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Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

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Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#481

Post by Philip-J-Fry »

Nursie wrote: post #467
Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK does treat SKILLED software engineers as skilled professionals. It's one of the highest earning professions here. What other jobs do you know where there's an earning potential of £80K+ outside of London while working regular 8 hour days? Not many I'll tell you that. If you want to be earning £200-300k then set up your own company. Almost no one is going to be employed by someone else on that money. And those…

> What other jobs do you know where there's an earning potential of £80K+ outside of London while working regular 8 hour days? Woo, £80K, for people in the top 2-5% of the game (going by salary distribution). Such rewards. Just don't look over the pond... > If you want to be earning £200-300k then set up your own company. Almost no one is going to be employed by someone else on that money. And that's part of the prob…

>Woo, £80K, for people in the top 2-5% of the game (going by salary distribution). Such rewards. Just don't look over the pond...

I'm not sure of your point. Become one of the top 5% of skilled workers and earn in the 95+ percentile. If you want money that's comparable to over the pond then go over the pond.

>And that's part of the problem right there. In the US you can aspire to getting salaries in those sorts of ranges, one day, if you're good at what you do and make good choices.

I don't think you realise how much money the average person in the UK earns, or even what the average american earns. Become an average developer making 50k and you're in the top 15% of earners in the country. That's a lot of money!

Just because the US has higher tech salaries doesn't mean you can't aspire to be a higher earner in the UK. Anyone who sees a £60-80k salary here and scoffs at it has unrealistic expectations.

Yeah, if you want to stay as a developer and not transition into a hands off management role then your earning potential will flatline pretty quickly. But I think that's just the nature of tech jobs in the UK, we don't have the high tech start ups that the US has. It's not like you can become an expert in creating distributed storage engines and have 10 companies knocking at your door here like you can in the US. There's not many companies outside of FAANG where expert software development knowledge is actually applicable and so the job market is less competitive.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#482

Post by blacktriangle »

stevezsa8 wrote: post #217
blacktriangle wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all about the environment. The pay was shit, but having the devs on another project letting you play their in-progress work and give real feedback at lunch or playing board games with the design team whose job is to literally go out to Walmart, buy board games, and come back and analyze them, then go home and play WoW in your company guild, its just not an experience you can get anywhere else. It may be an unpop…

I've worked in many software companies. We had lunch time/after hours boardgames at every single one. OK, I was the one organising it, but still. Plus we got paid well. Win/win :]

That sounds like a nice environment, but it just doesn't hold a candle to working in a place where everybody from the office staff to the devs to the artists to the managers just lives and breaths gaming.

Let me put this another way: there's a gaming group like you have where you have to drag everybody to the table occasionally at lunch time for some casual games, and then there's gaming groups where 6 of you show up to play Twilight Imperium every weekend and every person memorized the rules on their own time. Working at a game company is the later.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#483

Post by FartyMcFarter »

novok wrote: post #330
jedberg wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone I know who moved from another FAANG took a pay cut (and everyone who left Apple to another FAANG got a fat raise). So my data is anecdotal but consistent. Also MSFT isn't part of FAANG.

Basically google and FB pay the best, and then msft, amazon and apple are second tier as far as compensation goes. Twitter, square, uber, netflix, linked-in, pinterest, dropbox, airbnb, etc are all middle-big sized and are fairly variable comp wise.

I thought Netflix paid more than Google / FB (from online hearsay).

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#484

Post by Agentlien »

Oddskar wrote: post #474
Agentlien wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This does match what I have seen as well. It's part of why I myself briefly considered a consulting gig.

I also know two people who, when we worked together at one studio, were unable to move from junior designer roles to producer roles. They quit and started a consulting agency together, and now get contracted as assistant producers.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#485

Post by Nursie »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #481
Nursie wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What other jobs do you know where there's an earning potential of £80K+ outside of London while working regular 8 hour days? Woo, £80K, for people in the top 2-5% of the game (going by salary distribution). Such rewards. Just don't look over the pond... > If you want to be earning £200-300k then set up your own company. Almost no one is going to be employed by someone else on that money. And that's part of the prob…

>Woo, £80K, for people in the top 2-5% of the game (going by salary distribution). Such rewards. Just don't look over the pond... I'm not sure of your point. Become one of the top 5% of skilled workers and earn in the 95+ percentile. If you want money that's comparable to over the pond then go over the pond. >And that's part of the problem right there. In the US you can aspire to getting salaries in those sorts of ra…

> I don't think you realise how much money the average person in the UK earns

I'm well aware thanks, I've looked up the numbers.

> Become an average developer making 50k and you're in the top 15% of earners in the country. That's a lot of money!

Not really, and certainly not in the context of this conversation, if you head back up to the very top of the thread - "The massive gap between UK and US gamedev salaries seems to keep getting larger"

(FYI average dev compensation is under £40k)

> Anyone who sees a £60-80k salary here and scoffs at it has unrealistic expectations

> if you want to stay as a developer and not transition into a hands off management role then your earning potential will flatline pretty quickly

> I think that's just the nature of tech jobs in the UK

All of this is precisely the problem I'm describing, that realistic expectations in the UK are pretty poor in comparison to what you can make elsewhere, in other English-speaking nations. The nature of salaried tech jobs in the UK makes them relatively unappealing. So the most motivated people either go contracting, where they can make 3 times that if they do it well but companies don't really get to build sustainable teams, or they just plain leave the country in droves. Meanwhile British industry complains it can't find skilled people to work for it. There is a systemic problem with poor rewards and poor results in the UK in this area.

So to come back to this -

> I'm not sure of your point.

The point is that your earning potential as an employed software developer in the UK is severely curtailed compared to the US and some other markets, to the extent that it causes industry problems.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#486

Post by mettamage »

mkoryak wrote: post #391
mettamage wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconding this. Open for any faang referral as well.

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 accepted (with a lot of help from my teacher, this was no solo effort).

Hobbies:

Music (I think about it obsessively since I was 4, not great in making it though, I do beatbox okay-ish)

Mindfulness (not meditating, simply applying it)

Reading Hacker News (this is a legit hobby :P)

Hanging out with friends and talking about all kinds of things

I used to be the kind of person to want to know everything about the world and that's also how I studied. I gave up on that recently though.

---

Now you know me a bit better, albeit on paper, it's something ;-)

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#487

Post by DanBC »

labcomputer wrote: post #407
munk-a wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The profits may be capped but US healthcare is still insanely expensive compared to other first world nations. Articles on the internet seem to say that the US was 4-5 times as expensive in 2019 - but more reliable research from 2010[1] puts that number closer to 2 times as expensive. The issue is that the US's broken healthcare system just costs a lot more per patient than anything else - and a lot of companies take…

> 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.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#488

Post by anotherqqq »

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…

How is the work different? The core businesses have a lot in common. Gamification of attention?

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#489

Post by [deleted] »

tharkun__ wrote: post #360
koyote wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Western European salary is taxed for around 40% You'll only get that tax rate at very high salaries and it's also of course marginal. In the UK the first 12k (~$17k) is entirely tax free for example. After that it's 20% up until you have earned 50k (~$70k). Only after that does the 40% tax kick in. So on a $75k salary, only $5k will be taxed at 40%. For a $75k salary you would be paying just over 16% tax and 9% nat…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#490

Post by michaelt »

jasonkester wrote: post #475
michaelt wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tha…

You misunderstand my post - perhaps we have different ideas about what "pushing back on the narrative" means?

I'm not talking about setting personal-level goals used to guide your career planning. I'm talking about knowing the broader, population-level facts in order to inform discussions about public policy and advise the actions of others.

After all, knowing your country's median bodyweight is 170 lbs doesn't preclude you setting your personal goal weight as 135 lbs.

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