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I’ve been following this story for some time on other websites, and I have to disagree with the tone of this post. Near the end of any game development cycle, workers are required to stay very late, every night, until it is done, companies squeezing out more value per worker than they had been hired for. Walter seems to be arguing that working for 90 hours(I am not exaggerating) per week is worth the aforementioned bonuses and stock options. If entry-level lawyers leave firms because of hours like this, why would lower salaried game designers put up with it? Honestly, I would rather go home at a normal hour, and get paid when I have to stay later. Is that really such a terrible thing?

The particular case may be news, but the who is exempt and non-exempt “battle” has been going on in engineering and programming for years. My first brush with it was in engineering at AT&T in 1964. In the early 1980s, it was programmers at IBM.

The Overlawyered part may the lawyers in the article crying the sky is falling when it already fell many times before.

Yes, in software development (and especially in game development) it’s quite common to deliberately plan projects too tightly and make up for that by having your people work overtime to sometimes ridiculous amounts.

But if you’re stupid enough to sign up for a job that doesn’t mention overtime payment and/or a maximum length of your workweek you should know you can expect to be abused like that.

Aloysius, it’s still going on at IBM as it is everywhere else.
I worked for them in 1997-1998, they at the time had a policy (at least here in this country) of 40 hour weeks with overtime pay but the overtime pay didn’t take effect until you had at least an average of 45 hours per week for an entire month.
So project managers could prevent having to pay overtime by just planning to stay slightly under that amount of time each month and they did.
Effectively pretty much everyone was working half a day extra per week without pay, on a project with 80 people that’s a person you don’t have to pay.

Of course that’s nothing compared to the 16 hour days (and sometimes 20 hour days) EA let their staff work sometimes for months on end, which in the past has led to people dying behind their keyboards from exhaustion and dehydration.

“workers are required to stay very late, every night, until it is done”

So who exactly is preventing them from quiting their job of they don’t like the terms of engagement?

These are people who want to have their cake and eat it too.

I don’t know how labour laws are over there, but here if you quit your job you loose all rights to unemployment benefits and welfare.
As programmers (especially junior ones) don’t get paid an awful lot these days (especially in games companies that prey on fresh graduates who don’t know how the industry works) they won’t survive long without a job, and there is enough unemployment in the IT sector that just quitting in the hope you’ll have a new job by next month is a very long gamble indeed.

As EA also just about controls the games industry (they own or otherwise control something like 40% of all development studios) the chances of finding a job elsewhere where these people could employ their skills is low indeed.

They could try for unskilled labour, but likely wouldn’t be hired there for being overqualified and too likely to jump ship as soon as a better opportunity presents itself (not an unreasonable expectation).

So what many will do is try to find another job while trying to stay alive in their current one, which is made even more difficult with studios demanding 16 hour workdays 7 days a week and don’t give any days off for any reason except emergency medical care (and you’d better have a statement from the doctor to prove you were there or you’re fired).

Of course not all game studios work that way, but many do especially in the months leading up to major shows like E3.
And as more and more do it, the pressure on others to do the same or be left behind (either because they are too slow to market or too expensive because of their larger number of staff) becomes ever greater.

At some point of course it will break down, but that point hasn’t yet been reached despite people having been literally worked to death (and if that’s no alarm signal I don’t know what is).

If people do not like the job and the hours, then quit. Like investment banking or being a junior associate at a law firm, people who go to work at EA know what they are getting into, and they are being paid what that work is worth. Additionally, what rule is there that a salaried worker is only paid for 40 hours? One may think 45 hours per week is working an extra half-day for free, but I tend to think it is probably skipping a half-day of one’s work week. If you want high pay and good benefits for no work, go to France.