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Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

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Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#521

Post by ByteJockey »

daniellarusso wrote: post #480
ByteJockey wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Possible, and that does sound nice.

But in my experience striving for consistency means that before improving something you have to go and change everywhere that pattern appears in 400 different code bases going back 20 years (and all of the documentation across however many platforms). As a result nobody ever improves things.

As with all things YMMV.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#522

Post by tharkun__ »

oblio wrote: post #519
tharkun__ wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you're misunderstanding his post. "Marginal" doesn't mean "small", it means "at the margins/edge". He's saying the same thing you're saying, that's how a progressive tax rate works: there are multiple tax brackets, each of them is taxed at an ever increasing tax rate, but always lower than 100% (so the more you make, gross, the more you get, net, too). In your example, even in Germany, the total tax rate for…

I understand very well thank you. I have lived in both tax systems ;)

Germany does not in fact have tax brackets but instead has the aforementioned progressive tax. I think there's a problem of translation in the as well as the bracketing system used in many if not most countries are also technically progressive taxes. But progressive is the literal translation of how the taxation system is called in German ;)

As the OP mentioned the 40% marginal tax rate only applies to the income above the threshold for that bracket. He is absolutely right about that and that's how I'm taxed where I live now.

In contrast the German tax is applied to your entire income after the basic free amount and it is applied. To quote Wikipedia:

> The German income tax is a progressive tax, which means that the average tax rate (i.e., the ratio of tax and taxable income) increases monotonically with increasing taxable income.

The bracketing is only done above where it reaches 42%.

To quote https://www.icalculator.info/germany/income-tax-klasses/2020...

>... use geometrically progressive rates which start at 14% and rise to 42%. This means that those rates are calculated as a linear evoving ratio rather than a straight percentage as typical in most other countries around the globe.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#523

Post by tharkun__ »

socialist_coder wrote: post #397
tharkun__ wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No one expects the comp time to exactly equal how much extra time you worked. It's just like a little thank you for working hard, and so you can decompress and take care of whatever you've been neglecting in your life during crunch. Would I have enjoyed this if I wasn't a 20-something with no kids who who lived and breathed games? No. So I don't honestly expect everyone to understand this either. If you love your wor…

I would be careful with such blanket statements. I would agree with you that companies do not expect people to expect that and will do everything they can to make people believe that exploitative relationships are OK.

Personally though yes I do expect tit for tat. And there are employers out there that understand this very well. At one of my previous places for example we had a few major traffic days which required a sort of "all hands on deck" for the day and part of the night. You probably worked an extra 2 hours in total but you were looking at the chat and production monitors regularly while going about your day and evening/night otherwise. You got an extra day off for that.

Also for production support via 'pager' any call from the NOC to you, even if it took 5 minutes of you just telling them 'yeah restart service X' was an automatic 1 hour billed at overtime rates.

No not contractors. Internal employees.

Also I do love my work and it's not work in that sense. But that does not preclude me from wanting and working actively towards a proper work environment. If you pay me for 40 hours you get 40 hours. 40 hours of 100% of me. Not 60 hours of 50% of me.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#524

Post by onekorg »

titanomachy wrote: post #311
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.

I think this might be about right. Google's internal tools were built by very smart engineers for use by other very smart engineers. (I'm thinking especially of the Producers Framework as I write this, but there are other examples.) I've seen plenty of intelligent people struggle to get their heads around Google's abstractions. The tools are powerful enough, though, that once you get it you can pretty easily build st…

Producers Framework is awesome. Took me a while to wrap my head around writing code that way. Is there anything open source that is similar to it?

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#525

Post by n42 »

bawolff wrote: post #432
n42 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you just described supply and demand. supply is limited, recruiters poach, demand increases, salaries increase.

Not really, the parent didn't say anything about overall supply, just that its cheaper to let someone else sort the diamonds from the dirt than do it yourself.

recruiters resorting to cost effective measures to find qualified candidates because supply is limited

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#526

Post by hnick »

Agentlien wrote: post #446
hnick wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an outsider looking at this it seems like you can just work a decade in that job and earn what you'd earn in 2-3 decades in the game job. Even more if you can invest. Unless you're truly miserable, it seems like the obvious choice. You can always go indie or head back after that first decade and at that point it's all gravy.

A decade is a huge portion of your life and I certainly wouldn't want to spend what little time I have doing something I'm less fond of in the hope that I'll be sitting on a pile of money one day and maybe then I can go do what I actually want.

I understand that sentiment. I'd rather not be working at all, but alas.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#527

Post by Thorrez »

Pfhreak wrote: post #498
Thorrez wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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% o…

I guess if all the profits go to the workers, who provides the investment necessary to start the company in the first place? You could say it's the employees, but then we get in the weird situation of people having to pay to get a job.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#528

Post by bawolff »

n42 wrote: post #525
bawolff wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, the parent didn't say anything about overall supply, just that its cheaper to let someone else sort the diamonds from the dirt than do it yourself.

recruiters resorting to cost effective measures to find qualified candidates because supply is limited

Supply could be infinite and the same still applies. The reason people pay more for refined aluminium is not because aluminum ore is in short supply.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#529

Post by labcomputer »

DanBC wrote: post #487
labcomputer wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The profits may be capped but US healthcare is still insanely expensive compared to other first world nations. Number 1: It's not the profits that are capped. Profits plus operating expenses are capped. Operating expenses (like paying folks in the call center to answer questions about coverage, adjudicating claims, etc.) come out of the insurance company's 15/20% (national/regional). If medical claims are less than…

> By way of comparison, it is unusual for a doctor in the UK to earn even as much as $200k, and the average is around $100k. $100k is about £71k. Starting salary for consultants in England is £82096.

Sure, but:

1. Not every doctor is a consultant. Specialists range £41k to £76k. GPs range £61k to £91k.

2. The salary bands are fairly narrow. Consultants may start at £82k, but they only go up to £111k.

Here you can have it from the horse's mouth: https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/explore-roles/doctors/pay-d...

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#530

Post by LdSGSgvupDV »

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.

High divorce rates are quite common in developed country, but high cost may depend on countries I supposed.
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