Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 566 posts

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#281

Post by the_only_law »

aidenn0 wrote: post #148
darth_avocado wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US cost of living is ridiculous. You shouldn't just compare two numbers one to one. 150k in California is basically just scraping by.

I live in CA, and raise 4 kids while the total pay, including my wife's, just recently surpassed 150k (she works very low hours part-time). Not in the bay area though. We would probably need about $20k more for the same lifestyle had we not gotten lucky with timing buying a house (we bought in 2011, right before a big increase in prices). Alternatively we could have kids sharing a bedroom and live otherwise the same.

What do you and your wife do for a living, if you don’t mind?

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#282

Post by kenhwang »

thewarrior wrote: post #261
glimshe wrote: post #241

I left the game industry for FAANG and I'm getting paid 2-3x more. I'm happy with this situation if I consider the big picture but, at least in my case, my game job was much, MUCH better than FAANG. No matter how many fancy drinks and energy bars FAANG gives me, if the pay in the game industry was higher I'd have stayed without a doubt. What this means is that FAANG is actually paying what it needs to pay to get empl…

There’s some truth to this I’ll admit. But if most of the work is dull why do you need the “best” ? I saw an explanation later in this thread that made more sense. FANGs do have a lot of good employees. And if they didn’t pay high salaries other companies would simply swoop in and free ride on all the hard work they do to find and groom talent. FANGs spend a lot of money scouring the entire globe and interviewing so…

FAANG doesn't need "the best", but they do need to deny upstart competition that talent.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#283

Post by Tarsul »

munk-a wrote: post #85
nonameiguess wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teacher performance is difficult if not impossible to quantify, especially given how much student performance depends on factors external to the classroom. But more to the point, most teaching jobs are government jobs, and government jobs have salary bands set by legislation. You can't individually negotiate with legislators. That has nothing to do with having a union. Most government jobs are not unionized, but stil…

On this point in particular, most of the routes we've tried to use to quantify teacher worth have resulted in bizarre scenarios where teachers actively want to avoid certain classes of students. Early metrics usually punished teachers that were assigned underperformaners - while no child left behind had an expected grade growth formula that could result in a teacher needing to get a student a score above 100 to avoid…

well a good teacher could probably notice whether his colleagues are good teachers quite easily (at least if he had access to their classes etc.). Now that I think about it: colleagues probably are the best metric even for jobs like programmers (at least if they work on the same project/codebase) etc. However, it would be socially problematic if your colleagues were responsible for deciding your pay raises.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#284

Post by kenhwang »

sgerenser wrote: post #280
jedberg wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple still uses that line to underpay people. Their compensation is famously lower than all the other FAANG companies.

Is that really true? Levels.fyi shows Apple right about inline with GOOG, FB and AMZN and significantly higher than MSFT for mid to senior levels.

Supposedly its harder getting equivalent levels at AAPL.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#285

Post by Pfhreak »

hn8788 wrote: post #235
BeetleB wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just to have a bit of a counter argument from me You didn't supply any kind of argument. Your comment can be reduced to "If you want a good salary, you are not one of us." As a person who loved gaming and wanted to work in that industry, you are the reason I didn't go for it.

You should take some personal responsibility and stop blaming your life choices on other people. There's also a world of difference between saying that a FAANG salary isn't the most important part of a job for some people, and saying people in game dev shouldn't have a good salary.

Fuck off with this take. The parent poster blamed nothing on someone else. They made their life choice based on an evaluation of the conditions they would be working under and the types of people they would be working with.

They fully owned the decision, and understanding who your peers would be is not at all unreasonable.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#286

Post by jedberg »

sgerenser wrote: post #280
jedberg wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple still uses that line to underpay people. Their compensation is famously lower than all the other FAANG companies.

Is that really true? Levels.fyi shows Apple right about inline with GOOG, FB and AMZN and significantly higher than MSFT for mid to senior levels.

Everyone I know who moved from another FAANG took a pay cut (and everyone who left Apple to another FAANG got a fat raise). So my data is anecdotal but consistent.

Also MSFT isn't part of FAANG.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#287

Post by 1cvmask »

jedberg wrote: post #265
bedhead wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fairly normal for certain "glamour" industries. Back in the day when it was relevant, MTV was infamous for paying people almost nothing, for no other reason than they could because MTV had a coolness factor associated with it that people sought. Same is generally true for a lot of the entertainment industry.

Apple still uses that line to underpay people. Their compensation is famously lower than all the other FAANG companies.

Apple also famously hires from non-prestigious schools compared to the “elitism” at FB and Google. I have been in meetings at Apple with multiple people and not one of them was from an elite school (remember schools from Iowa and other parochial places). In contrast at FB and Google there were all the elite schools like Caltech, Stanford, MIT amply represented. I am not sure if Apple deliberately targeted such “lesser” schools or was just less elitist in the hiring process and the filters associated with it.

The salary expectations from Auburn (where Tim Cook is from) is a lot less than from say UC Berkeley or Stanford.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#288

Post by cmrdporcupine »

glimshe wrote: post #241

I left the game industry for FAANG and I'm getting paid 2-3x more. I'm happy with this situation if I consider the big picture but, at least in my case, my game job was much, MUCH better than FAANG. No matter how many fancy drinks and energy bars FAANG gives me, if the pay in the game industry was higher I'd have stayed without a doubt. What this means is that FAANG is actually paying what it needs to pay to get empl…

My theory is FAANG pays for "the best" not because they necessarily need them. But because it's better for them if nobody else has them.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#289

Post by werber »

ineptech wrote: post #262

I don't know why this is limited to game developers. I'm a mgr/dir and it seems obvious to me that secrecy around salaries is consciously perpetuated because it allows corporations to get away with underpaying some people. I can't think of any circumstance where it wouldn't be in the individual contributors' best interests to tell each other exactly what they all make. If everyone on my teams shared their salaries wi…

I've always been very open with coworkers about salaries. And in my experience the underpaid people were always not like me ( white and male ) and frequently better at their jobs than me.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#290

Post by Vaslo »

Are there just too many games? I basically rotate my time between a space mmo called Dual Universe and Red Dead Redemption 2 on the ps5. That’s it - I pay a monthly fee for DU and paid 60 bucks a few years ago for RDR2. That’s it. That’s all the gaming I really need for months.

Go to the web or steam up and see a plethora of games and realize how little share of wallet most of these games get. Unfortunately it’s not enough to pay some designers any decent salary. Sad to say but it may be a problem that works itself out through survival of the fittest. Only the best games will get the most bucks and the rest will languish. But if there isn’t enough time for them, should they really exist in the first place?

Post reply on HN