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Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

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Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#471

Post by ManlyBread »

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…

>You don't work in gaming because you want to make the top salary. You work in gaming because you love games

That's just rationalization. Gaming companies earn ridiculous amounts of money, especially the ones that do it through microtransaction model. These companies would have no problem paying FAANG-like salaries if they had to do so, but they pay less because they can get away with it.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#472

Post by oblio »

blagie wrote: post #456
marcus_holmes wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Divorces are ridiculously expensive. That was the major culprit for my generation. Only one peer of mine has actually retired before 50 (that I know of), and he stayed married. Everyone else ended up splitting up, which wiped all their savings. Or they went another path. I followed the other path - total mental breakdown, severe depression followed by "non-retirement" - working freelance, as a co-founder and in inter…

Both the divorce rates and the divorce cost are thanks to the divorce industry and the divorce lobby. We have a massive industry set up to encourage and profit from divorce. Most countries don't have this problem, but it's a bigger problem than even the US' ballooning medical costs.

More and more countries are having this problem as women get emancipated and make more money.

Few people want to be completely beholden to the whims of another person for their entire lives.

I'm not arguing that people don't divorce for bad reasons, but there's also a solid reason why divorce is a good idea in many cases.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#473

Post by nly »

Mauricebranagh wrote: post #468
nly wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are artifacts. Your marginal tax rate in the UK is 62% between $140K and $170K. £100K ($142K) take home => £66,689.16 ($94K) £120K ($170K) take home => £74,289.16 ($105K) (£74,289.16 - £66,689.16) / £20,000 = 38% for keeps

If you hit that you normally salary sacrifice pension to drop you out of that. Also the UK has very generous matching for pensions

Matching varies by employer and isn't a legal requirement. The legal minimum employer contribution is just 3% if you put in 5% and it's arguable whether 8% is enough for a comfortable retirement.

For most 40% tax bracket earners (earning less than £100K) once you get beyond your employers match, there's not much benefit to a workplace pension. A £100K earner sacrificing 10% in to a workplace pension scheme is only £200/year better off than someone taking home that 10% and paying it in to a self-managed scheme (provided they reclaim the tax).

Things change dramatically over £100K. Someone earning £120K and sacrificing £20K in to an employer scheme ends up £4400/yr better off than with a self-managed scheme.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#474

Post by Oddskar »

Agentlien wrote: post #380
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…

The picture seems to be different here in Sweden. It's possibly related to the difference in wages being less extreme overall. The best salary I ever had was as a software engineer at a AAA studio, and I used to work outside the game industry and had offers from a consulting firm which I know offer competitive salaries. I did end up leaving for a smaller studio who couldn't offer quite the same level of compensation,…

Anecdotally the way to achieve a high salary in the software industry in Sweden is to do solo consulting. Most companies seem to keep the salaries from inflating by getting seniors from consulting agencies or freelancing consultants; which comfortably segments the high earners from the internals.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#475

Post by jasonkester »

michaelt wrote: post #463
jasonkester wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does pushing back gain you though? How about we stipulate that you can convince Facebook to pay you $70k to work for them. But they’re also happy to pay you $300k, so if I were a fresh graduate I,would benefit from taking that on board and adjusting my goals and strategy accordingly.

> What does pushing back gain you though? More accurate knowledge of reality. After all, if someone on a forum is talking about $300k graduate salaries while the Bureau of Labor Statistics thinks the median pay of programmers in the US is $89k [1] I gotta take both of those numbers into account in my world view. Otherwise you end up being out of touch with reality, thinking that bananas cost $10. [1] https://www.bls.…

That's what I'm getting at. The BLS has told you that lots of people make $90k programming computers. Whereas Facebook has shown that they are willing to pay some people four times that much to do the same thing.

From your perspective, they only ever need to do that _once_. To you.

The takeaway is "Facebook will pay me $400k if I work on convincing them to do so." That's a much better thought to have in your head than "maybe somebody will pay me the median developer salary."

Of course, you're welcome to approach life however you choose. Personally, I chose that higher number for myself (for the handful of years it took to retire). And I'd recommend anybody reading this do the same.

Edit: I see this same argument coming up every time salary is discussed here. Somebody will say "look how much you can make", and somebody else will pop up saying "sure, but look how _little_ you can make!".

It's as though they're trying to justify not having to ask for more money by convincing themselves it's impossible. But it's not impossible, and all you can accomplish by thinking negatively is to make less money.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#476

Post by gambiting »

vsareto wrote: post #246
gambiting wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually work for a AAA games company and what you said only applies at kind of junior/intermediate level. Hit senior/lead/expert and you can walk out and get another job in a week, it's super hard to hire seniors and above and those positions hold a lot of leverage. Edit: obligatory "above is true in my experience, YMMV"

If there are so many at the junior/intermediate level, shouldn't they be advancing and the senior devs be a larger population? Plus if folks are really sticking to the industry out of passion, they have more of a chance to make it over time. I've heard about game dev's surplus of workers for at least 10 years for almost identical reasons in most of this thread, and that would make nearly anyone a senior for sure, so…

In my experience(again, I'm sure it doesn't apply everywhere) - a lot of people think they want to do games, but actually leave and do something else after a year or two - not enough to get to senior level, so not at the level when they can actually start seeing decent salaries and have that leverage I mentioned. So they are easily poached by software development/consultancy firms with better money. Then people who do stick around and advance to senior actually show very high level of loyalty, I work surrounded by people with 15-20 years of experience at the same company, they aren't interested in going anywhere, mostly because they still enjoy what they do and after that much time the money is usually more than decent so....why would you leave. But obviously people still do, and again, I see people leaving after 20 years making games to "try something else" and they actually leave the games industry entirely when that happens.

What I also see is people leaving due to crunch and burnout - companies which are famous for it seem to lose a large number of employees every time they finish a project, I see that in applications. They aren't being fired, they are just burnt out and they look for a place with better work life balance. We have a bit of a reputation for being really good about it so we see those people apply to us.

And then finally, the "I really wanted to work on X all my life" still applies regardless of seniority and if the opportunities appear people take them no matter the compensation.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#477

Post by Oddskar »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #315
rxhernandez wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I recall of the training I received from a somewhat well-known Chief Quality Officer, you don't get things right more often by getting better people, you get things right more often by making better processes for people to follow (the latter of which isn't as directly tied to better people as you may think). Frankly, I don't get the hype. I've interviewed FAANG engineers and have given a thumbs down almost…

Agree on the process points. Re: the hype .. what I would say is, as an employee of a FAANG, is that I work with really smart people. Some of the smartest and most competent people I've ever worked with. Most much smarter than myself. But after 9 years, I'm not convinced that their intelligence always yields results that exceed that of other companies I've worked at. In some ways, yes, but in other ways no. So, I dun…

I think it's because building software is a team endeavor. Just because individuals are smart doesn't mean that the end result will be great.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#478

Post by mensetmanusman »

akomtu wrote: post #323
gravypod wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Opinions are my own) > The whole "do it for the love of the craft not money" is bullshit propaganda that only serves to keep labor costs low If this is good or bad is up to interpretation but some people actually enjoy different work cultures. I just joined Google after a ~5 year career at various startups, 2 of them YC backed through Work at a Startup & Bookface. Google's culture and the culture at startups I've wo…

I don't get why you care about the company. Most of the time the sole purpose of existence of that company is making its owners and investors rich. That 100hr probably let them get an important contract, so they got a bit richer, but in return you were given food scraps (some time off). If it was me, I'd approach the owners and said "look, if this shit is so critical for your business, I can spend some extra time and…

This is a pretty cynical take. Often, companies provide value in some way to some people in the world.

Imagining who those people are and how you are helping them can help provide context to what you are doing.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#479

Post by Armisael16 »

majormajor wrote: post #270
sailingparrot wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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" That's a fallacy, no one goes to work at Wendy for the love of it. Some people do really want to work in video game for the love of it, they know that their salary will be lower, and they still do it.

> That's a fallacy, no one goes to work at Wendy for the love of it. I don't know, there are a lot of jobs that are worse than Wendy's out there. "Love" is a strong word, but the same forces are at play.

You seem to be having trouble grasping the core concept here.

There are some jobs people really want to do and would do to some degree anyways even if they weren’t employed to do them. This is not the same idea as ‘there are worse jobs out there’.

Making games is one of these things. Working at a fast-food joint is not.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#480

Post by daniellarusso »

ByteJockey wrote: post #350
daniellarusso wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the McDonald’s philosophy. Having clearly articulated processes certainly help consistency.

The problem with consistency is that if you're not already doing the right thing, you'll never do the right thing. Not even by accident.

I disagree.

Even if you are doing the wrong thing consistently, one has a much greater chance of knowing what parameters can be tweaked to alter the outcome.

Consistency is easier to monitor/log.

It is easier to experiment.

Without consistency, it is much more difficult to know which of your decisions changed the outcome, or was it just good or bad luck.

Toyota and McDonald’s are successfully companies, but they are not perfect.

Kaizen and consistency are not mutually exclusive.

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