Some people may rmember the EA not paying programmers overtime affair a year or so ago.
Anyway, they have finally backed down and paid the programmers the overtime. Finally!
Note that they already paid the artists thier overtime last year.
http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.asp?feed=AP&Date=20060425&ID=5669488So yea. Class action lawsuits are the way forward :)
It says "200 entry-level software engineering positions", why only entry-level. Seems a bit strange.
And then it says. "Muller said EA does not expect the settlement to have a significant effect on its fiscal fourth quarter results, which will be announced next week."
In other words, paying their developers overtime is just small change to EA....so why the heck didn't they do it in the first place.
Yes, it's a step forward. The next step would be to have developers organize their projects so that insane amounts of overtime were not requiered, especiallly considering that a lot of studies have shown that extensive overtime over longer periods actually has a negative effect on productivity. Tired and burnt out developers are ineffective and prone to make errors.
Ragnar
Probably becuase the higher level software engineers are over the $94,000 a year (or similer number) threshold that meens under californian law they don't need paying overtime anyway.
Ragtag,
At a certain point, overtime becomes irrelevant. If the company budgets a developer salary at a max of $100,000 per year, and they estimate they will have to pay $20,000 in overtime per year, they just offer their developers $80,000 a year (and the developers make overtime of $20,000), instead of offering them $100,000 a year (and not paying overtime).
Overtime is only important for strictly hourly workers, or lower income entry level workers who would be below a working wage if you cut overtime from their salary. So most places (at least in the U.S.), have a cutoff salary for overtime and other benifits requirements (say $100,000). The idea is, if you are making $100,000 a year or more, you really aren't the type of struggling worker that the labor laws were created to help.