employees are suing Electronic Arts

over 80 hour work weeks... pussies* actually, the law suit is a major event in the industry. i think many developers --and by that i mean the workers not the organizations-- have been waiting for this to happen. if the workers win, electronic arts will probably begin to follow some standard for overtime pay or comp time, and pretty much everyone will follow. It could truly transform this nascient industry. the article i've linked to above gets some things wrong though: "The uproar at Electronic Arts is a sign of yet another gut check for high-tech workers. We've come a long way from the dot-com boom days just a few years ago, when programmers and digital artists were celebrated for their tireless ability to work inhuman hours in pursuit of the start-up dream: creating something so new, so quickly it would make them all zillionaires. Back then, members of the high-tech labor force considered themselves a privileged elite, the backbone of the way new economy. Unions were for lefty wimps, antiquated relics of a bygone era, and Silicon Valley's ability to trounce all competition was what made it great. How quickly things have changed. Today, squeezed on the one side by outsourcing and low-priced foreign labor, and on the other by employers demanding more work for lower wages, programmers and designers are no longer keyboard-jockey heroes of the digital age. Instead, they are a new era's commodity workers, reduced to desperately suing to try to get paid for the hours they work or publicly embarrassing their employers into at least giving them a free weekend now and again. In the new standard operating procedure, crunch time is all the time. And there's little that anyone can do to help." The game industry should not be associated with the .com boom. EA, as the article notes, is highly profitable. The game industry as a whole is also in the black, and this alone is a huge distinction between it and silicon valley's pre-millenial dreamers. Also, the game industry isn't based in silicon valley. It is a worldwide industry, with important developers and publishers in LA, New York, Montreal, Paris, Tokyo, and so on. The author of the article also assumes that the absurd hours are part of designers and programmers becoming "commodity workers." Anyone in the industry knows this is false. Good game programmers are extremely hard to find. In fact, there some people make a handsome living headhunting programmers for developers. If I were to refer a lead programmer who was actually hired by my employer, I would get 20,000. This cash isn't payed for commodity workers. Something more complex is at play in the current industry practice of superhuman workweeks sans remuneration. What that is, i shall ponder another day. *this word was used for effect. women rock.