EA's longs hours

I guess that's the burden of putting out sports titles every year. INFERIOR sports titles compared to Sega's offerings.

So, Loren, was it this bad at LucasArts?

I'm going to laugh if, in the end, all that goes for naught simply because they've been undercut accross the board by ESPN's $20 games.

One of my good high school friends used to work for one of these big game firms and has since left for another big game firm where he's now working on one of these interactive MMORPG things. I have him out every year to talk about "real-world" software engineering to my sophomore-level CS course. He has all kinds of evil stories about crunch mode. ("How do you get to sleep after you've been up all day and you're too hyped up to actually sleep? Hard liquor!") Now that he works on a "service" instead of a "product", he finds that everybody is far more reasonable about the time it takes to get work done. Most of what they do is maintenance, and new features can be rolled in when they're good and ready without compromising all the (hopefully) happy users.

All of this reminds me of Steve McConnell's book Rapid Development (which I just read thanks to recommendataions here). One of his basic premises is that expecting overtime to produce faster results is usually the problem rather than a soltuion. I know personally that when coding I become less productive as the day progresses. When I'm fresh in the morning I produce tighter code at a rate probbably four times that of what I do at the end of the day. The only times overtime has ever been useful to me is when I've gotten so excited that I can't leave until I've gotten something finished. Even then, I'd probably have done better to walk away and finish the next day. But self-imposed overtime is far superior to manager imposed (or schedule imposed) over time.

My new employer is just across the street from EA. I pointed out the rather superior offices, squash courts, volleyball courts etc to be shot down by a dozen horrific tales of EA servitude. That's when I realised the tall chainlink fence around the whole campus wasn't to keep people out..

Rob

Rousing, continuous round of applause.

My sentiments exactly. I know of a couple of people here who will frown a little when I say this, however - but they are motivated people who enjoy doing what they do.

It's not just the gaming industry - it's software development in general. It's something I've had to put up with for years - the "unspoken rule" culture. I was always pushed into longer and longer days, getting diminishing returns, when all I wanted to do was go home and see my kids.

I cannot understand how a 60 to 90 hour working week (even when it's critical) can do any good whatsoever. If you are tired and unable to think or make clear decisions, you make mistakes which have to be re-worked later on, at high cost to yourself or someone else. It's totally self-defeating - no wonder the greater majority of software on this planet is such utter S**** (capitalised).

To me, long hours show a defective management culture without an ability to spend sufficient money (on manpower or tools), or plan, or utilise resources effectively. The best solution is, leave the company as rapidly as you are able and ignore the jibes. Otherwise, YOU might end up divorced without your kids.

I hate all that software development has become in the last few years. How can software engineering continue as a discipline if your end product re-coups no income? I know of no other product that is simply given away free (gross oversimplification). I am no longer motivated by, or interested in, software development. It's no longer an interesting journey - it's tilling at your oar in the slave's galley to the crack of the whip and the monotonous cry of "Deadline! Deadline!" in your ears. What a way to live.

Shoot all the f***** managers, I say.

I agree with most of the sentiment here, to the extent that asking someone who's on a straight salary with no overtime to work 60-80 hour work weeks is a despicable action. However, it takes two to tango, and the employee who chooses to take that abuse is also to blame. It's not like there is a dearth of jobs in the IT field, so I don't think EA really has their employees over a barrel. There are surely exceptions, and life situations that make leaving a job difficult, but if it's really a "sweatshop" as people say, the door opens both ways, and I have to place at least part of the blame on the poor sucker who decides to give up their freedom instead of finding a better job.

Well, I don't like employees who leave so precisely at 5:00 that you can set your watch by them (I had one like that once), but this is ridicoluos!

A few questions:

Is the situation in the industry that bad that people have to put up with this? I think that a nice little walk-out two weeks before the title release date would do miracles. Or am I wrong?

I gather this practice is not legal. So, where is department of labor or whatever is that called? Where are class actions?

Why do management drones do this? Is that some weird power trip? I mean, they cannot be so incompetent not to realize that they are getting perhaps 50% productivity (or worse) compared to that of a motivated team that works reasonable schedule. 80 or 90 hour weeks work for perhaps a month or so, and then only if people are extremely motivated.
(I remember deploying a complex piece of SW that was not tested thoroughly enough. My small team worked around the clock fixing things on the fly, correcting errors on live data, using bubblegum and duct tape to keep the system together, handholding clients empoyees, over 100 hours a week, for perhaps six weeks, among the worst in my life. Had we not managed to iron out all the major wrinkles in that time, we would simply had failed: towad the end out efficiency fell precipitously; we could not have continued for another month like that.)

The movie industry changed with the advent of unions. Wonder how long before the software industry (or heck, even the game software industry) unionizes like the movie industry did?

... but no matter what I hear about movie unionisation, what I also hear and read (in tomes as definitive as Cinefex) is that special effect post-production is also going the same way as software. Animators are having to put in similar hours, on a contract basis, for relatively short PP times. Apparently, PP is now becoming "Burn Out City" for PP and FX artists.

The situation that Bonzi has described has happened to me one too many times in the last 23 years. Being rung on Christmas morning by my boss around 6AM with a hysterical request to log into a client's site and get it running again was about the absolute pits (this, after having given up three consecutive booked holidays prior).

It is to do with the preception that software, and it associated products (like SFX) are "vapour". "immaterial" and apparently formless - hence, it must cost nothing to produce.

Oh, boys, but this is where the b***** managers are wrong - it costs immense concentration, and thought. It costs physical effort and endurance. It costs in tiredness and sickness. It costs in RSI and eyestrain.

But it doesn't cost the managers, does it? They don't have to stay late and miss their families - in fact, I cannot recall a single manager ever hanging around later than their normal departure time, while the galley slaves continue with an undue (and unrewarded) sense of duty and loyalty to the company "paying" them, to stay back and work on and on to just get the job done so they can allow themselves to maintain some sense of pride in their work.

No, it's a problem in the culture of software management (it's rubbish) and planning (there isn't any), coupled to a culture (bacterial ) that tries to reduce as far as possible the primary cost of software development - salaries - to a bare minimum. How long are the poor sap engineers going to put up with this before someone snaps? Want an indicator? How about the hardware engineer who took hostages at gunpoint in the Philips company cantine with a dummy pistol, complaining about - get this - the way management had interfered in the choice of a processing algorithm in a DSP used in a Philips widescreen television performing optical distortion compensation? He got shot in the head by the Police, of course. The ultimate overtime payment, eh?

Thump, thump, thump, thump LASH "Deadlines! Deadlines!"

Slave on, boys. Rome is still a few million oar strokes away.

True. However, I have seen largish local SW dev groups (mostly owned or on contract by European industrial giants - telecom, automotive, industrial electronics) with very '9 to 5' attitude. They did not particularly reward exellence (except that bright guys had tons of free time to pursue whatever they can while in the office), took forever to do anything, and were generally quite boring place to work. Many of them don't exist any more. That is not good, either.

I cannot blame anyone for the situation I described before, as it was in good part of my own making. I was project leader from our side. I failed to establish firm mechanism for requirements management (we said 'will do' to everything), rigid releases (all too often it was 'absolutely necessary to squize this or that in the current version'), and could generaly not say 'no' to the customer, including in regard to deployment schedule. Ah, well... one learns till one dies.

Professional services firms are remarkably similar - I am contracted to work a 37.5 hour week, but that goes up to 80 pretty regularyly, and sometimes 110 or more. We get no overtime pay, but it ain't too bad. Sometimes I get pretty tired if the kids wake up at night but I still figure it's a way better job than mst people have. (And the basic pay is pretty good)

I've been a full time software developer for 12 years and I have always averaged around 40 hours a week. I can't think of any year that I worked more then a few weeks over 45 hours. Despite this I am well paid for the profession, have always had ample job opportunities and have a contact list full of people who would gladly work with me again.

There is an unspoken expectation among some in the industry that you will frequently work uncompensated hours. My tactic is that I simply don't. I don't commit to deadlines that require unreasonable hours. If I see something heading that way I try to divert it as soon as possible by changing the deadline or the requirements. Sometimes the situation can't be manipulated and the hours are necessary to complete the job. In this case, I'll do it if it's a rare situation or I'll find another job if it is a pattern. Maybe I've been lucky that I've never had any really terrible situations but I've always been able to restrain my hours - even when people around me felt compelled to work more. It hasn't hurt me professionally that I can tell.

I'm also careful when I take a job what the work environment is like. I ask point blank how many hours a week the developers typically work. I once politely ended an interview when I was told to expect 50+ hour work weeks.

This is why I've always worked on boring IT applications instead of cool games or commercial web sites. While there would be a thrill and satisfaction from working on something in the public eye, the quality of life that often comes with those projects isn't worth it to me.

Same for me.
Work is what I do to live. not the other way round.
I work as much as I have to and leave at 4 every day.
But if its an emergency or cannot be avoided then I will work until its done.
I am working every weekend now until Christmas and have planned to do so, but will have the extra effort appreciated. The important part is that it is seen as extra effort.

I cannot see the point of working so much that I never see my family and friends. No amount of money is worth that.

To put this into perspective, my father worked his a$$ off, he was always at work, seven days a week.
After he retired, he survived 5 years before dying (July 04).
No thanks.

The old rule of thumb in the BBC was that you'd die within a year of retiring. There are quite a worrying number of people I know who fell into that category.

Remind me where you work again Canuck.... and do they have Bay Area offices. heheh.

I asked, awaiting a reply.

edit: here's his response:

----
he can't work weekends
or get free dinner or stay late
that guy is serious
he's literally like a teamster that happens to be an animator
its kind of perfect
big dude
with a gold's gym t-shirt
----

... followed by a conversation about how many wives of EA employees get divorced... heh.

Aarrrgh - my HEART Ka THUMP