Your favorite AAA video game was likely tested by folks who are poorly paid, get no benefits, no sick days and who are threatened to be fired if they show signs of fatigue.
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The company claims to be diverse and plans to March during Montreal Pride but our diversity comes from the fact that they literally hire everyone who applies as a tester. As soon as you look up in higher management, you starts seeing mostly white straight men.
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Some time ago, HR deployed an anti -harassment policy and training within work. As far as I can tell so far that policy has accomplished nothing. Project leads are still untouchable and testers are threatened to be fired if they complain.
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They installed keyloggers on all tester computers and they read through our chat conversations if they suspect us to be "unprofessional".
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Once, a particularly mysoginistic project lead reported a tester to HR for drinking on the job. She wasn't and he had no proof but HR still decided to read through all her private chat logs and by extend a lot of other people's chat logs.
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Once, a manager went to see our team of testers. He had to make a presentation and wanted us to send him pictures of funny bugs to make it less boring. It told him straight away that we had test cases from the client to finish and we didn't have time to do his own job for him.
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Shortly after, in my monthly evaluation I was told that I had been unprofessional for "verbally criticizing a suggested task from management outside the testing scope." And I was again threatened with dismissal for being out of line. The manager in question was not reprimanded.
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Once, I walked by a Certification manager and told him "I'd love to do more [console certification] if there's any project with an opening." Because I like learning new things and showing that I'm motivated.
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A few days later, I was sent completely out of the blue to a different office to work with a team I had never met before to be their [console certification] "expert". That other office had none of the documentation and resources normally available for [console certification].
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I had asked to get more experience in a certain domaine and they threw me into a project where i was expected to already know everything. The situation gave me a panic attack and after a trip to HR, I left.
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In the monthly employee evaluation that followed, I was again told I was unprofessional for "being visibly distraught and venting her frustrations with leadership around several testing teams."
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Last year the company absorbed one of their competitors in the same city. In the process they * very sincerely promised* all the new employees that they would not lose the health insurance and benefits they had before the acquisition.
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About 6 months later they announced during a general meeting that the health benefits were cancelled, simply stating "we really tried but we were unable to keep them. Sorry about that."
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Sometimes in QA you get scheduled but there's nothing to actually test. Maybe the build we received just crashes on boot, or the client had setbacks. It happens. In these cases two things can happen:
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1- the client cancels the hours and you're sent home. You're only paid for the hours you were there. 2- the client does not cancel and you do nothing for 8 hours. You have to look "busy." You are not allowed to browse online. You are not allowed to read a book.
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You are not allowed to listen to music. You are not allowed to spend your shift in the break room. You are not allowed to do anything that doesn't appear to be work to an observer despite the fact that you have no work to do.
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Have you ever tried to look busy and do literally nothing while sitting in a broken office chair for 8 hours every day? It's mind numbing and depressing. Most people still take the risk and browse or listen to music. If you're lucky your project lead doesn't care.
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If you get caught by an overzealous lead you get a warning, they slam you for being unprofessional in evaluations and they threaten to fire you.
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At no point in all of this do they actually care about the quality of the work you do. Did you enter a lot of bugs? Did you finish all your test cases with time to spare? None of that matters. If you appear to be slightly out of line, they punish you.
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Every end of fiscal year, upper management thanks us in a general meeting for all the hard work we do and boasts about how much profit the company made. We don't see any of money. We are paid barely more than minimum wage.
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If only gamers rallied their anger by protesting the inhumane working conditions in the industry rather than "that one lady was mean to me on twitter"
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Still here? I have more. Our open plan office is maximized to squeeze in a many workstations and testers possible so that we can accept as many projects as we can. We also test VR games. Many if them have motion controls. Some of them are multiplayer.
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For about a month, I was on a VR multiplayer project in which we had to do wide tennis like gestures to play... while being squeezed in together. When I brought up the issue of safety to my lead, he told me to talk to HR. When I talk to HR they told me to talk to planning, etc...
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I even escalated it personally to the studio manager. No one wanted to do anything about the problem even when I brought up that it was a risk for the equipment. They all just said "well all the space is taken up by other projects. Nothing we can."
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No one got seriously injured on our project but we hit each other multiple times, even trying to be careful.
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Because they want to accept as many projects as they can, we have 2 shifts so that every station can be used by 2 projects. Morning shift starts at 7am and ends at 3:30pm. Evening shift starts at 3:30pm and ends at midnight.
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Planning promises they won't switch you from an evening shift to a morning shit directly the day after but it still happens all the time. Whether these are genuine mistakes or not I don't know but once you're scheduled on a shift it doesn't matter.
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If you don't show up to it because you are exhausted, you are marked absent and that's recorded in the file HR keeps on you. If you show up and you doze off during your shift, most leads will report you and HR will give you a warning that goes in you file.
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I once involuntarily dozed off for a few seconds while waiting for a build and the project lead reported me for sleeping at work. They gave me a 3 day suspension.
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