Codemasters are on the scrounge | Hacker News Reader

Codemasters are on the scrounge

jheriko-rtw.blogspot.com

105 pointsjheriko52 comments

I never worked for Codemasters myself, and left a studio just after it was bought by Codemasters (for other reasons). But I think everyone in the UK that worked in games knows their reputation. They are the UK equivalent of EA.

I know about 10 people that left the mentioned studio just because it was bought by Codemasters (they simply refused to work for them, preferring unemployment).

Hope you the best in this.

Ha! Are you from the old Sega Racing Studio in Solihull? Me too!

A friend went for a job interview at Codemasters a couple of months before it all went tits up, and got privately warned away from joining by a couple of members of staff.

"You broke the law, but I'll ignore that if you let me keep the money you accidentally overpaid me"?

That's extortion and he needs to get better legal advice.

In general if someone makes an accidental overpayment to you it's not your money. Especially if you do not promptly let them know about it.

I suspect he's going to have to give them the money back. And he's going to have to forfeit any interest he earned on that money. And then he's going to have to pursue any other dispute separately.

The stuff about allowing other people to swipe him in and out of the building was really stupid: he shouldn't have let that happen and he certainly shouldn't be writing it in a letter of dispute.

He does have my sympathy though - working for bad bosses sucks.

"I suspect he's going to have to give them the money back."

In the US, if two parties owe each other money, it can sometimes be handled as a suit and counter-suit. I.e. one case for both debts. At the end, a balance might be calculated in favor of one party. (Larger debt minus smaller debt.)

This says nothing about the present case though, particularly given differences between jurisdictions. It's just a general observation about these types of cases.

I do not believe there is any obligation to pay back accidentally overpaid sums in the UK. I base this on the fact that if you receive money from some-one accidentally (they got the account number wrong for example) you are under no legal obligation to pay it back (although the bank will ring you asking you to).

I don't know if it's different with overpaid money during employment however I doubt it is.

That's wrong, and people can (and have) go to prison for it.

(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6966683.stm)

It's not your money. Make efforts to give it back. Don't spend it. Don't put it in a high interest account. Don't use it to get access to other stuff (while leaving the cash there). Even getting the answer "yes" after asking "Is this really my money" doesn't mean it is your money; you'll still have to pay it back. You're just less likely to go to jail.

Interestingly, that articles states (in the right hand box):

"If an amount is too large to be rightfully yours and you knowingly spend it, you're in trouble"

In the op's case he clearly thought it was rightfully his and spent it as such. I wonder what the law is in this case?

Whether it's theft or not comes down to whether or not you honestly believe the money is yours. The reference to the size of the amount is there because the larger the sum, the less likely it is that someone could reasonably believe the money was theirs.

In the UK (and other common law countries), there's a legal principle called estoppel which often operates in mistaken payment situations. Basically, if the court decided that even if the OP did in fact spend the money in the honest belief that it was his, Codemasters would be entitled to recover the money unless they are "estopped" by reason of the fact that he had significantly changed his position in response to the receipt of the money.

It's ultimately meant to be a "fairness" test - if you had £10,000 in your account and someone mistakenly paid you £100, even if you spent that £100 in the belief it was yours, it's hardly like your financial position has been dramatically changed in reliance on that £100 payment. Therefore, you're likely liable to pay the £100 back.

However, the situation at hand seems to be more in favour of the recipient - sounds like he did rely on the additional money by paying back some debt, and that could mean that Codemasters can't get it back (or, perhaps, only get a portion of it back).

He made no attempt to ask his former employers about it; he just assumed it was payment for his illegal hours.

It's a shame. He's getting screwed from all sides.

That is absolutely not what I am saying. I have made it abundantly clear that I want to repay the money - they have just as yet been unable to provide me with a reasonable way to repay.

The swipe card system was not used to pay me - it was simply the only evidence I could get of my hours at such a late date.

The issue here is that the company behaves illegally and immorally which can not be tolerated.

I think I'd have replied with something like: "Thank you for taking responsibility and beginning to compensate me for the extra time I worked for your company. The balance that is owed is $AMOUNT. If you would like to contest this amount, please provide a detailed accounting of your calculations. Otherwise, I will appreciate knowing your intended payment schedule.

Again, thank you for acknowledging the former shortcomings with regards to salary and pay.

--Former Employee"

I would honestly have steered the correspondence in this direction. Kinda saying "yes, the money you sent is MINE" without saying it directly.

Working for any company with time-cards sounds terrifying.

I work for one and find it rather useful. Most weeks are 40 hrs; no biggie. I use to eat overtime. Now I don't. I put 50 hrs. Management doesn't like it, stuff. We all need to know if we are missing estimates. There is no use lying.

As a result, I use the time track as a truth keeper. Without that, there is no metric tracking; everything is just annidotal.

PS. I'm forced to use IE so misspelling are not caught.

PS. I'm forced to use IE so misspelling are not caught.

Use this: http://www.afterthedeadline.com/download.slp?platform=Bookma...

I wouldn't mind that -- then I wouldn't have to keep track of the hours manually (If I work more than standard hours I am entitled to equal time of).

I find it handy. I know exactly when my working week is over, and my overtime is automatically recorded.

It helps, of course, to work somewhere that pays overtime!

I don't mean time-cards are scary, but that companies that employ them tend to be exceedingly bureaucratic. First it's time-cards. Then it's catching crap for spending 65 minutes on a 60 minute lunch break. Next you'll be getting reports on missing your start clock by a few minutes here and there.

Oh, absolutely, they can be.

I'm lucky in that mine provides decent flexi-time. I can start any time between 7:30 and 10:00, take lunch from 11:45 to 2:30 and leave between 3:30 and 6:00.

So if I want a 65 minute lunch break I can have it - so long as my times add up in the long run. I'm in charge of being responsible for my timekeeping, which is how it should be.

I know that usually games_industry = low_pay * long_hours, but it doesn't have to be that way. I worked in a studio where this does not happen and their staff turnover is very low. Maybe because the managers were former developers and they knew the limits to overtime. Other places have not been so nice.

Where and who is this mythically ethical game studio? In my experience, publishers force these hours: a studio can't land the publishing contract without milestones insuring these conditions.

They exist and take your pick pretty much. Most of them run much better than Codies, with less staff, smaller premises, less expenditure and putting out more, higher quality games, without masses of overtime. I used to work at Rebellion for instance, and although they made me redundant and cocked it up it was fine - they had good reasons and they never mistreated me. It was a great place to work.

Ha! "take your pick" sounds like a cruel joke... I gave up on the games industry after 15 years in the majors. Kept hoping to find ethical behavior somewhere, never did and left for film VFX. But I never looked outside the US...

Digital Legends in Barcelona.

I left in 2007 because I had to move to London for reasons unrelated to work.

It was one of the best places I worked at. I cycled in at 10 am, worked until 13:00 then went to the gym for an hour and had lunch for another half-hour, came back at around 14:30 and left at around 19:30.

In 2.5 years there I only remember spending one Saturday in crunch and they gave me extra holiday for that day. The people were very friendly and amazingly talented. They implemented normal mapping on an nGage back in 2004 ( this is a device with a 100mhz ARM CPU with no fpu and no division instructions and no GPU). They did one of the first 3D games for the iPhone and my boss got invited on stage to show it during an Apple conference.

In contrast, when I arrived in London in 2007, although I would be working on a sexier title for the then hot Wii the equipment in use was inferior ( CRT's where still used ), the code base was the worse I had ever seen ( switch statements with thousands of lines, spaghetti with meatballs code, stupid tricks like: struct { #include "somefile.h" }, etc... ), crunch was typical at the end of every deadline, talented people were unhappy and quitting... The embodiment of the game's industry cliché.

Feel free to spread this around - or ask me questions. :)

jheriko@gmail.com

I think this needs as much publicity as possible - so thanks to the 7 who have already upvoted. \o/

Hopefully startups can learn some of what not to do.

I think you're right to be angry; it certainly sounds like you did not have a positive experience at Codies and it certainly appears like they messed up the redundancy process for the Guildford studio.

However, I don't agree that you're entitled to more money for your unpaid overtime. From the mails, it looks like they notified you in advance that TOIL was off the table and therefore it was your responsibility to work hours that you deemed reasonable for your salary. I'm sure the company was very pleased that you worked so much OT, but it's clear that they did not require you to do so.

I also don't think you can justify keeping the extra months salary that they accidentally paid you. If your bank accidentally paid you a million bucks, you would not expect to be able to keep it, would you? What if you accidentally gave your buddy $100 instead of $10? You'd expect him to give it back, right? Sure, they screwed up; however they came clean about it and asked you to give the money back. They even gave you an extension to help you find the money. It sucks that you had already spent the money, but that was your mistake, not theirs. I think you're just going to have to bite the bullet and cough up the cash, sorry.

I'd chalk the whole think down to experience and move on. The games industry can be a very unforgiving place and now that you've seen some of the things that can happen, you can prepare yourself better for the future. There are many games jobs available in the UK at the moment, but, due to the bad economy, the publishers are all hurting for money. I would expect these kinds of situations to be quite common for the next year or two.

It is a reasonable thing to assume that money on your bank account is yours. Therefore they should at a minimum cover any and all damages their mistake has cost him.

This is totally wrong. They are right to try and reclaim overpayment if it actually occurred.

This refers to deducting wages from future pay packets but the principle is the same. You owe them if they make a mistake.

http://www.adviceguide.org.uk/index/your_money/employment_in...

It would appear that if they overpay on the final paycheck, tough shit.

Please check my reading--the link seems to indicate that future wages can be reduced to recoup an error, but that the money can't be collected back directly. So, it suggests that the final paycheck is overpaid, Codemasters would have to reduce future wages temporarily to make up for the imbalance, but there are no future wages (lol), so Codemasters cannot seek recourse.

Am I reasonable in this interpretation?

As an aside, it irks me that an employer is given any rights in this regard--if you can't do basic HR arithmetic (especially since they sure as hell aren't doing anything as exacting as code or what have you) I deserve the balance of your ignorance.

If a company overpays for a part and then finds out that the part went on sale right after purchase, they eat the cost.

If a company brings a product to market and underprices it and loses money, they eat the cost.

If a company hires someone for contract work and overpays them--pays them more than is reasonable for the work done, but pays them what was promised--then they eat the cost.

If a company decides to take out a chunk from its petty cash fund and burn it to make smores over, they eat the cost.

So, why the hell isn't an overpayment in HR considered something similar? Why isn't it a free-market "you can't do math accurately" tax?

(genuinely curious)

This kind of thing applies generally to all overpayment of contracts. The advice I've been given by employment lawyers in the past about this kind of thing is that once you leave, it becomes a normal debt and they are free to chase you about it however they choose. Usually this results in you offering to pay them a small some every month with no interest until it's all paid back. They don't want to go to court either after all.

If TOIL is in your contract, to remove it later presumably results in a break (and perhaps resigning) of your contract. If you continued to work for them after that, I guess the old contract would still apply since you never signed a new one. Which means you should get TOIL. So I think he's right to whine about that.

You can't just summarily change peoples contracted working conditions without notice and proper consultation. There are legal processes to follow to do that. It doesn't look like they did those. And it does look like they broke the EWTD by letting (and a case could probably be made to say encouraging) people work crazy hours.

So yes, I agree they should have seen this coming and got out before it got this bad, but that's kind of what the laws there for. To protect the people who didn't.

Often times companies change rules and policies and it effects everyone; if you continue to work there then you agree to those conditions. You don't sign a new contract when you get a raise or when you get a promotion, or when you change offices, or they change who delivers food, etc...

You should still receive official written notification of the change. (And if you choose to leave due to that change, you are not contractually obliged to work a notice period either.)

I agree about the continuing to work thing, it's not obvious from the article if CM followed the correct procedures when implementing that change.

Some changes to employment contracts can be deemed to have been accepted by your continuing to work there, some legally require you to formally agree to the revised contract, if you don't you aren't bound by it. This is to prevent employers making detrimental changes to contracts after hiring people.

All the above applies to the uk, not sure about other countries.

they absolutely have broken the EWTD - i have ample evidence of no 11-hour between shifts and 7 day weeks, they have been very careful never to deny this part of my accusations and they probably realise that if it goes to court they have absolutely no defence. i want to be compensated for their violating my rights - its pretty simple, but subtly different to asking for money to be compensated for overtime that i knew would be unpaid.

their comment about TOIL is a political manoeuvre and not relevant to my complaints in the least. all they are doing is confirming that they did something dickish in language that makes it look like i am in the wrong. its a very old trick...

i'm not justifying keeping the money either. i want to pay it back and have been 100% cooperative in this regard. this is a completely separate issue and this is why i can not just move on. they operate illegally and immorally and get away with it through fear. i can not tolerate this. nobody should be able to...

thanks for the comment. :)

I've made this mistake before. Even if you can personally justify something as being reasonable (they did that to me, so it's OK if I do this to them) it often doesn't hold up in the eyes of a 3rd party (like the law).

I have no doubt that you were mistreated, but be careful how you handle this. The worst outcome would be for the courts to rule against you - then they will have done it to you again...

Good luck

In his appeal letter to Codemasters, Essessi does mention that he took time to seek legal counsel before replying. I don't know if he's retained a lawyer, but it doesn't look like he's going into this totally blind.

thanks for the wish of luck :)

He's complaining that he didn't get proper training to 'know where to assemble for fire drills', among other things, after he no longer works there. Smells like sour grapes from a disgruntled former employee.

Sorry to hear this. I love Codemaster's games (Dirt and GRID). Too bad it's created in such a hostile environment.

Thanks for your comment. I am yet to actually play GRID, but yes, DiRT 3 is a pretty sweet game, although the tech behind it is comparable to something from 10 years ago covered in lazy post-processing it is both beautiful and fun, in fact even more impressive knowing how lacking the tech is.

Technical question to UK-based hackers... OP says: "...it wasn't quite the amount of money I was owed for unpaid overtime, but it was something."

Can you as an employee in UK lose pay like that when your employer goes bankrupt? Aren't there any government funds or organizations stepping in? Because strangely it seems this is the case in Germany, though in Austria I was victim to my employer's bankruptcy and I got paid for every single hour of clocked over-time by a government-owned fund which protects employees. Also, the government steps in and handles the whole thing; the original CEO won't have anything to say anymore after they declared bankruptcy.

Wow. Here in the US, the idea of the government handling bankruptcy to the benefit of the employees who lost wages is so completely foreign... I gotta stop thinking about it. That is simply impossible in the United Corporations of America.

My understanding is that wages owed is senior to any other corporate debt. Is this not true?

No true. Bankruptcy law in the US is all about helping the company get back on its feet. There's some useful information here, but the page takes forever to load: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/employee-rights-company-bankr...

Here it works like this (in my own layman terms): once you file for bankruptcy you'll have someone assigned to handle your company's business and this person's duty is to find out whether the company is just suffering from temporary cash flow problems and business could potentially continue or if it is all hopeless.

In the former case, an agreement with all creditors will be reached to write off x% so that the company can continue eventually - in the latter case, all money that can be squeezed out of the company will go to said creditors but of course they would still lose potentially most of their money but they can then write it off on taxes and it is considered a normal business risk. Also there are certain rankings and priorities for this distribution of what was left - social insurance and health care rank highest, they are also the ones that will HAVE you shut down first if you are late on payments, they will literally write to your customers(!!!) and tell them to send any payments to the insurances instead of to your company because you haven't paid your dues. This is also when your customers will freak out that you will go bankrupt and will very likely stop paying anything until they are being forced to in the bankruptcy process. So as a company just scraping by and hoping to make it SOMEHOW, at that moment you are frakked because you won't have a single euro coming in and anything that would come in will instantly go to social insurance and health care. No more cash flow and if you do not declare bankruptcy right then and there, you as the CEO can get into serious legal trouble.

Next in the ranking then come the other creditors with certain priorities and also employees but they are pretty much last so most of the time, they won't be getting all of their owed salaries out of the bankruptcy assets; and that's where the federal employment office and a government run fund will step up and pay you. Oh and you won't be losing your health care either, it will all be taken care of and until you find a new job you will receive unemployment money (let's say 80% or so of your former salary).

I had to go through the whole process after working a few years in a sweet startup and it really, really broke my heart to not be working with those guys anymore but it was also an extremely valuable lesson in "politics", learning to read management-speak in a situation like that and knowing which possibilities you as an employee have. And I was also very thankful for all the social security available to me as a citizen - I pay my taxes a lot happier now.

I think you are misunderstanding the phrase unpaid overtime in this context. Most jobs are salaried, not paid by an hourly rate, and small amounts of overtime required to get the job done do not get you extra money, but you cannot be forced to work more than 48 hours per week unless you specifically sign away your rights under the European working time directive.

As for insolvency law, if the a company goes under and has insufficient funds to cover outstanding wages then employees are entitled to up to £400 per week of outstanding pay, plus statutory redundancy rights (based on age and period of employment).

When a UK company enters administration then the appointed administrator replaces the directors.

Here is a question that probably betrays my naivety, but why can I even sign away my rights like that? What is to stop an employer from saying "We'll hire you, but only if you sign this, and if you don't we'll just find someone else." At that point, is it really a right? Or just a privilege afforded to those who aren't forced to sign it away?

Depending on industry and country, unions are by-and-large very strong here in the EU, especially in Germany, and I wouldn't be surprised if they would very quickly put their foot down once such a practice becomes known.

The ability to opt out was very strongly backed by the UK government. I don't know if any other EU countries do it.

Although many companies ask you to opt out, they must not force you to do so. In addition an employee can opt in again with a certain amount of notice.

Employees in the UK have a portion of their wages/backpay protected from an employer going bankrupt[0]: redundancy pay, 8 weeks wages, 6 weeks pay in lieu of holiday, and up to 12 weeks for long service, at a maximum of £400 a week, minus tax.

In addition, directors of a company which continues to trade once it becomes insolvent become personally, unlimitedly liable for the debt incurred while continuing to trade[1].

[0] http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/Pay/DG_1002... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_while_insolvent

just to clarify they do not owe me any money for wages that were promised. i had asked them for a sum to cover unpaid overtime and what they paid me was less but i took it to be a compromise.

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