"When a product gets planned, release estimates are made and engineering plays a significant role in creating those estimates. The writer seems to be laying all of this on "producers". Im not buying that "producers" make decisions in a vacuum, any more than executives do at Microsoft. Given the complexity of the products, software estimates are shots in the dark." Yes, they are. But, do you think that Dilbert and the pointy-haired boss grew out of thin air? Do you think that Bruce Bethke's Headcrash (a very funny novel) was written because it's usually the programmers who make stupid, greedy decisions? It's the producers who think they can make the name for themselves, as Claymor says. Greed and ambition based on other people's work ... You cannot expect to lengthen the crush time indefinitely. Good programmers and good workers in general are not that easy to find. BTW, I was part of a group of journalists working for a private television. Due to stupid (and I mean stupid!) decisions by the management, the company started losing money. And our salaries started not arriving. And not arriving. We were getting stories about this and that and promises that we would get bonuses later. One day we decided enough was enough and simply stopped working. They broadcasted some canned stuff and started threatening that they will bring people from the street to work. And then they folded. We sued the owners and got all of our salaries, even for the time after we stopped working. Action. That's the key. "EA's risk is huge. Engineers share in this risk by nature of their craft and having to cope with extremely tough conditions if a product is late." EA's risk is huge? Well, it's the nature of the business, ain't it? Engineers share the risk? Why don't they share the profit, too? If they shared the profit, they would certainly be more willing to put in extremely long hours. "There's a movement in some segments of the tech industry to unionize, and this problem with EA would seem to be a call for that. I predict, however, if engineers have to be paid overtime and unionization ruminations continue, it will simply drive more and more engineering overseas." The US government is stupid. The biggest software market is the USA. Let the government just say, "If you want to sell in this market, you have to produce such a percentage of the product in country." The companies would return to the States in a New York minute. Then, it's quite short-sighted to rely on the eternal cheapness of Indian, Russian and Chinese coding. Do you think that these countries will always be "Third World?" I wonder when we are going to see a wide action like the one against the Nike sweatshops abroad.

-- erlik