Game coder in suit pursues poetry

By: Ed Frauenheim
Topics: Workplace

Neil Aitken may change the game software industry through an overtime lawsuit he filed last year--but he won't be around to experience the difference. He's left programming for a career as a poet and professor.

Aitken's class-action suit against Vivendi Universal Games, one of several overtime suits to hit the tech industry in recent years, claims a group of programmers at the company routinely work more than 8 hours a day and 40 hours a week but haven't been paid proper overtime wages under California law. The suit also argues the class of programmers isn't exempt from overtime pay requirements, partly because the coders make less than $44.63 per hour.

Vivendi Universal Games has declined to comment on the suit and did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

Aitken's case has the potential to shake up the game world. In fact, it already may have done so. Earlier this year, industry titan Electronic Arts cited recent lawsuits in the tech field as a factor in its decision to treat some employees as eligible for overtime pay but not bonuses or stock options.

Aitken, who says he once worked a 95-hour week, hopes the end result of his suit "is a restoration of respect and dignity--and hopefully fun--to the job of programmer."

But Aitken has already moved on from software to stanzas. After four and a half years as a programmer at Vivendi, he left last year and now is pursuing a creative writing degree at the University of California, Riverside.

He wrote a haiku poem, though, that sums up his suit against Vivendi:

Legal Brief

coding is a skill
by law, we are non-exempt
please pay our wages