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Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

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Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#491

Post by mkoryak »

mettamage wrote: post #486
mkoryak wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is difficult to write a strong referral for someone you do not know.

Bachelor + master 2 years of software engineering experience 2 years of teaching experience Education: Bachelor information science Bachelor psychology Master game studies Research master computer science (and tons of failed studies, extracurricular courses, student boards and jobs) Notable fun achievements: Graduated from first bachelor within 2 years. Published my homework as a paper to a conference and it got acce…

There are questions in a form that I'd fill out like: how well I know this person, how well I know their work, etc.

For you, I would need to answer "don't know" for all of these.

Having a strong github would go a long way in making it possible to answer one of those with with something other than don't know.

Basically you need something more tangible than a resume for a stranger to go out on a limb for you.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#492

Post by Mauricebranagh »

nly wrote: post #473
Mauricebranagh wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 £2…

You know I meant the HMRC match and the tax treatment - not the statutory employer one.

You get tax relief at your rate of income tax, which is much better for higher rate tax payers

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#493

Post by [deleted] »

onion2k wrote: post #412
comp_throw7 wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, FAANG compensation lets you trivially retire (or achieve financial independence) by ~40 (if you're single), and that's assuming you're budgeting for 200k/year with an extremely conservative withdrawal rate (3%). If you're willing to resettle somewhere cheaper and live a somewhat less extravagant lifestyle, you could do it by your early 30s no problem. And, again, this is if you're single, i.e. no second incom…

I imagine this is true in theory . The math checks out. But every FAANG company has been around for at least 15 years now and we don't hear many stories of their early hires retiring. Where does it break down in practise? Is it just too hard to give up the high paying role? Is it that retirees don't talk about it? Or is it that the theory is actually wrong for some reason, and working for $200k for 20 years doesn't a…

[deleted]

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#494

Post by kilbuz »

wikibob wrote: post #91
hu3 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good for him. But that's an exception. How much does the average roblox dev make?

You can see for yourself here: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Roblox/salaries/Software-Engi... IC1 Software Engineer (Entry Level) $221k IC2 $249k IC3 Senior Software Engineer $285k IC5 Principal Software Engineer $422k

I love levels but the self-selecting group who reports their comp there cannot be used to reliably estimate the average, since they are not a random sample. I would guess propensity to report is correlated with higher TC.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#495

Post by AlwaysRock »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #301
AlwaysRock wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well this is bad negotiation for a lot of reasons. I've coached 1000's of folks on getting better offers. You are right that you have to have some leverage. But walking away is only one of many possible leverage points. You could also have other offers, have done well in the interview process, be walking away from an existing role that offers xyz that isnt offered at this company... What data points or pieces of leve…

> I've had exactly one person I coached ever have their offer pulled I've never seen an offer pulled, but it's common for companies to move on to other candidates when someone wants to draw out the negotiation process too long. This comes as a shock to some candidates who forget that companies can't wait around forever while they decide who to work for. The position must be filled someone quickly.

> The position must be filled someone quickly. Some positions must be filled by someone quickly. There are many many many positions that are not urgent or the candidate pool is limited enough that moving on is more akin to restarting the interview process.

Expecting someone to make a major life decision in less than a week is frankly silly.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#496

Post by canadianfella »

Mauricebranagh wrote: post #439
wildfire wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The typical engineer at Google/Facebook works 40 hours a > week, gets a good salary and is content with their life. Two of three things you've said here are true. 40 hours a week would guarantee you will not be effective.

Rubbish week on week no one can sustain more than the average work week.

That’s not true. Source: me.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#497

Post by Pfhreak »

comp_throw7 wrote: post #414
_qwfv wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 shou…

What does it mean that they underpay their workers, except that they pay them a smaller percentage of the economic value produced by their labor than you think they should? Is that just a deontological claim? Because I imagine "my moral system says software engineers should be paid more, no, don't worry how much more, I'll tell you when to stop" is not very convincing as an argument.

I'm of the opinion that workers should retain 100% of the value they produce. Not for deontological reasons, but because I hold the belief that the outcomes of paying the "leaf nodes" in an organization maximally results in a healthier economy, a healthier population, and more democratic workplaces.

This is not limited to software engineers. I believe the same is true for any worker, from fast food to manufacturing to engineers.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#498

Post by Pfhreak »

Thorrez wrote: post #434
_qwfv wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 shou…

How much workers deserve is based on profitability of the company they work at? Do workers who are equally talented and hardworking but work for a failing company deserve less?

That's a complicated question. My answer is probably they will get paid less. They are producing something for which there is less demand.

However, in today's economy the situation you describe would have the workers being paid less and the owner trying to keep as much of the surplus value from their labor as possible.

So, even in a failing company, I'd expect the wages to increase for workers if they received 100% of their value.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#499

Post by Pfhreak »

missedthecue wrote: post #392
_qwfv wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are no laws against worker co-ops. They are just a pretty inefficient way of running a business in that it's difficult if not impossible in most cases to raise sufficient capital. This is particularly true of software companies, where firms with 20 or 30 employees raise tens of millions of dollars. There is no conceivable way the employees would be able to put up that kind of money by themselves. It's why many…

Of course. I just bristle at the suggestion that they are "unnatural".

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#500

Post by socialist_coder »

ewmiller wrote: post #406
socialist_coder wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not overseas though, we're in the US where we get 15-25 vacation days a year. So an extra 5-10 days each time you crunch is pretty significant. Also this is extra vacation. I get the equation is still in favor of the employer but whatever, I thought it was fair, because of my next point: I loved working on games! It wasn't bad at all doing this back in my 20s. You're doing something you love! With amazing peopl…

What if you could work on things you love AND be compensated more fairly for it, through something like... collective bargaining? There are other creative careers, like acting, that have union representation for exactly this reason. If there were no actors' union, film companies could abuse an endless supply of wide-eyed hopefuls trying to get famous. Collective bargaining makes sure they can earn a real wage while t…

I never once took any position for or against collective bargaining in the game industry. I would say I have not looked into this enough to fairly have an opinion on the matter.

Plus, I do think my own experience has been with the "good" game companies who didn't work you down to nothing. I really don't think a union vote would have had a chance at all at the places I worked.

It does seem like the industry as a whole has gotten worse since I founded my own game company in 2010. Or, maybe the companies I worked at really were the "best" ones for worker quality of life.

As for my own politics, I'm not so much pro-union as I am pro-worker cooperative. Unions today do a lot of things for their own benefit at the expense of the rest of society. I see it locally with the teachers union in my school district. It's awful, they are bankrupting the school district and their demands are completely out of touch with reality. So I don't think just having a union is the silver bullet here. Unions pit workers against management. In a hugely creative and cooperative venture like making a video game, that is a pretty big negative.

I would love to see more employee owned businesses. Unfortunately video games are hugely capital intensive and very risky. You need to be able to throw away tens of millions of dollars. Very unlike manufacturing where at least if your product fails, you still have a valuable factory. If your video game flops, you literally have $0 in assets to show for it.

So, we need to come up with different ways of financing capital and organizing labor so that everyone's best interests are at heart. Very difficult problem to solve and capitalism isn't very interested in solving it. But, I guess it does work for the film industry so what's to say it wouldn't work for game development?

Also I want to say, I only wanted to share my view here because I felt like my perspective was missing from this discussion. It's not all unholy crunch time and rock bottom wages. I personally had a great experience in the game industry from 2000 - 2010. With that said, I don't disagree at all with the premise that most game companies take unfair advantage of their employees.

Lastly, I want to add that at my own startup, we practice what we preach. In the 10 years we've been going, the amount of days we've asked our developers to "crunch" is in the single digits.

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