GTA 6 Developers Unionize

Certainly you can quantify this poor quality and show it's due to unions and not, say, lack of resources?

> Transit unions (mandating 2 drivers per subway car, crazy benefits, etc)

2 drivers per subway car sounds like (at least with old tech) a good thing for everyone's safety.

> Auto industry fighting EVs.

Sounds like this was more the companies themselves, but I don't have the details.

In my view unions are largely a good thing to balance out companies power, but I've also heard stories where they have become too strong. There's nuance to the matter, but I feel like at least the US could use much more and stronger unions.

To start with, I've been at Ubisoft for 10 years - and the pay was famously abysmal. Like you could go and work at a supermarket and earn more, without joking. And every time I tried to argue about it the counter argument was

1) we pay low but you get to work on cool stuff

2) there is an infinite number of people interested in working here

3) if you don't like it, then leave

And you know what....as much as I absolutely hate to admit it, there was a nugget of truth to that. I was paid like shit, but I got to work on games which sold 30-40 million copies and were enjoyed by a lot of people. Nothing makes me happier than meeting people saying they played one of the games I worked on and they loved or they have fond memories of it. I don't think that justifies the poor pay, but all of my friends in IT were paid a lot more but worked on some software they hated and no one remembers it. I mean there are exceptions to this, but in general, I really enjoyed my time at Ubisoft, the problems were interesting and everyone who worked there really wanted to be there. Incredibly skilled and passionate people.

BUT I've since moved to one of the other largest publishers in video games and basically had the same position but doubled my salary. Then couple years later I moved to another big publisher and I got a crazy pay bump, basically in line with what people I know at "big tech" are being paid. And I took a step down from a tech lead to senior engineer to be here.

So I think some parts of the industry are definitely paying top money for people to work for them. When I was looking for jobs I had several offers from big companies in video games at similar pay too, so they weren't alone in this.

I think the industry has just changed from what it used to be. At least afaik programmers are being paid much better than they used to be. But that's just my personal experience.