191–199 of 199 posts
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Libertarians should, in principle, be okay with people exercising their personal freedom to form a union.
The issue is that people not in the union are not free to pursue their own negotiations.
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Workers in the game industry are not only devs. There are also artists, testers, IT techs, marketers. I'm not sure the biggest issue is about the salary, but the (unpaid) overtime, precarity, sudden lay-offs, etc.
Okay, let's call it compensation. That is a good umbrella term that includes salary, overtime and benefits. The compensation for game workers sucks compared to their counterparts in other software fields. This is probably because it is sexier to be a game dev than, say, working at Salesforce. It is a good idea for game industry workers to form a union or guild.
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> No individual worker is going to negotiate with a company on equal footing. Equal footing how? If the "worker" and the company could be on truly equal footing, then there would be no point in having companies at all. The whole point of a company is for the company to have more resources than any one person is entitled to or capable of retaining. If you mean equal footing relative other employees , why would they ha…
Every person under capitalism has to sell their labor in order to survive. This means that the employee and employer are not on equal footing - I cannot reasonably refuse to work and live a comfortable lifestyle, which means I have to make certain sacrifices (ie, working 40 hours a week in order to survive). This is all fine if I feel like I am treated well and compensated fairly, but if I feel like I am not, as an i…
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Sexier seems like an odd choice of word. I assume you mean, being a video game designer is sexier to the person doing the job? Low pay. Low prestige. Long hours. I mean, give me two of those and maybe I'll consider the sexiness. Don't you think it's that a lot of young future-Salesforce-developers think that making games will be a lot more like playing games than it really is? (PSA: Making games usually is not at all…
A better word might be “glamorous”.
My only guess is that gamers think games are way sexier than the way Salseforcers think about Salesforcing, and so maybe game devs get a little more hero status than Salesforce devs? Something like that?
Do most actual game developers think, "whoa, this work I'm doing is so sexy"? I don't know that they don't. I've just never heard it.
I'm sorry to all the sexy game devs I've slighted by these opinions. It is not at all my intention. Keep on with your sexiness.
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This comment seems to ignore the large portion of people that operate as small businesses. They make money by selling products they create or services they provide, not raw labor to customers. You certainly can choose not to work for any given company (or even industry). You just might take a pay cut or might have to take on some personal financial risks to start your own business, which isn't palatable to some peopl…
And rightfully so - the world can’t all be small businesses of 1-2 persons. There are things worth doing that require a large team working closely. More closely than a bunch of mercurial small businesses.
For example, a public school shouldn't need to employ janitors, it should just contract with cleaning companies.
Unfortunately, the high school systems in the US give people no education on starting small businesses so people lack the economic and practical knowledge on doing so.
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This comment seems to ignore the large portion of people that operate as small businesses. They make money by selling products they create or services they provide, not raw labor to customers. You certainly can choose not to work for any given company (or even industry). You just might take a pay cut or might have to take on some personal financial risks to start your own business, which isn't palatable to some peopl…
> isn't palatable to some people And doesn't seem to be economically viable for everyone to do, or we'd already be doing it. The main financial risk for people is that cashflow problems can lead pretty rapidly to homelessness or health deterioration.
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Yeah because that's really shitty. If you actually cared about that person you wouldn't throw them out, you'd train and place them elsewhere within your company because they are good employees that contribute positively to your culture.
Unions are just as responsible for being myopic and irresponsible. Shouldn't the teamsters be leading the way in retraining truck drivers given the coming automated truck apocalypse?
This article is one of many discussing the dawn of truck automation in very much detail: https://teamster.org/news/2018/01/teamsters-union-perspectiv...
As you can see unions are in fact discussing this very broadly without jumping to easy conclusions.
Automation by ML is a complex topic on all levels. We are just at the beginning of what will be very interesting times regarding policing automation, ML, and AI.
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This comment seems to ignore the large portion of people that operate as small businesses. They make money by selling products they create or services they provide, not raw labor to customers. You certainly can choose not to work for any given company (or even industry). You just might take a pay cut or might have to take on some personal financial risks to start your own business, which isn't palatable to some peopl…
> isn't palatable to some people And doesn't seem to be economically viable for everyone to do, or we'd already be doing it. The main financial risk for people is that cashflow problems can lead pretty rapidly to homelessness or health deterioration.
I agree that the current framework makes freelancers and self-employed more vulnerable to cashflow problems, and it's an issue.
I've seen some interesting ways to mitigate it, even in my own country (with affordable health services for small business owners but they have salary caps that exclude IT workers)
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And rightfully so - the world can’t all be small businesses of 1-2 persons. There are things worth doing that require a large team working closely. More closely than a bunch of mercurial small businesses.
There are lots of things that don't require dedicated employees that companies insist on. For example, a public school shouldn't need to employ janitors, it should just contract with cleaning companies. Unfortunately, the high school systems in the US give people no education on starting small businesses so people lack the economic and practical knowledge on doing so.