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Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

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Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#381

Post by mssundaram »

vvanders wrote: post #305
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…

> Also the argument that it's "grueling 80+ hour weeks day in and day out is" is bullshit! The only time I ever worked 80 hours in a single week was when I was starting out in Quality Assurance and I was getting paid hourly so I was happy to make the extra overtime. Sorry but I'm going to call bullshit on your bullshit. Spent ~5 years in the industry and every place I worked crunched like hell and every place that my…

You can even perceive it from the vernacular of how you refer to "crunch" - it has a feeling of something often talked about, a term used in the industry.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#382

Post by souprock »

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…

Since you are a game developer with kids, I have to ask... what about the addiction? Have you seen your kids getting addicted to games? Does that bother you? Have you pondered your own contribution to that problem?

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#383

Post by Jweb_Guru »

bko wrote: post #211
paxys wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well getting minimum wage at Wendy's is also a supply and demand issue, but that job isn't sold as "do it for the love of the fast food industry". Ultimately a large chunk of game developers do have the skillset to be able to get better pay and working conditions elsewhere. They like making games, sure, but the tiniest amount of collective action among workers in the industry could ensure that you get to do what you…

The problem then is that if the industry pays above market wages, then there will be too many prospective game developers for the roles. Then the question is how do you choose who gets to be in this industry where you can do what you love and get paid well for it? Things have a way of balancing out, and labor organizers will see this surplus and capture an ever increasing portion of it through fees or other means. Th…

Game companies lose a ton of great developers due to their atrocious salaries and this is (IMO) reflected in many ways, from ever-lengthening development cycles to quality issues at release to feature cuts and crunch. I believe this affects the bottom line pretty significantly, and game publishers would look at the problem more seriously if they weren't making profits hand over fist due to the expansion of the industry as a whole lifting pretty much all boats. Seriously, for every one dev I know who actually works in the industry I probably know 10 who would much rather work there than their current job if the salaries were even close to competitive.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#384

Post by _qwfv »

bogwog wrote: post #334
_qwfv wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And furthermore, it's how it compares to the profits of the company. If an engineer is returning $500,000k annually in profit to a company from their work, and getting paid $75k of that, they are being exploited. (Or at the very least are undervaluing their labor.)

That's an unnatural/weird way to look at it. If the engineer provides $500k value per year, and they get paid $500k per year, the company makes $0 profit. By that logic, the only way to not be underpaid is for the company to be in the red; but if that happens, there won't be a company to pay you! Plus, it's likely any other engineer could provide the same value. So (as always) it's about supply and demand. In this ca…

It's not unnatural at all, or at least it's not any more unnatural than someone getting to keep a portion of your labor's profit just because they put the most money down when they started the company.

A workers co-op, for instance, splits all the profits between all the employees in an arrangement that is basically "we collectively produced profit X we all get an equal share of that profit."

While "unnatural" is the wrong word, imo, I think it's fair to say that it's "unfamiliar" to most folks and "uncommon" out in the world.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#385

Post by _qwfv »

tptacek wrote: post #333
_qwfv wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> should NOT be treated as an indicator for what "reasonable" pay looks like across the entire industry. Hard disagree. The comparatively low salaries in other sectors are just that, below what workers should be earning. Things are fuzzier in the indie space, but companies like Blizzard, Activision, EA, Epic, Ubisoft, Rockstar, CDPR, etc. all pay low and absolutely rake in profits. We should call worker exploitation…

When we talk about FAANG companies in this context, we do so with the subtext that there are so few companies that pay this way that they'd fit into a short acronym. The idea that the top of the market rate is the moral floor for compensation is hard to take seriously. Besides, people trade compensation for all sorts of things: working at a nonprofit, working in their rural hometown. Why shouldn't problem domain be o…

FAANG companies also underpay their workers. It can simultaneously be the case that they pay their workers best in class wages AND those wages are less than the workers deserve. Apple has immense cash reserves built from the labor of their employees. That is essentially the difference between what value those employees generated for Apple and what they were paid. More of it should go out to the employees, and we should push to make the wages of workers at any company be higher percentage of the value they generate for that company.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#386

Post by oreally »

sanxiyn wrote: post #299
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 that while work is dull, people are not overqualified. They need smart people not because logic they write is complex, but because navigating total chaos of internal system complexity needs smartness. If they could refactor and get internal systems in order they could lower qualification bar, but that refactoring requires super duper overqualified people, etc.

> They need smart people not because logic they write is complex, but because navigating total chaos of internal system complexity needs smartness.

Careful, that's the FANG SWE ego speaking. What you describe isn't smartness but a willingness and patience to put up with lots of bloat.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#387

Post by missedthecue »

zmalski wrote: post #366
dreyfan wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. How is a startup supposed to compete when today's economy has resulted in fresh grads commanding $200k total-comp? Of course the answer is "you raise money!" so you can pay them "market-rates" at which point you may as well say fuck it and just get a job too because now you've given up so much equity and have such an aggressive burn-rate you're pretty well screwed from day one.

Not sure where you are that fresh grads get compensated with $200k but please, as a fresh grad who spent 6 months job searching and just accepted a software engineering job for $50k, let me know.

It's refreshing to see someone pushing back on this narrative a little. FAANG employ a cumulative total of about 100,000 software engineers globally (can't find US-specific numbers).

There are 4.4 million software engineers in the USA. I'm sure the graduate -> $200k move happens, but it's only an extremely small number in terms of the occupation as a whole. People on this forum seem to casually mention it as if it's some kind of default.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#388

Post by davidgould »

golemotron wrote: post #361
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.

It's not just glamour. There's an argument that teacher salaries are low because people find it more rewarding than a lot of other work.

So by this theory people must really love janitorial and fast food work.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#389

Post by oreally »

whoisjuan wrote: post #167
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…

This is a fair take, but modern gaming companies have similar margins as other consumer tech companies since they are operating on profitable business models such as subscription and micro-transactions. The gaming industry has been playing the same card movie studios play which is “This is a passion industry. Come and work for us but we can only offer this range of compensation and this type of contracts because we a…

> The gaming industry has been playing the same card movie studios play

FWIW, the mobile games industry takes a different route. Unfortunately the media loves to shit on them while not being too hard on how the AAA movie-like industries operate.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#390

Post by sanxiyn »

oreally wrote: post #386
sanxiyn wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My theory is that while work is dull, people are not overqualified. They need smart people not because logic they write is complex, but because navigating total chaos of internal system complexity needs smartness. If they could refactor and get internal systems in order they could lower qualification bar, but that refactoring requires super duper overqualified people, etc.

> They need smart people not because logic they write is complex, but because navigating total chaos of internal system complexity needs smartness. Careful, that's the FANG SWE ego speaking. What you describe isn't smartness but a willingness and patience to put up with lots of bloat.

I mean, yes, it's not only intelligence, but also willingness to put up with bullshit, but "isn't smartness" is going too far. It IS taxing on brain.
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