For developers, it's not all fun and games

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"They've basically created an atmosphere of fear," said the former employee, who resigned about a month ago because he didn't think he could balance family and work pressures. "Pretty much everyone at EA is scared for their jobs."

An industrywide issue
The IGDA's Della Rocca said work schedules that grind down workers don't make sense. "Happy workers are more productive," he said. "Happy workers are more creative." He said the industry fails to devote enough attention at the beginning of game projects to create prototypes, which can determine what is really fun about a game. Without such initial research, last-minute interventions can be needed that increase the burden on workers, he said.

Games also are becoming more complex, Della Rocca said. A decade ago, five people working for six months to a year with a $100,000 budget could create a game. Now a team might be composed of 200 people working for more than a year on a $25 million budget. But management training to handle these more complicated projects is lacking in the industry, Della Rocca said.

He said EA and other industry players are setting themselves up for potential challenges related to stress-induced health problems and unpaid overtime.

A tangle of rules governs what types of employees are exempt from overtime pay and how it is calculated. In California, an employer must pay premium overtime rates to an employee working more than eight hours in a day or 40 hours in a week--unless he or she qualifies as exempt from overtime pay. Certain administrative, executive and professional employees are exempt. Salaried workers are not necessarily exempt.

The lawsuit against EA, filed in July, claims that EA improperly classified image production employees as exempt from California overtime laws. Those employees, defined to include animators, modelers, texture artists, and lighters, are "assigned to duties inconsistent with exempt status," the suit claims. Among other things, the suit asserts that image production employees "do not customarily and regularly exercise discretion and independent judgment," part of the state's test for determining a "professional" exemption.

EA image production employees "regularly work more than eight hours a day and 40 hours in a workweek," the suit alleges. "They work on weekends and occasionally on national holidays, and are not paid any overtime compensation for such work."

In the wake of the initial blog posting last week, there's been chatter about the possibility of unionizing the game industry.

The IGDA has also joined the debate. On Tuesday, its board of directors published an "open letter" that, among other things, called on game developers to take some responsibility for bad working conditions. "Developers are sometimes just as much to blame for submitting themselves to extreme working conditions, adopting a macho bravado in hopes of 'proving' themselves worthy for the industry," the letter said. "Our own attitudes towards work/life balance and production practices need to change just as much as the attitudes of the 'suits.'"

Straitiff said he's in the midst of balancing his home life and career. He is "getting over the burn-out" of long hours at EA and is enjoying playing with his 20-month-old daughter.

He also muses about returning to a field he's loved since he was a kid. Armed with a Commodore home computer, he wrote his own games. He later took a pay cut to come to EA's Maxis division because he was drawn to the "SimCity" game. But EA was snuffing out his passion with the hours it demanded, he said.

"You shouldn't be able to ask a person to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week for months on end," he said. "You really fry a person working like that."

[audiophilecc]

Can they do that?

I mean forcing hours to these employees, instead of hiring more staff?

[audiophilecc]

Or these people are just whining

I mean firing the staff who can't make a deadline seems reasonable to me. So maybe these people are just whining because they are scared that they can't make the deadline for the next game. i mean committing to a deadlline is important.

yeah right

A job is a means to an end, not the end itself. It is not your life, or it should not be, but something to pay for your life. Too many software companies see their employees as nothing but cattle. That is immoral.

More often then not, deadlines are imposed by bean counters who don't have the first clue about software.

[sunnymix]

ok. i'll give you a deadline

i want you to finish climbing mt. everest by the end of thanksgiving holiday. i'll give you two crew members but no tents. i want you to climb every day for 12 hours. you can't stop for a break. or eat. now take that, and finish that by the end of thanksgiving.

of course you can expect some whining.

[audiophilecc]

People married too early

I think the problem is that people are getting married too early. If they know their workload is that much and cannot commit to both the relationship as a father, a husband and an employee, then they shouldn't have got married so soon. They should always consider everything before deciding on marriage.

Yeah, sterilize them all!

Take the time to read a small handful of the comments on the links in the story, there are many examples of people with 15 to 20 years in the industry still getting this abuse. If these people got their job right out of college (~21 years old), that would mean that even at 35 to 40 they would still not meet your requirement to get married and have children as they are still working the 12+ hours a day, 7 day a week shifts.

Also, one point that CNN's story failed to elaborate on is that most of these people are earning relatively little ($30,000/yr). Hardly a good wage as they are putting in twice the amount of time in jobs that require skill, talent, and determiniation, yet are earning marginally more than the janitor that cleans their cubes. On top of that, they have the cost of living expenses of those costal areas such as LA and San Fransisco.

With that factored in, there really isn't an end and would never be a point in their career to do those useless things like living a life outside of work, having a family, enjoying a holiday, or taking a vacation.

Wow, the point just flew right past you, didn't it?

Sheesh. 80 to 110 hours weeks, burnt-out employees and buggy software. Ya think the problem is relationships? Try again.

I can't even comprehend the logic of a company that expects high-quality work from an employee putting in sixteen hours a day.

Companies that operate this way are so short-sighted it isn't funny. I flat would not own stock in a company that operated in such a manner. Long-term, a disaster waiting to happen.

[chojinjia]

What a bunch of whiners!

Anyone who's ever worked in the videogame, software industry or internet startups knows this is the way things are done. When crunch time comes, you have to get your work done.

You get paid lots of money, good benefits, and sometimes perks like company stock and free food/drinks. If you don't like it, go work in an environment that has lower pay and more flex time. You can't have the high pay and benefits and want to work only 40 a week. Especially when we know there's a lot of surfing the web at work and playing videogames after hours to "de-stress".

The only thing I think the companies should do is institute bonuses. If a game sells really well, then the people on that team should get bonuses. Investment bankers work 80-100+ hours a week, but they get bonuses when the firm reaps profits; it should be the same here...

wake up

whiners? because we expect to be treated decently for our (actually pretty average) salaries? yeah, we "expect" a bit of crunch from a project, but really, 100+ hour weeks? no days off? for 3 months? thats not an expected crunch period, thats slave labour. alot of the things we now take for granted as violating out human rights in the workplace used to be "expected" as normal. off the top of my head, i seem to remember that sending little boys up chimneys, and rubbing salt into their wounds to toughen up their skin so they could climb better, was accepted behaviour not so long ago. it was expected of little boys. does that make it right?

i've worked overtime, i've stayed til 1 in the morning to get my work done, i've made sure the milestone got produced on time... but i only had to do this for maybe a couple of weeks total per project, and i never had to work weekends. the projects were relatively well managed, it didnt require working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.

its a sign of the immaturity of the industry that this kind of exploitation is considered normal, and it doesnt help when people dismiss those with valid complaints as "whiners".

[wg2k1]

hey tough guy

Talk about macho.

Guys like this is one reason why I never tried to get into the video game biz. (The main reason is that I stopped playing video games.)

If you were the kind of guy who worked on cars for a living, you'd be the dude bragging about how many toxic chemicals he's inhaled, and explosions he's witnessed.

[tammyd57]

wah wah wah

I agree, if ya want the big bucks, don't cry about the work.

[mugwump64]

Stone Age Myth

It is an often told myth, that programmers who work longer achieve more. This is simply not true: There are lots of studies, that show that the productivity decreases dramatically, when programmers work for endless hours without a break. So, working overtime will help you in absolutely no way to reach your deadline. The funny thing about this, is the fact, that this "over-clocking" of workers only happens in immature industries like the gaming-industry: Without any sensible, proven metrics to measure the productivity of a worker, the only way an under-competent manager has to show his boss that he did everything to reach the deadline, is make his employees stay longer.

This situation is not likely to change, if management continues to ignore proven facts and the methods for developing software and measuring productivity remain on the poor level they are today.