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Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

nytimes.com

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Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#471

Post by ghaff »

LanceH wrote: post #429
ghaff wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree with all that. I was photo editor of my undergrad paper back in the day and just the mechanics of shooting film, developing it, printing it required quite a bit of knowledge just to get to output that was reasonably competent technically. Of course, go back pre-35mm and that was even more the case but--as you say--even just a phone takes precent decent pictures for at least certain types of shots if you…

The sheer quantity of shots changes everything. Back in the day of film, a pro could burn a roll of film for a single usable shot (maybe). An amateur had development and printing combined (expensive) and had to make every shot count, leading to most shots being of a staged and unnatural variety.

For B&W, it actually wasn't quite that bad with 35mm relative to today. For something like a football game, I might have shot 5 rolls (so 200 frames or so). Random assignments for a given day a roll or two. You made contact prints and printed up what was needed.

Definitely a bigger consideration than today but it's not all about quantity.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#472

Post by Retra »

jquery wrote: post #276
gregcrv wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other practical solution is basic income. In a basic income society people can do (if they want) the jobs they have a passion for without poor conditions. And people who will want a higher income will do the jobs that a few people can do (highly skilled jobs..), or wants to do (picking up garbage, cleaning toilets...). These jobs will probably have much better conditions than now.

Who is going to pick up garbage in a basic income society and why? Don’t be surprised if you have to pay these people radically more than they are currently paid. In which case COL goes up significantly and the basic income doesn’t go as far and we are back to square one.

"Millionaires don't exist, because who would ever want more money?"

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#473

Post by holy_city »

noego wrote: post #274

I'm all for protecting the vulnerable and underprivileged. I'm all for universal healthcare, increased minimum wages/EITC, and increased taxes on the rich. But I'm very skeptical of the idea that white collar professionals earning well above the median, are somehow in need of "protecting". They have every opportunity to quit the video game industry and take up very lucrative and easygoing jobs in other industries. Th…

>Anything that reduces competition in the marketplace is bad for society as a whole

Just like engineering, every economic design has tradeoffs. There's no ideal solution to the problem, and if there is it certainly isn't unbridled competition.

Labor protections have to exist in order to humanize the commodity that it is, especially when demand dips below supply. Otherwise labor will be exploited. The difference between labor and oil as a commodity is that labor is people with unalienable rights. Unlimited and unregulated competition cannot always guarantee those rights, it can infringe on them for no fault of the individuals affected.

That's why there can never be a truly free market for labor that is also moral - all the upsides of the S/D curve are mirrored by the downsides. Competition is amoral; it's neither innately good or bad for society. The effects of competition can be good, which we should encourage, but they can also be quite negative, which is why we need consumer and labor protection.

For developers in all industries, I see major upsides to unionization. It's not synonymous with reduced competition or salary schedules. Think more in terms of minimum salaries, work and vacation schedules, healthcare/pension funding that isn't tied to your employer, standardized NDA and non-competes, standard FOSS contribution policies.

And yea, I think a lot of us in a hypothetical union would want to codify stuff like a meritocracy and salary/equity negotiations. People on the whole are reasonable. The idea of a union is not to ruin competition for developers, but to provide some benefits developers who don't work at the top of the game for the biggest companies out there. There's a lot of bullshit people at small and mid sized shops deal with that we could fix if we unionized.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#474

Post by odessacubbage »

watwut wrote: post #465
rurp wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a common strategy but, as far as I can tell, a completely useless one. The US govt has been spending resources for years pushing messages that people should just not do drugs, or that by doing drugs they are funding terrorists, destroying families, etc. I haven't seen any evidence that such campaigns work, and given drug use rates across time and countries I'm pretty skeptical that they do.

People do less drugs then they did in the past. Especially young people.

i wonder how much of that decline is simply driven by changes in socialization. most casual drug use has always been peripheral to the spaces where people would congregate e.g; bars, concerts etc. now that kids pretty much have access to their ingroup basically on demand and entertain themselves differently than prior generations, maybe they're just less likely to end up in the kind of situations where social drugs are desirable.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#475

Post by WalterBright »

fredophile wrote: post #453
WalterBright wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> teaching wages On the other hand, the retirement and health care packages for public school teachers is quite generous

Retirement benefits for government employees typically also rely on the current government adequately funding those liabilities. There are several examples of governments that consistently failed to do this and then reducing those benefits when they need to be paid out.

Another way of saying that is the benefits package is so large it often throws the city/state government into a crisis.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#476

Post by kibwen »

jedberg wrote: post #366
ohaideredevs wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the main appeal of being a dev by far - they can't just hire an incompetent family member, no matter how much they want to. They do put them through the best schools and coding classes to hire them, but they still need.someone.competent.

Not really. They just need to hire someone competent to take work alongside the family member and take up the slack. Happens in all industries with a measurable work product. At one point my dad was doing finance for a 20ish person company, where five of the employees were family members. He said that they basically did nothing all day, but all collected paychecks. As the finance guy, he could see how their results w…

Seconded. Seen more than one software company with departments named something like "R&D" that were used as a playground for executives' children where they could screw around all day and collect a wage, while once in a blue moon releasing some sort of press release composed of a meaningless soup of last year's buzzwords.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#477

Post by Macross8299 »

dalore wrote: post #403
derefr wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the only practical solution is for people to stop taking on terrible jobs because of some sense of 'passion' So the “practical” solution is to change human nature? That doesn’t sound right. It’d be like saying that the practical solution to human trafficking is for people to stop visiting prostitutes; or that the solution to gangs’ drug income is for people to stop buying drugs. In all these cases, you can quash su…

I'd say a better solution would be to universal income, or a freedom fund of sorts. So people can be free to go and do their passion jobs, be it making music or writing games. Game development companies might become more like a collective where the developers who are all on universal income pool together and treated as equals. One can dream.

Cool idea, but how do you split the profit (assuming this is a world where games are still sold for money)? I'd imagine once you start having discussions about equity distribution and revenue split, it stops being a collective of equals.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#478

Post by Macross8299 »

TylerE wrote: post #304
dom96 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nepotism is so pervasive and so horrible that I believe it should be outlawed. My SO is trying to get into the Media industry and I am myself incredibly frustrated for her sake by the amount of nepotism she experiences, when you've got assistants who are rude to everyone and lazy outright at a company but can't be fired because one of the producers knows their mother it's pretty freaking annoying.

How do you outlaw it? Do you propose shutting down every small family-run business in the country?

In some cases, nepotism isn't even harmful. Plenty of cases where hiring a family member doesn't mean that family member is necessarily unsuited for the job.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#479

Post by Macross8299 »

CM30 wrote: post #175
DangitBobby wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a difficult claim to make that there's no demand when they specifically state that unpaid overtime is the norm. Why would they need overtime work if there were enough workers?

Because it's technically cheaper to have less workers and to work them for longer hours than to have more workers working for less time. Especially when you're not paying them for overtime.

>Because it's technically cheaper to have less workers and to work them for longer hours

That depends on whether fixed costs of hiring another developer (and coordination costs) outweigh the variable costs of the current developers working more. The variable costs could be lesser quality of work when the developer is overworked or overtime laws.

Overtime laws are supposed to act as a penalty on companies for not hiring enough labour for the required task.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#480

Post by RobLach »

CM30 wrote: post #97

> 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…

What is life if getting rid of passion is sensible? It's a better goal to create systems where passions can flourish.
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