Wives of Rockstar's San Diego office are up in arms over engineer treatment
gamasutra.com
gamasutra.com
Dear Rockstar Management:
We wives of Rockstar employees are contacting you to address poor conditions in the San Diego office.
Working conditions have deteriorated since March 2009, to the point where employees' lives and families are affected by them. The fault lies with management, though it is probably a result of ignorance rather than malice. Immediate steps must be taken to improve the office.
Employees have suffered stress-induced illness caused by pressure from work. Several employees have been diagnosed with depression; at least one with suicidal tendencies. Rockstar has provided a full-time massuse: this will not address the causes of the stress and is insulting to employees.
We understand that the video game industry experiences periodic crunch. Traditionally, teams were offered time to decompress after milestones. This policy has been abandoned. Managers at the San Diego office have instituted a de-facto policy of permanent "temporary" crunch. Employees currently work 12 hour days, including on Saturday, regardless of the status of their projects.
This infringment of our rights is unacceptable.
Employees seeking treatment for stress-induced illnesses have been forced to use leave to do so, because most healthcare providers are not open on Sunday. Management is dismissive of complaints.
In addition to pervasive crunch, the last year has seen benefits cut. Comp time and a week of post-Christmas vacation have been eliminated. Medical benefits have also been cut, which has exacerbated the stress-induced illnesses. Non-exempt artists and designers have had overtime pay eliminated on the excuse that they are "too senior" to be non-salaried employees. One manager cusses.
Our children miss their fathers.
Rockstar customarily pays employees predictable bonuses. The bonuses have become unpredictable and, when not eliminated for specious reasons, are not actually paid in a timely fashion after being awarded. Raises have been below inflation for each of the past four years. Employees have been told that this is due to Rockstar not being profitable, however, Grand Theft Auto had over a billion dollars in sales. Rockstar should share the wealth with its employees.
If working conditions are not improved immediately, we will be forced to sue Rockstar.
Sincerely,
The Wives
Edit: Sorry, I meant, "using many words does NOT improve communication." (I guess using few words does not improve communication either if you mistype them.)
Organizational issues aside, I am moved by the sentiment behind the original author's words. Fred Brooks compared large programming projects to tar pits, wherein the thrashing of the largest beast only serves to sink it farther. It must be terrible to be constantly commanded "thrash harder!"
It's very possible that the author feels her husband would not approve of (or consent to) publishing a criticism of his employers. I can fairly easily recognize the writing styles of several dozen of my friends, and I'm not married to any of them.
In any given essay/blog of that length, without employing deliberate obfuscation, someone looking for it would likely be able to spot a saying/phrase/crutch word that could identify the author.
The excessive use of the thesaurus is a pretty solid indicator that the author wrote their original draft, then went through and replaced words and phrases with ones of similar meaning.
For example, I wrote the above naturally, without trying to hide my writing style. Glance over the above and you'll probably notice; I have a habit of using indecisive adjectives in statements where I'm not confident that I'm 100% accurate. (Hell, I reflexively did so while writing the sentence talking about the habit!)
That kind of thing can be as good as a signature. When that signature could hurt your marriage or your husband's career, looking like a 6th grade poet is a small price to pay for some insurance.
I think it is just a bad, bad industry to be in... and yet I feel its siren's call for my next app, too.
Also it's not like that you decide to quit, and go to another work.
I have a friend that moved from Heavy Iron studios to that exact same one, and he drives 100 miles back and forth (Santa Monica -> Carlsbad/OceanSide/San Diego - not exactly sure where the studio is).
He moved away from Heavy Iron studios because they were told that all salaries would be halved.
He's with kids, and has to react quickly. He can't let himself be laid off (on half salary), and then search. He needs to quit (so no compensation) and has to find job in maximum one two months.
So here you go. He went over there, and although he's driving much - does he has much choice? Or should he start his vacation days back from a two weeks, until it accumulates to a full month and more? And at some point one would have to settle at one place - buy a house, etc.
Now, why they don't line up another job is a good question. But 70+ hour weeks can get in the way of job hunting.
Probably because most other studios in the area are just like this also - this is a persistent problem in any industry where there is a lineup a mile long of suckers who want the glamour of making video games.
Just look at Hollywood.
Low supply of jobs + huge influx of desperate glamour seekers = massive drop in pay and benefits, and more incentive to abuse (there's a guy who's spent years honing his experience right outside the door ready for you to burn out and quit).
That said, I don't know anyone who was happy working at EA.
The 2004 EA Spouse LiveJournal:
I know when I worked in the video game industry about 60% of the year we worked 12+ hour days. We were just testers not even the programmers who were often there longer.
Indeed. The problem is that lots of young programmers want ot be game developers, thinking its a really cool job. The games companies know this, and fully exploit it, wringing as much work of of employees as they can, while the employee is still naive and doesn't expect management to be utter cunts. When the employee wises up, there's always the next generation of mugs to exploit.
How to fix this? I guess the important thing is to get word out that employers like Rockstar are scum who should be avoided at all costs. (caveat: I've no direct experience with Rockstar, my impression of them is based on a friend who used to work for them).
There surely must be a limited supply of people who can do the really serious physics modeling or AI stuff. Are they subject to the same conditions?
I mean, if you can do that, you can quit and go work for a hedge fund as a quant... Same long hours, 10x the pay, treated like a prize racehorse.
Yes, they are, because there are still more available than needed, and 'the best' is rarely a trait that games studios look for in hiring.
That said, someone with a SIGGRAPH presentation, or equivalents in AI or physics, WILL be treated with more respect in the industry. But at the end of the day, you'll still be a very disposable cog, that works the hours that management decries, or you're gone.
It's at the point where many of the better college programs oriented at the "you like playing games, so you'll obviously master making them" adolescents have given up the pretense of teaching CS or programming to their students.
But not everyone is like that.
It's not manager problem. It's an industry problem. No silver bullet...
"Factors outside my control will make me look for other employment in a short time, unless you give me a better deal."
Think of it as the other "player" seeing you throw the steering wheel out of the car window, when playing Chicken. He knows you can't turn...
"You should always have a higher authority with whom you have to check before you can change your proposal or make a decision. A negotiator who presents himself as the decision-maker has put himself at a severe bargaining disadvantage. You have to put your ego on the back burner to do this, but you'll find it very effective.
"...When the other person knows that you have the final authority to make a deal, he knows that he only has to convince you... Not so if you are telling him that you have to answer to a higher authority. Whether you have to get approval from a region, head office, management, partners, or board of directors, the other person has to do more to convince you... He knows that he must completely win you to his side so that you want to persuade your higher authority to agree to his proposal."
You also buy time to review any proposal that is made, or look for counteroffers, because that proposal has to be taken away behind the scenes and shown to the higher authority for approval.
Note, however, that your family isn't the best choice for this: "be sure that your authority is a vague entity, such as a pricing committee, the people back at corporate, or the marketing committee. If you tell the other person that your manager would have to approve it, what's the first thought that they are going to have? Right: 'Then why am I wasting time talking to you?'..."
Of course, the flip side of that is that a company might find it exceedingly awkward to demand that your wife come in to work and participate in the negotiations. Such things are just not done. So the "wife" version of the gambit does work better than the "manager" version, though nowhere near as well as the "ambiguous corporate overlords" version.
People often allege -- correctly, I fear -- that some companies prefer to hire single people rather than people with families. And here we have the reason: Having a family automatically, perhaps even unconsciously, puts you in a stronger negotiating position with your employer, not just at the beginning of the job but day-to-day. "Oh, how I would love to spend the entire weekend fixing my co-worker's bugs, but my child needs me." If you are a single person and your employer knows it I encourage you to invent some fictional relatives. For an astonishingly relevant guide to this, see Wilde, Oscar: The Importance of Being Earnest.
Negotiation tactics exist in order for both parties to be able to pressure the other ones and find out more about their true position without the use of force. It's a dance -- sometimes a complicated dance, but a dance. You resort to higher authority, I pull a previously-made concession, you ask for a price, I give you one, you flinch, etc.
There are lots more tactics than just higher authority, although that is a good one.
BTW, great book and set of tapes Secrets of Power Negotiating. I used to read/listen to a lot of business books and tapes, and it was one of the few that really made a difference in my work.
When I was made redundant last year they asked if I wanted to have a union representative present. It's just part of the standard text they have to say for legal reasons, but as far as I'm aware there are no unions related to software engineering. This is probably because the industry is still fairly young.
Point: Unionization distributed wealth across the economy, building a consumer society and accelerating growth.
Counter-point: The economy was growing so much for other reasons that it succeeded in spite of unionization.
Discuss.
Is it possible that unions made wealth more equally distributed and thus increased growth? Yes. However, using unions to increase distribution of wealth is pretty much worst imaginable way to do it.
It's basically the double-defect equilibrium in the prisoner's dilemma, which is where short-sighted self-interest so often leads.
- Hourly employees
- No bonuses
- No royalties
Off course take that with grain of salt - I doubt it applies to all EA studios.
Well, much better than slave work is still kind of shitty, but...
Are we still in the '50s? (I mean the 1950s)
I stand by my snooty comment.
How hard can it be to find someone willing to look over an English letter and offer suggestions?
I can't speak for Bulgarian, but English has standard rules of grammar, spelling, and usage. Anyone who's made it through K-12 public education in the US should be able to help you with those rules, if you ask them.
If you're trying to communicate, why not make the marginal effort to do it right? Or is that an ethic only native-born English speakers should adopt?
I'm grateful that people are making an attempt to share something in a language I can understand, I don't see the gain in making them feel bad if they break a few grammar rules in the process.