Electronic Arts Reviews in Vancouver, BC Area

Pros

Good co-workers to work with.
Can learn alot of processes to make you strong producer at producing tangible results.
You learn what is important to consumers from a company that is good at delivery.
You learn what it is like to design "inside the box"

Cons

Such a large company that there is a lot of red tape to deal with in any position.
Inconsistent promotions across teams. Not all individuals evaluated against same parameters.

Advice to Senior Management

We have turned into an entertainment company and are no longer making games. This divides workers into camps that compete against each other and makes it tough to achieve high effeciency.

Pros

Coolness factor is quite high
No lack of technological bandwidth: you ask for it, you can get it, if you can figure the system out.
Experience at EA is well respected outside the games development community

Cons

Extremely poor management. it is as thought they have found a way to take all the bad aspects of software development management and games studio management and put them together.

Advice to Senior Management

Value your software . Value your people. They are not commodities which can be thrown out after boxing day like your dry christmas tree. Think longer term, and maybe don't start that project that only had a lifetime of 4 quarters: your career will be a reflection of those you manage.

Pros

Great Salary and good benefits. Great communication and technology sharing between studios (at the production-level), thanks to efforts of EA's Knowledge-Sharing and Central Tech groups. Good work-life balance.

Cons

Senior Management seems at a loss for how to move forward. We seem to be making one major course correction after another and each time, new companies are purchased and hundreds of existing employees are laid off. Case in point: EA's announcement that it would be laying off 1500 employees came on the same day that they we announced we were spending 300 million dollars to buy Playfish, a company making Facebook games. Among those laid off were employees of studios we'd only acquired a year or two ago. As a result there is a general atmosphere among the employees that they might be let go at any time with little warning, which has been horrible for morale.

Advice to Senior Management

Put some thought into the long-term roadmap, communicate it to the studios and then make it a reality. Put more effort into anticipating the direction the industry is moving in and stop trying to react to every tiny change in the marketplace.

Pros

I started off getting hired onto a project which ended up getting canceled within 2 months of me starting. I wasn't super excited about the position that I had taken, but It was one of the only jobs I could find due to the poor economy. After the projects cancellation, I was reassigned to another project in a different role, which I was much more happy with. Maybe It was just luck, but it's been working out great for me. I'm learning a lot, working with amazing people on a product that's exciting.

Cons

Coming from a smaller company where everything is very personal, and you get to know each employee by name, it was hard to adjust to the large corporate climate that exists in EA. It's huge!

Advice to Senior Management

I know it's hard to predict the future, but a little less chaos and a little more predictability would be really helpful.

Pros

I learned so many things from my colleagues.
You see a lot of smart people around.
They have awesome technologies.

Cons

- Its a very big company, and sometime its hard to get recognition for your work.
- some of the game teams are just doing the same over and over and are not innovating enough

Advice to Senior Management

Acknowledge empoyees for their hard work.
take new risks, and let people innovate.
take new risks, and let people innovate.

Pros

There are some really talented and hard working people at EAC that are passionate about doing the best job that they can. Day in and day out these engineers, artists and producers work their butts off (long hours) to get the job done. And that job is often an on a project that is over capacity, under resourced with tight deadlines. There are some real troopers at EAC that make the great games possible and it is these brothers in arms and their camraderie that are the pillars that support EAC.

The amenities and health benefits of being an EAC employee are top notch. There is unlikely no other workplaces in the world that have a soccer field, outdoor volleyball & basketball courts and a huge gymnasium AND fitness gym all on site. Add to that a resource center with a ton of magazines, publications, video games and movies available to employees for free - there is simply a ton of things that no other workplace out there can match to EAC. Aside from these physical amentities, EAC also offers a strong health benefits plan to it's employees that has excellent medical/dental coverage and an $400 annual health spending account that can be spent on things like contacts, prescriptions, massage etc.

Cons

EAC is an "older" studio that has been around for a couple of decades now and with that age, a certain type of politics and culture has permeated and set into the studio. There are "old boys clubs" among the various Dev Teams at the studio. A couple of these groups have become a hiding place for poor leaders and managers who are only skilled with their mouths. These are the guys/gals who have tanked projects, driven away top talent and who only put in an 8 hour day. Yet, they hide in these clandestine groups who protect each other from being fired or laid-off. EAC has become a bit bloated at the upper management levels with people who don't provide anything tangible. The biggest problem with this group of people is that most if not all of them are NOT gamers and are thus clueless about what makes great games.

With significant hits such as NHL, FIFA and Fight Night coming out of this studio, there are also a plethora of poor titles that have been released from this studio in the past few years. The poor or below target projects are often a trainwreck in terms of organization, vision and leadership. The people in key positions who are often responsible for these projects are insulated from termination and often just move along to the next project. Be ready for a lot of politics and head-shaking at how things are done on certain franchises.

Advice to Senior Management

Get rid of the dead weight at this studio. If there are leaders who have only shipped poor products and don't have a track record of excellence then drop them. They are bringing down the quality of your projects, ruining the retention of top talent and are basically poor leaders who are more concerned with looking good at presentations and meetings and not delivering the best quality software possible.

Pros

Cool games and great people

Cons

Money sucks for what you do, long hours

Advice to Senior Management

Employees need to be paid for what they bring to the table, not how long they have been sitting there. Someone who has been there for 5 years should not be paid less to do the same job as someone who has been there for 10.

Pros

I had a blast working at Electronic Arts. The people are the best part. Only at a video game developer will you find so many like minded individuals who are as passionate about video games as I am. Electronic Arts has some of the greatest perks from parties to massages to free coffee and food. I was fortunate enough to work at their Black Box Studio (which is in the process of being shut down as I write this) in Downtown Vancouver. This studio is located at probably the best location in Vancouver over looking Coal Harbour. A party was held every Friday in the cafeteria which was the perfect way to end a week(unless of course you were working the weekend too).

Cons

Long hours. Everyone knows this about the games industry. The problem is that a lot of these people WANT to work this much. They are passionate about their work and maybe have just a little bit of workaholism. But who can blame them when you know hundreds of thousands of people will see your hard work. Sometimes it can be frustrating when design decisions are in the hands of the wrong people, or when you know that end project crunch is coming because it really is expected. It can often feel like the only role of the managers is to slave drive the developers. The worst part of EA at the moment would have to be the mass layoffs.

Advice to Senior Management

A more Agile development process would help developers spread out the crunch periods of projects.

Pros

10 year old kids say "wow" when they find out.
If you look you'll find knowledge beyond what you can anywhere else.
If you're into games, aside from all the EA haters who are, much like mac fanboys, very useless, it's a great place to build things that made our childhoods great ... granted that time is gone.
It's a big company, full time job, security for people with families, mortgagees etc.

Cons

50 hour weeks are quite common, 80+ when finaling.
EA is a machine that makes games ... not meant for people.
People how have no business making some decisions are in charge of making those decisions, and some people with knowledge to make the decision have no real say in anything.
Entire projects can fail because of a few select individuals.
Projects are guided by the select few and no other opinion is valued ... Valve would be the exact opposite. Without naming specific game, one of the recent big titles failed but could've been saved if people in charge where only to listen to people who where making the title ... it wasn't fun to play from the getgo and didn't improve one bit.
There is no easy way to relate problems with management.
In all, it's overstressed enthronement with few compensations ... if you're fine writing something less fun then games, like DB2 code, go work for IBM, you'll work less, be less stressed and get payed more. There's also many smaller game companies around where you'll have much more say in what's actually being built.
... I wouldn't consider leaving because of most of the above, the only thing that makes me think twice about staying longer is the finaling (a month or two before title ships), it's brutal every time, every darn time, and wouldn't people learn by now? schedule better, give more time for the tasks that actually need to happen ... well, they would, people (in charge) are smart ... so that leads me to think that it's actually planned and pulling 80+ hours for two month is exactly what studio wants and thinks can get away with ... and then act all surprised that great people leave and next project is suddenly without a lead or such.

Advice to Senior Management

What's good for the company may not directly relate to what's good for the people ... and people are always better for the company.

Pros

Salary is OK, experience is good, a lot of resources available for new SEs working in games, a lot of smart people to learn from.

Cons

Pressure to work more hours, centralized teams can create resentment and a lot of red tape to get things done that should really be simple. Currently the video game market is in a bit of a transition - many of them have laid off employees, including EA which has had over 10% of total workforce cut across the board in the last 6 months. Merit increases for all employees have been frozen until further notice.

Advice to Senior Management

Sports gaming and yearly releases of NBA/NHL/FIFA can't last forever. We need a contingency plan for what to do once consumers wake up and stop throwing money at us.