461–470 of 513 posts
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My experience is that new members subsidize veteran members as junior non-full time pay in but don’t get a lot back.
That applies to pretty much everything in life — The more you put in, the more you get out.
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I didn't say that unions decrease employment. I did describe the mechanisms by which employment might be reduced due to increasing costs (regardless of the cause of the cost increases). In the referenced comment, you speak of "profit from abuse/exploitation", which presupposes that abuse or exploitation is occurring. Most game developers (programmers at least) have skills that are valuable in other kinds of SW develo…
If our only consideration for every decision is whether or not if it will increase cost for employers, then we would still have child labor and slavery. I don't believe this is a hyperbolic statement. The specter of increased costs is used to justify opposing everything from higher minimum wages to the 40-hour workweek.
The point is that the large majority of these developers are choosing this line of work, not being forced into it. Including the long hours and frequently lower than average pay. Any comparisons to slavery or child labor are an insult to all those who actually suffer(ed) under those conditions.
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Employers tend to be a lot more hostile to unions in the US. This manifests with deliberately spread FUD about unions (e.g. the ridiculous Walmart video), covert attempts to sabotage, depiction of schoolteachers as terrorists (by the Kentucky governor) and, in one rather extreme case, aerial bombardment of striking workers.
Why is this grayed out? Wrongthink?
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If our only consideration for every decision is whether or not if it will increase cost for employers, then we would still have child labor and slavery. I don't believe this is a hyperbolic statement. The specter of increased costs is used to justify opposing everything from higher minimum wages to the 40-hour workweek.
You're missing the point. The point is that the large majority of these developers are choosing this line of work, not being forced into it. Including the long hours and frequently lower than average pay. Any comparisons to slavery or child labor are an insult to all those who actually suffer(ed) under those conditions.
And just because people currently are satisfied with mistreatment doesn’t mean it’s not worthy of change. Whether if that change comes from unions, or from the companies themselves.
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> creating more opportunities for young new grads to break in Just going to point out, everywhere, I have ever heard of a union it generally made it harder for new people to come in, not easier, by increasing the commitment an employer is expected to make to an employee, and by making it harder to remove employees that need to be removed but can't because of their seniority with the union.
Just going to point out, everywhere, I have ever heard of a union it generally made it harder for new people to come in, not easier My observation has been the opposite. I believe because the unions have an interest in increasing their membership, not letting it atrophy and decrease due to time and deaths. A union that doesn't have a growing membership is a union that will disappear. In fact, some unions I've seen ha…
I would strongly consider supporting a video game union, if only to help formalize the things that the good shops do and bring those practices industry wide. Personally I haven't done a day of overtime in seven years and I feel reasonably compensated but there are clearly other places out there that are still exploiting their workers. Improving worker input into production schedules and creating clear guidelines arou…
I don't really understand this obsession with credits in the game dev industry. There's no credit list in GMail for example, and yet everyone is fine with it?
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> it's not like you don't have options There's a catch-22 there, though - the more times you exercise your option (to move to a different job), the harder it is to exercise it the next time. Too many job changes is considered a negative.
In other industries, perhaps, but it's standard in tech work to move jobs frequently. Every time I hire a new dev I slog through 200 - 300 resumes, the overwhelming majority of which have never held a job longer than 18 months.
A series of quick lateral moves - this obviously excludes freelancers and consultants who specialize in short term contracts - can be a sign of someone who stays just long enough to either show they're not great at the role and took off before they were let go, or otherwise has something else going on with them that you'd want to look into more. It could be perfectly understandable. It can often not be.
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> Standardizing crediting would be one close to my heart. Oh hell yeah. I did 3+ years on a title, nearly killing myself to ship it. When I realized that doing that much OT was doing to my personal relationships, health and sanity I left with a generous transition ~8mo before ship(including tossing 2.5mo of PTO because they didn't have to pay it out and I could never take it). Listed under "special thanks" as well, i…
With less and less titles shipping as boxed-product and very few of those having anything approaching an instruction booklet crediting is almost dead already. Some in-game credit screen buried in the options menu or after completing a 50+ hour campaign is about as un-readable as the end credits on a Netflix TV show. The argument against you getting a full credit is that it would list your contribution to the game as…
I don't know about films, but credits on TV shows apparently work more like lifetime achievement awards than like a list of who worked on what. Everyone touches a lot of different things, your total contributions are tracked informally, and when they exceed a certain amount you get an episode credit. You need to have touched the episode, but you might have done much less work on that particular episode than a dozen uncredited people.
Source: Mark Rosewater's writing about his time on Roseanne.
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The only union I know much about is IBEW. My dad's family is huge, and everyone in it is an electrician basically. The way it seems to work is that a contractor wants N number of electricians for a contract, so the first N electricians in the queue are laid off get dequeued and sent to work. This is a really interesting system, and I think if there were subgroups of software engineers it would pretty much work fine.…
> Only problem is, I don't see how you're going to get top engineers to join. You appeal to their boredom. FAANG pays people to not compete more than anything. Rotation is a chance to break the monotony and actually be able to steer the ship for a change.
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Yeah I don't get why people bring up Hollywood in union discussions. Virtually every position in the film industry is unionized, even the semi-obscure ones like storyboard artists.
The film unions are the perfect thing to bring up because they are the most like video games. Thus both the good and bad from those unions are likely to apply. Apply the rules for a coal miners to video game workers and the union will die quickly as workers realize the rules coal miners need are not helpful for their situation. Apply the rules for the actors union to video game workers and you have a chance of succes…