EA Sweatshop

Electronic Arts or better known as "EA" is a colossal developer of games for consoles and PCs. The company's market capitalization is $14 plus billion dollars. Its annual sales is between two to three billion dollars a year. EA is by all means a giant company not just in the gaming industry. Most gamers dream of working at EA. Games are fun. There is nothing better than getting paid while doing something you enjoy, right? To the contrary, working at EA is by no means a dream job at all as noted in this journal by a disgruntled spouse of an EA employee:

I look at our situation and I ask 'us': why do you stay? And the answer is that in all likelihood we won't; and in all likelihood if we had known that this would be the result of working for EA, we would have stayed far away in the first place. But all along the way there were deceptions, there were promises, there were assurances -- there was a big fancy office building with an expensive fish tank -- all of which in the end look like an elaborate scheme to keep a crop of employees on the project just long enough to get it shipped. And then if they need to, they hire in a new batch, fresh and ready to hear more promises that will not be kept; EA's turnover rate in engineering is approximately 50%. This is how EA works. So now we know, now we can move on, right? That seems to be what happens to everyone else. But it's not enough. Because in the end, regardless of what happens with our particular situation, this kind of "business" isn't right, and people need to know about it, which is why I write this today.

According to the journal, EA operates like sweatshops to pump out games. Employees must endure long hours and tolerate endless empty promises. Do you ever wonder why there are so many bugs in a game? The employees at EA are so tired from the long hours during the "crunch"; they introduce just as many bugs as they eliminate them. You ever wonder why a game's release is constantly pushed back? The programmers of the game are so tired, they drop like flies.

Read the Full Journal Here