IrresponsibleUseOfFr's Journal: EA... Your Experience May Vary

I work for EA. I intern'd for Microsoft. As far as my short experience and ongoing experience at the company goes, I my experience working for EA is not as bad as some horror stories on the 'net. Although, the EA spouse thing does bring up my greatest fear about the job, that is, the job will consume my life.

Also, I thank that person for writing that livejournal entry. This needs to be discussed and thanks for bringing it up in a way that everybody at the company and a lot of people that don't have an oppourtunity to discuss. Your post was also extremely well written and you didn't flame the company although it didn't paint it in a good light, which was also good.

However, I can honestly say that working for EA does not consume my life as of yet, although, I have heard that will change once we hit Alpha. I can easily see why we are likely to have a painful Alpha. We are shipping early. Designs aren't done although all of our TDD's (technical design documents/implementation plans) are supposed to be final. The time to do TDD's is compressed becasue designs they are late or unfinished. I had a game designer literally change a design doc while I was working on a task. It wasn't like the TDD wasn't completeless worthless anyway. It was scheduled for a week, and basically said "Do It." But, how are estimates supposed to be accurate if we don't know what we are implementing? Is this the same company that expresses their competitive advantage being they know what game they are making better than their competitors?

Then there are problems from the software engineering point of view. We have no automated testing (besides the test project I just set up). Most code isn't even unit testable because functions change their behavior based on some global game data usually from a half dozen different modules. QA hasn't been doing their job, in that they haven't found obvious bugs in code. I think the only thing that saves us is that it is written in C.

That said, I think the process we have is good. We just need to follow it. This is a lot better than what my experience at Microsoft was like. Developers need to take more ownership over quality because we are the ones that end up paying and QA doesn't do their job very well.

Ultimately, whether I stay at EA for longer than 3 years is totally dependent on my life not being Hell working for them (at least the me leaving part of it). I hope things get better. But, it is more of a matter of being able to light fires under people's asses. Dev's just end up paying the price since they are at the end of the pipeline. It is exactly like expecting a women to produce a baby in under 9 months. It won't be properly developed and the baby is likely to have many problems because there wasn't enough time to do things right.

The head of the studio talked about EA Spouse. So I know they are listening. But, actions speak louder than words. He sort of made light of it, which to me means he was out of touch with the problem. He needs to take it seriously. We lose too many good devs because of this crap. My project has already lost two, which makes it tougher on the rest of us. Then the whole thing just snowballs and things get worse. Which is definitely not good for the company, shareholders, or profits for which he is the steward.