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First off let me get on my high horse and say the engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the engineering I've done working in big tech. You need a lot more creativity and ingenuity to solve the unusual problems you run into in gaming.
From there, as others have said, it's a simple supply and demand issue. Nowadays I am a university professor, nearly every student who comes in wants to pursue one of the three fields: cybersecurity, video gaming, or recently ML/AI.
This shouldn't come as a surprise, they want to work on the things that influenced them and shaped their experiences so far. There's an absolute over supply of students who want to make video games.
Gaming, like most of entertainment, is a passion-driven industry. You trade good salary for your name in the credits. You trade nights, hobbies, marriages, and your health for this opportunity. That is unless you reach that lofty 1% of developers who are too valuable to be fired.
Not all areas of gaming are like this. Gambling, like working on slot/pachinko machines, pays very well and has pretty realistic work-life balance. However every student I've talked to about this has universally said "no I don't want to make slot machines. I only want to work on GTA/Stardew Valley/Hollow Knight/Fortnite."
There's seriously no shortage of starry-eyed students who are willing to accept minimum wage to solve SDE3 level problems. I was one of them once.
Yes. Having done everything from mainframe OS internals to proof of correctness to autonomous vehicles, video games are the most difficult.
At the beginning, game dev looks easy, because the tools are good and modern hardware is very capable. But as you approach a big, highly detailed, photorealistic world, the easy approaches hit a performance wall. Then the necessary optimizations become insanely complex. That's the tyranny of the frame rate. That's why I've complained about game engines in Rust. Everybody writes My First Game Engine, then hits the wall about two years in.
The metaverse problem is even worse. All the problems of game dev, plus the problems of user-created content and large scale. With all the effort and money put into metaverses, none emerged that worked as well and looked as good as an AAA game title from the GTA V era. Roblox, Improbable, and Second Life are as good as it got. You'd think there would be some good examples still around, with small user bases, but there are not. There are a whole range of problems only metaverses have, and some of them are unsolved. For commercial games, much of the work takes place during level building and optimization. Unreal Engine Editor does much of the heavy lifting. Metaverses don't have that option.
The total failure of the metaverse industry comes partly from this. It's hard to do, and the problem was underestimated. Mostly by the people who really just wanted to sell their crap NFTs and coins.
The people and wage problem comes from too many people wanting to make games. It's like Hollywood. If you've spend any time around there, you've met the actress/model/waitress types. The male version has stand up comedy levels of ego. That pushes wages down.
Wouldn't VRChat qualify?
* this doesnt even include graphics programmers who are also awesome. and are just a different breed than i am, for whatever reason my brain just won't process the world of graphics pipelines
Now I've branched off on my own as I've been disillusioned with academia as well. Can't win'em all.
It comes in the form not so much in dropouts, but in bad course feedback and bad professor reviews.
"The professor made the class unfun."
"The professor said she's made games but clearly has never done that before with how she taught the class"
I'm a woman so, unsurprisingly, I experience a fair amount of misogyny from students in the class who have never made a game nor have they worked in industry but believe they know how it works.
(And in indie it's way worse, it's more like 1% making it one year)
I worked on games for several years early on but quit after going through an EA spouse experience.
In some ways it’s too bad, because the great thing about games is that there is such a great variety of different kinds of problems to solve. Even so, I quit cold turkey and never looked back. It is what it is.
From there, I wound up at a community college running a bachelor's level degree. They hired me because I was the only candidate with NSF experience. They proceeded to fire their grant manager and have me manage the whole grant without extra pay.
Actually used to hire people for exactly what you want to do: be an adjunct for night classes in tech.
If you want to go that route you need to make friends with the Dean and the head of program. It's rare that we hire someone from the general application process, because most people who work in tech do not make good instructors.
This tracks with my experience. Games present so many unexpected challenges. Or, known and expected challenges that are challenging nonetheless.
The other place I've had my ass handed to me was in robotics. Translating digital models to the physical space is how physics tells you it's actually in control and your ideas are cute and all, but other things are going to happen instead.
The simulator starts out simple and gradually becomes grotesque as it contacts reality.
I'd agree with all of this from what I've seen though. The problems that some of my buddies solved straight out of college, while very different than 'hard problems' at bigcorp, are... hard.
One buddy ended up moving to the worst of both worlds... backend infra for a large video game and ended up getting video game salary for bigcorp distributed systems problems.
I always roll my eyes when I hear this from game developers. And my eyes hurt from rolling I've heard it so many times.
I've done game dev, systems, backend, frontend, all of it. It's all the same. Maybe you developed low complexity "big tech" projects but, c'mon, you're really going to argue that games are categorically MORE complex than what Google, Apple, etc develop?
They're not. It's all the same. Same complexity ceiling, same prerequisite levels of creativity.
Most frontends that I develop use the same patterns as games and the backends that I've developed recently look like game servers. Same patterns, same techniques, same level of complexity.
Game development is just development.
Sometimes you get similar demands at the big companies like Google and Meta, but often you have the opportunity to throw more compute at the problem. That is rarely possible in games.
Having been a game dev before getting my PhD focused on NLP, I can definitely say some of the challenges I ran into developing a first of its kind MMORTS, was seriously challenging. When I took the mandatory grad classes in distributed systems and low level architecture design, I already had first hand experience and aced those classes without any effort. I was familiar with many of the problems and their solutions because I needed to for my work. In addition to working at the lowest level debugging the memory allocators, full networking stack, database layer, you name it all in C++. Being a lead developer on a project of that scope was much more complicated than any work I did later.
My first semester of my PhD I wrote a Transformer from scratch referencing only the original paper (it was soon after the paper came out, there were few resources then). I was the only person who got an implementation that matched the results from the original Transformer (most got much worse performance). I credit the skills and abilities I gained in the game dev industry.
That isn't me throwing shade at others; as I said there are hard problems in industries other than game dev, but the skills required are not compensated at the level you'd expect given the difficulty of the work.
A simple card game is on par with standard app development.
But if you're working at lower levels of a world simulation engine that require linear algebra, computer graphics knowledge? Camera and joint manipulation? Animation? Navmeshes? Physics? That's a notch harder than a REST app and microservices infrastructure. Some robotics, ML areas touch on this too.
The only tough topics at these adtechs that might match would be graph manipulation, or currently ML knowledge. I suspect leetcode isn't very applicable in everyday usage.
At a high level the engines and frameworks don't feel any different.
Work with graphics and models feels more difficult though then most networked application work I've done.
To be fair, you don't have to be a teacher / lecturer to notice this. One trip to an AI reddit thread asking what people are working on will reveal that it's either porn, role-play, or game development.
When did that become a thing? When Gears of War bonus checks started hitting Epic's parking lot went from a random collection of reasonable vehicles to looking like an exotic car show. I'm fairly certain every dev that worked on Gears or Unreal could have retired off the bonus payouts.
so economics takes over.
whereas your typical saas, adtech - once the business is proven u print money unless u r doing stupid shit n being driven by ego such as having the biggest org or pursuing passion projects such as "a.i"
Working class person being exceptional at low latency game development, will unlikely get a chance in finance and earning 10x for very much the same level of competence, because their accent might not be good enough and parents don't frequent members' clubs.
I will say that different industries have different formalities (generally speaking). But that just means you have to interview with smarter attire in FinTech vs interviewing for a job in gambling.
As a hiring manager, I can say that companies will recruit for as little as they think candidates will accept. Fintech gets a bit of a pass on this one but only because they rake in so much money that they can generally afford to attract higher salaries. But it does also mean that gaming can get away with paying people peanuts in comparison and that is literally due to supply and demand.
In places where the C-suite have set unrealistic thresholds on tech salaries, I’ve had to get creative to attract candidates. And that often meant contributing back to open source and basically using that as advertising.
Anyway, this is already a verbose reply but the crux of it is:
1. you shouldn’t underestimate the power of supply and demand in the work space
2. The profitability of a sector also plays heavily into the equation
3. You don’t need to be posh to get a job in FinTech.
I too wanna work on cooler stuff. Sooner rather than later.
[1]: https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2024/05/seinfeld-on-when-mo...
In fact since we are on hackernews that is kind of thing people wanting to be entrepreneurs do. Work at recognizable big tech company for a few years. Leave to be a founder of a startup. Investors ... well that guy came from google they must know what they are doing etc (the irony is they probably have less of the skills to start a company going that path).
Margins.
Game development doesn’t pay more because game development companies can’t afford to pay more.
Sure, an individual game dev company may make a lot due to the hit driven nature of the field, but the totality of the market simply makes less money per developer than big tech does.
In order for that to change, the market has to increase in size by appealing to a more casual audience, or existing gamers have to pay more. Not something I think most gamers would like. And these are the people who the workforce of game developers form from.
However, I joined EA in 2015 and have been in game development since. They offered really good pay and now at my current job I even get great pay and no overtime.
There are a large number of people that are passionate about games. Moreso than say, ERP software.
And this holds true relative to demand (gaming is ~$300B/year globally).
---
Additionally, most software engineering is not FAANG. That is the upper end of it.
How is the existence of a monopsony necessary or even related to a passion tax existing? Suppose the market were a fully free market with tons of software companies on one side and tons of developers on the other. It would fly in the face of reason, and fairness in my eyes, if all developers were paid the same but some got to work on fun stuff like games and others worked on the scheduling software for the scheduling software for the warehouse robot repairs. So a passion tax seems like something that should exist and not really be decried.
To put it the other way, work that is distasteful in some way, should also pay more, but this is missing the point.
I think the point of the unionization is that the monopsony of a small number of AAA game studios gives them excessive market power to reduce compensation and especially to reduce working conditions.
A union can acquiesce to the passion tax and say that top developers at a AAA should make $150k/year (a bit low), while simultaneously saying that that developer should be able to see their children on nights and weekends. The project management that leads to "perma-crunch" is something that ought to be resolved on the employer's side, not by the employees.
Now rather than being a relatively underpaid worker in an industry you're passionate about, you don't have the opportunity to work there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision_Blizzard_worker_org...
Regarding your hypothetical, two points. First, Hollywood unions did essentially go down the path you imagine. The solution there was to create a less arbitrary system that allowed actors to work their way into the union and get a degree of income stability and protection from (previously horrendous) employer abuse.
"The supply of jobs won't magically increase (it would likely decrease with higher wages)"
You should look into the economics of these game studios a bit more. The unit economics are not like those of producing bricks which an essentially linear (capital, labor) -> bricks production function. The distributive effects between the employers, workers, and consumers would be very difficult to model. You can't really figure out the marginal contribution of the factors of production. To use a Hollywood analogy: Do we know how much less one of George Clooney's films would net if a different actor were cast instead of him? If we can't be sure, can we know what his marginal contribution was?
Would the company not conduct interviews and pick out whoever seems like the best candidates?
This just brings game development in line with other code monkeys. Top studios will pay top dollars, Indie studios will pay what they can, often almost nothing.
And I see nothing wrong with that, do you?
I had to look it up as well. I assumed it was a play on words about Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony (the three big video game console players).
Not many people get into computers because they dream about staring at a console to figure out why the kubernetes cluster is misbehaving again (though some do).
Like another commenter said, it's the "passion tax": The more interesting a job, the more people seek it. The more people competing for a job, the lower the pay.
Suckers.
Is it any wonder the quality bar for modern AAA games is under the floor? How many $400 million dollar flops do we need before these people take a hint?
I would bet money that the story for GTA6 is gonna be horrendous, based on what we’ve seen so far, but this game will make a trillion dollars or whatever because “it’s GTA6”. Bbuut they modelled individual bubbles in the pint of beer with real physics! Does the game even need to be fun anymore? Does it need to innovate or push the medium forward in any way? Or is it just a way to juice up another GTA online putting out mid content with horrible writing just to keep buying up shark cards for another decade, because people will buy it no matter what. Game journalists would never dare give the game a bad review, because they can’t risk losing access to Take Two published games. So what are we left with? A game with completely unjustified amounts of hype and “brand loyalty” that can absolutely get away with phoneing it in and make record breaking amounts of profit. But if you criticize it in any way, you’re just a hater or you’re not “media literate” or something.
>there's a large pool of juniors/interns that will accept these low wages just because they want to be a part of something popular.
That's an unbelievably bad _and_ disrespectful take. They accept these low wages because it's their only way in the industry, and because the industry has made sure to keep a steady supply of fresh meat to burn out. "because they want to be a part of something popular" doesn't work when the vast majority work on unknown games in content factories for the first ten years of their careers.
Is it really “disrespectful” to make an observation of how the world is even if it maybe isn’t how it should be? That fact of the matter is no one “needs” to accept these wages. Software development in general and game development in particular are labor fields of choice. Being a software developer can pay you better in so many different parts of the field, even today long after the dot com boom. People are choosing to accept these bad offers because they value working in this part of the industry more than they value the higher wages they can get elsewhere. Just like plenty of us choose not to make FAANG levels of money because we value our work life balance, or our specific living locations or our principles and beliefs over the money that those companies are throwing at people.
We can talk about how these bad offers are knowingly abusive or artificially suppressed and still acknowledge that people are making informed choices to accept those offers.
He's talking about the people who make those tools, and he's right. Engine developers are paid pretty well, especially at Epic and Unity. You don't think Tim Sweeney snagged SPJ because he's really into Fortnite, do you?
Also VC doesn't seem to be all that interested in investing into game dev companies, I guess because it's such an extreme hit-and-miss business (e.g. even when a game-dev company lands a massive hit, the next attempt may be a massive flop and sink the whole company).
> Ostensibly they are doing remarkable similar engineering problem solving
The engineering problems have been mostly outsourced to Unity and Epic Games (e.g. Unreal Engine)
Recent notable example is Crimson Desert, they spent years building their own engine for this game and IMO they raised the bar when it comes to creating a huge realistic world.
Others that come to my mind are Decima and RE Engine.
And Unity always ruled supreme for AA and mobile games.
That's how most studios work.
Most games are expensive to make and most of them fail. Way more than normal software which doesn't have ultra-high marketing costs or diverse staffing needs (Art, QA, game design, etc).
And Advertising (FAANG) is insanely profitable, while doing software in other difficult fields (firmware in automotive or embedded, etc) may be technically challenging, but the margin is is only like 6-10% max
I think flipping the question like this gets at the heart of the true answer.
The question is not why video game pay has lagged, but why tech pay has jumped ahead.
Not in a sense that it's so good so you don't want to leave, but that other companies are leery of hiring people with the gamedev experience.
Make what you will out of that remark.
You can't ride on a single game for long, and if the next one goes badly half the company will get fired. Not true of the bigger studios, but of course not everybody works in those.
I have friends who work in gaming, and it's a regular thing for studios to form with a great game, go bust a year or three later, and then a new studio get formed with largely similar staff.
Developers move between the same companies around and around again. The lack of stability is a real problem, especially with increasing use of "AI".
I don't really buy the supply/demand argument everyone else is saying here. The end product just doesn't provide value to people's lives. The amount of effort you'd need to put in to provide value to someone's life through a video game is way higher than the effort you'd need to put into a productivity tool.
In fact, more often than not, video games provide negative value to people's lives. They're usually a waste of time at best. And at worst, addictive and carpal tunnel inducing.
You're waaay too tuned in to the corporate ideology to be saying something like this. I suggest you zoom out. The top heavy games do make a ton of money, so evidently there's value in entertaining people and giving them some good playtime compared to the drudge that is corporate life (PS. in case you didn't know not all people love to work for some other guy's mission/vision).
The question is why the gulf, rather than why the lag. Why is big tech pay so high?
When you compare it to other trades and industries video game dev pay is much more “normal”
So basically, high supply of labor and relatively lower demand for it in games than in boring business/SaaS software.
IIUC, the majority of FAANG is people who are there, first and foremost, for the paycheck. (And then maybe they get interested in the work, especially if it seems like progress towards a promotion for more money, or because it gave them skills or resume keywords that they can then use to get more money elsewhere. It's the money/career that's interesting first -- craft and product are only a consequence of wanting the money.)
Tangible example: Walmart labs had to quadruple the salaries once it realized they could not attract any scientists or top tier engineers.
“Writing react components” “deploying a database” “debugging the Android build” are not dream jobs and you can do it at hundreds of companies
That and they used to be able to waive a mythical shipping bonus but if it was ever true, I don't think its really something to count on these days.
But the labour demand half is important too. Bigtech makes so much money (or is so well financed) that competing on top talent is more feasible when compared to the boom/bust nature of the games industry.
For example, GPU shader programming is something people will practically fight over doing because it's so non obviously utterly addictive.
I would say dev roles in tech in general that lack an operational component also lag in pay, and much of gamedev is pure dev in a sense the wider tech industry has since largely forgotten exists.
On the art side it's even more extreme.
I believe its game developers are more easily exploited is because typically they really want to work in the game industry.
1. You love the area and are willing to take a cut to work in that area, particularly when the alternative is working on CRMs for a PBM;
2. Demand for these jobs still exceeds supply; and
3. The very top of this pyramid makes a shitload of money. If you get to like a Lead Engineer type position, you might be making points on unit sales. And for a big hit that can be big money; and
4. Historically, indie development wasn't a viable route to making a living but it suffers from the same distortions too. For every Notch or ConcernedApe, there are thousands of pepole who below the poverty line. Look at something as widely regarded (but niche) like Dwarf Fortress. They made bank (and deserved it) from the Steam release but they spent 10+ years making a couple of thousand of dollars a month between the two of them.
Just look at the music industry. There are artists and bands who are trying to make it, training for years and making $50 to play some local venue and they're just hoping to get noticed. In years gone by that was a record contract. Nowadays, there are alternate routes. Justin Bieber was a Youtube breakout.
Fun fact: the first artist to have a #1 single without a record contract was Lisa Loeb for Stay in the early 1990s because it was picked up for the sound track (those used to be a big deal) for Reality Bites.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/video-game-industry-revenue...
Those silos maintain different processes and workflows, different company cultures, different skill specializations, etc and jumping around between them in mid-career or senior can be very challenging. So they tend to have their own org chart shapes and salary/benefit norms.
When a Big Tech company moves into or absorbs one of those silos, or emerges from one of those silos, it can shake up what the people within them get paid (and thereby have big knock-on effects for legacy employers), but otherwise it's just it's own little bubble in a lot of ways. People can share stories and ideas across the siloes in venues like HN, but many of the "what are you even talking about" reactions that happen on here often occur when people from these different silos stumble into what are sometimes deep differences in what they do and what their work experience is like.
It's a consumer business much like any other. Just like most startups and major companies, they are not necessary for the world in the way utilities for example are.
The problem of videogames compared to startups and SV tech is that the long-term money potential is very limited at best, and rapidly becomes very brittle. Most startups pay bigger salaries for much easier work, because they burn the money investors are betting hoping the company will crack a new long-term market, not because they make money themselves. There's very little games market to crack, very little chance to turn your product into a long-lived platform to built on top of, meanwhile the upfront investment is huge.
Big Tech has infinite money from ads to spend on whatever. Video games do not.
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.
I was unaware of the crunch concept:
"In the video game industry, crunch (or crunch culture) is compulsory overtime during the development of a game. Crunch is common in the industry and can lead to work weeks of 65–80 hours for extended periods of time, often uncompensated beyond the normal working hours" -- wikipedia
Needless to say this seems extremely predatory.
And that’s why it was the last game company I ever worked for.
When you have a deadline to meet, sometimes you need to go into crunch mode to get things done. Of course the crunch mode should last no more than a week or maybe two, otherwise you risk burning out. After crunch mode there should be a slow period where you take some time off or work on something not urgent at all.
An 80h week should not be compensated the same as two 40h weeks
In the UK if you are low waged, paid for 40 hours, asked to work another 40 hours for free... your pay test for minimum wage compliance is total pay divided by total hours worked. If this puts you under minimum wage, then the company is paying you illegally
Since then I've worked at Thunderful and now 505 Games. I haven't done overtime since I quit EA and I've been very efficient because I'm not too tired and I get peace of mind working from home.
I may have thought it was cool and in line with my passion and desire to learn and ship cool things, but I was plainly taken advantage of. I’m willing to admit I was naive.
> saltyoldman
I wonder how you've gotten so salty... those working hours wouldn't be a factor, would they?
Every human gets only ~16 waking hours a day to live their lives, it is absolutely immoral to sign a contract to pay somebody for literally half of this time, and then pressuring them into giving up even more of their life on top of that. Especially when using threats of revoking the original contract if they don’t comply, and/or not offering any additional compensation.
That’s a lot of demands, what next? Competitive salary?! /sarcasm
I hope more people will start fighting together for better work conditions. Company owners have money and lawyers so workers must unite to fight them back. I’m saying this as employer.
We've all tried methodologies to counter this problem and create a continuous, sustainable pace. Unfortunately there's something deep in human nature that prevents us spreading that effort out evenly from day one.
I do understand there are certain periods where games _should_ release to make more sales, and for most games that's probably true. But this is GTA VI, they can miss the launch window by a month and it'd probably hardly impact their sales.
You could try to argue that companies shouldn't even start that process until the project is finished. Step 1: finish project, Step 2: book ads/shelf space, Step 3: 6 months later, ship it. But sitting on a finished project for 6 months is like not investing your money for 6 months. A lot of money is lost. Money can comes out of salaries
You (as an employer) accept one of two things: either 1) scope is reduced when you get closer to the deadline and find that you are behind, or 2) deadlines will have to be moved.
It's not like other industries, or even other software companies don't have deadlines and feature sets they want. And some of them do have a form of crunch that I equally rebel against. (I've never worked at a company where we had several months of crunch, though; at most it was a couple weeks.) They end up doing fine, dropping features from the first release, or pushing the release date out if they have to.
These are video games. No one should be ruining their mental health or getting burned out because a corporation decided they need to ship exactly their vision on a particular date.
Failures of management’s planning are imposed as emergencies on the devs.
Building a piece software for years and then releasing it all in once reminds me of the 1990s. Nowadays we continuously deliver.
Euro Truck Simulator 2 works with that model. Every few months they release a new part of the European map. And every few months they release new truck models.
Two words: overtime pay.
This makes crunches disappear as if by magic.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/694472/labor-union-approval-rel...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/27/majoritie...
https://www.epi.org/blog/americans-favor-labor-unions-over-b...
How about going to work somewhere with better compensation and working conditions?
Generally the reason there is a company that has better working conditions and compensation to go to is because of their union… so…
If workers could easily find jobs where employers aren’t maxing extraction at the lowest cost possible, your proposal might be realistic. In this timeline, it is a suboptimal proposal.
> Today, the US Treasury Department released a first-of-its-kind report on labor unions, highlighting the evidence that unions serve to strengthen the middle class and grow the economy at large. Over the last half century, middle-class households have experienced stagnating wages, rising income volatility, and reduced intergenerational mobility, even as the economy as a whole has prospered. Unions can improve the well-being of middle-class workers in ways that directly combat these negative trends. Pro-union policy can make a real difference to middle-class households by raising their incomes, improving their work environments, and boosting their job satisfaction. In doing so, unions can help to make the economy more equitable and robust.
https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/labor-unions...
https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Labor-Unions-And-...
(“if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together”)
But I’ve been annoyed at the significant shift in tone that software company executives’ have used when communicating with employees lately. For one, we went from being admittedly pampered compared to most other industries to getting threats of mass layoffs unless we do more and demand less.
I wouldn’t mind the idea of using the possibility of unions to have executives back off, but if people are going to pop off at mere suggestion of unions I don’t think we’d get very far.
https://www.ae.dk/debatindlaeg/2023-05-staerke-fagforeninger...
Sorry, it just doesn't make any sense to make such a broad statement regarding this at all.
Sorry, it just doesn't make any sense to make such a broad statement regarding this at all.
A union's job is to protect the union. Nothing else.
We'll see. It's not like police unions are making life better for citizens.
Unions are there for one reason, the union members. This will most likely be good for the employees and good on them for acting in their best interest but it seems just as likely that a unionized rockstar is negative for the consumer in either increased pricea, extended timelines or minimum effort to meet exact requirements from employees.
The benefits that workers gain from unionizing come from somewhere.
Edit: and a note to say that comparing all unions to police unions isn’t a good faith/useful comparison. It’s true that the quality of unions vary, but overall they do far more good than bad.
The police aren't allowed to join a union
For all this consumer cares, great. Make it 20% more expensive. Make it 50% more expensive. A hundred. If that helps the greater union cause I can take more walks in the woods to pass the time instead.
which is precisely why many union advocates argue that police should not have unions. the police exist as the physical arm of the capital class in direct opposition to the labor class. they are class traitors. police unions are not the same.
https://theconversation.com/why-police-unions-are-not-part-o...
Notably, American police (the country that invented police unions) are a modern invention that largely exist as a output of slave catching and bounty hunting services.
Police unions act just like every other union does: in the interests of their members.
Unions are illegal in lots of the world. Federal public sector unions weren't legal in the US until the 1960s. Did the fact that they were illegal in 1965 have any bearing on whether or not they should be allowed? Does the fact that something is illegal in the US have any bearing on whether or not Japan should allow it?
Slave patrols were a form of early organized policing, but only one of many and hardly the first. And certainly this isn’t to say that racial tensions didn’t drive various forms of law enforcement. But this idea that police in general and American Police in particular are some direct descendant of salve patrols or wouldn’t exist without the institution of slavery ignores so much of human history and the long history of organized forms of law enforcement that predates the American colonies.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/police/Due-process-and-indi...
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-origins-of-policing-in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police
I'd really like to know what kind of tangled logic it requires to believe that.
Regardless, police unions aren't the only example of unions who have worked against the benefit of everyone else but themselves. I only used them as an example because I didn't think anyone here would argue disagree that it's had negative outcomes.
What I didn't expect was to find someone arguing that a union wasn't a union. It doesn't matter if it's legal in other places, it's legal in the US. Just because Japan has made police _unions_ illegal doesn't make an US police _union_ not a union.
At the expense of the mental health of everyone involved. It's a video game, not a life-saving new medicine. Not worth it.
What’s an example of a unionized vs non unionized group producing the same thing where unionized is better?
Aviation unions force very high standards and represent a lot of the developments in safety and procedures.
Nuclear power is heavily unionised, resulting in a very stable and highly qualified workforce.
Unions in film and tv have done great work defending artists rights and protecting actors, writers, crew, and others from predatory behaviour by studios.
Fire fighter unions stand against unsafe demands and protect the crews in ways the individuals can’t, resulting in meaningful change. (I’m aware of UK but projecting and assuming this applies internationally)
I could go on…
If that were self evident how come there has never been a company that started with employees unionized? To get this supposed benefit
Boeing joined the chat.
and it's crap compared to Romanian or Polish which are not unionised (I think)
Here's a layup: art. Remember the writer's union strike in 2007-2008? All of the shows whose writers were on strike that still went on were terrible.
Edit: also, the purpose of a union is not to "produce something better". The purpose of a union is to protect workers' rights. They generally serve their purpose very well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederation_of_Japan_Automob...
In fact part of the SCAP mandates after World War II two during the MacArthur occupation was specifically to form powerful unions in Japan
https://uaw.org/we-keep-toyota-running-workers-at-critical-t...
Seems hard to compare since there is no comparison in Japan that is not unionized
But given that China is now winning my original point stands
As a counter anecdote I’d point to Boeing’s non-union facilities, which have produced notably less reliable airplanes than their union locations ever did.
Your hatred of workers striving for better working conditions is disturbing. Maybe there are more important things in life than conspicuous consumption and filling one's home with cheap garbage?
might want to check your facts before posting
Ignore my first hand experience with your political ideology, it doesn’t bother me.
But, I’ll tell you I’ve been at on-site RVs and BBQs with dozens of on the clock workers. I know a guy making 80/hr to nap and watch TV in his RV for six of his eight hour shift, and this was not uncommon. I know him, because he is THE GUY that can get a vital operation checked out and no one else.
I’m not debating history or ideology. Just experience of a long time working adjacent to UAW.
When I go to on-site to Mexico it’s like an entirely different industry.
I’m unaware of this ever being the case in the UK — the lack of closed shop units means that even when collective agreements cover promotion they cannot meaningfully set this based on dues paid, both because they don’t necessarily know how long each employee has been a member of the union, and regardless that would be illegal discrimination based on union membership vs not.
In the common case for private-sector white-collar collective agreements in the UK, promotion is mostly just required to be transparent, rather than setting out procedural rules for promotion.
Your focus on union dues also makes me suspect you’re commenting from the US, expecting a union environment much more like the US — and US unions are outliers in many ways.
Per https://iwgb.org.uk/en/join/game-worker/ union dues max out at £35/month for those earning £80k and more — this is vastly less than unions require as dues in the US, and that almost certainly reduces the impact that union dues have, even beyond the illegality of closed shop units.
This isn't a strict requirement of unions though, right? As a trivial example grad student unions have no real career ladder, though the union negotiates a minimum pay and amount of work for everyone.
That’s not true at all. Look at professional athletes. The starting pitchers in a baseball game are the best pitchers. Or consider WGA screenwriters in Hollywood. Their ability to make money doesn’t depend in seniority.
Maybe exaggerating a bit, but that's the reality in many game dev shops, especially when a game doesn't immediately sell in great numbers.
The trouble seems to be that it's so easy to scab (outsource) or hire foreign competition (H1b et al) which is a pretty broken program even according to some of the people whom I've talked to who are on it.
One multi-team architect I know working for a brand you've definitely heard of was making like $65K and doing a $250K job of it. Brilliant guy. The H1B program hurts everyone except employers' vast bank accounts and their shareholders.
Not so much anymore, still a lot but much less than it used to be
A) Allowed a bug in the code make all GTA5 Load times on every single copy on every platform take exponential times longer to load, for YEARS, unchecked or investigated, until some random kid FIXED IT by reverse engineering compiled code?
B) The bug was a simple and unneeded look up for SHOP items
C) The never rewarded the kid, with say a job or something worthwhile for him like 100k ( when they earn billions ). I mean even this decision ALONE is such terrible optics clearly mgmt were AFK.
D) They then came onto HN to argue with me in the comments about how " its not nice to say mgmt responsible should have been fired over this"
I mean Ive had my share of almost blinding incompetence, but the one that really bothers my crumpet, is when they come on here and start denying things.
Im for the union, Rockstar North made one of the greatest games of all time. It will probably result in an inferior product but crunch is unethical and always due to poor management. Ironically it was probably mgmts' own incompetent hiring policies that resulted in a union being formed.
PS - I got a bit heated and have edited this comment so its readable apologies.
PS - All of this can be verified in previous posts on HN regarding both the bug and replies
PS - And to whoever is downvoting me, feel free to reply and tell me what I am wrong about
But I bet it happened like this:
- when the game was still in active development, it was maybe anticipated that the shop might have a couple dozen items, no problem even when the JSON parsing is extremely slow
- game is released, a separate maintenance team takes over, online mode is running for several years
- over time more and more items are added to the shop, and now maybe there are a thousands of items in that JSON file
- ...and when there's some 'accidental exponential' code in the JSON loader/parser the loading time gets worse and worse, what once was a few milliseconds is now minutes, but there was never a sudden regression after an update, just every week a little bit slower
- depending on the churn on the maintenance team, the current people on the team probably don't even notice an increase in loading time until they leave again for greener pastures, e.g. for them "it has always been that slow"
- management probably first read about the problem in the news ;) (which of course is a problem on its own - but as long as the money keeps flowing and the curves in Tableau go up and up, why should they even care... players apparently also endured it without bringing out the pitchforks)
I've done this kind of stuff many times, and something like a json array taking minutes to parse would likely be very very obvious when looking at a trace.
The maintenance team probably maintains other games as well.
Then you add in the knowledge loss through the churning of developers and over time the organization forgets how things should be.
I have nothing to do with Rockstar and wish them well, Im just saying that if I were management during these situations I would have quit or made a public apology. Its just what I feel I would have done. Regardless of the salary. I mean if one is mgmt they should take responsibility.
But maybe in late stage capitalism that is both an abhorrent and illogical idea.
Didn't think so.
This simplistic view of "management" is detrimental to a productive conversation and doesn't reflect reality.
This is the kind of weird ass replies I just said appeared last time.
PS - You are editing your comment which is fine, but in turn I have to reply. If it is not reflective of reality feel free to add to the discussion and explain what is false. Also ironically your statement doesnt add to the discussion by elaborating on any part of it. This is exactly the kind of behaviour that doesnt help anyone learn any lessons. its just random insults.
Does the concept of redundant middle management scandalize you? It's a relatively common experience, even if it's sometimes exaggerated. It actually takes a lot to be a good manager, and most people are not self aware enough to be good at it.
Happy for the devs, more power to them! For the sake of workers everywhere, I hope the US also catches up one day in empathy and rational thinking, when it comes to labor laws and rights.
There are obviously areas with decline for sure, e.g. the auto industry, but unions are usually seen as lessening the impact of that on the workers rather than the source of blame (not that everyone holds a single view). E.g., for the most part, people don't blame the union (or non-unionized industry) for the problems in Flint as neither is meant to privately fund e.g. the water pipes. They blame the downturn of the auto industry, which then gets into whatever reasons one prefers to assign. For some that's unions, but it's not actually been a very big mind changer on that aspect.
“employer seen as blocking union effort”
I’m wondering if that’s simply a rational thing available to do as opposed to an actual opinion about collective representation whether thats bargaining or something else
“hey, here’s this regulatory overhead you can completely avoid by merely being present, unless people interested in the regulatory overhead are more persistent. just don't fire them though”
(ah s** here we go again by the way).
lol no.
That’s the industry you’re in unfortunately.
Timing v. trends: - big game studios are already reviled as lazy, bloated - nimble indies are hitting a lot of records - gen. AI coming for many studio roles - employees have lower friction to be entrepreneurial
It’s like if home cooking and self checkout were going really strong and then the restaurants workers picked that time to riot for higher wages
Pay related items also seem to be a small portion of what's being pushed for change.