Scott Murphy is not someone who, by today’s standards, you would expect to see working in the computer industry. Living in Oakhurst, California, in the early 1980s, he had only a high school diploma, and, while raising a family, he worked in any less than pleasant position he could find in order to keep his family afloat.
Eventually Murphy gained a job with Sierra On-Line, a fledgling computer game company that was operating out of the area. Starting out as a support representative, he worked his way up the ladder, until he became manager of the support department. While working his regular job, Scott became increasingly interested in the programming side of things, and made an effort to learn how to program:
Mark and I had been cooped up together working on The Black Cauldron for the Disney movie by the same name. I’d conned Ken into letting me learn how to program adventure games in my off time, which meant being at his house from 5:00pm to 3:00am usually. There was a puzzle in the game where you had to acquire some gruel. I was rather tired one VERY early morning, and to amuse myself I installed a response message that said something like, "Mmmm, this tastes like freshly roasted mule shit, just like mom used to make." When I saw something I wrote actually displayed on the screen, I was totally f’ing hooked. What I didn’t know was that they were going to send that version of the game down to Disney for their perusal of our progress. They saw that message and pretty much shit themselves. Amazingly, I didn’t get fired and Mark and I eventually came up with our space comedy idea and convinced Ken to let us develop it.
After spending his spare time learning how to program, Scott, along with his co-worker, Mark Crowe, went to work on their idea for a space comedy. The resulting Space Quest adventure game series became one of Sierra On-Line’s most successful, spawning a cult following that remains loyal today, despite the fact that a new Space Quest game has not been made in over ten years. As you can imagine, the success of the Space Quest series was just what Sierra needed, and everything they could have asked for.
In a rational world, where rational business decisions are made, such success would have translated into leeway and respect for the talent that spawned it. Instead, the very opposite happened, as Sierra became increasingly obsessed with squeezing more out of the bottom line:
The more successful each game became, the worse they treated us and the less they wanted to pay us. I’m not talking about us demanding more money like some sort of prima donnas. They seemed like they were actually penalizing us for being successful for them. They didn’t want to pay us as much, which wasn’t a lot anyway, as they had for each of the previous games. We’d done well for them despite the fact that they spent virtually no money advertising the games, especially when you look at how much they hyped the King’s Quests. I’m quite proud of how we sold despite that.
On Space Quest 2, I worked fourteen months and had only TWO days off during that period, but that wasn’t good enough for them. I got called in and chewed out after that one and SQ3 for taking too long to get them shipped. SQ4 showed how dark we’d become as a result.
Success is not greeted with praise, but, rather, with damnation, and commands to "work harder." No matter how well he did, no matter how successful his games, Murphy felt increasingly squeezed by his employers, both in the amount of time he was given to complete his projects, and in the amount of money his employer wanted to provide to him.
Such a situation is, sadly, illustrative of what the U.S. labor market has become in the past few decades. According to a James Park article on the AFL-CIO Weblog, U.S. workers are the most productive in the world, and work longer hours than workers in any other developed country. Average wages, meanwhile, are only 15% higher today than they were in 1980, despite the fact that productivity has increased by 67%.
The end result of this pressure on American workers is that being employed no longer means being free of financial insecurity for most people. It also means unhappy employees, with unpleasant places of work, which is exactly what happened with Scott Murphy, who describes in his interview how he was "depressed" during the development of Space Quest 4.
Eventually, as Sierra’s working conditions continued to decline, and, as the computer game industry moved away from adventure games, Sierra’s margins took a hit. Thus began the layoffs, and, yet another example of screwed up corporate values.
In a rational world, a worker who took the time and effort to learn programming from 3 PM to 5 AM, while working another job, would be the kind of person you’d want to keep around. Certainly, such efforts would seem to indicate a certain level of devotion and ability that would be admirable and useful in an employee, no matter what kind of degrees they might have. That such a person would play a role in creating one of Seirra’s more successful line of games would only create further cause for keeping them.
By the late 1990s, however, it seems that there was no room for such people in the computer industry. Sierra, like many other employers today, wanted only people who had a formal, college education. As a result, Scott Murphy soon found himself laid off, and in search of a new, "ordinary" job:
I was pretty much a one trick pony, with that trick being adventure games, and since I was in school before the era of microcomputers, I had no formal education in computer science and companies then wanted people with diplomas which I did not have. I was entirely self-taught and only have a high school diploma, and from a shitty high school at that.
Murphy’s dismissal from Sierra, it turns out, was merely a sign of things to come. Two months later, in what became known as "Chainsaw Monday," a whole stream of Sierra employees found themselves unceremoniously dumped. No loyalty, no respect for their past endeavors. Just, "good bye, and good luck." In the words of Murphy:
I know that my comrades in arms have long ago moved on and are doing well but I’ll never forget how roughly their lives were impacted despite the blood, sweat and tears they gave to what had become a truly ungrateful company.
Such layoffs, too, are, sadly, an example of what the labor market has come to stand for, even in "educated" technology fields. The trends have accelerated under the Bush economy. According to an eWeek.com article from 2002, the number one priority of the IT business that year was reducing costs. And, for most, reducing costs meant cutting staff. Out of a panel of 25,000 IT professionals in 34 countries, 47.6% said that they cut their staff. Such personnel cuts were widespread for one simple reason: Workers are seen as being expendable. Worse, as was the case with Murphy, more and more jobs that did not concretely require a college education are now requiring one. Given that this is happening at the same time as higher education is becoming less financially accessible, this means that, for many people, the door to a decent job has been slammed shut in their face.
An uncertain job market, with fewer opportunities, and with zero corporate loyalty, even for successful employees, means an increasingly insecure population. And, an increasingly insecure population means insecure families and individuals, who have difficulty thinking about anything beyond their own well being, or beyond what the uncertain future has in store for them. In The Way We Never Were, Stephanie Coontz describes this process as part of the reason for America’s decline in social solidarity over the past few decades, a decline that has had a toxic impact on families. From page 277:
America needs more than a revival of obligation within the family. As business writer Bob Kuttner has commented, it "desperately needs an economy based upon notions of mutual obligation and reciprocity." People should be able to expect "that our home, our church, our kid’s school, our bank, and the place where we work will stay put." Without such commitments in the economy and polity, family life will remain precarious no matter how many family values we try to inculcate. Where there is so little trust and commitment outside the family, it is hard to maintain them inside the family. Old family strategies and values no longer seem to fit the new rules of the game.
It’s not that the old rules of the game were fair. But the past two decades have stripped away the illusion of fairness, as well as much hope of winning by the old rules, without leading to construction of any new rules.
The old rules may not have been perfect, but at least someone who valued hard work, and was willing to learn stood a decent chance of getting ahead, and being treated with dignity. No more today. Instead, hard work simply leads to demands to work harder, right up until the point where the company is ready to kick you out to the curb. Instead, a self-taught education is valued less than a piece of paper from a school. Instead, it becomes every person for his or her self, as you wonder whether your future at a particular company can be measured in years, months, or weeks.
Such trends are not good for the community. Nor, are they particularly good for the consumer. Staffing cuts eventually paired the IT industry down to the point where there was fear that they would impact their ability to function. And, as for Sierra, their layoffs, and the squeeze that they put on their employees, ultimately did them no good. Their decline continued as the gaming industry further moved away from adventure gaming. They attempted to adapt by releasing non-adventure games, such as Outpost and Alien Legacy. Such attempts generally failed, however, in large part due to the release of buggy and poorly implemented final products - which, in turn, was likely due to the pressure and schedule rushing they exerted on their employees. In the end, Sierra was taken over by a larger company.
We have a market economy because it offers the best possible benefits to society as a whole. However, how we manage our market economy is an extremely important factor in ensuring that those benefits are as widely accessible as possible. The no holds barred system we’ve set up today is bad for employees, society, and families as a whole, and also offers more than a few pitfalls for consumers. As such, the political debate, going into the 2008 presidential elections, must focus not only on the war in Iraq, but also on our increasingly frazzled quality of life at home, and how to improve this country by creating an economy that works for everyone.
Such a debate is sorely needed because companies like Sierra On-Line in the 1980s and 1990s were just the tip of the iceberg. Companies today are making their employees do more, for less, and with decreasing standards of loyalty and commitment. If we truly wish to see change in our society, and in our families, then such practices will need to be reigned in.
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