Hi, i've just read a topic of the year 2004 about EA Employee mistreatment EA Employee mistreatment, the next blog and a blog ea spouse. Is this still the case in the year 2009?

Tough question, but it all depends on the Studio (EA is not the only one that mistreats their employees), the Department, the Team, and even ranks within the Team. I worked at EA for four years and my experience was fairly good. There was crunch, not as bad as the EA Spouse blog, but my department was fairly good compared to others. Each team within the department differs too.

The basic answer is...it depends..

Ha okay, I already thought about something like that.
Thanks you for your answer:)

There were a few specific individuals in the EA Spouse lawsuit. Those specific individuals have been dealt with.

Few people at EA had as bad a situation as the few in that lawsuit. The lawsuit was focused mainly on a single (big) team within a single studio --- within a company that has several hundred offices spread across the entire globe. New corporate policies were put in place globally due to the lawsuit, but I don't know of anybody who was seriously impacted outside that single studio.



Every studio and office is different. Every game is different. Every team is different. Every individual is different.


Let me give a specific example:

Every studio is different. Consider Studio A and Studio B. Management is key. The executives at Studio A believe that a 40 hour work week is the minimum. The executives at Studio B believe that 40 is the maximum regular workload. The mentality at these two studios are fundamentally different, even though both believe the employees should work 40 hours per week.

Within a studio, every game is different. Consider game X and game Y. Game X is the fourth title in the series with little new innovation and low risk. It is well planned and follows the schedule. Game Y is the first of a new product line, and high risk. At the first major review there were several major issues that prevented the game from being fun. So now game Y faces serious changes. It is the role of management to decide if game Y will face extended crunch, or chop features, or change dates, or take any number of other actions.

So if management believes in a 40-hour-max, they will be much more likely to cut features or change the scope or hire additional workers to work in parallel or ease the work of the main teams. If they believe in a 40-hour-min, they will simply divide the work among the existing workers and introduce mandatory overtime.


Within the game, every team is different. Consider the game is mostly done. Assume that management has actually managed features and scope properly, so the work can get done on time. Content is usually finished off before code, so the art people are going to have a big push to finish up by a certain date, while the programmers are on a steady flow. The next week or two, art drops off to almost no work, and programmers have tons to do. This is natural.

Within the team, every individual is different. You have different tasks than your co-worker. Some tasks are inherently riskier, or inherently larger, or otherwise more likely to cause work to pile up. Some people take on too many tasks early in the project and are flooded with bugs later on. Some people are extremely good at writing low-bug code. Whatever the combination you face, you can observe that some teammates will have lighter or heavier loads over the course of the project by the nature of that person and the work itself.



When interviewing at companies, it is your duty to learn the nature of the management and assessing the teams. Do they believe in overtime, or do they hate it? Do they believe in chopping features and fighting back against designers and marketers? Do they provide appropriate staff and equipment so that individual workers are able to focus entirely on their work? Do they schedule their projects appropriately? Do your potential teammates do their job or spend the entire day surfing the net? And finally, how skilled are you at estimating your own tasks and managing your own workload?



These are some of the bigger factors that contribute to your own QoL, and are much more accurate that looking at individual lawsuits within single teams of global companies.

nice answer, frob. couldn't write any answer better than that.

even in my current company, the atmosphere is different from department to department, and how the manager run their department is the key.

Thanks guys for your comprehensive answers. And now i know some extra attentions points when I apply for a job soon.