Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the type of software people make for free is not the same software people get paid to create. I bet few people would be eager to develop banking software on their free time for instance.
There's a lot more overlap than I'd have predicted 30 years ago. There are very good open source databases, content management systems, web servers, full text corpus search systems, operating systems, and 100s of other "kind of boring" things that a 20 year old version of me would assume people would need to be paid to create. (Some of those are a crossover where a substantial portion of the development was originall…
Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job
321–330 of 505 posts
Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
You seem like the exception rather than the rule.. I don't think anyone is suggesting people not follow their passions, its more about people not knowing what they're getting themselves into most of the time.
Consider this though, he's not doing that now. He did that when he was young, dumb, and full of dreams... He couldn't sustain that lifestyle. We do sort of glorify the past and lionize struggle as if there were some nobility to it. There's not. There's no inherent nobility in struggling or being ignorant. Being a dumb kid willing to work awful hours for worse pay to get out a demo in time is not an ideal to strive to…
Just to be perfectly clear though: I'm glad I did it, have zero regrets, do find nobility in working a crunch period to ship [a demo] on-time as you promised you would [I was tech lead; that we weren't in a position to ship on-time without a crunch time was at least 50% on my shoulders], and would hope that I'd chase that same job/dream/experience if I had a chance to live my life all over again. (There are other things that I might wish to change, but that's not one of them.)
[0] - Technically, I surely could have sustained that lifestyle, but chose not to. Your overall point there remains valid, of course.
Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job
#323> 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…
For an example of unionization and certification issues that deal with this, look at the medical field. There are many more people that want to be doctors than there are spots in med schools (US-centric view point here). The AMA artificially keeps the enrollment numbers at med-schools low, so as to drive demand for doctors in general and therefore, increase their wages. The AMA is well aware of the current shortage o…
In short, you'd want to make it illegal to program for pay (or to distribute free software) without being a member of the guild.
That will never happen -- thank goodness. But, it is the model that allowed the economy to chug along through the Middle Ages.
Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
>but by extension that unions are evil, corrupt and lazy organizations infiltrated by organized crime. That's because, in the US, it's all true, historically. Auto unions were a big reason why Detroit's automakers were so uncompetitive against the Japanese automakers in the 80s; autoworkers got ridiculous pay for menial work, which is why Detroit moved a lot of their production to Mexico and Canada, and other automak…
Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a lot more overlap than I'd have predicted 30 years ago. There are very good open source databases, content management systems, web servers, full text corpus search systems, operating systems, and 100s of other "kind of boring" things that a 20 year old version of me would assume people would need to be paid to create. (Some of those are a crossover where a substantial portion of the development was originall…
Operating systems and programming languages do come in the cool catagory
Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job
#326Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job
#327They are not being exploited. They are free to take on another job. Especially coders could certainly find jobs in other industries. And "Fortnite" is not the games industry. There are a variety of ways to make a living making games.
Of course you can stop being exploited as a game developer by leaving the games industry---but why should people be forced to change their career in order to avoid exploitation?
Games is kind of like a 'galapagos island' to its own. Most games developers won't know any language other than C++, won't know anything about the web, won't know anything about databases, etc....
Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
I probably jumped the gun on the unionization part. I don’t know a lot about it but my impression of unions is not so bright. Maybe my ignorance is showing with that regard
It's all the propaganda corporations have been feeding you about how evil unions are. The wage stagnation of employees and stratospheric rise in senior management pay can be directly correlated to the decline of unions in North America.
Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
"For the exposure/to build your portfolio." Uggh. To be clear, I sometimes shoot events for free as a favor. And I sometimes shoot concerts or sporting events just because I feel like it. And if you find my photos on Flickr I'll probably give you permission to use them for free. (Though if you want to pay me, that's fine too and I do sometimes get annoyed with the presumption that I'm not going to ask for a fee.) But…
Do you _really_ think your photography job deserves the same hourly wage as an engineer or manager?
Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would be interesting to know exactly why you think (even if you know you don't know) unionization are not so good. So far on HN, I've noticed that people from the US seems to not like the idea at all about unionization while people from EU (me included!) see unionization as something good that protect workers. I do know that efforts around unionization are very strong in Europe, and helpful for the workers. Maybe the…
It’s a combination of multiple reasons. First, culturally, US Americans are much more individualist than most Europeans. (Obviously I am painting with broad strokes here, but it’s true in a general sense, on average). US Americans are somewhat less likely to feel solidarity or a sense of common cause with coworkers, and more likely to value the freedom to negotiate their contract on their own. They are also much more…
> US Americans are somewhat less likely to feel solidarity or a sense of common cause with coworkers, and more likely to value the freedom to negotiate their contract on their own.
No one is negotiating their contracts on their own. A negotiation requires at least two parties, and when it comes to negotiating employment terms, one party typically had no problem incorporating and using that to their advantage.
> They are also much more likely to distrust large organizations and bureaucracy, sometimes to an extreme extent that would be puzzling to Western and Northern Europeans.
Yet some of the largest and most powerful organizations in the world are US based. For a place where so many buy their food at large restaurant and store chains, buy their internet and phone plans from large national service providers, trust large organizations like Google or Facebook with information about their browsing and communication habits and depend on large credit organizations and banks, this just doesn't strike me as true. Large, bureaucratic organizations thrive in the US and people love them. Maybe not meaningfully more than in European countries and probably even less, but to call it an extreme distrust is a mischaracterization IMO.
> Third, there are many current examples of unions in the US that have made industries meaningfully less efficient.
IMO this is an important point, but in a country with the GDP per capita of the US I think that there is some margin to improve conditions in a lot of industries, of course at the expense of some very rich people. The problem is that consumers cover that margin instead of shareholders.