Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job • Hacker News Board

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#351

Post by golergka » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:31 PM UTC

hnarn wrote: post #94

maxehmookau wrote: post #67

Earlier 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…

Well, as someone from Russia and before that, Soviet Union, despite having the polar opposite message in propaganda, I've seen it again and again to be exactly true. I haven't seen a single competent, able-bodied and hard-working man staying poor in my life. What I've seen though was a lot of laziness, entitlement and horrible work ethics.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#352

Post by ghaff » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:31 PM UTC

wolco wrote: post #337

lacey wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a photographer by hobby and you very often see people wanting to hire someone good but who isn’t expecting to make a living at it with offers like “I’ll let you shoot my event to help build your portfolio, and all you have to do is give me a copy of all the photos.” Or alternatively offering something like $100 for four hours to do lifestyle street shoots. I don’t know how often they are successful at getting pho…

25 an hour might be a good rate for someone starting out. I do programming work that takes that long and charge less than that amount.

In all fairness, when I was an undergrad long ago I earned beer money doing various photography-related jobs for the alumni association and other such groups for not a lot of money. But, today, $100 to go somewhere, spend 4 hours doing something you otherwise probably aren't interested in doing, and probably spend the rest of the day editing? $100 for basically a day really isn't great money unless there were some reason you wanted to do the job and the money was just a little something extra.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#353

Post by pslam » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:31 PM UTC

It is appalling that the top 3 comments (at time of writing this one) are victim-blaming. "They should get better jobs". "There's a high demand so they should go elsewhere". "They should have known before they went there".

Where have you been in the last few years, and how have you not learned anything about abusive practices which entrap people? These companies are basically abusive — they abuse their staff with long hours and low benefits, taking full advantage of the cool-factor to entangle them. As anyone who has the slightest empathy and has read anything in the news cycle in the last few years would know, people caught in this situation are often unaware they're being abused, blame themselves, and don't realize there is better elsewhere.

If you're one of the people who are, right now reading this, thinking "That's a load of BS these people are idiots and they deserve what they get", then I implore that you think again and realize you are essentially blaming the victim. That's almost never the right side to be on.

What we need to do is expose these companies for what they really. Put all these things out in the open and air them for all to see. Perhaps at some point we can have all the major studios unionized, and perhaps once their internal cultures become less toxic, their external one will likewise clear up a bit. Here's hoping.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#354

Post by mediocrejoker » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:32 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #316

jackfraser wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or alternatively offering something like $100 for four hours to do lifestyle street shoots. I personally think that's not a terrible offer. $25/hour to stand around clicking pictures? It's a lot easier than most work people do for minimum wage, first, and secondly it's not like you have massive film costs or need a ton of technical knowledge anymore. 99% of the shots people want can be accomplished with stock or re…

>$25/hour to stand around clicking pictures? I'm going to assume good intent but that's an incredibly condescending remark. Just so you know. How about if I offer a trained developer $25/hour to write me some software? It's just sitting and typing.

Why do you assume that the parent was talking about your photography ability, and not their own?

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#355

Post by anoncake » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:35 PM UTC

jimcsharp wrote: post #174

lfcc wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm from Portugal (where we've had somewhat similar experiences to Spain with the mentality for unions). When I was young I believed they were good as it was what I was taught and fell in the socialist-leaning mentality of much of the country. Having started to learn about economics, entering the industry, and seeing the arguments many people make for unionization have definitely led to me to swing much harder to the…

Unions are just reverse corporations. They cannot be any more good or evil than a corporation.

Unions consume goods and use services to make a loss?

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#356

Post by hellllllllooo » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:35 PM UTC

I'd love to understand how many people who frequent hacker news have actual experience with a union directly beyond what the have read? The anti union rethoric is strong in the US and it seems like a lot of comments start with the position that unions are bad and go from there without really understanding what they do or thinking through what things good unions can do well.

Companies have spent a lot of time and money spreading this message so it's not suprising but it seems like a default position of many tech workers I've met in the Bay Area while they also grumble about many aspects of their job.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#357

Post by BadassFractal » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:38 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #254

slg wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In this case, the demand is “the ability to express myself to a huge audience.” People are willing to pay to do that. Because of that, they see any job where they get to do it as a net positive, even if the job is horrible. This is true for any job that is just an extension of a hobby. People put on local community theater productions in their spare time because they find it fun and fulfilling. You don't have to pay…

See also photography, writing, art, etc. Some professionals are in fact resentful to greater or lesser degrees of amateurs willing to work for free (either just for fun or because it's useful to them professionally for reputational or other reasons). I asked a journalist I knew whether he minded the fact that people like myself publish articles/blogs for free in publications that also have paid staff/freelancers. His…

Photography has been hit hard this last decade, with IG blowing up and everybody having a half decent camera in their pockets all the time, AND knowing exactly where to go to get high quality shots. For most people it's about replicating the exact formula, vs doing something original, but that's actually pretty common for every art form. It's simply more visible in photo than in other creative endeavors: https://www.instagram.com/insta_repeat/

Seems to me that if you want to "be special/be paid/be known" in your art form, you need to pick the ones that are enjoyable to you AND have a significant moat, or barrier to entry. e.g. making complex pieces of music, assuming you're not stitching together prefabs from Splice, is actually much harder than pulling your phone out. Same thing with shooting, color grading, and cutting a great video, that's MUCH harder than shooting a frame and applying a filter. Same with doing a beautiful sketch or painting, that takes years of practice.

Photo cameras used to be moats a long time ago, when they were bulky, expensive, a novelty, and the development of film was not as straightforward. But now, it's gotten 100% democratized.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#358

Post by BadassFractal » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:39 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #334

detaro wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What quality freelance developer or manager in the US takes 4 hour jobs for even close to $25 per hour, in a customer choosen location?

I think his gist is that, of course a developer should expect to be paid more than that because they're special. But photographers just click pictures so they should be grateful to make anything at all.

There's a little more to being a photographer than clicking a button, but it might not look like that from the outside. It's like calling basketball "just tossing a ball around".

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#359

Post by ghaff » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:39 PM UTC

mediocrejoker wrote: post #350

ghaff wrote: post #283

Earlier 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…

The general sentiment here seems (to me, anyway) to be that photography is one of those things that many people _are_ going to do anyway, which is why it's very difficult to be highly paid for it. If so many people are willing to do something for free, is it really fair to vilify someone for inquiring as to whether you are one of those people?

For the most part, yes.

In general, my doing something that I want to do for free is different (usually) from you asking me to do a job that you want done for free.

Now, of course, there can be exchanges that don't involve money changing hands. Perhaps part of the deal is that I get into a concert (or whatever) for free and that may be perfectly reasonable. I do attend events on media passes on the (implicit) condition I'll publish a story about some aspect of the event.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#360

Post by danbolt » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:41 PM UTC

Tiktaalik wrote: post #315

My video game developers need unions story: I was a core developer on a major feature of Sleeping Dogs/'True Crime: Hong Kong' for 2+ years. At one point, when the game was still being published by ATVI under the title 'True Crime: Hong Kong', ATVI cancelled the game and 100+ developers were laid off including me. Fast forward a few months and miraculously Square Enix decided to pick up the publishing rights for the…

This is a bit off-topic, but a lot of my friends and peers who have Cantonese-speaking heritage (eg: Chinese-Canadian) have spent a lot of time playing Sleeping Dogs and I think deep-down there's a representation they resonate with in the game. Kotaku even did an article on the topic years ago.[1] Thank you for investing (uncredited!) time and work into the project, as I think it's likely given something special to a group of people.

[1] https://kotaku.com/what-sleeping-dogs-gets-so-right-about-be...