111–120 of 175 posts
Interesting development. Glitch used to be Fog Creek, where Joel Spolsky talked of treating developers well (latest hardware, private offices etc) and paying them well. I wonder if the culture has changed and that's why the developers felt the need to create a union. [ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/07/a-field-guide-to-d... ]
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Or game developers can just hire non-union employees. The reality is that game development studios can get away with poor work life balance because there's people who are passionate about making games and are willing to accept poor working conditions to get a chance at their dream job. This Stage Actor's Guild exists, but aspiring actors still have to work second jobs to put a roof over their heads. When a job is a l…
Employees usually receive shares as comp, don't they? I will say that the horror stories and bad press coming out of the video gaming industry will possibly have a chilling effect for new grads who would otherwise jump straight into it. Eventually management will run out of non-union workers to hire. Or the non-union workers themselves will demand better treatment.
Very rarely do employees receive equity as compensation.
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My concern as a libertarian is that unionizing tech will lead to calcification, decline of agility and innovation, and diversity of business structure. There's no question that the U.S. has been more innovative in tech than other countries over the past few decades. That's thanks to an entrepreneurial culture that encourages risk taking. Unions attempt to limit risk to employees. In doing so, they limit the agility o…
Funny, I feel the same way about MBA mills and slash and burn private equity firms.
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Or game developers can just hire non-union employees. The reality is that game development studios can get away with poor work life balance because there's people who are passionate about making games and are willing to accept poor working conditions to get a chance at their dream job. This Stage Actor's Guild exists, but aspiring actors still have to work second jobs to put a roof over their heads. When a job is a l…
Employees usually receive shares as comp, don't they? I will say that the horror stories and bad press coming out of the video gaming industry will possibly have a chilling effect for new grads who would otherwise jump straight into it. Eventually management will run out of non-union workers to hire. Or the non-union workers themselves will demand better treatment.
Non-voting shares, yes. Voting shares are usually only given to very senior people, if ever, and not nearly enough to form anything close to a controlling ownership of the company.
> I will say that the horror stories and bad press coming out of the video gaming industry will possibly have a chilling effect for new grads who would otherwise jump straight into it. Eventually management will run out of non-union workers to hire. Or the non-union workers themselves will demand better treatment.
Decades of game development suggests otherwise. Like acting, it's people's dream job. And when the supply of labor exceeds the demand workers do not have leverage.
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Employees usually receive shares as comp, don't they? I will say that the horror stories and bad press coming out of the video gaming industry will possibly have a chilling effect for new grads who would otherwise jump straight into it. Eventually management will run out of non-union workers to hire. Or the non-union workers themselves will demand better treatment.
> Employees usually receive shares as comp, don't they? Non-voting shares, yes. Voting shares are usually only given to very senior people, if ever, and not nearly enough to form anything close to a controlling ownership of the company. > I will say that the horror stories and bad press coming out of the video gaming industry will possibly have a chilling effect for new grads who would otherwise jump straight into it…
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> Employees usually receive shares as comp, don't they? Non-voting shares, yes. Voting shares are usually only given to very senior people, if ever, and not nearly enough to form anything close to a controlling ownership of the company. > I will say that the horror stories and bad press coming out of the video gaming industry will possibly have a chilling effect for new grads who would otherwise jump straight into it…
For decades there was no interest nor action towards unionizing in game development. Greater scrutiny into the industry from modern game journalism, and perhaps worsening experiences as the industry heads towards Hollywood-like AAA titles produced by monolithic studios, is surely causing something to change.
I think you need to qualify the claim that these experiences are worsening. In fact, from most of the veteran developers I've talked to report the opposite: before the proliferation of the internet crunch time was way more serious since patching was not a viable option. Nowadays it's pretty much the norm that games have significant bugs for the first week or two and still need to mature after release. This creates greater room for error and less pressure to fix every bug before release.
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It is a government problem, the government gave unions special rights that other organizations don't have. It's easy to fix, treat them like any other organization.
Not trying to be snarky, but what rights do unions have that others don't?
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For decades there was no interest nor action towards unionizing in game development. Greater scrutiny into the industry from modern game journalism, and perhaps worsening experiences as the industry heads towards Hollywood-like AAA titles produced by monolithic studios, is surely causing something to change.
Game developers' experiencing the misery of crunch time and layoffs is something I've heard about firsthand since the early 2000s at the latest. Reading accounts from earlier games' development cycles suggests that this has been common for even longer than that. Game development has always had cyclical labor demands and tight deadlines. I think you need to qualify the claim that these experiences are worsening. In fa…
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> Why not? The same reason your criminal defense attorney doesn't sell themselves to the public prosecutor's office.
Are you implying that public prosecutors have the option to not interact with criminal defense attorneys, because companies certainly have the option to hire employees that do not work for unions.
No, I'm implying that working for an actor’s counterparty compromises your ability to represent that actor in adversarial interactions with the same counterparty, which is a core function of unions with respect to employers as it is with defense attorneys with respect to prosecutors.
> companies certainly have the option to hire employees that do not work for unions.
Not in the US; even where union shops are prohibited by state right-to-work laws, adverse employment decisions on the basis of union membership or union-related activity by an employer are prohibited by the National Labor Relations Act. That is, in some cases, employers are allowed to hire employees who aren't members of a union, but they aren't legally permitted to hire employees because (even in part) they aren't members of unions.
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Game studios especially need this. I'm a conservative in most other labor-related things (liberal on social issues), but holy shit the devs are abused by the game studios.
Former game developer here. Game studios don't need unions, they need better management. Basically, an 18-year-old QA tester gets promoted to lead QA then associate producer then assistant producer and then producer. The producer manages by industry lore. And industry lore is terrible. Unionization is not going to fix the management training problem.
In an industry known for abusing its employees (which, BTW, does not extend to software engineering in general, in my opinion - software engineers are treated well almost everywhere else), you _need_ pushback to end abuse. It's as simple as that. Even if unionizations fail, they still serve as a signaling mechanism - if things get bad enough, they'll start succeeding, and that's the outcome employers would like to avoid. The solution is simple: they should pull their heads out of their collective asses and start treating employee abuse as a real problem. If there's no downside for them to not doing this, they won't do it. It's as simple as that.