) there were groups called Unions, groups of workers who decided they had been fucked by the bosses for long enough, and it was time to get some fairness.
People in my country fought [ballarat.com] and died [netconnect.com.au] for a fair go in the workplace, but recent government policy involving workplace agreements and enterprise bargaining have severely damaged the rights of workers.
If they are treating their employees poorly who cares?
That kind of attitude is exactly why those in power are able to continue exploiting people in the third world (and the second, and the first).
You don't get the hostility? (Score:4, Insightful)
Mmmmmm....libertarianism at it's best.
How about the fact that they are breaking the law by improperly classifying employees as exempt and therefore not paying them their due overtime? Is that acceptable to you?
How about the fact that this is getting so much press because in the free market - people also have free speech. No one's talking about burning down EA's headquarters - but we are talking about taking action. Boycotts, Letters to editors, Letters to company chiefs. It always pains me to see someone give the free market argument yet completely miss the free speech one.
You say if the company is treating their employees poorly that their employees should act. It appears that that's exactly what's happening.
Hmm, what a coincidence (Score:1, Insightful)
Hmm, in wake of the recent outburst of events, I think the motivation for this move is clear.
That prof will be really happy to know how they used him (as naive as he appears) to lure people into their company to fuel their venture for more profit by cutting the amount of experienced workers who would actually have a leaverage on them.
Why EA? (Score:5, Insightful)
- dshaw
ea sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
I am so sick of hearing "Challenge Everything" when I start up B3. They only thing they know how to challenge is the paradigm of game making. And by challenge, I mean ruin.
When I read stories about how they treat their employees, who are fellow software developers, it makes me glad I am "evaluating" Burnout 3.
Re:I don't get the hostility (Score:3, Insightful)
How is you new job in burger-flipping going for you? I understand you had no trouble switching from salting the fries at that chicken joint.
Re:I don't get the hostility (Score:4, Insightful)
However, there are cases where the customers do care, and in those cases, I imagine that the customers want both a good product and the people who make it to be treated well. They don't care if EA makes money or not. I know that an individual company's profits or lack thereof don't concern me at all (sure in the larger sense, in which I want a healthy economy and game industry they do, but on an individual company by company level they don't).
I don't really care if a company is making money or not. I want a good product at a low price, and I want it made under decent working conditions. Those things are hard to do and still stay in buisness? Too bad. No one ever said the demands of a customer are reasonable.
I mean, on a flamebait level I could say something like, "Boy those Nazis sure make good stuff. I heard they kill lots of people, but hey, that's not my concern," but that comparison does bring up the old point of "Do the ends justify the means?" Everyone has their own line that they think company practices may or may not cross and it is up to each of us to decide where that line is.
Re:I don't get the hostility (Score:5, Insightful)
Somehow, I think many Slashdotters would love the policies of Margaret Thatcher [wikipedia.org]. Hell, she's not quite dead yet, and she's newly widowed - why not marry the wizened old bastard?
Electronic Arts, like all other companies, is comprised of people. If their creation can behave in an utterly inhumane manner, operating only to increase some arbitrary numbers in a computer system somewhere, then what's the point? Why bother with any niceties whatsoever, as nobody else seems to do? Kick the employees when they're down, exploit their enthusiasm and just hope the latest product gets finished before they burn out and find some sort of work elsewhere. And, if they start demanding more reasonable hours, or even paid overtime, then just sack them or outsource the work to some even more badly exploited sods the other side of the world...
Screw the welfare state. If workers want to live, they should work for it. Screw free healthcare, screw any kind of regulation on how employers treat their employees - if they're so unhappy, they can go elsewhere, even if conditions there are just as bad - all brought on by the unending, mindless competition and lower costs demanded by the holy, almighty dollar. No need to be decent people, no need for random acts of kindness - after all, there's no such thing as society. All that counts is money.
Why should a company treat its employees well? Because it is an institution created by human beings.
Re:I don't get the hostility (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyways, the reason this is an issue is EA is taking advantage of the fact that its employees have nowhere else to go, and are making it harder for them to find other jobs. EA realizes that for a lot of its employees it's either EA's way or no paycheck. This in and of itself is not neccessarily bad. There are many job markets that are saturated. The bad part is EA is exploiting this situation to treat the employees very poorly.
Capitalism is not perfect. The human factor remains, and treating people like slaves to make a few extra dollars is not ethical and in many situations not legal. It is our job as a society for all our sakes to make sure this kind of abuse does not happen.
Re:I don't get the hostility (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe you don't give a flying fuck as you push your cart around in Wal-Mart, but as someone who works in a technical industry I find this highly interesting. The labor market for educated and technical people is in the process of a major deterioration in this country and this is just one more symptom of America's slide toward the kind of economic system that existed in India- where you have a few rich people, and everyone else is poor and destitute. (They have a small middle class now, which grows at the expense of our own.)
If the game is good I'll buy it, if it's not I won't.
If the game is good I'll buy it, unless I see it was made by Electronic Arts. The leverage afforded to workers is mostly gone, and the only force affecting EA anymore is the power of consumers- which is largely ineffective anyway.
If the employees are treated poorly they should quit. That's how capitalism works, if all the good employees quit, or start demanding more and more money to make up for the poor working environment then EA will see that it's policies are not best for the bottom line and they will change.
Take off your rose colored glasses. Capitalism works that way only under certain conditions which are largely disappearing- labor and management need to have equity. If one gets an upper hand this idealized scenario breaks down.
Now that several billion desperate people have been dumped into our labor markets (added to the millions of geeks who have always wanted to program games), if the employees of EA quit for being worked 80 hours a week for X dollars they'll be replaced instantly by more desperate geeks worked 120 hours a week for X>>1 dollars. Or better yet, Chinese prisoners. It's getting to the point where almost everything I have was made in a Chinese prison.
Who's telling the truth? (Score:5, Insightful)
Randy Pausch [cmu.edu]:
Who's telling the truth? You decide.
Personally, I think Randy Pausch is a putz, and I'm speaking both as someone who has seen him lecture at CMU and who has friends that were advised by him.
-c
Re:I don't get the hostility (Score:5, Insightful)
Regular life in the real world disagrees with you. EA does have an ethical imperative to treat their workers fairly, humanely, and to put the lives of the employees before business. Only libertarians and high school juniors think that capitalism means, "Do whatever it takes to get money, and let the course of business take its toll." (Libertarianism is, by the way, the carrying out of fascism by other means; the one thing libertarianism precisely does not grant is liberty.)
The employees shouldn't have to quit if they're being if they're being treated poorly; government agencies, unions, and consumers should take proactive measures to stop the poor treatment. That may involve monetary fines, forced arbitration between an employees' union and the company, and if warranted criminal proceedings being taken against the company's officers. No, that isn't very laissez faire, but neither is real life.
This paper is a concentrated piece of PR (Score:5, Insightful)
The guy wants to teach a master-level course tailored so that the graduates can go and apply for EA positions right away. So, this guy goes to EA and 'studies' its management culture for half a year. Then he writes a paper how tough-but-fair the company is.
If there is something fishy you will not learn it from this propaganda - quite opposite, it would make you think that the *real* reason why you end up hating your rude slave-driving overlords is that you are not talented and focused enough to measure up to the highest standards of this "ruthless meritocracy".
The value of this white paper should increase - if they print it on a soft foldable sheets.
Re:EA's shitty games (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don't get the hostility (Score:3, Insightful)
Please, comparing having to work long hours in front of a computer screen in order to get a large paycheck to forced labor in the form of slavery is just absurd and insulting. You don't like your job, there is nothing stopping you from quitting and looking for a new job. That is not the case with slavery. Learn to appreciate the freedoms you have instead of whining everytime your boss asks you to sit at a desk for a few hours.
An overpaid job requiring short hours and virtually no manual labor is not a right of yours.
Too much complaining and it's off to India (Score:5, Insightful)
The only other way for them to start treating their employees in a reasonable manner is to start buying their competitors products and just stick to getting EA games off of Usenet.
Eventually, there will be enough of the old EA gurus around to pool together resources and start their own game company, then beat EA at their own game (pun intended).
Re:I feel that the professor let his students down (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Factually False... (Score:4, Insightful)
Saw it coming in the eighties (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I've got enough Karma for now (Score:4, Insightful)
People who think they can hurt software companies through piracy are stupid. All you're doing is expanding their marketshare for them, increasing the popularity of their product, and that increases their sales and profits.
Use your head. Boycott, don't pirate.
What I have suspected.. (Score:1, Insightful)
That sounds about right. Of the few games I've installed from EA, they have been riddled with bugs. And this idea of "unlikely to be seen by typical consumers" is totally bogus. It seems more like it's likely to be tolerated by consumers. sad.
Re:They still get money.... (Score:2, Insightful)
You look like nothing more than an opportunistic thief if you're willing to break the law and then justify it by saying "I'm trying to stick it to the man! If Blizzard wasn't such a bastard company, I would've bought the game instead of pirating it!" The bottom line is that if you don't want to support a company whose practices you don't approve of, don't use their products (which means, gasp, you have to suffer a bit because you don't have them).
I know I'm not going to be buying another EA game soon, but it's not hard for me because I don't like sports games and I've got more than enough versions of SimCity kicking around.
Re:I'm surprised no one has said this yet (Score:1, Insightful)
Interestingly enough, the "conclusion" he draws (i.e. his specific recommendations) are all part of the way his own Entertainment Technology Center works. Why did he waste a whole semester at EA if his recommendations are to do what his center does already? Couldn't he have written this document without it?
Grads are "malleable" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:EA Sports... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmm EA has been getting alot of bad press here (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll still agree that the perponderance of the evidence is against EA, and their lack of response is troubling. But notice that IBM hasn't been vocal in it's responses to SCO rants. So that's not proof.
The heart of the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
"Probably the most surprising thing I learned about EA is that its leaders, including its creative leaders, describe it as a packaged goods company like Proctor and Gamble or Nabisco."
This, in a nutshell, with extreme eloquence sums up EA's fundamental problem...and from the sounds of things it is very fundamental to them. There is no possible way that a company with this mentality can hope to run an MMORPG in particular...because a boxed product is the direct opposite of what an MMORPG is. A more appropriate conventional metaphor, or one which boomers would at least be more comfortable with, would be to think of an MMORPG as a virtual theme park or wildlife reserve. Expansion packs therefore, rather than being end products in themselves, should be thought of as visitor passes to previously roped off/undeveloped areas of the park. This analogy actually works very well with UO in particular...as using a client older than Age of Shadows for example after AoS's release meant that a person could not go to Malas or Ilshenar, for example.
If EA want to really break into the MMORPG space, (and they haven't substantially yet; UO is going downhill at a rate of knots, and The Sims Online is still well below target population) they're going to have to stop thinking purely in terms of being box-sellers, and start thinking in terms of being virtual park rangers. (or in the case of The Sims Online, even a virtual government)
An MMORPG is NOT something you can put in a box, throw out the door, and then heave a big sigh of relief because it's finished. They need continual maintenance, and if they are to do well they need continual maintenance by someone who actually has a clue about how to do it.
Even for single-player games however, this type of thinking is creatively barren and disastrously toxic. It might work fine for the annual regurgitation of a football game, (like Madden, and what Unreal Tournament sadly seems to be in danger of becoming) since football does not fundamentally change over time, (although on that score UT has absolutely no excuse) but with virtually any other genre, all it will ensure is that rehashes and regurgitations of the same tired old formulas get trucked out the door every year...Innovation comes to a standstill. I truly hope that for EA's sake they have in mind to change this philosophy, because they're signing their own commercial death certificate if they don't. Sure, it makes good commercial sense to go with the tried and true, (at least for maybe the first couple of sequels as far as games go) but there should I think be a dual approach. While you're assuring that the bills get paid today, you should also be focussed on staking out as much new creative territory as possible...because that's the only way to make sure that the bills also get paid tomorrow. Trying to get EA to put an emphasis on creativity is futile...They're a company, and their primary interest is to generate as high a margin as possible. But I wish we could encourage the company somehow to at least be halfway intelligent and forward-thinking when it comes to making money as well.
A lot of people seem to be missing something... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a CS grad, and most of my fellow CS grads, including myself, originally got into progtamming / CS because we wanted to do games.
Along the way there, EVERYONE knew that game developers worked long hours for little pay. Most of my friends then chose to follow another path. I wound up going into the Power Industry.
Even in spite of all the bad press EA has been getting (even though it's deserved), there are still tens of thousands of people who would sell their souls to work on an EA game.
No, that does not excuse the employee's mistreatment entirely. But you can't ignore that fact.
I've got one friend who ended up going into the Games Industry anyways, in spite of all the stories. Every once in a while we'll all get together and play the latest game he worked on. He gets bragging rights that none of the rest of us do. Everyone else writes business or industrial Apps. Nobody WE talk to gives a squirt of piss to see our latest creations, but everyone can't wait to see the newest game he churned out.
So in the end, I don't think it's fair to look at EA as this huge monolithic beast that's 100% evil, and all the poor poor employees as 100% victims. They knew what they were getting into when they applied (or at least they SHOULD'VE done their research). And now they're just getting what they should've expected.
Not everyone gets paid a huge salary and mega-benefits to work their dream jobs.
Re:I'm surprised no one has said this yet (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'm surprised no one has said this yet (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to defend the professor, but this statement can be said about virtually ANY "successful" (however you want to term this) professor with graduate students. Graduate students tend to be driven already. Couple that with a driven professor....
I have also noticed there is a difference (even with the same prof.) depending upon whether the student is a MS or PhD student. Of course, it is hardly a surprise when you encounter these professors-their reputations as "slave-drivers" are NOT hidden. It is only a surprise to the student when they find that, yes, they are no different than anyone else-if everyone else worked like a dog for him/her, you will too. Remember, professors look out for themselves first, their students second, just like everywhere else (employer/employee relationship at work for instance)-it just so happens that many times those interests tend to be the same.
I am just amazed at the students (who should have known better/claimed to know better) who get screwed or feel they get screwed in this arrangement. The same ones who had ample warning that it was going to happen but did it anyway. My advisor wasn't a "slave-driver" but I had problems in other ways and I dealt with them-no point in whining about it (excessively)-do something about it, do something to prevent it in the future, or just shut up. The same thing applies in work environments.
"the department even has an official "reasonable person policy""
Question: Is it enforced? Or more importantly, do those with no power (grad students) feel they can take complaints to the department and something will happen AND they won't get screwed. If not, then the department really has no policy. My department had lots of rules but we all knew which ones were enforced (depended greatly on your advisor) and which weren't (hint: does it help the department). The only real recourse would have been to burn the department chair and graduate chair-sure you would have won the battle but lost the war.... Otherwise you play the game and imply you might, and document in case you HAVE to nuke the bridges....
"He's not your average academic...."
Oh, I would say he is VERY close to your average academic. Maybe not in funding or OUTWARD demeanor but you don't become tenured faculty without having a rather large ego. Some are just better at concealing it.
Re:Who's telling the truth? (Score:2, Insightful)
That's not how Silicon Valley became what it is (Score:1, Insightful)
Unions were for groups of workers who, traditionally, were not very well educated and could not easily be expected to develop their own businesses, and were in jobs that involved manual labor that required very little skill.
...(you guessed it) Electronic Arts.
On the other hand, at technology companies that create things, the best thing to do is grab a group of colleagues and start your own business.
That is why Silicon Valley became successful.
In the 1950's, the co-inventor of the transistor, William Shockley, and winner of the Nobel Prize, was dissatisfied with his employer, Bell Labs in New Jersey, and headed back to his alma mater, Caltech (formally, "California Institute of Technology" in southern California), where he got in touch with a Caltech grad-school alumnus named Arnold Beckman, who had founded a measurement company called Beckman Instruments, and who offered to fund Shockley's future research and development in commercializing the transistor. (Because Bell Labs was a public monopoly, it may have been prevented from legally commercializing its work, just as another Bell Labs invention, Unix (TM) could not be commercialized. But that's just a guess). Because Shockley's aging mother was living in Palo Alto (in northern California), Shockely decided to move there, and Shockley Semicondutor Laboratory, a divison of Beckman Instruments, was founded.
Shockley personally recruited a bunch of research scientists to help him, but he proved to be a terrible manager, eccentric, and erratic. In other words, an a--h-le. He pissed them off so much that eight of them decided to leave and start their own company. These 8 men (derided later by Shockley as the "Traitorous Eight") sought venture capital funding from Sherman Fairchild, an East Coast guy who had founded a camera and instrumentation company.
Thus Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory begat Fairchild Semiconductor with 8 disgruntled employees.
But not all was happy at that company either. Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, two of the Traitorous Eight, would leave to form a little company called Intel. Jerry Sanders and other disgruntled employees would also leave Fairchild Semiconductor to forma a little company called Advanced Micro Devices.
After Intel successfully IPO'd, one of its employees, Mike Markkula, became quite wealthy in the process. He decided to pour money into a little project produced by two guys named Steve (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak) seeking funding, and thus created a little company called Apple Computer.
Another Traitorous Eight alumnus, Eugene Kleiner, left Fairchild to create a venture capital company which provided initial funding for about 300 technology firms -- little companies like AOL, Sun Microsystems (creators of Java) , Amazon.com (booksellers), and
There are hundreds of companies, if not thousands, that have spawned off in the Silicon Valley in this way, tracing their original ancestral roots to Arnold Beckman and William Shockely. Why? Because technical employees are smart enough to realize that their intellectual capital produces a company's success, and if the company doesn't like them, those employees can become the compeition. They don't need unions.
In many cases, unions are the antithesis of innovation and subject to abuse and corruption.
In California, the Longshoremans Union (which controls the unloading and loading of ship along the entire California Coast) refuses to modernize a
Re:A lot of people seem to be missing something... (Score:4, Insightful)