Wat. This sounds great. Count me in!

If you're seriously interested in spending so much time at the office that you turn off the gas and electricity at your home and keep a week's worth of clothes in your car at all times (all things I did),

I do that right now!

you can probably find applications on all of the big production house websites. EA and Activision-Blizzard have offices in LA (as does THQ, though I can't guarantee the same "opportunities" for OT there). Microsoft is in Redmond, WA. I've never worked for them either.

Anyway, May and June are big staffing months as they gear up to crunch test the christmas launch games. About half of the staff is seasonal and only works during the summer months (this way, every single year, they can impress their shareholders by "hiring 150 additional test staff" and then quietly lay them off three months later).

Back when I was testing, we hired every single applicant because they had that many jobs to fill. I once had two guys on my team who didn't speak a lick of English and I had no means of communicating with them. But we had to hire them so we met our "new hires" numbers.

Good luck!

This sounds like fun. Going to look for something in Florida.

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Good grief, what is the minimum wage where you live? I'm pretty sure if I worked enough at a minimum wage job to make $60K in a year, I'd be dead.

At the time, I was making $9.75/hr to manage a team of 300 people. Yes, you read that correctly. I was working 80-100 hours per week every week, 13 out of every 14 days. I had turned off the electricity and gas at my apartment. I slept at the office. I showered at the gym next door. I kept a week's worth of clothes in my car and washed them at a nearby laundromat. I ate whatever food the office bought and I only replied to voicemails when they were of the "Kahz, it's your mom, are you dead?" variety (and even that took me a few weeks to get back to).

The math on the earnings was: 9.75 for 8 hours, 29.25 for the next two, and then 130 for the remaining 6 2/3 hours of my typical 16 2/3 hours workday, for a total of 237.25 per day for 5 days of the week, and 276.25 for my 6th day each week (change first 8 hours to all time and a half), and 325 for my 7th day every other week. There were probably some labor laws being violated as that rolled into the following week, but I never asked a lawyer so I don't honestly know. Anyway, every 2 week pay period came out to (on average) $3,250. Fifty working weeks in the year for $81, 250 per year at that pace. Generally the crunch only lasted for 8 months out of the year rather than all 12 though, so $60k is what I was realistically earning.

It was hellish, and when my boss offered to put me on the fast track to EP in 7 years, instead of taking his offer, I quit. And now I edit reality TV!

So what I'm reading here is: I was right. Would be dead. Probably by my own hand.