Friday, November 12, 2004
Permanent crunch time at EA
Anybody who's worked on a software project is likely to be familiar with the concept of "crunch time", the time just before a release when everybody ends up working 12-hour days. It seems that this is now regular, scheduled policy at games maker Electronic Arts, and some people, like the spouse of one developer, don't like it at all. It also seems like there is a class action lawsuit against EA in the works. Here's another blog entry about life at EA, from a former employee. I thought the good old dot.com days were over, but it seems like some of the less appealing aspects are still around. Glad I don't work there.
Comments:
Actually, this kind of thing has pretty much become the status quo across the board in the software industry. Haven't you ever read about "death march" projects? It's not just in game companies. Software in general has leveled so much there are no more "killer" apps, no really new types of software, so now the only thing that companies can hit to try to impress customers is the cycle time. Lots of companies have now committed to turning out new product or major upgrades every six months, or even faster. I've now worked for four companies on a 6-month schedule, and every one of them has been afflicted with the exact same problems - products that are buggy as hell because there's never enough time to test and troubleshoot, open war between the developers and the marketers, work hours from hell, personnel turning into zombies because of the hours or going insane from stress, screaming chaos at home, and constant turnover. Why do you think that programmers these days are almost never more than 32 years old? It's not because of people moving up - it's because they crumble under the work. It's now standard business practice for software companies to hire only the young genius brats right out of school, because they have the stamina to work 75 hour weeks for months on end and the lack of experience to think that working such hours makes sense. Most of them reach total burn out in about 6 years.
# posted by 
: 3:52 PM
: 3:52 PM
Yes, I know about "death marches" and I've worked a couple (fortunately, they were short - I'm too old to do that for months on end). The point of the articles about EA was that they had really institutionalized the practice, more so than even most dot.coms. The other area where that happens is with medical residents in hospitals -- and some areas are legislating caps on their working hours, realizing that sleep deprivation causes mistakes and in their case, mistakes can kill.
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