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Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

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Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#231

Post by Viliam1234 »

irrational wrote: post #123
intended wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly your pay has little to do with merit, and more to do with perception, connections, face time and ability to handle office issues better than your cohort. It may well be, if not more likely to be, the other way round - you could be a GOOD performer, but since you can't or don't gork office politics, you are underpaid or even not at the level of challenge and seniority you should be.

Eh, anecdotal, but that hasn’t been true in my experience. I’m fairly certain I’m perceived negatively. I show up, do my work, but do not seek any sort of human communication beyond the bare minimum required. I certainly don’t create connections, seek face time, etc. I’ve been with my company for nearly 2 decades and only know about 10 people, and only 2 of those well. I worked with one person for five years on a dai…

> My salary has gone up 84% in those 18+ years.

My salary went up 300% during the first three years of my career... but it mostly meant that I had no idea about the market when I was freshly out of university, and my employer was happy to take the advantage of my ignorance. (As I later found out, the increased salary was still way below the market rate.)

I am not contradicting your judgment, just saying that increased salary may also have another interpretation. And how much you feel you deserve, that also depends on your background, etc. For example, it felt quite weird to me when I was making more money than both my parents together; and yet, it was below the market rate for my type of job.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#232

Post by john-shaffer »

onemiketwelve wrote: post #222
john-shaffer wrote: post #9

I boycotted Blizzard after their censorship regarding Hong Kong. It was a great decision since it saved me from the dumpster fire to end all dumpster fires that was Warcraft III Reforged [1]. I would strongly suggest that if anything about Blizzard pisses you off, just be done with them entirely. The people who created the great games of the past don't work there. Blizzard is no longer capable of producing good produ…

Isn't it going to be hard to stay away from both blizzard and Activision? They made/make really good stuff. The concept that if anything about x pisses you off, just be done with it entirely would be great in theory if a large portion of the market felt the same way but in the end it's vidja games and a lot of people are sucked in and don't want to give up something fun for some high minded ideal that doesn't really…

> Isn't it going to be hard to stay away from both blizzard and Activision? They made/make really good stuff.

Not really. The last good game that Blizzard made was StarCraft 2, 10 years ago. It's free anyways, so you can cost the company a few cents in server charges without supporting them. I don't play console games, so Activision is completely irrelevant to me.

> The concept that if anything about x pisses you off

I was talking about Blizzard specifically, not x. Ditching Blizzard will save you years of disappointment and frustration. It's quicker & easier to forget them for moral reasons than to be gradually disillusioned by their releases.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#233

Post by Viliam1234 »

xpe wrote: post #83
rosywoozlechan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't benefit top earners to share salary information. If I'm making more money than everyone else and the consequences of sharing salaries is equity than it is in my rational self-interest to keep my salary hidden because I'm unlikely to get any kind of raise until equity is achieved whereas I may continue to get raises otherwise. You know what those top earners are going to do then? Quit. And then you end up w…

> You know what those top earners are going to do then? Quit. Maybe, maybe not. The opposite could be true: employees might more likely to quit a company that generally pays other employees poorly. There are lots of reasons why this might be the case. Here is one type of scenario where that may be true. Many people recognize that company performance is not a simple linear combination of individual employee performanc…

> employees might more likely to quit a company that generally pays other employees poorly

For me, finding out that my more skilled colleagues make more money than me would be encouraging. It would mean that if I learn more, I could possibly get a raise.

The bad news is to find out that the people whom I admire because of their god-like skills actually make the same money as I do. That means that I have most likely already hit the financial ceiling.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#235

Post by Viliam1234 »

xtracto wrote: post #220
overgard wrote: post #132

At risk of sounding like a mercenary, in my experience the only realistic way to get paid your market value is to be on the market. It's just way easier to get a pay bump by switching jobs. If you wait for your employer to give you a raise, they usually will drag their feet for as long as possible and then give you something disappointing. One consequence of this is, in companies that are willing to do it, it can be…

>The cost of recruiting and interviewing candidates, not to mention training new hires, is huge. As a team leader let, I have been so frustrated with this. HR has no clue on how time consuming is to transfer context knowledge. There is a point where companies should do all in their power to keep people. But they fail to account for these types of indirect costs.

> HR has no clue on how time consuming is to transfer context knowledge.

It is not consuming HR's time, I suppose. Therefore...

The general problem is that different parts of the company are evaluated based on their separate metrics, which usually ignore the "externalities" they create for each other. Sometimes those externalities are caused by incompetence that isn't captured in the metric. (Imagine that you would pay developers by the number of lines they write, but no one would ever check for bugs. If one day the developers start producing really bad code, their measured productivity stays the same; it's the measured productivity of the users that would plummet. The developers might even get a bonus that quarter, if they produced more lines of code than usual.) Sometimes the metric is actively harmful, so that doing the right thing would actually hurt the measured productivity of the department. (Imagine that the developers are paid for introducing new features, but no one acknowledges the existence of bugs. It would be a nice thing to fix at least the worst bugs, but doing so would mean the developer stays behind at implementing new features, and gets fired. So even if the developer is fully aware of the situation and wishes to fix the bugs, out of self-interest they would choose not to.)

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#236

Post by Leherenn »

pjmlp wrote: post #101
axaxs wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why all the hoops? Companies have shamed us into thinking sharing salaries is bad. It's not. People should share freely, in my opinion it benefits all parties except the company.

I also don't get it, here in many European countries that is very easy to know and we don't make such a big deal out of it. Public servants have a progression table, so by knowing their level, you know the salary. Companies either have an union agreement, so it goes back to the same level agreements, or they have internal evaluation with salary matrix, so again by knowing department and skill level, it is relatively…

Progression tables are just age discrimination though usually.

I've seen it a few times, people with 30+ years of experience being paid massively more than newcomers, and just waiting for retirement. There's absolutely no point to do more than the bare minimum not to be fired in this situation (and if it's a government job, then it's pretty much impossible depending on the place), and it absolutely shows.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#237

Post by pjmlp »

Leherenn wrote: post #236
pjmlp wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also don't get it, here in many European countries that is very easy to know and we don't make such a big deal out of it. Public servants have a progression table, so by knowing their level, you know the salary. Companies either have an union agreement, so it goes back to the same level agreements, or they have internal evaluation with salary matrix, so again by knowing department and skill level, it is relatively…

Progression tables are just age discrimination though usually. I've seen it a few times, people with 30+ years of experience being paid massively more than newcomers, and just waiting for retirement. There's absolutely no point to do more than the bare minimum not to be fired in this situation (and if it's a government job, then it's pretty much impossible depending on the place), and it absolutely shows.

And? Most of the times those newcomers are full of ideas trying to reboot everything without spending one second to understand why things are the way they are.

I also have many seen people waiting for retirement on the private sector.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#238

Post by pandaman »

vvanders wrote: post #54
davidgay wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80 hrs/week is ~4000 hr/year. Your salary was only ~$16000/year?

You have to factor in the 1.5x overtime that's standard on hourly. I went back and did the numbers, it was closer to $6hr but well below minimum wage for a dev position. From the little bit of salaries I heard art, design and test had it even worse.

80 h/week at 1.5x overtime for 40 hours = 100h/week * 50 weeks (less holidays) = 5000 hours a year. At $6/h it makes 30K/y. This looks very low for the US tbqh, even for a non-programmer. When I started at my first job in the US game industry in the late 90s I've made 75K in a small independent studio. I had probably 3 years of experience at that time but no shipped games, I also was a foreigner on a temp visa so I don't think I had significantly more than a fresh grad would have got at the same position. This looks like QA salary from more than 10 years ago but where did you get a salaried QA job?

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#239

Post by Leherenn »

pjmlp wrote: post #237
Leherenn wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Progression tables are just age discrimination though usually. I've seen it a few times, people with 30+ years of experience being paid massively more than newcomers, and just waiting for retirement. There's absolutely no point to do more than the bare minimum not to be fired in this situation (and if it's a government job, then it's pretty much impossible depending on the place), and it absolutely shows.

And? Most of the times those newcomers are full of ideas trying to reboot everything without spending one second to understand why things are the way they are. I also have many seen people waiting for retirement on the private sector.

Do you think it's fair that people that do twice the work are paid half as much just because they're younger?

In the case I know (nurses), it's about a nurse taking care of twice as many patients, and usually better. Not trying to change things, just doing their job.

What I can tell you is that those people doing more either quit or just give up and stop caring.

For what is worth my experience is mainly with the private sector. It's just that usually they are a bit more willing to sack people.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#240

Post by masayune »

oefrha wrote: post #177
kalleboo wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least company scrip was used to buy food/normal goods, albeit at a large markup. "Blizzard bucks" sound completely useless unless you're really into games

Since you can trade WOW (and many other MMOs’) items for real world cash, I wouldn’t call Blizzard bucks useless. In fact I’ve heard people playing WoW for a living... Basically, say Blizzard compensates you $20k in Blizzard bucks, and you auction off $20k worth of items at a reduced rate, you end up taking $20k * discount rate from Blizzard’s revenue, roughly speaking.

Yeah you can't do this w/o risk of getting fired. Blizz had an internal affairs division that would track this kind of stuff down.
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