Does anyone have a link to the EA Quality of Life paper written by an (ex?)-programmer?

You mean this?

(Copy-pasted from this thread)

There are quite a few of them. Obviously none are official.

Perhaps you are thinking of the easpouse blog entry from six(?) years ago that escalated to a lawsuit?

There were ultimately only a dozen or so managers involved at the offending studio. Several were fired, and the company added some mandatory practices to avoid it on other teams.



Overall QOL is unique to every studio, to every project, and to every team.

This is almost entirely up to the team's management (fighting for the cause) and team members (doing the work promptly, efficiently, and with minimal defects).

Two teams working on the same project can have different demands placed on their time, although this is usually based on their discipline. An art team may be basically done but the developers are fighting an avalanche of new bugs. Or the code may be awesome but a legal issue means lots of art needs to be reworked.

Publishing deadlines are very hard to move late in the project, so even the best managed project that had zero requested overtime may suddenly find a nightmare week when a severe blocking bug is found that Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft won't overlook. That's just the nature of the work.




I've always had excellent managers over the years, and never had any mandatory overtime, even working at EA for over 3 years. I've also rejected job offers when I studied their overtime and talked to former employees, and once refused to work under a particular manager due to their history of overtime.

If you want to control your QoL then you must take active steps to do it.