Pros: hour lunch, two breaks during the day, relaxed work atmosphere
Cons: low pay for the amount of work and responsibility that a tester could end up with, and not much recognition for guiding teammates.
I worked the day shift from 7-4. Testers arrive before the "Full Time" EA employees and would start and end the day with shift reports, emails from the game developers as well as keeping track of testing times. Each tester was assigned a specific area to test and would have a checklist from Pre-Alpha, Alpha, Beta, and Final testing stages during the
– more... development process.
All testers were only working for a set time according to their contract. Either a tester worked full time for a year, or they worked part time for 18 months. After which they are put on a furlough, but are guaranteed their position back after 3 months. The "Full Time" EA employees did not have this same contract. The testers were paid by a company named PRO Unlimited, and the EA employees worked directly for EA. Needless to say the majority of the EA employees let the title of their position go their head and treated their co-workers as beneath them in social status. This does not apply to all of them just most of them.
Doing the checklists would be the most meticulous part of the job which wasn't hard at all. The checklists were Excel spreadsheets that for everything tested it was either marked as Pass, Fail, Not Applicable, Blocked, or Cannot Test. The main goal of tested was not to see if something worked, but if you could break it. Worked there gave a lot of insight as to the difference between playing a video game, and testing them.
Employees had to have at the very least a general computer knowledge. Knowing more than others didn't give an edge in the workplace for people to see, and would be just looked over. The IT staff there was comprised of only 3 people. Server Administrator, IT Head, and the third would mainly replace the hardware for a system to bring it up to minimum specifications for what it was needed. – less