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Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

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Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#351

Post by chris11 »

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…

> if the pay in the game industry was higher I'd have stayed without a doubt.

There are exceptions. Roblox has a reputation for being competitive with FAANG. You should check them out. It's also a platform company, so it has all the technical challenges of the gaming industry without the crunch-time that comes along with releasing a major game.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#352

Post by tharkun__ »

NamTaf wrote: post #306
socialist_coder wrote: post #150

Just to have a bit of a counter argument from me, a game developer who loves games and has worked in the US games industry for the majority of my 20 years career: If your argument is "You can make more at a FAANG company" - well yeah, you can. You don't work in gaming because you want to make the top salary. You work in gaming because you love games and you enjoy having all your coworkers also love games and being ab…

> As a salaried developer I don't think I was ever expected to work more than 60 hours a week, and then after the crunch was over we always got 1 or 2 weeks of extra vacation ("comp time"). To be clear, the normal working schedule was 40 hours per week. Crunch time is like 1 or 2 times a year, for maybe 1-2 months each time. And like I said, depending on how much you crunch, you would get extra paid time off afterwar…

I wonder why you got downvoted as you're basically spot on. Can someone check my calculations, because I'm getting ridiculous numbers, not "marginally behind"

He remembers 1-2 times of 1-2 months of crunch of "not being expected to work _more_ than 60 hours". My bet is that this means people usually stayed _at least_ 60 hours during the crunch time due to social pressures created by the employees themselves. Sort of like "unlimited vacation" usually means that on average everyone takes less vacation, because they don't want to be the one with the most vacation taken. So to me this means the _lower_ bound is 60 hours, not the 50 you put as the average.

1-2 in this context tells me: it's definitely 2, if not more, but let's take the lower bound, i.e. 2. The following uses some generous rounding:

That's 4 months, so the 1/3 of the year you mentioned of 60 hour weeks. 4.33 weeks per month on average times 4 months is 17.3 weeks of at least 60 hour weeks =~ 1040 hours of work over a period of time that they should've worked ~690 hours. That's an extra of about 345 hours of work they did, which is a whopping 43 8-hour days. Even if after each of the crunches they got 2 weeks off, that's 20 days of vacation to compensate for 43 days of unpaid crunch time that also wreaked havoc with their actual lives.

Is my math off somewhere? Because otherwise as this was the lower bound from an idealized remembering of "the good old times" I'd call that exploitative.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#353

Post by chris11 »

rawtxapp wrote: post #64
ttul wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno. My friend is making $250K working for Roblox. He’s 15yrs into his career - all game dev. Doesn’t seem too bad.

That's great, but most FAANG eng make more than that by their 2nd or 3rd year. With 15 years of experience, they could be making at least 500k+. edit: for the skeptical, this is what an L4 makes at Google[1], L4 is easily attainable within 3 years, pretty likely in 2 years, that's assuming you start at L3 (straight out of college or very little experience). 1: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-E…

I've got friends at Roblox. 250k sounds really low for a senior engineer that started pre-IPO.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#354

Post by chris11 »

ironmagma wrote: post #273
ska wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's simple; most bay area, like most everywhere, is not FAANG. Treating a non-unimodal distribution as if it were unimodal leads to all sorts of silliness.

I agree. Why compare game developers to FAANG at all? When deciding if it’s worth it, the main thing I want to know is how it stacks up to an average software job.

I don't entirely agree, averages are useful for decisions like deciding if I want to move to a new city, or deciding what type of job I want. But I want a great fit when I'm looking for a new job. If I have an average job that I don't have strong feelings for, I don't need to accept the first good offer. So I can wait for something I'm really excited about.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#355

Post by inopinatus »

Dracophoenix wrote: post #349
inopinatus wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting my hiring manager’s hat on, I recommend asking for more, without hesitation. There is practically no downside. Especially if it’s your dream company, because you are likely to be extra motivated, and this is a case you can genuinely make. Once an offer’s already on the table, the worst possible outcome from asking will be “sorry, that’s as high as we can go right now” without any rancour. If instead the respo…

In your previous experience with FAANGs, were your requests for a higher offer taken as an affront? Also, what was your role with regards to ISP infrastructure?

1. No. I'm also speaking from both sides of the table, as a hiring manager I could never be offended by someone simply looking to gain the greatest benefit from their employment. I won't say it can't happen, however, because every service team is different.

2. Well, over the course of the last few decades, I think probably most of them, having started out building dialup services in the '90s on shelves piled up with USR Sportsters, to principal engineer for a multinational service provider; developing various appliance products; developing global-scale provisioning & monitoring tools for transit and hosting services; helpdesk; operating a LIR; dating RIR staffers; standing up new IXPs; SRE; hiring; designing data centers; M&A due diligence; post-M&A systems convergence; webdev; postmaster. My concept of "full stack engineering" starts with racking the servers, or perhaps even before that: getting the business case approved and running the RFP. Never been a peering coordinator, though, I'm not demonic enough.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#356

Post by darth_avocado »

dragonwriter wrote: post #337
darth_avocado wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay most of the replies I see in here claim here that 150k is a luxurious living are assuming a lot. First and foremost, most these 150k game dev jobs are near big cities, the remote ones at least pre covid never paid that much. Second, yes after taxes your take home pay per month is ~8k, and a little more if you have dependents. But here's a couple of things to put into perspective: 1. It's not a lot of money if th…

> It's not a lot of money if that's your household income and you have kids. Its about 50% above median family income in California for a family of four, and most of those families of four aren’t getting by with just a single worker. > That leaves you about 3000 for groceries, gas, medical expenses, school related expenses, recreation, clothing, and bunch of other expenses for say a family of 3-4. That's not a lot of…

>Its about 50% above median family income in California for a family of four

You're missing a key point, that this thread is about game dev salaries and most of them tend to be in major cities (and require you to go in). Sure you can central California and work on a farm, but that's irrelevant.

>Yeah, it is. I mean, its not “eat out every day” money, but its quite comfortable.

It depends on where you are and for most game devs, I wouldn't consider it "quite comfortable".

>150K is almost the median household income of households headed by a Ph.D. holder

Sure, but they'd still won't have it easy if it's a family of 4.

>but you can drop to a much lower CoL within a reasonable commute distance, either within the 9-county Bay Area or adjacent, such as southwestern Solano County

I used to work for Ubisoft in San Francisco and let me tell you there isn't a single county within "reasonable" commute that is cheaper to live in. My commute was one and half hours each way and was still paying $2200 for a single bedroom apartment (two bedroom was unaffordable).

There's no denying there's people in California who make way less and live far from the big cities. But there's a reason why the limit to be considered "low income" is $120000 in San Francisco for a family of 4 (and similar in other big cities where game studios have offices).

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#357

Post by [deleted] »

Raed667 wrote: post #31
bluescrn wrote: post #10

The massive gap between UK and US gamedev salaries seems to keep getting larger :(

I'm struggling with this, I can't find a formula to translate US salaries to European ones (UK, FR, DE, mainly). On the one hand in the US if you save a lot, you can retire early and move somewhere cheap. On the other hand in Europe a lot of things are covered for you without having to deduct them from the salary. If anyone has researched this subject I'd love some links.

[deleted]

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#358

Post by therealdrag0 »

inopinatus wrote: post #253
dwaltrip wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like you can’t even imagine that someone might not be interested or willing to work at FAANG? If those aren’t an option, then it might not be a lowball offer anymore. FAANG compensation is in an entirely separate category, from what I can tell.

The point is about not allowing yourself to be exploited, just because it’s what you love, and in any context. I earned as much in enterprise and consulting as I did in FAANG and ISP; there is sector median disparity, but to paint the differences as somehow magically intrinsic and inevitable would be as false for FAANG as it is for game dev and any other industry besides.

You can't avoid some level of exploitation when you have little power; and you have little power when there are 5 other people willing to do the job at a wage you think is too low.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#359

Post by sgerenser »

munk-a wrote: post #232
dijit wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of people seem to forget that employers pay more than the base salary in Europe. For instance your “salary” in Sweden is 31.42% higher than what you’re told your base salary is, due to pension contributions, and social services. As an employer I would have to pay 78.852 if an employee had a base salary of 60.000. This is before personal income taxes, which are also very high. https://www.verksamt.se/web…

I don't believe there's any country in the first world where your take home matches the employer's out of pocket - in the US you've got healthcare, retirement matching, payroll taxes, other employment fees and a few other employer-side taxes. Most other countries follow a similar logic, relying on offloading some of the income tax burden onto the employer to prevent a total loss of tax income from judgement proof fol…

In the U.S. I don’t think it’s really possible to (legally) segregate benefit packages by pay range. What they do is segregate based on part time/full time, and barring that, use contractors for their low paid positions.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#360

Post by tharkun__ »

koyote wrote: post #268
tgv wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$75k is considerably higher than the top 10% for almost the entire world. Even in most of Western Europe, $75k would be in the top 5%. It of course depends on what that salary actually contains: a Western European salary is taxed for around 40%, but health care is cheap.

> Western European salary is taxed for around 40% You'll only get that tax rate at very high salaries and it's also of course marginal. In the UK the first 12k (~$17k) is entirely tax free for example. After that it's 20% up until you have earned 50k (~$70k). Only after that does the 40% tax kick in. So on a $75k salary, only $5k will be taxed at 40%. For a $75k salary you would be paying just over 16% tax and 9% nat…

Careful with the "of course marginal" and lumping all of Europe into one bucket :)

E.g. Germany has a progressive tax rate system and the salary ranges this applies to are rather small. Quoting from: https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/germany/individual/taxes-on-per...

For a single taxpayer:

Free amount: 9744 EUR Progressive tax from 14-42%: 9744-57918 EUR 42% on your entire salary from: 57918-274612 EUR 45%: > 274612 EUR

Also see a nice explanation and graph here, though the numbers they use are different, because different tax years are assumed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Germany#Income_tax

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