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Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

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Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#541

Post by johnnyanmac »

tayo42 wrote: post #297
thewarrior wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s some truth to this I’ll admit. But if most of the work is dull why do you need the “best” ? I saw an explanation later in this thread that made more sense. FANGs do have a lot of good employees. And if they didn’t pay high salaries other companies would simply swoop in and free ride on all the hard work they do to find and groom talent. FANGs spend a lot of money scouring the entire globe and interviewing so…

Theres no reason to not pay for the best. Engineer's provide so much value compared to an individuals cost. I can give an a example of what I'm working on. I'm doing maybe 2-3months of work, the project cut a one time cost in half saving 10million dollars. I make about quarter million in a year. A tiny fraction of the value I provided this year alone. Why penny pinch on pay and risk having employees that might not be…

>Why penny pinch on pay and risk having employees that might not be as good?

with regards to the game industry: because outside of maybe a dozen studios worldwide (EA and Rockstar studios level of profit), most of the games industry literally cannot compete with the salaries FAANG offers.

all those trillion dollar companies have dozens of services and products to monetize off of (indirectly or directly). Games need hundreds of employees to deploy one short lived project in a few years minimum. And attempts to monetize in a service format (the default for FAANG) has been met with much criticism. So games operate on razor thin profits.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#542

Post by johnnyanmac »

mtrpcic wrote: post #291
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.

> Until 2017, FANG was limited to Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Alphabet. Another variant of this acronym is "FANGAM," which includes Microsoft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech#FAANG I think Microsoft is up there and competitive in the same landscape, and calling out their lack of inclusion in the original acronym is just pedantic. Everything discussed in this thread applies just as much to MSFT as it does to…

pedantic, tangential rant: I still don't understand why people include Netflix in that calibur. From what I heard and researched, Netflix doesn't hire junior talent and their scope of work is a fraction of Microsoft/Apple/Google. If competitive pay is the only distinction here, I'm sure we can expand that acronym to include a dozen more tech companies

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#543

Post by johnnyanmac »

blaser-waffle wrote: post #538
majjgepolja wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be downvoted to hell, but it's more likely because of same supply-demand thing. Teacher is not a high skilled job, not to mention most teachers are outright bad at their jobs thus not producing much value anyway.

Bollocks. Most teaching requires as much training as several other degrees. I'm a solution engineer and only made it here with a BA in English. I learned a lot of code, but I haven't had to much else formally. My wife is a teacher, and she has to jump through hoops for a teaching certificate, do regular, on-going re-certs, and be covered in basic first aid. Plus there is a shit-ton of other issues to stay abreast of,…

>Attitudes like this are why the state of education in the US is abysmal.

sounds like a death spiral. The attiude is teachers are unskilled jobs, but you also propose that teaching is more involved than engineering (which I don't disagree with: the thought of dealing with minors undergoing puberty increases my stress levels). But if they don't get enough training, the quality suffers and the reputation of the profession and education as a whole is "abysmal".

However, are teachers getting the proper training for that? is 2 years of certification post undergrad and a few more years acting as a TA enough to prepare them for these conditions?

Compare that to university professors, who need a PH.D and much more research to teach. Should that be the low bar for teaching even more rambuncious students "lower down"? The answer is ultimately theoretical, because I imagine the issue is similar to police; there requires a LOT of positions to fill, more than what they could hope to get if they set such high requirements.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#544

Post by johnnyanmac »

davidgould wrote: post #388
golemotron wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just glamour. There's an argument that teacher salaries are low because people find it more rewarding than a lot of other work.

So by this theory people must really love janitorial and fast food work.

If I could be 16 and be paid to teach, I sure would "love" teaching.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#545

Post by johnnyanmac »

_qwfv wrote: post #307
julienb_sea wrote: post #179

This is ultimately a supply and demand issue. Google pays high salaries because they have to in order to hire the talent they want. Game devs apparently do not have to, because they are able to fill their roles for lower salaries. Don't pretend like all tech companies wouldn't love to lower dev salaries, they just can't because they wouldn't be able to hire. Game companies apparently have a meaningful differentiator,…

> should NOT be treated as an indicator for what "reasonable" pay looks like across the entire industry. Hard disagree. The comparatively low salaries in other sectors are just that, below what workers should be earning. Things are fuzzier in the indie space, but companies like Blizzard, Activision, EA, Epic, Ubisoft, Rockstar, CDPR, etc. all pay low and absolutely rake in profits. We should call worker exploitation…

I think this sets some dangerous thinking because it gives this idea that "you are underpaid" if you happen to fail to make it into those 5 specific companies out of college.

I don't think the situation in tech is as black and white as "FAANG or QA tester". I have friends working at non-FAANG, non-gaming tech companies that seem fine with their salaries. Ticketmaster isn't as pristine a name but they seem to pay well.

Also, pedantic point: CDPR isn't American. I'd rather not get into the details on international salary because that's a whole other topic.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#546

Post by dv_dt »

aidenn0 wrote: post #153
dahfizz wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you're uninsured. Any halfway decent health insurance plan has out of pocket maxes that a software engineer can easily cover. I'm general, QOL is going to be better in Europe if youre in a low income bracket because you get so much as a public service. But if you make real money, you're going to be better off in America.

I have never seen a health-care plan in the US with real out-of-pocket maxes. The fine-print is crazy on those clauses. We got burned by going to an ER while traveling, and while the ER bill was covered under out-of-pocket maxes, both doctors who saw our son in the ER were not employees of the ER, and so counted as neither in-network nor emergency room care. Basically 90% of the bill was not subject to the out-of-poc…

One chilling exception I found with a previous employer was in the small print with "premium" cancer treatment medications. I kept thinking cancer is a primary case where I really do not want to worry about if my chemo drugs are on the premium list or not to avoid out of pocket costs.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#547

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

>My answer is probably they will get paid less. They are producing something for which there is less demand.

and this is how gentrification works. Not because a company starts to pay less, but because other companies pay more and make just the act of existing close to those companies (even if you were in fact there first) more expensive.

Your solution is great for tech workers, but ultimately means a large swath of society would suffer.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#548

Post by johnnyanmac »

paxys wrote: post #163
socialist_coder wrote: post #150

Just to have a bit of a counter argument from me, a game developer who loves games and has worked in the US games industry for the majority of my 20 years career: If your argument is "You can make more at a FAANG company" - well yeah, you can. You don't work in gaming because you want to make the top salary. You work in gaming because you love games and you enjoy having all your coworkers also love games and being ab…

The whole "do it for the love of the craft not money" is bullshit propaganda that only serves to keep labor costs low. The entities on top are large multi-billion dollar corporations who are running a business, just like any other industry. And this has been more and more apparent in recent years seeing just how anti-consumer the video games industry is getting. If a Google recruiter told me "take a low salary and wo…

>The entities on top are large multi-billion dollar corporations who are running a business, just like any other industry. And this has been more and more apparent in recent years seeing just how anti-consumer the video games industry is getting.

depends on the studio. Everyone focuses on the EA's, but most game studios aren't these huge billionaire ventures cranking out 12 games a year. It's certainly not the modern EA or Naughty Dog or Blizzard that give devs the low salary reputation.

I worked at one for 3 years, and it was <300 employees. I was still surprised at how much money they can bring in after talking to producers (spoiler: maybe it varies in other studios, but the most profitable games worked on weren't console games), but it was very clear that this wasn't a studio that could pay everyone even 100K/year and expect to be in business next year.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#549

Post by johnnyanmac »

jjeaff wrote: post #238
bko wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole "do it for the love of the craft not money" is bullshit propaganda Or you could just value things about work apart from salary. No need to shame people for going for not doing for the absolute highest paying job. You can try to do the best you can comp wise, but if you're only chasing money your whole life, it won't lead to much satisfaction and is generally bad advice

It's not nice to shame people, but it is helpful for the greater good of software developers if people would change their mind about being willing to work gruelling hours for lower pay. Because if there aren't enough developers willing to do it for low pay, the multi-billion dollar companies would have to pay more for game developers. This is why groups like actors needed a union. There is an endless supply of wide e…

>but it is helpful for the greater good of software developers if people would change their mind about being willing to work gruelling hours for lower pay.

As a former dev (but I still work games adjacent), I'd never tell someone about the industry without telling them about pay and work hours. But at the same time I feel people who are interested in this are likely somewhat aware of this already, and ultimately experience will be a better teacher than me saying X is better. It's not like kids these days can't google.

----

Ironically enough, google and the like is likely the biggest reason gamedevs don't have unions. Despite the stigma, most devs aren't trapped the same way a fast food worker may be. I've had several friends laid off (including myself) and we then pivot to a "boring job" making more money than we were making before being laid off. few other industries can boast this. Even a similar industry like VFX can't just pivot to a whole other sector of work once they get laid off (after making a movie billions).

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#550

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

Are we pretending most non A-list actors make 6 figures entry level? unions help to prevent abuse, but it won't solve the "undrepaid" argument.

in this regard, crunch time with a max work per day, with actual overtime compensation and post crunch vacation sounds about as fair as the situation can be (you know, short of avoiding crunch). whether the final amount made is enough is a compensation issue, not an abuse issue. I doubt unions formed would eliminate crunch as a whole.

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