Remember that thread that said it was a nightmare and they completely fucked their employees? http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/fortune/0705/gallery.great_for_new_grads.fortune/2.html
Obviously they didn't interview any of the grads that got the jobs. :lol: I thought they were going to end the piece "Be prepared for a challenge, though: Last year, 5,000 college graduates applied, but only 200 were hired and only 150 of them quit in the first year."
Well, I always thought that thread had at least a lot of bullshit in it, if not the whole thing. For one, why would you work for a game developer if you can't handle deadlines & crunch time? Two... if it was easy, anyone could do it.
It's easy to do when young but difficult when older (luckly i'm still in the young phase so I can advance my career more). Also sometimes game companies really do treat their staff like slave labor. The previous game studio I worked for atm is going from project to project with no down time between (this is a small studio so everybody esentualy is all working on the same game) projects and all are 6months or less. :S Haha Since I left I have not accomplished anything at my current job (first game was canned and current ends in late 08). Yet if I stayed I would be well on my way to finishing up a second project (counting since september of last year).
You seem to be on the "if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen" side of the argument. But remember that even the most hellish of employers still have to obey the employment laws of the country/state where they operate. Companies such as EA didn't.
EA offers great benefits, a good salary and 9-5 hours the majority of the time. They also have a number of studios with good potential for promotion. It's probably not as fun working for them as some indie dev, but at least your job is secure and you're pretty much certain your project won't get cancelled mid way through. I remember reading a news story about dodgy work practices but I don't think that is the norm. From what I have heard, crunch is not as bad in EA because they expand teams as the project develops and are fairly dynamic with work allocation. This is what one of my uni buddies told me, anyway. It's got to be better than working for a Japanese dev at least :lol:
I recently got the opportunity to ask a guy high up in the audio department of a UK EA studio how bad his department suffered from crunch... he said straight up that it got bad, but that's how things are, and it's generally not too bad for too long. Given the EA horror stories of a few years back I was kind of interested to hear that, although he did say that things were different between countries, so those old reports may not have been entirely fabricated, even if that's not how things are now.
Non-game companies do too. What laws did EA break? You are right about my stance though. Having spent most of my corporate life in Japan (only two years I wasn't was working for the company I worked for in Japan), I have grown immune to long work days. I definitely work far fewer hours than I did, but I almost always do some work (at least catch up on emails) at night before going to bed, and am always available unless I'm on a plane or underwater. My job also features pressure you would never experience at EA, so that part of the complaint doesn't really phase me. I still don't see how a crunch in a game company is different than that in another company? All companies get audited. Everyone generally has to drop what they're doing and suck the auditors dicks on demand when this happens. Nobody's ever had an emergency project come up? Think about how shitty it must be to be a CPA in March & April. I think this just hits close to home on an interweb forum b/c some of the greener posters have aspirations for working in a game company, and think it will be all fun. Sorry folks, if the word 'corporate' or any offshoot of it is in the name of your employer, chances are it won't be fun... or easy.
For the most part, they misclassified some employees as "salaried" (fixed pay, regardless of hours) instead of "hourly" so that they would not have to pay overtime wages. There are certain criteria which must be met in order to actually classify an employee as salaried though.
Its not just game companies. Adult life is hard - plain and simple. Living on your own, having bills, debt, etc. just sucks. I'm 23 and I'm starting to get into all of it. I'm living on my own and going back to school. A few years ago I was living with my parents and life was easier. I didn't have to pay bills, I could spend the money I got from work. I had it easy, until now. Now I have credit card debt, rent, and bills to pay. I also got back into school, so I'm not working as much and will have to have school loans to supplement some of my living expenses. But I'm going thru all of this for a better a life in the future. I'm going back to school to study Civil Engineering. It pays very good, if you're very good at it. I've learned that you have to know what you're getting into. Don't jump off the deep end is how the saying goes. I was going into game development but after finding out how its generally like working in such a volatile industry I realized it isn't for me. I like games, but not that much to where I'll work 60+hours a week for most of the year and making less than $50,000 a year. That's just not me. There are other careers/jobs out there that are like that. It all depends on the person. My buddy is a level designer and works almost 12hour everyday for 5 days and sometimes 6days out of the week. he's ok with it for now but I'm sure it will start bothering him if he keeps on working such a schedule as he gets older and if he wants to have a social life (ie girlfriend/wife & kids). CPAs may get slammed with clients 2 months out of the year, but that is where they make most of their money for the whole year. That's why you put up with it. It's the only way to make a living, by working your ass off most of the time of your life. And if you do it right you during that part of your life you can come out of it with a nice retirement . Again, life is tough. But if you have what it takes you'll succeed in it. EA's recent problem in treating its employees is minuscule compared to Walmart. I hear MANY horror stories about people working overtime and their manager simply erasing their time from the payroll. That's why I'll never work at Walmart.
Just so you know: engineering (civil included) projects are no better than game projects. If you want to see a definition of hell, look up the Wilson Bridge project in DC.
Yeh, I know. Anything construction is exactly like game development. It has its ups and downs and hellish moments. Whats different about it though is that it tends to be more boring than game development as far as the designing of the building components go. Imaging spending a whole week designing nothing but steel beams over and over again. What's so exciting about doing the layout of a parking lot or drainage systems compared to designing an FPS?
To this, I can only say "welcome to the real world". Living in a country that has this law but never enforces it, I am completely numb to it...especially for people straight out of school. I know that's shitty, but it's just the way I am. My first "real" jobs were 60 hours a week easily. My next job which was good was 50. I work for the same company. Technically I'm around that much, but I get to goof off the last few hours a day if it's not busy. Again, as I've said in the other "EA sucks" thread, if you don't like your job, get a new one. Lots of people died so you could.
<-- Studied architecture and civil engineering in high school and briefly in college. I still like the engineering side of things even though eventually switched to computer science. There is something satisfying about solving a complex problem. :dance:
If people like macwest had their way humans would no longer be born, they'd be mass produced on a production line! :lol:
The problem with EA and many studios is not that "life is hard", It's purely down to not fully compensating employies correctly. Very few game studios actualy compensate for overtime either with extra time off or pay compensation. Sure we can all say "buck up" but sometimes just going to make it worse. For the record, Ubi (a rather large company) actualy does treat me better then the previous studio I worked for. I've barely done any overtime since i've been there but most of that is being on the start of projects with long dev cycles. The previous place I worked I did numerous 24+ hour shifts (be in at noon on a sunday and leave monday night at 5-7pm) including working 6-8 hours on saturday and staying 2-4 hours more every day durring the week. That was actualy the norm for my first year but hey when you need a door into the industry, you're willing to put up with alot. Oh I forget to mention that I also got no bonus, extra pay or extra vacation days even after doing all that? The only time I got something extra was on one project I agreed to do the work of 2 coders to get a cheap ps1 game done in a 4 month span (I got double my pay for the period but did not get the bonus till about 6 months later since the game went into limbo over the publisher going bankrupt). Not everybody gets it as bad as I do but I'm also far from being alone in doing this much overtime in the industry (actualy a few coders at my previous employer have been doing this alot recently). madhatter256, After a while, Coding a game is alot like building another parking lot. By the end of a project you've played the game so many times and in so many ways that it just becomes torture. Not to mention rewriting a ps1 memory card system for the Nth time. :S Also while your now 23 and just getting into the big wide world. I'm 24 and a 5 year industry coder. I knew what I was getting into and I dont regret it. I actualy am glad to have gone though what I have because it's made me a far better coder as a result. Yet that does not mean working in the industry is all sunshine and farts (to steal from family guy). *note, im not grumpy. I'm just giving my experience.* Oh words of wisdom, Never give your project manager your cell phone number. You'll live to regret it when you start getting calls at 11pm at night to return to work. Oh god that was never fun. Returning to work to fix someone's else bug that takes 15-30 mins to fix yet having to stay about 3-4 hours because you got to verify it's really fixed and no other critical issues are still outstanding. Always for some reason the problem can never wait till the morning, it always ends up having to be fixed that night. *cries*
