A good reason not to work at EA.

Quote:Original post by Xentropy

From what I've heard, working at EA involves 16-18 hour crunch days (7 days a week) for the final 3-4 months of every project they ever do. You remember the whole ea_spouse LiveJournal a few years back, right? :)

Yeah, I've heard that as well, for us it was only about a week to hit a milestone. I worked at another company though with little to no project management and we were putting in 16-18 for 3-4 months, it was horrible and one of my main reason for leaving that job.

*edit for jerax* Don't worry the positives far out weight the negatives.

I am a tester at a software company right now and I usually spend about 90% of my eight hour day testing. There's a little goofing off here and there but most of the time I am doing something work related. The company has a few software products out right now and a couple in development. So a tester might have a specific product or driver within a product to test and that's what he works on. The developers are portioned out similarly as well. Overall it's not too bad. This is only a summer co-op, but I am learning a quite a bit. For instance I never how much good documentation standards for code and testing really increases productivity. If I have a question about how something works I know exactly where to find it and can be relatively assured that it will be adequate.

It also helps to have decent test docs to drive the testing. While most of it is exploratory, it is nice to have somewhat of a road map.

I take breaks when I want or need them, can leave early or come late without much problem and I get paid relatively well for my experience and area of living.

Quote:Original post by Dancin_Fool
*edit for jerax* Don't worry the positives far out weight the negatives.

At EA? Ha!

Quote:Original post by eedok

Quote:Original post by Xentropy

Quote:Original post by Jerax
If you're having to work 16-18 hour days you need to learn to schedule better (or hire a project manager who can). Anything more than a few days of crunch (and by crunch I mean 12 hours tops) is just wasting your time, you'll get more done by working sensible hours.

From what I've heard, working at EA involves 16-18 hour crunch days (7 days a week) for the final 3-4 months of every project they ever do. You remember the whole ea_spouse LiveJournal a few years back, right? :)

EA is a huge company, I doubt this is true for the majority of EA(doesn't a member here work for EA and said they enjoy it? I remember they got a 360 on/near release day). A lot of the large companies can have a mismanaged sector being all that you hear about.

That sounds about right. While I don't think that the member you're talking about was me, I really enjoy working for EA. There might be a lot of work but it's a fun place to work and they treat us well.

So EA = Bad?

That's kind of a disappointment for me, I was looking forward to getting an internship there once I'm in college.

Not at all, I mean you'd be hard pressed to find any game company that didn't have some kind of a crunch at some point during a project.

pretty normal where I'm working, we all have our tasks to do, mostly work independently. We go movies once in a while, play games, eat lunch, go in and out whenever you want, just get the job done. Crunch time is like 12-15 hours if needed but that's for like 1 day. If crunch at a longer duration then we stay around 9-10 hours. Must get rest to produce quality results.