Could be an Amazing Employer - TechOps Organization Electronic Arts Employee Review

Unfortunately, EA misses the mark on so many things. What could be one of the best companies to work for struggles with absolutely overwhelming mismanagement. Over the past year and a half, the TechOps organization in Austin has lost massive amounts of key talent. Employee satisfaction surveys have come back with awful results, and executive level leadership is trying to improve, but the lack of real action tells the real story. As people are quitting and overworked, middle management is clamping down on things like working from home, instead promoting people that have worked at the company for months over much more experienced employees and holding monthly kumbaya chats to try and improve morale. Despite these middling efforts to improve employee morale, more people are quitting than ever before due to poor management. Instead of focusing on releasing great games and ensuring those games are running on the best infrastructure, most middle management is only focused on office politics and forwarding their own position in the organization. They are always changing the “strategy” but never really getting any actual work done. Hiring for roles that actually do work is almost impossible, as you have to justify how that role is going to fit into the latest strategy, which seems to change every quarter. This is even the case when attempting to backfill all the people that are leaving, leaving all the actual work to be dropped on the shoulders of the dwindling staff still with the organization. As people leave, their team has to justify why that role was needed to begin with and then enter into a six month long hiring process to backfill them if you can even get the role approved. This company has so much potential. There is so much talent at EA, and they do such a poor job of tapping into that talent and letting them grow because of the obsession with strategy that never gets fully formed and implemented.