The video game industry has the same problem a lot of creative jobs have: the work force is large. Companies can afford to treat employees like shit because there are so many fresh grads who want to be game devs lined up to take the place of anyone who complains. Compare that to writers/graphic designers who are often undercut by their peers who are willing to work "for exposure". Hopefully unionizing helps these guys out, but I think as long as there is such a big pool of people willing to suffer to have a shot in the industry, it's going to be an uphill battle.
Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job
131–140 of 505 posts
Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not knowledgeable enough of unions to take an informed position on their merits. My impression was that unions are often an image of protection and nothing more. I could be wrong about that though.
Not unionized since unions cannot seem to stick to protecting my rights and always expands into supporting socialism and meddling with foreign policy. That said my views on unions have become less negative: as someone pointed out - at least around here the construction companies with highest percentage of unionized workers are generally the most profitable ones year after year. Why? I can only guess but I guess peopl…
"Not unionized since unions cannot seem to stick to protecting my rights and always expands into supporting socialism and meddling with foreign policy."
Seriously?
You honestly think your employer, who you support with your daily toil, does not contribute to any political causes you might find objectionable?
Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job
#133> For many kids who grew up with controllers in their hands, being a game developer is a dream job, so when it comes to talent, supply is higher than demand This is basically the reason for low wages in quite a few 'passion' driven industries. If a job is something enough people want to do, then talent is cheap and plentiful and companies can provide low wages and poor conditions that for every person who quits, ten…
Part of the problem is that while there is a lot of emphasis on "following passion", "dreams" and "sacrificing for the project", there is very little emphasis on "actual working conditions", "reality of that dream" and "impact of such sacrifice" (or whether it is even reasonable).
It is changing a bit lately but to large extend, going through deadmarches was/is bragpoint. It gives you credibility and proves you are passionate. Ability to say no and negotiating for good conditions, scope control and good treatment is framed as weakness or laziness.
Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job
#134> For many kids who grew up with controllers in their hands, being a game developer is a dream job, so when it comes to talent, supply is higher than demand This is basically the reason for low wages in quite a few 'passion' driven industries. If a job is something enough people want to do, then talent is cheap and plentiful and companies can provide low wages and poor conditions that for every person who quits, ten…
Can confirm this having accidentally ended up working in the Media industry (in a non-passion capacity).
More pertinently, I know someone trying to get an entry level role in a similar passion field and is struggling.
Adding to the problem is:
- Passion fields are quite insular and like to only hire from within the industry
- Nepotism is everywhere. In something like art, hiring so and so's son/daughter may cost you $30k but could close you a $10M deal which is good business
- Pulling up the ladder culture: "well I had to go through XYZ to get where I am so I don't see why this new person shouldn't also have to do it and maybe a bit more"
I think the real problem is we've somehow managed to glamorize work as an end rather than a means. Is spending the first 5-10 years of your working career doing grunt work which could be making coffee and doing photocopying really "living the dream"?
Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
My knowledge of unions is based entirely on the UK. They allow groups of employees who are subject to poor conditions to group together and participate in collective bargaining. Most programmers in the UK are not a member of a union as pay is fairly high and conditions relatively good, but the majority of public-sector and a lot of private-sector workers are. Unionising would be an excellent first step for employees…
> I see a lot of anti-union talk on HN That's because most people on HN are from the U.S. where a century of propaganda has convinced most people not only that poor people are lazy, but by extension that unions are evil, corrupt and lazy organizations infiltrated by organized crime. While this propaganda has a minority basis in reality in some cases, as all propaganda will have because propaganda can't be 100% fantas…
>If you ask someone from Spain or Germany about unions and attempt to explain why they're "evil" from the US perspective, I can guarantee you will be met with complete disbelief.
How can you possibly guarantee (no less!) what someone, regardless of where they come from, will say about any subject? You cannot complain about generalizations and broad statements, as in here:
>...a century of propaganda has convinced most people not only that poor people are lazy, but by extension that unions are evil, corrupt and lazy organizations infiltrated by organized crime.
And then try to fit reality into your own narrative at the same time without being a hypocrite.
I will tell you this, though: CCOO and UGT (the two major trade unions in Spain) are publicly funded, which I find absolutely wrong. Moreover, they tend to be incredibly incompetent and useless in most cases. Of course, I'm drawing from my own personal experience and others' accounts of their own.
Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job
#136> For many kids who grew up with controllers in their hands, being a game developer is a dream job, so when it comes to talent, supply is higher than demand This is basically the reason for low wages in quite a few 'passion' driven industries. If a job is something enough people want to do, then talent is cheap and plentiful and companies can provide low wages and poor conditions that for every person who quits, ten…
|Unionisation may help By restricting the supply of talent, thus artificially driving up wages, but at the same time keeping a lot of people from being able to pursue their dream.
A lot of people from pursuing their dream who would be willing to do it for less. That's always the crux of unions, is the people left at zero wages who were willing to do the exact same work for less wages than the current person with the job.
Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why wouldn't they give a trivially large (and very safe) estimate? Telling someone you will be finished tomorrow puts the onus on you to explain why your estimate was wrong.
Great question. They have pet features. Features with long estimates are targets for being cut. Give a long estimate, you risk not being able to build your feature. I once asked, how long to add analytics to your code? (I wrote a one line utility that could bundle up objects and fire them off for you.) The response was "three weeks per event". Guess which part of the code didn't have analytics. Now, at some level thi…
This and so much this.
To elaborate on your point, say a programmer and a designer brainstorm an amazing new jetpack feature for the game. They spend a day (when they should be working on less interesting but planned features) on a quick first pass and show it to their PM.
The PM asks how long it will take to complete, they say 3 weeks (2 days of UI/UX time to add the fuel bar, a week to tweak the feel and mechanic, 2 days of FX artist time, 2 days of artist time to make the rocket pack model). The PM says that the feature is unplanned and that is too long, so they say they can cut some corners because they really want the feature in and its more interesting than working on their planned tasks. The PM agrees because he wants the team to be creative and take control and pride over how great their game is.
In the end the feature stays in and takes 2 months of development time since it requires modifications to world collision geometry, each selectable player needs a differently modeled jetpack to fit their geometry, a jetpack upgrade system is added, loot box unlockable color customization gets introduced, bots need to be able to fly too and so pathing and behaviors need extensive modification, a tutorial needs adding, sound effects need designing and adding, QA has to do a pass of finding everywhere in the world that the jetpack can be used to get out-of-bounds and to avoid gameplay trigger volumes, and someone has to triage and fix all those issues. And I realized I probably vastly underestimated... do we slip, missing being part of this quarters revenue and cancelling our ad-campaign or have we just pushed into development hell?
Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job
#138Game developers let themselves be exploited with low pay and unpaid overtime. They should grow a spine and say no to ridiculous work conditions. I am tired of hearing about it. They don’t need to unionize, they need to realize that they have a unique and valuable skill set. If we are talking specifically about programmers, we have the fortunate leverage to tell our employers to go piss up a rope with the weekly job o…
>They should grow a spine and say no to ridiculous work conditions. YES! You're absolutely right! > They don’t need to unionize. Err... Why on earth not? That would literally be the definition of growing a spine and saying no to ridiculous work conditions but also having it be effective.
If you have two people equally passionate and capable about doing a job, but one wants more money for fewer hours and the other is happy with less money for more hours, why should the more costly, less productive person get the job?
Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
they need to realize that they have a unique and valuable skill set The competition to be a low-paid drone in game development is huge; significantly more than in non game dev. The games industry is powered by huge numbers of low-experience software engineers. They get paid in glamour and the thrill of being able to tell their friends they work in games. They could leave and go somewhere else for more money, but they…
People say that, but what's the glamour? Do you have friends in AAA gamedev? Do you think that's cool? Do their parents? Their little brothers? You know who is cool? the 2-3 people who designed and built Pac-Mac, or Legend of Zelda, or Braid, or Papers Please. Not the people making guns for Call of War 7 that's a clone of a dozen other AAA games.
Exactly. I thought I wanted to make games professionally for a long time, then realized that I'd just be a cog in the machine if I worked for a large company.
Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job
#140> For many kids who grew up with controllers in their hands, being a game developer is a dream job, so when it comes to talent, supply is higher than demand This is basically the reason for low wages in quite a few 'passion' driven industries. If a job is something enough people want to do, then talent is cheap and plentiful and companies can provide low wages and poor conditions that for every person who quits, ten…
|Unionisation may help By restricting the supply of talent, thus artificially driving up wages, but at the same time keeping a lot of people from being able to pursue their dream.
Only if union membership is both required and restricted. In each of my workplaces, union membership has been optional and open to anyone who works there. It's weaker bargaining-wise than a closed shop with entry requirements, but we've still been able to collectively negotiate to better outcomes (the current round is UCU's dispute with the universities and their pension fund over proposed changes to the pension scheme, which we look to be fighting off).