[HN Gopher] Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter
___________________________________________________________________
Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter
Author : elsewhen
Score : 222 points
Date : 2021-05-10 18:22 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.axios.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.axios.com)
| swyx wrote:
| because this post and the linked bloomberg post was frustratingly
| light on detail:
|
| - the blizzard spreadsheet:
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/119RI3oS9XNOjq2X8VLpU...
|
| - visualizations: https://imgur.com/a/OBG7Fch
| ineptech wrote:
| I don't know why this is limited to game developers. I'm a
| mgr/dir and it seems obvious to me that secrecy around salaries
| is consciously perpetuated because it allows corporations to get
| away with underpaying some people.
|
| I can't think of any circumstance where it wouldn't be in the
| individual contributors' best interests to tell each other
| exactly what they all make. If everyone on my teams shared their
| salaries with each other, it would lead to two things: a) some
| short-term bad blood and awkwardness, and b) some underpaid
| people getting raises or quitting. And I think my bosses,
| especially the old-school ones, consciously play up a) and treat
| salary as a giant taboo to avoid b).
| Ekaros wrote:
| Supply and demand. If there is more people accepting lower rates
| then rates will be lower. Nothing wrong with that. It's not like
| many of the skills aren't at least some level of transferable. So
| if money is an issue try to find employment outside gaming
| sector. Like everyone else does when balancing income and job.
| twodave wrote:
| The skill required to perform a job isn't the only consideration
| when determining its cost.
|
| I grew up with the dream of working for Blizzard or the like. The
| truth is, gaming is a major gateway into the programming world.
| Kids grow up playing these games and dream about what it would be
| like to be able to create something so spectacular. Many of us
| who went through with learning to build software took a different
| path, either due to location restraints or economics or just lack
| of ability.
|
| These wage discrepancies are not caused by companies paying crap
| wages. It's caused by game developers who are willing to accept
| living in a high-cost area alongside earning crap wages. If
| you're in game development and want to be paid more, step out of
| game development and optionally move to a more affordable area.
| If you're competent you'll end up with a pay raise and better
| working/life balance.
|
| If you're hell-bent on working your dream job in a high-cost
| location, you should be cognizant that it's lots of other
| people's dream job, too (many of whom have put it aside, but
| would return in a heartbeat if the compensation were comparable).
| You've chosen to put money in the back seat.
|
| TL;DR - until more people start making the economical choice,
| game development salaries will continue to be low.
| stewx wrote:
| I looked at the salaries people are posting, and what I am seeing
| is people (at least the ones comfortable with posting this kind
| of info on the Internet) rapidly climbing from $30-50k/yr USD to
| $75-150k/yr USD.
|
| These are excellent wages. They may be lower than outside the
| video game industry, but by any other standard they are
| phenomenally good wages, in the top 1% globally and at least the
| top 10-20% in developed countries. In terms of income, these
| people are unambiguously part of the upper class.
| tgv wrote:
| $75k is considerably higher than the top 10% for almost the
| entire world. Even in most of Western Europe, $75k would be in
| the top 5%. It of course depends on what that salary actually
| contains: a Western European salary is taxed for around 40%,
| but health care is cheap.
| koyote wrote:
| > 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% national insurance (i.e. pension) in the UK.
|
| When I first started working as a SWE in the UK I worked out
| that my average tax rate was actually slightly lower than if
| I earned the same in California. If I was earning 2-3x more
| then the higher European taxes start to kick in.
| moksly wrote:
| $75k a year will put you in the top 25-20% in "Western
| Europe". In Denmark where education and healthcare is paid
| for collectively and our tax is 38%, you would need to earn
| $125k to be in the top 5%, and we're pretty similar to
| countries like France and Germany.
|
| So you can say that 75k a year would be a decent pay in
| Europe, though maybe not for someone with a candidate degree
| in software engineering.
|
| https://www.detdanskearbejdsmarked.dk/den-danske-
| model/portr...
| ctvo wrote:
| It isn't about how the salary compares globally. It's about how
| does this compare to their peers.
|
| The asymmetrical nature of information available to employees
| vs. information available to the company generally leads to
| employees undervaluing themselves. By sharing what others in
| the company or in the region make for the same job, we help
| people ask for more.
| bluescrn wrote:
| The massive gap between UK and US gamedev salaries seems to keep
| getting larger :(
| darknavi wrote:
| Which direction? The article doesn't give me a good sense for
| how European devs are getting paid.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Vastly higher in the US (at least 2x, maybe 3x), judging from
| the #gamedevpaidme hashtag.
|
| Yeah, there's cost-of-living factors involved, but gamedev in
| the UK (and Europe?) just pays poorly. There's certainly
| money being made, but it's usually buying fancy cars for
| studio directors, not going into rewarding the dev team.
| Nursie wrote:
| I don't think it's just games! UK software dev money is
| terrible, outside of contracting.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Londoners can make good money, it seems. But London isn't
| somewhere you want to be unless you're still in your 20s.
|
| And in a post-Covid world, 'being in/near London' may not be
| able to increase your earning potential in the way it usually
| has done.
| ngngngng wrote:
| Why in the world is software money so terrible in the UK? I
| always look up salaries and cost of living when traveling and
| the UK was one of the more surprising instances of that. It
| seems like the only way to live comfortably in London is in
| finance.
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| Well, that's because you're looking at London, infamous for
| how expensive it is to live in.
|
| It's fairly easy to be on PS60k outside of London with a
| few years of experience. Moving up north towards the
| Midlands or even further like Manchester or Leeds and
| you're going to live a very comfortable life on a Software
| Developer salary.
|
| Yeah, it's not the US where people are on PS200k at 25. But
| earning PS60k in your 20s puts you so far ahead of almost
| everyone else in their 20s in the UK.
| ck425 wrote:
| Software salaries aren't terrible in the UK, they're just
| not as crazy as the US. Most decent software engineers I
| know are comfortable in the 80th percentile of income or
| higher.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I don't think software is terrible anywhere in the world,
| compared to local pay level. In many parts it's not at
| top, but it always decent. USA is just outlier. In other
| places it is comparable or slightly above other
| engineering disciplines...
| gambiting wrote:
| London skews all comparisons though, literally move to any
| other city in the UK and you'll see rents drop by 50% if
| not 75% for not a lot less pay in salaries. Try Manchester
| or Edinburgh, you'll get decent pay and rent a nice place
| for affordable money.
| Silhouette wrote:
| _London skews all comparisons though, literally move to
| any other city in the UK and you 'll see rents drop by
| 50% if not 75% for not a lot less pay in salaries._
|
| /cries in Cambridge, Oxford, Bristol...
| ojhughes wrote:
| I disagree, I get paid a lot more than anyone I know who
| isn't in tech and I'm outside of London. Even Doctors in the
| UK get paid less than a senior engineer at a decent company
| gambiting wrote:
| Correct. I've had this discussion here with someone saying if
| you don't make at least $150k/year(or equivalent in local
| currency) as a dev, leave immediately. I was like.....in UK,
| that would mean 90% of the programming workforce would leave
| tomorrow :-P to get that much as a programmer you need to
| either be in contracting, or few of the companies paying that
| much in London(but then you're paying London rent so I'm not
| so sure it's such a great thing). Up here in the North I make
| about.....let's say half that, and that's a _very_ decent
| salary up here.
| ojhughes wrote:
| I earned very close to that this year outside of London.
| It's definitely possible to live up north and earn that
| (working remotely)
| gambiting wrote:
| I don't doubt that, but it's pretty rare. I know several
| devs in lead/expert positions(not in games, in finance,
| in consulting companies, in DWP and NHS) and no one
| breaks PS100k/year. It happens, but it's very rare(in my
| experience).
| ojhughes wrote:
| I work for a large US tech company (not a FAANG). Getting
| in early on the Kubernetes bandwagon has helped me a lot
| . I used to work for a research consultancy and was paid
| significantly less then (but the work was a bit more
| interesting)
| Silhouette wrote:
| I agree, except that I don't believe anywhere close to 10%
| of programmers working in the UK earn that much on salary.
| You're probably a senior at certain big name employers
| probably in London or possibly working at a FAANG or
| similar if you're making that as an employee today.
| Contracting and freelance work has a much higher ceiling if
| you're experienced, well connected and working in a high-
| demand field, but obviously that income is not directly
| comparable to salary because you have the downtime,
| overheads and loss of employment benefits to consider as
| well.
| AS_of wrote:
| US salaries also have to include cost of healthcare.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The quoted salaries are 99% of the time excluding the
| employer paid portion of health insurance, which for an
| individual is typically at least 50% of the cost (~$2k to $6k
| depending on your age), but at a white collar tech firm, I
| would expect even more. For family coverage, the employers
| that pay well cover the other family members too so that can
| be added on as well, you might be looking at $20k+ in
| additional pre tax pay that isn't mentioned when people state
| their nominal wages.
|
| Plus HSA contributions, 401k matching, dependent care FSA
| contributions, etc. The US has tons of tax advantage pay
| options for the well heeled employers. If someone says
| they're earning $250k, and doesn't specify if it's total comp
| or not, I assume the employer is kicking in an extra $50k for
| various benefits.
| munk-a wrote:
| Not in their dollar amount unless something really weird is
| going on - the effective cost of US employees is a lot higher
| than employees elsewhere in the world due to the overhead of
| health insurance - but US salaries remain pretty much at the
| top of major nations world-wide even ignoring that cost.
| labcomputer wrote:
| > to the overhead of health insurance
|
| Not really. The ACA (Obamacare) caps overhead and profits
| at either 15% or 20% depending on market (google "medical
| loss ratio").
|
| The dirty secret is that too many doctors go into medicine
| for the wrong reasons (making money, instead of helping
| people), and collude to limit the number of new doctors
| created each year. The AMA is by far the most effective
| union in the US.
| munk-a wrote:
| 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 cuts of every dollar
| that goes into that cost while, in Canada, a lot of types
| of organizations: PBMs, Payers, Reimbursers - are all
| just the government, and it doesn't do that work for
| free, but it's a lot more efficient.
|
| 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3024588/
| dijit wrote:
| I think a lot of people seem to forget that employers pay
| more than the base salary in Europe. For instance your
| "salary" in Sweden is 31.42% higher than what you're told
| your base salary is, due to pension contributions, and
| social services.
|
| As an employer I would have to pay 78.852 if an employee
| had a base salary of 60.000.
|
| This is before personal income taxes, which are also very
| high.
|
| https://www.verksamt.se/web/international/running/employing
| -...
| munk-a wrote:
| I don't believe there's any country in the first world
| where your take home matches the employer's out of pocket
| - in the US you've got healthcare, retirement matching,
| payroll taxes, other employment fees and a few other
| employer-side taxes. Most other countries follow a
| similar logic, relying on offloading some of the income
| tax burden onto the employer to prevent a total loss of
| tax income from judgement proof folks - it's always why
| withholding and tax refunds are so encouraged. If you've
| got proper or overaggressive withholding setup with your
| employer than it isn't possible for you to find yourself
| with a 10k bill in April that you can't pay - instead the
| government will return any wrongfully withheld income and
| you get a "bonus check".
|
| In terms of the proportion 31% is relatively small
| honestly - employee charges in the US generally range
| somewhere in 40-60% but senior developers with families
| often have payroll overhead that can run upwards of 80k
| and can represent a much higher proportion of the
| employer's out of pocket employment expenses. These costs
| can be extreme at relatively hip progressive companies
| that employ some unskilled folks. Your 5k/month
| healthplan might be proportionally little on your 150k
| salary but if someone working in the mail room and
| earning 20k annual has the same benefits it'll work out
| to 300% their take home cost - this is why employers
| often segregate benefit packages to different pay ranges.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| US cost of living is ridiculous. You shouldn't just compare two
| numbers one to one. 150k in California is basically just
| scraping by.
| pengaru wrote:
| > 150k in California is basically just scraping by.
|
| That's complete nonsense.
|
| 150k is scraping by when attempting to live in any of the
| most desirable cities of the USA, some of which happen to
| reside in California.
|
| It's a _huge_ state, there 's plenty of housing outside of
| Santa Monica and San Francisco.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Most game dev seems to be in LA which is quite a bit cheaper
| than the bay. 150k is solidly upper middle class in most of
| LA. I think only Roblox is in the bay.
| Impossible wrote:
| There is way more gamedev in the Bay Area than Roblox...
| smus wrote:
| If you aren't at least living in a comfortable 1 bedroom
| apartment in a desirable location while contributing 30-40k
| in savings every year off 150k, you are seriously mismanaging
| your finances. I guess 150k is scraping by if you blow 50k on
| gacha games a year or something? I can't envision another
| scenario where you aren't incredibly comfortable off that
| much
| dv_dt wrote:
| Plus one carries a huge high side uncertainty in costs from
| healthcare in the US.
| dahfizz wrote:
| 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.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| 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-pocket maximum on our
| plan.
| dahfizz wrote:
| I have always had an option for a plan that has an
| explicit out of pocket max for out of network costs.
| Maybe that's not very common.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| We have that option to, and I looked at switching to it,
| but the list of exceptions to the out-of-network costs
| was still fairly long and contained words that I wasn't
| sure what they meant in the context of a legal document.
| Considering we'd be paying about $20k more out-of-pocket
| with that plan in a typical year, I wasn't sure if
| "getting a smaller list of exceptions" was worth it.
| fanciestManimal wrote:
| This is true for people in the middle to the bottom of the
| pay spectrum in the US. From experience where insurance
| paid ~1 million for a significant healthcare expense and my
| out of pocket was $4k -- when you are in a field with such
| a low unemployment rate and generally good benefits, it's a
| non issue. The month premium we pay is a non-issue. The
| maximum out of pocket is a non-issue.
|
| That being said, the way healthcare is paid for in the US
| is complete garbage for basically everyone that doesn't
| have that same (more or less) guarantee of employment (with
| benefits) and is a huge problem. It just isn't for upper
| middle income (and above) workers.
|
| Same with college. In my experience most SW engineers in
| the US make enough money to drop money in some kind of
| investment account for their children monthly so that
| college isn't so burdensome unless their children go to the
| absolutely most expensive places or they have a ton of
| kids.
|
| Again, it's the people in the middle and bottom that are
| getting screwed. The top 20% of earners in the US come out
| ahead i think.
|
| EDIT: I'm not advocating this as a positive thing or
| anything, just noting that I think SW engineers in the US
| have a pretty good gig compared to many other people both
| globally and at home.
| dv_dt wrote:
| I think if you read the fine print, it is quite possible
| to get hit by high out of pocket costs in surprising
| circumstances, but also if you have an extended illness.
| You may very well have had great coverage, but it's all
| to easy to end up in a uncovered circumstance. Most
| medical bankruptcies are people who have health
| insurance.
|
| Also as the average age of many high tech companies
| increases, expect more cost limiting changes from offered
| benefits.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I live in CA, and raise 4 kids while the total pay, including
| my wife's, just recently surpassed 150k (she works very low
| hours part-time). Not in the bay area though.
|
| We would probably need about $20k more for the same lifestyle
| had we not gotten lucky with timing buying a house (we bought
| in 2011, right before a big increase in prices).
| Alternatively we could have kids sharing a bedroom and live
| otherwise the same.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Okay most of the replies I see in here claim here that 150k
| is a luxurious living are assuming a lot. First and foremost,
| most these 150k game dev jobs are near big cities, the remote
| ones at least pre covid never paid that much.
|
| Second, yes after taxes your take home pay per month is ~8k,
| and a little more if you have dependents. But here's a couple
| of things to put into perspective:
|
| 1. It's not a lot of money if that's your household income
| and you have kids. Buying a house is nearly impossible with
| that salary and the average rent for a two bedroom apartment
| goes 3.5k which also includes a significant commute. Houses
| are even more expensive to rent. You can definitely get
| cheaper deals, there's no shortage of shitty housing in
| California. There's also rent control deals if you never
| moved out of a house for a decade.
|
| 2. A decent employer sponsored health insurance costs about
| 350 a month for the family.
|
| 3. Car payments and insurance on an average are about 400 per
| month.
|
| 4. you put about 500 per month to 401k if you want any decent
| future savings.
|
| 5. Utilities (Internet, water, electricity, gas) comes to
| about 300 per month
|
| 6. That leaves you about 3000 for groceries, gas, medical
| expenses, school related expenses, recreation, clothing, and
| bunch of other expenses for say a family of 3-4. That's not a
| lot of money tbh if you want to save anything at all.
|
| Sure 150k is a great salary if you're fresh out of college
| and share an apartment with other people. But 150k isn't a
| starting game dev salary. And it isn't a remote part of CA
| salary either. This is a salary paid in big cities that are
| too freakin expensive to stay in.
|
| PS: most of these estimates are conservative, it can easily
| exceed the cost. For eg, we only have one internet service
| provider in our area. And if you want the worst plan with bad
| speed and data caps, you still shell out 80$/month after they
| finish adding all the bs fees.
| veilrap wrote:
| The cost of living in California IS high. But $150k is much
| better than just scraping by. Assuming 40% tax rate, and a
| montly rent of $3000, that's $54,000 remaining with the two
| biggest expenses already accounted for.
| baron816 wrote:
| $150k/yr would be taking home $8k month (source https://www
| .paycheckcity.com/calculator/salary/california/), so would
| have $60k/yr after taxes and rent at the end of the year.
| Raed667 wrote:
| I'm struggling with this, I can't find a formula to translate
| US salaries to European ones (UK, FR, DE, mainly).
|
| On the one hand in the US if you save a lot, you can retire
| early and move somewhere cheap. On the other hand in Europe a
| lot of things are covered for you without having to deduct them
| from the salary.
|
| If anyone has researched this subject I'd love some links.
| kube-system wrote:
| There's no good formula to convert salaries from one part of
| the US to another part of the US. :)
|
| Even to do that, you need to consider:
|
| * State and local income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes
|
| * The value of the particular benefits packages at the
| respective jobs
|
| * The comparative cost of living difference (housing can be
| up to a 10x difference)
|
| * Insurance rate differences (which can vary widely because
| most insurance regulations are per-state)
| stinos wrote:
| Spot on. Whenever reading articles regarding salary expressed
| in USD I honestly have no clue what I'm looking at. Numbers
| sometimes look wild in comparison with what I get in euros.
| Yet the latter is well above average in my country. And those
| are just the bare numbers; then there are the factors sibling
| comments point out. tldr; impossible to compare, we need the
| same hastag with _eur appended?
| gpm wrote:
| It seems like you should just be comparing pre-tax salary
| converted into the same currency?
| [deleted]
| Raed667 wrote:
| Not really, for example in France I can go and do a full-
| spectrum healthcare check (eyes, dental, physical, mental,
| name it...) and it would cost me -in total- less than
| 100EUR nothing is deduced from my salary.
|
| One year of prestigious university is less than 600EUR in
| fees...
|
| Cost of living, education, transportation, etc... also are
| a factor.
| gpm wrote:
| The health check is paid for out of taxes though, in the
| end money/goods/services aren't free.
|
| I mean sure, France's government and health care system
| is probably a bit more efficient than America's, but I
| doubt it's order of magnitude different. Maybe more
| importantly, but in the other direction, as a developer
| in France you're probably paying more for healthcare than
| you use (subsidizing the average person who pays less
| taxes). Quite arguably differences like those are things
| that you are purchasing with your salary by choosing to
| live in the US instead of France, I don't think it's
| either desirable or really possible to eliminate them.
| Raed667 wrote:
| Hence my inability to compare a 150k$ offer in California
| to a 62kEUR offer in Lyon.
| gpm wrote:
| I mean, completing my argument with those numbers
|
| 62kEUR = 75k usd, 150 - 75 = 75. so assuming both numbers
| are before tax (and neglecting things like bonuses,
| benefits, equity, etc that you probably need to add into
| both numbers), there's your comparison.
|
| Now the question to you is "is Lyon worth 75k/year over
| California". That's not a question of compensation,
| that's just a question of how much you value the
| difference in culture and society. Do you want to spend
| 75k$/year on purchasing universal healthcare (edit: I.e.
| your share of healthcare for everyone instead of what you
| purchase in the US, which is approximately just
| healthcare for you), a better public education system, a
| better social security system, less... American...
| neighbors, and/or whatever else you think Lyon gives you
| over California.
|
| Edit: Accidentally had this saying "after tax" instead of
| "before tax" for an hour, I think everyone replying to me
| mentally corrected that anyways, but noting that I fixed
| it here in case they didn't.
| _delirium wrote:
| > I.e. your share of healthcare for everyone instead of
| what you purchase in the US, which is approximately just
| healthcare for you
|
| This is getting off-topic, but maybe surprisingly,
| Americans pay _more_ to subsidize other people 's
| healthcare than the average French taxpayer does, despite
| the American system not being universal. Some back-of-
| envelope numbers,
|
| France: Total French healthcare spending in 2017 was $337
| billion, of which 77%, or $259 billion, was publicly
| financed. [1]
|
| U.S.: Total U.S. healthcare spending was $3.8 trillion in
| 2019, of which 45%, or $1.7 trillion, was publicly
| financed (29% federal, 16% state/local, 55% private). [2]
|
| Adjusting for the two countries' population sizes, that
| puts publicly financed healthcare spending at about $3900
| per capita in France, versus $5200 per person in the US.
| Basically the somewhat lower public share for the US (45%
| vs. 77%) is outweighed by costs being about twice as
| high.
|
| [1] https://www.commonwealthfund.org/international-
| health-policy...
|
| [2] https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-
| Systems/Sta...
| gpm wrote:
| Maybe off topic, but I appreciate the information, that's
| pretty surprising to me. The numbers do seem to check
| out, and once you actually say it makes sense.
|
| Thanks :)
| Keats wrote:
| French always use before taxes numbers ("brut"). EUR62k
| is about 41k after taxes.
| gpm wrote:
| I'm the first to admit I have no clue about the French
| tax system, but a quick search finds this [1] that
| suggests there are both employer and employee paid taxes.
| Would I be right in assuming that the reported numbers
| are after the employer paid taxes and before the employee
| paid ones?
|
| [1] https://www.cabinet-roche.com/en/payroll-taxes-in-
| france/
| Raed667 wrote:
| TBH for the average employee it doesn't matter if the
| company or you are paying, it gets deducted automatically
| anyway.
|
| There are websites [0] that will help you do the
| conversion Brut/Net easily
|
| [0] https://www.salaire-brut-en-net.fr/
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| > The health check is paid for out of taxes though
|
| In Europe most of those taxes are paid by your employer,
| on top of your "before taxes" salary.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Average cost of healthcare in the US is ~$15,000 a year
| for a family of 4. When you're working full time, your
| employer generally covers most of your healthcare with a
| small amount contributed by you, and this employer
| contribution is counted separately from your salary. It
| depends on the employer, but the cost to you is generally
| in the range of $1,000-$6,000 a year.
|
| So no guarantee of health care coverage after losing your
| job etc. but it's basically only ~$6,000 extra a year out
| of your salary at worst. So a $150,000 job in the U.S. is
| roughly equivalent to a $144,000 job in Europe (before
| you get into housing and food prices etc.)
| Jommi wrote:
| Pre-tax doesnt include: - Childcare - Full healthcare
| expenses - Transportation - Security
| _delirium wrote:
| It's pretty complicated in general. For example, if you have
| kids, the European advantage tends to be bigger than if you
| don't (depending on which country, this may include
| subsidized daycare, cheaper or free college tuition, cheaper
| or free healthcare, etc.).
|
| In my particular case, when moving from the UK to the US, my
| estimate is that the "headline" salary number for the US
| offer I got overstated my pay by about 30% when comparing on
| a "like for like" basis with the UK salary. It was still a
| pay increase, but not by as much as you would think from just
| looking at the two salary numbers.
|
| The main differences were: 1) my UK taxes were lower, 2) the
| UK job made pension contributions worth about 18% of salary,
| while the US one didn't, and 3) the US job deducts about 5%
| of my salary for health insurance premiums.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| My early salary history as a midwest gamedev:
|
| 17yo: unpaid intern, 1 year (2005)
|
| 18yo: $20k/yr (2006)
|
| 19yo: $35/yr (2007)
|
| 22yo: $70k/yr (2010)
|
| I don't regret it; I learned most of my skills during those
| formative years. But I was also "part of the problem" in the
| sense that I was happy as a clam being paid $20k/yr living at my
| parents' house, putting every dollar into the bank. Saved up $15k
| and felt like I was rich; it was great.
|
| I'm not sure there's anything to learn from my experience, since
| I was an outlier, but there y'go. I was also so completely
| dedicated to the idea of becoming a gamedev that I'm not sure
| anyone could have talked me out of it.
| mywittyname wrote:
| This is pretty insightful. My (non-dev) career path followed a
| similar path (due to skipping college).
|
| Are you still in the gaming industry?
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Nah, that last datapoint was also my last job as a gamedev. I
| went into finance (avoid, unless it's at a fund), security
| (avoid; you no longer build things), then ML (total
| immersion; happiest I've ever been).
| munk-a wrote:
| To contrast - I only got into the gaming field briefly in
| Canada and after working at a med device company that paid me
| more as a junior dev than I ever got as a database and server
| specialist in gaming -
|
| 24yo:50k CA
|
| 26yo: 53k CA
|
| And at 28 I shifted to an insurance related software company
| and immediately got bumped to 80k which still wasn't that
| amazing. There was also a whole bunch of unpaid overtime while
| working in gaming.
| ngold wrote:
| Good for you. You are not part of the problem, you figured out
| how to get a 4 year degree and they paid you for it.
|
| The problem how I see it is the lack of recurring revenue from
| your work. Sure pay shit, bUT if the game makes a billion
| dollars, you get a check every month.
|
| Employee owned businesses are the only hope I see for the
| future.
| Impossible wrote:
| I was paid similar rates at a midwest non-gamedev company in
| early and mid-2000s. Left to get in gamedev and got a 2x salary
| bump instantly...
| [deleted]
| stunt wrote:
| I don't remember now but I thought many contracts require
| employees to keep it confidential! Or not?
| paxys wrote:
| That is illegal in the USA.
| q_andrew wrote:
| Unfortunately this probably won't be changing any time soon.
| Similar to the movie industry in CA, execs see game developers as
| totally replaceable, because they kind of are. There are so many
| people who are extremely passionate about making games, that they
| will jump after any opportunity, even when they know it isn't
| paying what it should. The only thing that might bring about some
| kind of reform is a union or a change in US/CA/UK labor laws.
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| One thing that I haven't really seen mentioned is that the
| barrier for entry is high in a lot of video game development.
| Meaning, I can't really take 3 of my friends and make the next
| GTA in my garage. Those type of games need developers, but also
| artists, writers, actors, etc.
|
| They're expensive, risky operations of which development is
| only a part of.
|
| This is probably why it makes the most sense to treat
| developers as a commodity in the industry. The level at which
| the consumer interacts with the developer isn't as high as say,
| a website.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Underrated comment.
|
| It's even worse when you consider that the engines are
| generally already made, you only need developers to do what
| you could almost call glorified scripting compared to engine
| development.
|
| I think Unity and Unreal probably have to pay their devs a
| reasonable salary. But having devs work in Unity or Unreal to
| produce a game is not really all that hard. That's kind of
| the point of Unity and Unreal.
| luaKmua wrote:
| Having done work in a variety of contexts from Game Engine
| development to working in Unity, what you are describing is
| only true for the most trivial of projects. Larger projects
| (especially AAA) have so much customization of the engines
| and pushing of their boundaries that they require just as
| much technical expertise as engine development for many of
| the required tasks.
|
| There are advantages and disadvantages for using these
| engines. They soften the "getting started" part of game dev
| for newer people, but for complicated projects it tends to
| be kicking the can down the road for dealing with deeper
| issues.
|
| You'd be hard pressed to squeeze good perf out Unity while
| fully using the HDRP and not understanding the ins and outs
| of the pipeline.
| a_t48 wrote:
| I left the gaming industry for robotics. I'm lucky in a number of
| ways (no college degree, no robotics background), but the salary
| and WLB is so much better here. My last job was FAANG level
| salary/bonuses, my current company is a bit smaller but maybe
| we'll get there at some point. Don't get me wrong - I _miss_ it.
| So much. I know it's Stockholm Syndrome, but the people in the
| industry are my people and I miss shipping games. The work is
| very interesting (not that my current job isn't). But my life
| outside of work has improved so much after leaving - I likely
| won't ever go back.
|
| I remember being told "why would you want to do that?" when I
| told a gamedev friend I wanted to join the industry. I didn't get
| what he meant then, but now I do. If some young programmer wanted
| to get in now...well - I wouldn't dissuade them - it's a great
| way to get a lot of experience and work on cool stuff - but go in
| eyes wide open. Maybe have an exit plan. Off the top of my head I
| know a dozen excellent developers I worked with in the past who
| have left games for greener pastures (most of them robotics - the
| 3D math experience and ability to work with large codebases carry
| over well).
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| This isn't unique to game dev. This is true in education as well
| - most white collar positions pay between 40 - 100k while vice
| presidents and presidents get 250k + packages.
|
| I think more developers need to get better at negotiating. One 10
| minute conversation can beat years of 2-4% raises. It's all about
| setting expectations and being willing to walk away.
| o_p wrote:
| "If you get physically bullied just become stronger" is the
| opposite of society
| ryandrake wrote:
| You see this advice a lot, but it's never very specific. "Just
| negotiate better!" OK, great... how? Most of us have no
| leverage besides our willingness to walk away, and when the
| market is saturated with talent, it's usually fine for a
| company to just let you walk away. I bet for someone who
| happens to be the world's foremost expert in some niche skill
| the company needs, negotiating a higher comp is
| straightforward. For the 95+% of the rest of us, it goes kind
| of like this:
|
| Candidate: I'd like $150K. Comparable companies offer people
| with my experience $150K.
|
| Company: We'll offer you $100K.
|
| Candidate: I'll walk if you give me less than $140K.
|
| Company: Ok... Bye?
|
| Candidate: How about a little more equity?
|
| Company: How about no?
|
| Candidate: OK. $130K and maybe a bigger potential bonus?
|
| Company: We're already interviewing the next person.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| 1. The company you describe was never going to pay you much
| more than $100k. If you wanted more than that, you should
| have picked a different company. Setting your salary is more
| about efficiently finding that other company, and less about
| negotiation.
|
| 2. Your willingness to walk away is, indeed, your primary
| leverage. Ongoing employment is a great way to have lots of
| leverage there -- you can start filtering out offers at the
| "recruiter is emailing me" stage -- otherwise, develop
| leverage by collecting multiple offers at once (lining up a
| variety of interviews so that they come in around the same
| time).
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| None of us have leverage besides our willingness to walk
| away. That's not the difference.
|
| I see some people act like negotiating is an antagonistic
| game of chicken or something. In reality, it's just an
| amicable case of you finding your best options, communicating
| them clearly to everyone involved, then taking the best
| option. Think of it as more like an auction than some slick
| game of poker. What's wrong with this script?
|
| Candidate: I'd like $150K. Comparable companies offer people
| with my experience $150K.
|
| Hiring manager: We'll offer you $100K.
|
| Candidate: I'll walk if you give me less than $140K.
|
| Hiring manager: Ok... Bye?
|
| Candidate: Okay, bye. [Takes a job earning $150k at one of
| those other companies]
|
| In general, I think the benefits of negotiating don't go to
| the individual. They go to _next_ individual /the market. You
| repeat that script a few times and the hiring manager goes to
| HR and says nobody's taking the job unless they pay more.
|
| (If instead, you say "okay, fine I'll take $100k, I was
| bluffing" then that's what the next person is offered too.)
|
| > "Just negotiate better!" OK, great... how?
|
| My mental model is to approach it cooperatively. You're not
| trying to beat them. Talk about other data points if they say
| you're not being realistic, and talk about the reasons you're
| a better fit than they accounted for when you ask for more.
| They say they're better than the next company and you say
| you're better than the next candidate.
|
| But most of all, just make sure you actually have that
| alternative you're willing to walk away for. Interview while
| you have a job. Time your interviews so that you have options
| while this conversation takes place.
|
| YMMV. I've gotten like +10% from negotiating and +30% from
| walking away to take other offers, which should tell you the
| relative importance of each.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| The problem with most online salary negotiation advice is
| that it revolves around this idea that hiring is a 1-on-1
| game between the candidate and the company. It assumes that
| the company has no other choices, so they must cave to the
| demands of the candidate.
|
| In practice, companies keep multiple candidates in the
| hiring pipeline and candidates usually interview with
| multiple companies at once. It's not a 1-on-1 game, it's an
| N-on-M game. Unless the specific candidate has something
| ultra-specific to offer, companies are fine with declining
| increased salary demands.
|
| I'm not suggesting that people shouldn't negotiate, but you
| have to keep in mind that neither side holds all of the
| cards.
|
| > Candidate: I'll walk if you give me less than $140K.
|
| > Hiring manager: Ok... Bye?
|
| As a hiring manager, I might have multiple candidates with
| different levels of seniority in my hiring pipeline. I
| might be willing to pay $300K for a senior, $200K for a
| mid-level, and $100K for a junior employee (example
| numbers). If my mid-level candidate threatens to walk
| unless I pay them $300K, I'm going to let them walk and
| give the $300K offer to the more senior candidate. I have
| no desire to overpay for a mid-level when I can get a
| senior-level for the same price.
|
| This is what most people forget in negotiations: You're not
| just negotiating against the company, you're negotiating
| against everyone else who wants the job.
|
| In practice, reaching equilibrium requires being willing to
| push the demands until your demands or offers are being
| rejected more than they're being accepted. That requires
| more sample points, so always apply to as many jobs as
| possible.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Well this is bad negotiation for a lot of reasons. I've
| coached 1000's of folks on getting better offers. You are
| right that you have to have some leverage. But walking away
| is only one of many possible leverage points. You could also
| have other offers, have done well in the interview process,
| be walking away from an existing role that offers xyz that
| isnt offered at this company... What data points or pieces of
| leverage do you have other than I will walk? Because that is
| and should be the last piece used.
|
| If you are putting the first number out you're already
| working from behind.
|
| Company: We'll offer you 100K.
|
| Candidate: I'm really excited about the role for xyz reasons
| and I liked meeting with (insert persons name here) because
| it allowed me to learn about (insert reason you actually like
| the company here).
|
| I had a question about the offer. The base salary was a bit
| lower than I was expecting. Do you think we could get it
| adjusted? (If you have a point of leverage insert that here
| like, "My current comp is actually pretty close to this offer
| and I am expecting an promotion sometime in the next 6 months
| based on conversations with my manager").
|
| I hope we can work this out over the next few days because I
| think this opportunity is the right next step in my career.
|
| Let me know what you think. Thanks!
|
| Company: "Okay we can do 115K"
|
| Candidate: Thanks so much for getting those adjustments. I
| was targeting closer to a 150K base salary. I am very
| invested in the role and the company though. I'm specifically
| excited about working with XYZ.
|
| Do you think we can move the base salary closer to that 150K
| mark? If not could we get a sign on bonus for the difference?
|
| If you could get to 150K base salary or something like 130K
| with a 20K sign on bonus I'd be ready to sign today and could
| start 2 weeks from Friday.
|
| Company: probably comes back with something less than 150K
| but something a whole lot better than 100K.
|
| I've had exactly one person I coached ever have their offer
| pulled. He basically said here are all the reasons your
| company sucks and I need XXXk to come work there.
|
| That's not negotiating. Negotiating is finding a point where
| you and the company both feel like you are both fairly
| valued.
| jupp0r wrote:
| The advice is to walk after "Company: We'll offer you $100K."
| and go to "Comparable companies". If there aren't any then
| you lied with point 1.
| ryandrake wrote:
| That's not negotiation, though. That's just walking away
| when the number isn't high enough. Negotiation implies some
| kind of discussion: back-and-forth, give-and-take. I've
| rarely experienced any discussion actually working. It's
| usually the company, who has all the power, giving a "take
| it or leave it" offer, and that's it.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Depends on the size. Larger places not so much but if you
| talk to the owner during your interview you can go back
| and forth.
| kgantchev wrote:
| I recommend reading "Never Split The Difference," the
| book is great and it has served me well in negotiations.
|
| Where you're right: yes, you need to foster the
| conversation. It's a skill that one develops with
| practice.
|
| Where you're wrong: I negotiate for my consulting
| business and I can guarantee you that the companies don't
| have "the power." The power is held by whoever is better
| at negotiating. If you're good at negotiating, you will
| hold the power.
| [deleted]
| munk-a wrote:
| Just a pro-tip - there probably are companies willing to
| give you that bump, you just need to look for them. I
| really wish it were easier to get appropriate compensation
| but without a union or legislation it's all on you.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Pretty much. I had one (out of about ten) company ever offer
| more from negotiation, and that was only because I had a
| counter offer from another place. And it was 10%. Every other
| company has been, "this is our best offer."
|
| I'm pretty far from a FAANG uber-dev though.
| Mehdi2277 wrote:
| I've had 3 jobs since college. First one I unintentionally
| negotiated the internship although did not negotiate the
| later full time conversion. 2nd/3rd jobs both were
| negotiated. 2nd job was around 20% increase while 3rd job
| was 17ish percent. I only had offers from 3 places for the
| 2nd/3rd job. So 2/3 were successful negotiations. The 17ish
| percent was also an easy negotiation as I basically just
| said the current offer number wasn't enough to make me
| leave my current role and the recruiter immediately jumped
| to that so they had a 2nd offer ready as a backup. The last
| company I couldn't get them to budge at all although to
| there credit they were near the top end of the pay band
| data I found in levels for the role. The companies were 1
| small startup (first one) and then 3 big N type companies.
| I think startups tend to be negotiation friendly and have
| poorly defined pay bands anyway. big N is sorta used to
| them for candidates negotiating with multiple offers (or vs
| there current role).
| yurishimo wrote:
| Walking away is only powerful if you have leverage. Game devs,
| unlike a lot of other software, are not super in demand. You
| can't apply for an entry level job at EA and then pop over to
| Ubisoft instead when the offer from EA is crap. There are way
| more folks trying to break into game dev than there are jobs
| available.
| gambiting wrote:
| I actually work for a AAA games company and what you said
| only applies at kind of junior/intermediate level. Hit
| senior/lead/expert and you can walk out and get another job
| in a week, it's _super_ hard to hire seniors and above and
| those positions hold a lot of leverage.
|
| Edit: obligatory "above is true in my experience, YMMV"
| yurishimo wrote:
| Yeah, I largely agree. You as the developer know if you
| have leverage, and seniority generally means you have more
| leverage. This is true in any field. But, if there are more
| jobs available, then you need less leverage to walk at a
| bad offer.
|
| So yeah, of course all the guys leaving Blizzard are
| getting snatched up, and there is a lot of demand to fill
| their shoes, but those roles need to be filled by equally
| competent people, not just anyone off the street.
|
| It seems that in games, you either have leverage to
| negotiate, or you don't. There doesn't seem to be a
| credible middle-ground like in other software disciplines
| where warm bodies capable of writing for loops are all
| that's required to build the product.
| dijit wrote:
| I work(ed) for the same company as gambiting and can
| confirm this to be true.
|
| Hit Senior (easy to do after 5y) and game companies throw
| money at you to come over because getting people in who
| have a shipping mentality is hard- most people who want to
| be gamedevs see the glamour, those that ship see the pain a
| mile away and how to avoid it.
|
| The issue might be that most who become senior do not
| really move because the tool chains are largely different
| between companies. Frostbite and Snowdrop are incredibly
| different game engines and even those working on
| Unreal/Unity at the AAA level invariably maintain a fork
| due to limitations in the engine itself which makes it not
| compelling to sacrifice all your knowledge.
|
| Also, I find that most companies end up turning their C++
| into a custom C++-like language with fancy types like
| growable hash tables and vectors. Many of which have quirks
| which require experience otherwise there can be footguns.
| (Some functions may be more correct but quadratic and
| others are fast but less precise and knowing when to use
| what is part of being a senior in some companies)
| vsareto wrote:
| If there are so many at the junior/intermediate level,
| shouldn't they be advancing and the senior devs be a larger
| population? Plus if folks are really sticking to the
| industry out of passion, they have more of a chance to make
| it over time.
|
| I've heard about game dev's surplus of workers for at least
| 10 years for almost identical reasons in most of this
| thread, and that would make nearly anyone a senior for
| sure, so that problem should have been "fixed" by now.
| minimuffins wrote:
| Yes! I keep seeing these idealistic responses about
| negotiation.
|
| When you negotiate a higher salary, you are saying to your
| boss, look, I know I am creating more value for you than I'm
| getting as a wage, and I know you can't just swap me out with
| somebody else. You're actually making a demand that needs to
| be underwritten with a credible threat, no matter how
| politely you communicate that. You demand that the company
| realign your wage with your value (actually, you demand that
| they get closer, they of course never pay you your full
| value, or they don't make any money).
|
| It's really that simple. You get what you have the power to
| get. It's not magic, and it's not all about the attitude or
| w/e.
|
| Of course we are all still constrained by material reality!
| If you can't make the credible threat, you can't "just"
| negotiate. (Duh)
| jb775 wrote:
| > I think more developers need to get better at negotiating.
|
| You're forgetting that hiring managers know exactly how much
| everyone gets paid. This gives them extreme leverage in the
| negotiation.
|
| If it were public information that the last person was offered
| $x (for a given position), it would be much harder for the
| hiring manager to justify an offer of $x-$25,000.
|
| We are all shooting ourselves in the foot for not sharing our
| salaries.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| Spoiler: Without reading it, it's shit.
|
| People go into it thinking they're in love with video games and
| get chewed out of the machine after a few years.
| pasquinelli wrote:
| what i learned as a gamedev: the saying, "do what you love for
| a living and you never work a day in your life", is false. it's
| actually, "do what you love for a living and what you love
| becomes a job."
|
| what you need is a job you don't mind doing, which is the scam
| of higher education, because you plunk down all that money or
| debt or both, and years of time, and you get no guarantee that
| there'll be any job for you, but worse, you have no idea if you
| want to do that job. meanwhile, corporations have plenty of
| people to pick from who need to get a job in their field,
| either for financial reasons or psychological ones, who trained
| themselves at their own expense. the idea that such a large
| block of people are cornered into acting against their own
| interests and in the interests of such a small block of people
| almost makes one question the idea of liberal democracy.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| The one thing that has pissed me off the most about job
| markets is that companies have outsourced the training on
| you... the most common remark when interviewing is "we want
| someone be able to hit the ground right away"
|
| I remember hearing about companies actually training their
| people.
| stevezsa8 wrote:
| So true.
|
| Each time I was hired, I was expected to learn on my own
| time. The best I could get was a $30 book paid for.
|
| I kinda assumed the company was responsible to train you.
| The only training I received was when I volunteered to be
| first aid for the office. But I assume it was only due to
| it being a legal requirement to have some trained people.
| xtracto wrote:
| I second this sentiment. I did my BSc Soft. Eng. between 1999
| and 2004. At the time I wanted so bad to get into game
| development. Being myself from a third world country there was
| no clear path to that. More or less at the same time, the
| infamous "EA Spouses" scandal broke, and after giving a good
| look at the industry I decided against it.
|
| 17 years later, I don't regret my decision at all. I'm at the
| top of my career, earning a USD salary, (around $150k USD)
| living in my third world country with great benefits and
| developing exciting things (fintech, crypto, etc). I still
| sometimes doodle around with Unity some weekends, for
| entertainment purposes
| paulpauper wrote:
| being a game dev. seems like the worst tech job: few perks,
| minimal promotion opportunity, no ipo riches, no buyout riches,
| no lucrative stock options, high failure rate, low pay relative
| to revenues and exec pay, long hours, no credit, low salary cap,
| etc.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| 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 unpopular opinion, but game devs are paid
| correctly since game companies offer an experience and culture
| that is totally their own. It's too bad one eventually needs to
| move on to a inferior environment in search of more income and
| free time.
| stevezsa8 wrote:
| 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 :]
| sadpolishdev wrote:
| Makes me sad as a polish game-developer, who decided never to
| work in my country again. I have 15+ years of experience, I've
| made games for ps2 and original xbox aside PCs, and until i've
| left the "national" gamedev industry, my salaries were (monthly)
| along these numbers: around 2005ish: 3d artist / junior - 600usd
| 3d artist / mid - 800usd around 2009ish: 3d artist / team lead:
| 1100usd 3d artist / senior / team lead 1200usd around 2012ish: 3d
| artist / senior / team lead / delegated to maintain and oversee a
| remote office in other side of the country - 1200usd + rent paid
| (around 300usd) 2014 decided to leave any employment, and started
| own company that freelance/outsource work - salary quadrupled
| (after taxes). Since then, I had a steady rose in hourly rates,
| so its not comparable to normal local gamedev salaries at any
| point. Its ok to love games and want to make games. Just dont be
| exploitable idiot, and working on AAA title that sells millions
| for 1000usd/month, while beign called mid, or lead for 2.5k
| usd/month for having responsibility of evaluating several other
| teammates work.
| node-bayarea wrote:
| If my software is online and the company can make profit from
| across the world, why should I get paid locally?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| There is no 'should' either way in a salary negotiation though
| - just what can you two agree on.
| bidirectional wrote:
| Surely this line of thinking leads to _lower_ salaries? Silicon
| Valley salaries are purely a function of the local labour
| market, Facebook still pays Oxford graduates in (insanely
| expensive) London a fraction of what they would be earning in
| the US.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| > Surely this line of thinking leads to lower salaries?
|
| Only if one falls for the canard that employers anywhere -
| yes, in Silicon Valley as well - are actually paying their
| employees their full worth. If they were doing that, they
| wouldn't be making any money.
|
| Most of the companies that are large enough to be hiring
| internationally are already paying even their top-earning
| non-executive staff a tiny fraction of what they bring to the
| table. Any company that's trying to undercut that even more
| in the name of "location awareness" isn't a company I want to
| work at.
| duxup wrote:
| What is the supply of labor like like when it comes to game
| development?
|
| It seems like there might be a huge number of folks who want to
| get into the game industry, but not as many jobs available? Could
| that have an impact on salaries?
|
| When I changed careers and attended a coding camp, there were a
| handful of very capable folks who had failed to get into the
| gaming industry noting how many other folks like them there were
| trying to break in. They had much less trouble getting into other
| (not gaming) areas after they retooled a bit.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Wanting to be a game developer and being a good game developer
| are pretty different things. I'm sure that first shipped game
| to appear on your resume greatly increases the frequency and
| salary of offers.
|
| Also game development requires a lot of disparate skill sets.
| Artists are pretty much always underpaid relative to the amount
| of time and effort they put into their craft. The money there
| is always going to be as a lead/manager.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Wanting to be a software developer and being a good software
| developer are pretty different things. However most good
| software developers make more money than good game
| developers.
| f430 wrote:
| What is it about game development field that makes it so labor
| intensive with consistent overtimes?
|
| I tried to make a simple FPS game and it was astounding how much
| work was involved. Took 6 month of learning Unreal and Unity and
| gave up with a functioning prototype. Took 4 months of back and
| forth with Steam to list my game. Even harder trying to make
| money off it. I'm just in awe of Roblox, Minecraft, Fall Guy and
| all these other successes.
|
| We all love games but not everybody gets to make em. It's insane
| how much detail and granted we take for all the flood of games we
| have out now.
|
| It did make me change my stance on piracy. Somebody spent their
| sweat and blood bringing that game. We should pay for it what we
| can but won't be against emulation of retro ROMs.
| amelius wrote:
| > It did make me change my stance on piracy. Somebody spent
| their sweat and blood bringing that game. We should pay for it
| what we can but won't be against emulation of retro ROMs.
|
| I don't know about games, but in movies I don't care about the
| detail that CGI offers. Just give me a good story.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I know it sounds trite, but it really is supply and demand.
|
| So so so many developers want to build games. The market for
| developers making things that _aren't_ games is red-hot. But
| because they REALLY want to develop games, game companies can
| use them to their limit for low pay.
| foobarian wrote:
| The game industry has the unique advantage that entry level
| developers spend their preceding 10-15 years playing games
| and building up a desire to make them. Imagine if kids had
| Enterprise Software consoles and played with Jira tickets on
| them. The rest of the industry would be swimming in
| applicants :-)
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Modern AAA games involve an absolute ton of work, but the
| reason for the consistent overtime is that abusive labor
| practices have become institutionalized within the industry in
| the US. The EA lawsuit is a famous example, but truly is just
| the tip of the iceberg. Most gamedevs become personally
| invested in what they're doing enough that the
| studios/publishers know they can underpay and overwork their
| staff. I was briefly in the industry at the end of the 90s, and
| still talk with people in the biz today occasionally. From what
| they tell me things just keep getting worse on this point.
| emtel wrote:
| > What is it about game development field that makes it so
| labor intensive with consistent overtimes?
|
| I helped lead a team that built and shipped a 3D multiplayer
| game from scratch with a custom engine. I went into it
| expecting it to be harder than I thought it would be, and it
| was harder still.
|
| I think the thing that makes game dev fundamentally harder than
| other types of software is that most software products solve a
| problem or take away pain. So they only have to be good enough
| that the user is better off using the product than not using
| it. And there are still many problems out there that people
| face for which there is no solution. So even an imperfect
| solution might be quite good.
|
| Games on the other hand have to be so good that playing them is
| more fun/appealing/rewarding than the next best thing the
| player might do with those hours.
|
| While the technical challenges in some types of games are
| daunting, I suspect that even technically simpler games like 2d
| platformers are probably much harder to develop now than they
| were a few decades ago, due to necessity of competing against
| every other activity the player has to choose from.
| matt_s wrote:
| I think this hits the nail on the head.
|
| There is a low barrier to solving someone's pain in creating
| a typical CRUD app. Its easy to pick an industry, find an
| application that could use some newer features and create
| something. Copying feature parity involves little creative
| work.
|
| There is no ceiling on making a game fun to play. Creative,
| fun ways to do crafting, leveling, fighting, puzzles, etc.
| can engage players to come back and replay content infinitely
| if that is the goal.
| adammunich wrote:
| Attention is competitive and you always have to churn out new
| stuff when running a game company.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Making a game is a deeply interdisciplinary exercise. Sound,
| visual art, storytelling, game theory, acting (voice or full
| body acting if motion capture) and of course many fields of
| technology, ai, graphics, core performance tuning, esoteric OS
| and hardware knowledge...and much more.
|
| We're also exposed to AAA works that easily took 500 highly
| skilled artisans several years to build. Expectations are sky
| high.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I would add: there is also no "happy path" for gamers. Users
| will do _everything_ they can within the game and you will
| spend a great deal of time handling those "edge cases" in
| code.
| duxup wrote:
| I'm amazed any independent games get made considering all the
| skills needed, but that scene seems very rich in content... I
| always wonder how that is considering the breadth of
| knowledge required.
| junon wrote:
| And even if you're not doing those things directly, you
| absolutely need to know how they all tie together and how
| they work at some level of proficiency in order to make a
| cohesive game.
| mbesto wrote:
| > with consistent overtimes?
|
| One thing I've noticed about businesses that operate in the
| arts & entertainment space - people who do a lot of the labor
| have personal passions for their industry and are subsequently
| are willing to deal with employer abuses.
| munk-a wrote:
| OT in the gaming field is insidious and mostly comes from the
| fact that the majority of your employees are salaried and
| working in fields where OT pay is not required. Overtime is an
| inefficient use of employee stress when compared to working
| regular hours - you'll burn people out and cause health issues
| in your workforce (a friend of mine had tension headaches when
| they worked too much OT - I turned to sugary drinks to keep
| myself going and put on weight). However, if the cost of those
| extra hours to the company is nothing then just see how quickly
| shops like EA are willing to force you into 20 hour days while
| you see nothing extra in your take home.
|
| Overtime laws need real overhauls and nobody should be able to
| bargain away standard working hours or it hurts all of us.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| I an 42 on the usa and three years ago when job hunting got five
| offers. non game offers were in the 140-150 range, some with
| equity on top, gamedev was 110 (EA)
|
| I might have taken it but for the looong commute. glad i didnt
| though!
| socialist_coder wrote:
| 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 able to
| talk to all of them about games and having your company culture
| revolve around games and gaming. It's games all the way down!
| It's a completely different work environment. As someone who
| loves games, the best years of my working career were when I was
| working on game teams, not at tech companies.
|
| Also, developer salaries in games is still plenty good. It's
| still great money. I never felt like I was losing out.
|
| Also the argument that it's "grueling 80+ hour weeks day in and
| day out is" is bullshit! The only time I ever worked 80 hours in
| a single week was when I was starting out in Quality Assurance
| and I was getting paid hourly so I was _happy_ to make the extra
| overtime. As a salaried developer I don 't think I was ever
| expected to work more than 60 hours a week, and then after the
| crunch was over we always got 1 or 2 weeks of extra vacation
| ("comp time"). To be clear, the normal working schedule was 40
| hours per week. Crunch time is like 1 or 2 times a year, for
| maybe 1-2 months each time. And like I said, depending on how
| much you crunch, you would get extra paid time off afterwards. So
| for me, that was a pretty good trade. I'd much rather work my ass
| off for a couple months and then get an extra 2 week vacation at
| the end of it.
|
| Maybe some game companies treat their employees like dirt and
| work them into the ground, but the ones I've worked for, I never
| felt that way. Don't work at those terrible companies! There are
| plenty of "good" game companies out there who pay good salaries
| and have good working conditions.
|
| As someone who is older now with kids, my priorities are
| definitely different than when I worked in games during my 20s
| and early 30s. I would no longer be happy working those 60 hour
| weeks. I want a better work life balance. So I don't know if I
| could work on a game team like that anymore. But do I regret
| working there before I had a family? Absolutely not.
| #gamedev4life
| Impossible wrote:
| It's also possible to work on games or game like software at
| FAANG, not crunch (although FAANG companies have plenty of
| other toxic qualities that can make them worse than a game job
| in subtle ways) and get paid a FAANG salary.
| selestify wrote:
| What are the toxic qualities that are unique to FAANG?
| [deleted]
| paxys wrote:
| 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 work 70+
| hours a week because you love writing software and all your
| coworkers love writing software and it's a great environment"
| I'd (justifiably) laugh at their face - enough though I really
| _do_ love everything about software. But somehow this is
| completely fine in gaming.
| Voloskaya wrote:
| > "do it for the love of the craft not money" is bullshit
| propaganda that only serves to keep labor costs low
|
| It's not, it's simply reality.
|
| When deciding where to work, people don't just myopically
| look at the $ amount on the salary and nothing else. The
| company reputation, industry, culture etc. all have intrinsic
| value.
|
| That's why SpaceX and some game dev's studios can get away
| with lower salaries than the market rate, because working
| there in itself has value for some people. And that's why
| Morgan Stanley and Facebook can't.
|
| Good old supply and demand.
| ska wrote:
| Sure, but "most of the industry can't pay FAANG salaries" is
| also true.
|
| There is a lot of room between that your characterization.
| bko wrote:
| > 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
| moksly wrote:
| I think your advice is only solid as far as pay goes.
| Nobody should work overtime for free. If you want to throw
| 80 hours a week on game development, at least make sure you
| own part of the company.
|
| But for anyone working normal hours with normal benefits in
| a decent environment you are absolutely right. Money can be
| an excellent goal, but so can working on something you
| like, or working less to spend more time on something else.
|
| Just never work for a company for free.
| jholman wrote:
| > Nobody should work overtime for free.
|
| > Just never work for a company for free.
|
| Screw you, buddy, I'll do what I want to!
|
| (Okay, my aggressive tone is a joke, but I do actually
| mean the underlying point. I've worked for free many
| times, for at least two totally different reasons in
| different situations, and I'll do it again, and it's
| ridiculous to say that people should "never" do this.
| Different people have different goals.)
| r00fus wrote:
| The kind of insight into the gaming industry tells me my
| job in tech outside of gaming is far more sane, and
| rewarding than the absolutely grueling schedules gaming
| companies foist on their devs week in and week out.
|
| 80+h weeks will absolutely kill any love or value you can
| get unless you're also a masochist.
| jjeaff wrote:
| 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 eyed actors out there willing to
| work for nothing just for the chance of maybe becoming
| famous one day. The union keeps the big players from taking
| advantage of this endless supply.
|
| Even with their union, actors make a median salary of
| around $40k. The top 25% best paid make closer to $60k
| median.
| bityard wrote:
| > The whole "do it for the love of the craft not money" is
| bullshit propaganda
|
| A bunch of people already responded to this, but I'm going to
| add my two cents anyway:
|
| I currently make 6 low figures in a relatively boring but
| non-stressful systems administration job. The company is a
| dinosaur in Internet Years and has its idiosyncrasies but is
| ultimately a very decent place to work. My manager gives me
| my priorities and then gets out of my way to let me do my
| work. I work 40 hours a week, sometimes less. The company is
| mostly software devs and QA, so there's no such thing as on-
| call because nothing we manage needs 24x7 uptime. In 10
| years, there have been about 3 times I've gotten a call on
| the weekend to help bring something back online.
|
| I could very easily double my salary in under a year if I
| really buckled down and tried to pivot to DevOps role in some
| rapidly growing biotech or fintech (read: crypto) company
| instead. The tradeoffs being: 1) sacrificing basically all my
| free time and time with my family in order to adequately grok
| the ever-changing world of DevOps 2) that feeling of being
| out of my depth for 6 months to a year that comes with moving
| to a new company 3) almost certainly being part of an on-call
| rotation 4) taking a risk on a new company that may go
| bankrupt or get bought out a few years down the road, and so
| on.
|
| I'm making an active choice to keep my stability and
| work/life balance while making what I consider to be a
| reasonable wage.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I currently make 6 low figures in a relatively boring but
| non-stressful systems administration job.
|
| For context, I was contacted by a game dev company
| recently. The max they could pay me was 5 figures.
|
| Doing a gaming job for 40 hours a week for low 6 figures is
| fine. However, it's not the reality for many, if not most,
| game devs.
| kelnos wrote:
| Right, and that's a perfectly reasonable choice to make.
| But that's not what this thread is about. It's about being
| paid at a similar level as your pay, but being expected to
| work 60+ hour weeks for several months out of the year.
|
| No thanks.
|
| But hey, each to their own, I guess. If a game dev wants to
| work more and get paid less because they love building
| games, that's their choice.
| [deleted]
| darkhorse13 wrote:
| You seemed to have missed the entire point of the comment
| you're replying to, which is that this is not about money.
| julienb_sea wrote:
| 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,
| which is that working in a gaming context is something people
| actually value and are willing to give up potential
| compensation for.
| paxys wrote:
| Well getting minimum wage at Wendy's is also a supply and
| demand issue, but that job isn't sold as "do it for the
| love of the fast food industry". Ultimately a large chunk
| of game developers do have the skillset to be able to get
| better pay and working conditions elsewhere. They like
| making games, sure, but the tiniest amount of collective
| action among workers in the industry could ensure that you
| get to do what you love _and_ get paid for it.
| Voloskaya wrote:
| > minimum wage at Wendy's is also a supply and demand
| issue, but that job isn't sold as "do it for the love of
| the fast food industry"
|
| That's a fallacy, no one goes to work at Wendy for the
| love of it. Some people do really want to work in video
| game for the love of it, they know that their salary will
| be lower, and they still do it.
| majormajor wrote:
| > That's a fallacy, no one goes to work at Wendy for the
| love of it.
|
| I don't know, there are a lot of jobs that are worse than
| Wendy's out there. "Love" is a strong word, but the same
| forces are at play.
| bigbob2 wrote:
| The whole thing is apples to oranges because Wendy's is a
| specific business whereas the game industry is an entire
| industry. Many people enjoy working in restaurants, maybe
| just not so many at Wendy's. I'm sure many people who
| work at abusive companies such as EA love the industry
| they're in, but maybe not as many love working at EA.
| Probably explains the high turnover rate.
| ska wrote:
| > game industry is an entire industry.
|
| And it's crazy to hold up the restaurant industry as some
| kind of model of reasonable work hours and fair
| compensation.
|
| If anything, game developer war stories pale in
| comparison with fine dining kitchens.
| bko wrote:
| The problem then is that if the industry pays above
| market wages, then there will be too many prospective
| game developers for the roles. Then the question is how
| do you choose who gets to be in this industry where you
| can do what you love and get paid well for it? Things
| have a way of balancing out, and labor organizers will
| see this surplus and capture an ever increasing portion
| of it through fees or other means. This leads to nepotism
| or favoritism as you see in some jobs that pay above
| market wages.
| gravypod wrote:
| (Opinions are my own)
|
| > The whole "do it for the love of the craft not money" is
| bullshit propaganda that only serves to keep labor costs low
|
| If this is good or bad is up to interpretation but some
| people actually enjoy different work cultures. I just joined
| Google after a ~5 year career at various startups, 2 of them
| YC backed through Work at a Startup & Bookface.
|
| Google's culture and the culture at startups I've worked at
| are extremely different. Even the scales of your work are
| entirely different.
|
| One of my first projects at Google was a "minor" change that
| resulted in migrating a majority of our users code. This
| involved a high level design doc, another doc sent to a
| committee, and for me to actually write the code which
| involved a series of reviews from my TL. What was essentially
| a very complex "find and replace" operation took ~2 weeks and
| it consumed a large percent of my bandwidth so I was
| operating at ~10% speed on other tasks while this was
| happening. After this we were planning another "medium sized"
| project and we were talking about timelines. I was confused
| about why we don't "just do it" and it turns out this task
| was going to be taking years.
|
| This is a _very_ different pace to what you get at a startup.
| At a previous job I rewrote how our entire CI worked. I
| essentially setup a demo, had another coworker I liked
| working with look at it and raise concerns, I fixed them, and
| then I pulled the trigger and migrated us a few days later.
| This also involved switching us from BitBucket to a self
| hosted Gitlab (which I setup runners, backups, etc for in ~1
| day). We essentially changed the entire way we did
| development over a week because I decided it was the way to
| go, one other coworker agreed, and I executed on it and made
| it happen.
|
| Another time we had a client identify a bug in a build we
| were going to ship them last minute. This was a "we're going
| to drop you as a client if this doesn't work" thing. Me and
| the same coworker had to fix this in 2 weeks or the company
| was _screwed_. I found this out as soon as I signed on to
| slack when my coworker who had been up till 6AM talking to
| our contact at the other company filled me in. I told him to
| go to bed and I 'd start working on a fix. 1AM rolls around
| and he wakes up and I'm still working on a fix and feel like
| I've made no progress. I talk to the coworker and say "We're
| not going to make it, we're screwed". He tells me to go to
| bed and he'd work on it assuring me we'll be fine. I wake up
| the next day and he calls me saying we're screwed and I told
| him to catch some sleep and he'd I'd work on it and we'll be
| fine. We trade off like that every day for ~2 weeks including
| weekends. We pull off a fix using some new tech I was working
| on and by using standards we were pushing for others to use
| (unit testing, TDD, my automated deployment pipeline, duct
| tape, etc). It was exhausting and we both worked like
| 100hr/week for that time period. The next week the client was
| pleased, management was like "take whatever time you need
| that was amazing", and we went on our merry way. I basically
| vegged out for a week and, whenever I did do work, it was
| stuff I wanted to clean up anyway due to being bored.
|
| You'd _never_ get what happens at Google to happen at small
| company (years for a speculative project that may /may not
| help), and you'd _never_ get what happens at small startups
| to happen at Google. Is that bad? No. Different people want
| different things. Honestly, the most fun I 've had working in
| my career were those 3 weeks and working with that coworker.
| I still talk to him every week to catch up and about how our
| lives are going (he just bought a house, I'm moving, etc).
|
| Obviously no one wants to work 100hr weeks _but_ I want to
| work with people who care about the company, what we 're
| doing, where we're going, and who are incentivized to do so
| (significant stock allocations, etc). I've been lucky enough
| to find a team like that at Google and at a few of the
| startups I've worked.
|
| In short: it's not "bullshit propaganda" if you enjoy working
| with people who care, lack of bureaucracy, management
| structure, and actually like what you're building.
| creato wrote:
| I think you have the cause and effect reversed. If there were
| more competent software engineers out there available to be
| hired, you wouldn't have a choice but to accept that Google
| recruiter's offer.
|
| There are so many people that want to work on games, and
| there are many positions where these people are capable of
| doing the job, that that is the situation in that industry.
|
| There are a subset of game development positions that are
| just like FAANG: well paid, good working conditions, with
| high skill requirements. Just like FAANG is a subset of the
| software industry. As big as FAANG is, the median software
| developer is not that.
| wernercd wrote:
| > If a Google recruiter told me
|
| But it's not google telling you... it's literally the
| rank'n'file staff telling you that there's more important
| things than "money".
|
| I'll not argue that many of the big players are garbage and
| are "anti-consumer"... but to dismiss how workers feel
| because you don't like some companies seems like you're
| missing the trees for the forest...
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Educating people on available options at different companies
| is crucial. Everyone should know what companies pay well and
| what is required to join them.
|
| However, we need to stop shaming people for having different
| career priorities than our own, or assuming that people are
| only making these choices out of poor judgment. As the parent
| comment explained, some people really do prefer to engage in
| non-FAANG career paths for various reasons. For many, it's as
| simple as not being willing or able to relocate to a location
| with a FAANG office, as few FAANG companies offer remote
| positions even after COVID.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Just to have a bit of a counter argument from me
|
| You didn't supply any kind of argument. Your comment can be
| reduced to "If you want a good salary, you are not one of us."
|
| As a person who loved gaming and wanted to work in that
| industry, you are the reason I didn't go for it.
| hn8788 wrote:
| You should take some personal responsibility and stop blaming
| your life choices on other people. There's also a world of
| difference between saying that a FAANG salary isn't the most
| important part of a job for some people, and saying people in
| game dev shouldn't have a good salary.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > You should take some personal responsibility and stop
| blaming your life choices on other people.
|
| You should stop jumping to conclusions. Nothing I said
| indicated I don't take responsibility for that decision. I
| can choose not to take a job because of crappy pay, but I
| can still point out why the job has crappy pay (and the
| reason is not me).
|
| > There's also a world of difference between saying that a
| FAANG salary isn't the most important part of a job for
| some people, and saying people in game dev shouldn't have a
| good salary.
|
| I don't get paid anywhere near FAANG salary, but I bet I
| get paid more per hour than most game devs.
| socialist_coder wrote:
| > I don't get paid anywhere near FAANG salary, but I bet
| I get paid more per hour than most game devs.
|
| If you don't get paid anywhere near FAANG salary then
| you're probably making the same as what you could make as
| a game developer...
| whoisjuan wrote:
| This is a fair take, but modern gaming companies have similar
| margins as other consumer tech companies since they are
| operating on profitable business models such as subscription
| and micro-transactions.
|
| The gaming industry has been playing the same card movie
| studios play which is "This is a passion industry. Come and
| work for us but we can only offer this range of compensation
| and this type of contracts because we are making this single
| thing that needs to first break even before it can even
| generate a profit".
|
| The problem with that idea is that gaming in general doesn't
| operate that like that anymore. Game developers can now tap
| into scalable royalty programs like Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation
| Now and Apple Arcade. Or they can build free games with micro-
| transactions.
|
| Building AAA games is still a huge investment. But gaming
| companies nowadays have way more avenues to generate revenue.
| So it's sad that they still play that card to pay lower wages
| than in other tech-verticals.
|
| If your love for games is such that you are willing to get a
| lower salary just to be part of that creation process, that's
| fair. But expect to be dealt the same "do it for the
| experience, not for the money" card even when you reach levels
| of proficiency and skill that deserve higher wages.
| inopinatus wrote:
| Don't get suckered by this argument, folks. It's the start of
| an abusive relationship. Whatever your sector, you should
| expect to be paid for your time and your skill. No-one pulled
| this shit at my FAANG or global ISP gigs, despite the fact I
| love working on high scale infrastructure. There is no special
| magical wonderland industry that intrinsically bathes its staff
| in so much joy that you can lowball their pay and it's just
| fine.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| TBH a lot of people don't have that many choices. I mean if a
| dream company gives me an offer with a reasonable salary, I'd
| jump for it without hesitation. A lot of people are OK with
| median salary.
| inopinatus wrote:
| Putting my hiring manager's hat on, I recommend asking for
| more, without hesitation. There is practically no downside.
| Especially if it's your dream company, because you are
| likely to be extra motivated, and this is a case you can
| genuinely make. Once an offer's already on the table, the
| worst possible outcome from asking will be "sorry, that's
| as high as we can go right now" without any rancour.
|
| If instead the response is in any way affronted, then run
| the fuck away because that's a clear early warning sign of
| toxic, bullying management; avoiding such environments is
| also on my list of good outcomes. The only exception
| context being, if you don't currently have any income at
| all.
| [deleted]
| dwaltrip wrote:
| It seems like you can't even imagine that someone might not
| be interested or willing to work at FAANG?
|
| If those aren't an option, then it might not be a lowball
| offer anymore. FAANG compensation is in an entirely separate
| category, from what I can tell.
| inopinatus wrote:
| The point is about not allowing yourself to be exploited,
| just because it's what you love, and in any context. I
| earned as much in enterprise and consulting as I did in
| FAANG and ISP; there is sector median disparity, but to
| paint the differences as somehow magically intrinsic and
| inevitable would be as false for FAANG as it is for game
| dev and any other industry besides.
| jayd16 wrote:
| >Also the argument that it's "grueling 80+ hour weeks day in
| and day out is" is bullshit!
|
| This is just your experience. There are plenty good studios but
| plenty of grueling ones!
|
| If you're working on a AAA title, crunch can be all year long.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Outside of HN, most senior engineers understand that they can
| relocate to an area with a FAANG office and earn more money.
| It's not a secret. Many choose not to pursue this option,
| despite knowing it exists.
|
| And that's okay. The incessant drive to obtain FAANG employment
| and FAANG salaries at any cost is not common outside of
| internet forums like HN or Blind. For many people, there is
| more to life than chasing the highest paying careers.
|
| FAANG is absolutely a great option for anyone who can make it
| work. Some FAANG companies are opening up more offices and even
| considering remote work, but for many of us who aren't willing
| to relocate our families to FAANG office cities, it's not
| really an option any more.
|
| And of course, it's fine if someone willingly chooses to work a
| lower paying job to work on something they enjoy. We shouldn't
| criticize people for not seeking out the maximum salary they
| can find if they're actually happy with what they're doing.
|
| Careers are not one-size-fits-all. It's fine to share options
| with other people, but let's not criticize people for choosing
| career paths that differ from our own personal priorities.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Crunch time is like 1 or 2 times a year, for maybe 1-2
| months each time._
|
| So, at worst, one-third of the time is crunch time. That's... a
| lot. Even a full month of crunch time per year isn't nothing.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Yeah - plenty of SW jobs that pay as much and more, with 0
| crunch time per year.
|
| A month is a lot for subpar pay.
| Finage wrote:
| I believe cryptocurrency based gaming would be new level for game
| developers like Alice.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| My standard advice to every graduate CS student is to stay the
| hell away from professional video game development. If you want
| to make games, turn it into a hobby instead.
| pgt wrote:
| I say the same about art and music to my nieces and nephews:
| when you make art, people will really appreciate it, but you
| won't earn much financial currency - you will earn a different
| kind of currency...a social currency, which you can exchange
| for other things, but not rent.
|
| So make art as a hobby or as a way to meet people, but not for
| money. The same applies to game development, which is art.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Eh. It depends on if you want to make art or be an artist.
| Artists make art. People who make art make art. But if you
| want to be an Artist you cant really do something else full
| time and do art on the side. Maybe at the start but
| eventually you have to be an Artist full time. Otherwise the
| other thing will take over.
|
| To be fair I give people the same advice. Just that the
| people who want to Artists look at me like I'm insane because
| nothing I say would stop them from living that life. The
| people who just want to make some art realize that it's not
| that bad to get paid well in a career and do art on the side.
| [deleted]
| BurningFrog wrote:
| The more unsexy a software field is, the better the pay and
| work conditions are.
|
| Sewage treatment plant software is probably an awesome field to
| have a career, aside from when you want to explain what you do
| at cocktail parties.
|
| Video game development is _the_ most glamorous showbiz part of
| the industry, so working there is, on average, really awful.
| granshaw wrote:
| Really? I think FAANG, which is generally the highest paying
| in software, is percepted as sexy, at least to the layperson
| and to recruiters.
|
| If there are really sewage industry jobs that pay better than
| FAANG, please tell me more cause I'm interested
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Seems like FAANG is seen as less sexy by industry insiders
| nowadays. Amazon in particular seems to be a "see you in a
| year!" Kind of situation.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| As someone who does industrial controls wastewater treatment
| is one of the worst industries because it's so low-margin.
| It's a 'barely pay for it the first time and run it until it
| breaks down' type of industry because municipalities and rate
| payers are usually quite cost sensitive, but pedantry aside
| your point is largely accurate.
|
| As a side note - In my experience the best paid but most
| mind-meltingly dangerous industrial controls work is in oil
| refining. The most low-stress (and somewhat less well paid)
| work i've experienced is in designing control systems for
| hydroelectric facilities for private utilities. I wouldn't
| consider either glamorous but the hydro work does have a more
| environmentally friendly image and does have a correlating
| lower pay!
| rhodozelia wrote:
| I've done private and Public hydro and the private projects
| were still stressful with liquidated damages hanging over
| my head if i caused a delay in the project and all of the
| environmental considerations which dramatically complicated
| the machinery and the controls.
| bluesquared wrote:
| I work for a medical device company in the midwest. So
| definitely meets the "unsexy" criterial - slow-paced embedded
| development in an "unsexy" location. Definitely low on the
| pay side even when factoring in cost of living. Work
| conditions are pretty ok, especially if you are not
| ambitious. I doubt this kind of work gets much more than a
| CoL bump on the coasts.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Would you be down to give an approximate range for salary?
| khazhoux wrote:
| > The more unsexy a software field is, the better the pay and
| work conditions are.
|
| I don't know... tell that to everyone who rebranded their
| statistics degree as "Data Science" starting ten years ago
| and got a huge career boost, or all the fresh-outs with
| multi-hundred-$ grant packages because they got an A in their
| Machine Learning class.
|
| In fact, I can think of glamorous places that do pretty well
| for their software engineers (Pixar, Apple, ...) and I've
| seen firsthand how unglamorous companies can also be shitty
| and low-pay.
|
| Apart from video games, I think there's not many examples to
| bolster your claim.
| myfavoritedog wrote:
| Same here.
|
| At very least, understand the tradeoff you're making. If you
| love the creation of games so much that it's worth the stress
| and lower pay, go for it. Money isn't everything if you're
| doing something you love.
|
| But if you want better compensation for your time, look for
| something more corporate.
| ttul wrote:
| I dunno. My friend is making $250K working for Roblox. He's
| 15yrs into his career - all game dev. Doesn't seem too bad.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| That's great, but most FAANG eng make more than that by their
| 2nd or 3rd year. With 15 years of experience, they could be
| making at least 500k+.
|
| edit: for the skeptical, this is what an L4 makes at
| Google[1], L4 is easily attainable within 3 years, pretty
| likely in 2 years, that's assuming you start at L3 (straight
| out of college or very little experience).
|
| 1: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-
| Engi...
| daniel-thompson wrote:
| Most FAANG eng in their 2nd or 3rd year are not FAANG
| anymore by their 15th year.
| wikibob wrote:
| Interesting hypothesis. Where do you think they go?
|
| I'd say it might seem this way because of the hyper
| growth. Most people at FAANG haven't been there long,
| because they haven't been big that long.
| xenihn wrote:
| In my network:
|
| - early retirement
|
| - founding their own companies
|
| - landlording
|
| - teaching for fun/enjoyment/fulfillment, not because
| they need money
|
| Some have done all 4 of these.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| I've had plenty of coworkers who've been at Google or
| Apple for longer than 15 years, but what I've seen is
| people will usually jump after 4 years for even more comp
| or go the startup route. So those FAANG salaries are like
| the lower bound for most. Of course, some people will
| just save/invest and retire after 6-10 years, that's fine
| too.
| ironmagma wrote:
| Citation? Even in the Bay Area the median is considered
| somewhere around $150k.
| ska wrote:
| It's simple; most bay area, like most everywhere, is not
| FAANG. Treating a non-unimodal distribution as if it were
| unimodal leads to all sorts of silliness.
| ironmagma wrote:
| I agree. Why compare game developers to FAANG at all?
| When deciding if it's worth it, the main thing I want to
| know is how it stacks up to an average software job.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I looked into bay area jobs and FAANG was worth a minimum
| of $40k premium over working at other companies.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| I've worked at one of the FAANG for 6+ years, have
| coworkers/friends at each one of them and people openly
| talk/compare their compensations.
|
| edit: I'm not surprised about the median, big tech has
| roughly around ~200-300k engineers, probably slightly
| less of it in Bay Area which has a population of ~7.7M,
| so it probably doesn't affect statistics all that much.
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| Here you go: https://www.levels.fyi/
| ironmagma wrote:
| Judging by levels.fyi it's exactly what I said, L4 at
| Google makes ~$157k a year. If you're talking about TC
| that has to be said; most people when they are talking
| about "making X amount" are talking about salary.
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| Total comp is what matters, and that's what people talk
| about. Bonus and RSUs are just cash.
|
| L4 SE makes $266K:
| https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-
| Engi...
|
| And L4 is one rung above entry level, 1-2 years at
| Google, right out of college.
| xenihn wrote:
| >If you're talking about TC that has to be said; most
| people when they are talking about "making X amount" are
| talking about salary.
|
| Not in tech.
| ironmagma wrote:
| So what's the recommended way of talking about how much
| you make when you are at a startup which only has stock
| options, where the stocks may eventually be worth
| hundreds of thousands but are currently worth 0?
| comp_throw7 wrote:
| If it's an early-stage startup, "base salary (+ bonus if
| applicable) + paper money". If it's a late-stage startup
| where you're getting RSUs and the company is likely to go
| public soon, people usually give a TC number that assumes
| equity pricing at FMV with the understanding that much of
| it is illiquid (I'd personally put a 30-40% discount on
| that kind of equity offered by late-stage startups to
| compensate for the illiquidity, uncertainty, and risk,
| but different people will have different numbers, and
| obviously the specific details of each situation are also
| important).
| xenihn wrote:
| go ahead and count them if you work at robinhood or
| stripe
|
| you could also just lie if it's that important to you
| ironmagma wrote:
| Well the question was more around what to count them as
| since there's a wide range. In my experience people
| typically just mention salary and count stock options as
| 0 but everyone in this thread seems to disagree.
| adventured wrote:
| That's definitely off the mark for the Bay Area.
|
| The median software developer nationally, with a pool of
| 1.47 million developers, is $110,000 as of 2020 according
| to the BLS. That median developer is going to be in
| places like Atlanta, Des Moines or Pittsburgh.
| [deleted]
| ashtonkem wrote:
| And some college athletes will eventually end up in a Tom
| Brady situation, that doesn't mean I would recommend anyone
| bank on getting drafted as a career.
| hu3 wrote:
| Good for him. But that's an exception.
|
| How much does the average roblox dev make?
| wikibob wrote:
| You can see for yourself here:
| https://www.levels.fyi/company/Roblox/salaries/Software-
| Engi...
|
| IC1 Software Engineer (Entry Level) $221k
|
| IC2 $249k
|
| IC3 Senior Software Engineer $285k
|
| IC5 Principal Software Engineer $422k
| hu3 wrote:
| I'm not sure how Levels.fyi work but those are great
| despite being paid in part with stock grants and bonuses.
|
| However, Roblox itself is an exception. I'd guess the
| average game developer income to be much lower.
| jmcgough wrote:
| Friends at blizzard are paid well too, but a lot of them
| didn't start out in games - they started in devops. Lots of
| need for that skillset for big MMOs.
| stale2002 wrote:
| Roblox is an exception. I am in a similar situation, at
| twitch, where I work, but these companies are the exception
| and not the rule, for game dev stuff.
|
| Epic games probably pays highly, as well as riot, and value.
| But I can count on maybe 1 hand, the number of actual good
| "video game" companies that I would want to work for.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| Roblox is a very different kind of game company though. I've
| noticed the more service oriented game companies have better
| wages and work life balance. The more old school, content
| heavy ones have lowe pay and longer hours.
| Impossible wrote:
| Ultimately it's working on game tech and companies like
| Roblox also hire for other roles that don't have exact
| equivalent in web or mobile development (art and game
| design roles mostly). Limiting your definition of "game
| development" to content heavy games with low pay and longer
| hours, especially when the industry is moving away from
| that type of game with a few exceptions, doesn't make
| sense.
| dbish wrote:
| 15 years in software could get you a lot more outside game
| dev
| Thaxll wrote:
| Most dev in the US don't make 250k after 15years.
| xvector wrote:
| Most devs in the US don't care about maximizing their
| career.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Pay isn't even the main reason I'd avoid gaming, it's the
| tendency of game companies to grossly abuse their workers
| via crunch time and sudden studio closures that worries
| me. The same dynamics that suppress game dev salaries
| also lead companies to treating their workers as
| replaceable, which is a pretty bad situation to end up
| in.
| dbish wrote:
| Yes, but I think of Roblox like a FAANG in terms of
| success and money. If you moved to a FAANG with that
| experience you would likely make a good chunk more
| the_only_law wrote:
| I was shocked at the pay at Roblox. I was on levels.fyi the
| other day and came across a list of companies with the
| highest pay for new grads and it was in the top five I
| believe.
| pavlov wrote:
| It's a recent IPO, and a social gaming platform company
| rather than a game studio.
|
| Roblox's competition is TikTok and Snap rather than
| traditional game companies.
| xvector wrote:
| This is because of recent IPO inflating TC
| NDizzle wrote:
| It was near the top / at the top even a year ago.
| sidlls wrote:
| Their cash compensation is more like Netflix than Google.
| martincmartin wrote:
| So is he making games, or making a game _platform_? There 's
| a big difference.
| ttul wrote:
| This is a good point. He works on the platform.
| hintymad wrote:
| Game development is arguably technically harder than typical
| CRUD-type of app development, even if one uses a game engine. I
| was wondering if it's simply a matter of supply and demand. So
| many great programmers want to work on games, hence driving down
| the salary in the industry.
| 0xy wrote:
| It's really weird how this article starts by showing how through
| negotiation and job searching you can increase your salary, but
| bizarrely then talks about unions, which are known to depress
| wages for top performers (just look at teachers unions, where pay
| is totally disconnected from competence and performance). If
| you're a really good game developer, artist or animator then you
| should learn the skill of negotiation and asking for what you
| want.
|
| Negotiation is an extremely important skill in life. So is
| knowing when to leave companies. I truly do not understand why
| anyone stays at these game studios for 5+ years and allows
| themselves to be absolutely robbed blind by pitiful wages and
| cost-of-living raises.
| de_keyboard wrote:
| > just look at teachers unions, where pay is totally
| disconnected from competence and performance
|
| I think this is a poor example because the challenge
| exceptional teachers have is that it's really hard to prove
| their outcomes in a short time-span. It might be 10, 20, 30
| years before it becomes clear that a teacher had a large
| positive impact on the world, and by then they likely won't be
| around to collect a bonus.
|
| Compare this to say, a trader who can point to hard PnL numbers
| over the previous quarters, or a sales person who has shipped X
| units.
| lend000 wrote:
| You're probably being downvoted because you mentioned unions in
| a negative light, but your points are factually correct. Unions
| have a place for protecting unskilled workers, but what happens
| in game development is quite unique, because these workers are
| in-demand software engineers who typically have better options
| working in a less glorified field.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Seems pretty analogous to a union like this one:
| https://www.sagaftra.org/
|
| Actors are certainly not unskilled, many are well paid, and
| some of the most vocally supportive of the SAG are the
| extremely well paid ones. They're also involved in an
| artistic pursuit, and similarly have various other options
| for converting their talent into cash ("selling out").
| sldksk wrote:
| Most unions in the US are in fact only made up of skilled
| workers. Your point is just wrong.
| minimuffins wrote:
| I think you'll have a hard time sourcing that claim.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-
| finance/07301...
|
| The top 5 appear to be teachers, steelworkers, public
| service workers, autoworkers, and electrical workers. How
| many of these would you describe as "unskilled"?
| minimuffins wrote:
| Eh yeah, you're right. I was really thinking about white
| collar vs blue collar unions.
| minimuffins wrote:
| The games industry is notorious for crunch hiring and firing,
| low wages and exhausting work regimes. When work conditions
| like that prevail, people unionize (good for them imo). If
| there's anything surprising about it, it's that people put up
| with it for this long.
|
| Yeah, it's a good idea to learn how to negotiate and good
| advice to leave a failing company if you can.
|
| But "just learn to negotiate" is really a non-solution if the
| goal is to transform unacceptable industry wide labor
| practices.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Not just actors, but pro athletes as well. Unions have been
| tremendously good for them, forcing owners and leagues to
| commit to a specific guaranteed revenue split with players.
| It has not prevented rewarding of outstanding individual
| performance or even individual contract negotiation (just
| like actors). Some rules are set by by the union, including
| at least minimum pay, possibly maximum pay (in sports that
| have salary caps, it's to promote competitive balance, which
| acting doesn't have to worry about). But you can still
| negotiate quite a bit within the allowed bounds.
| da_chicken wrote:
| > but bizarrely then talks about unions, which are known to
| depress wages for top performers (just look at teachers unions,
| where pay is totally disconnected from competence and
| performance).
|
| Public sector unions are an entirely different ball of wax
| because negotiation power and strike power are both limited.
| The management for public sector jobs doesn't determine budget;
| neither does the amount of revenue generated by the business.
| It's 100% a decision of a legislature, and that decision will
| often have absolutely nothing to do with the quality,
| performance, or demands of the actual faculty, staff,
| administration, or schools themselves.
|
| For example, teachers are unioned and do have generally low
| pay[0]. However, I could point to police officers, which are
| also nearly ubiquitously unioned as well and they have high
| salaries[1] in spite of a training program that is generally
| less than a year[2].
|
| The difference? Increasing police funding always looks good for
| both parties (or has historically). For teachers, half the
| political landscape has a plank that's all about de-funding
| public education in favor of 100% private education.
|
| Furthermore, there's another factor: Teachers are generally
| women while police officers are generally men. That means the
| structural gender bias in salaries is going to be higher here
| than in careers where the genders are more equally divided.
|
| In short, it's much more complicated than you're making it out
| to be.
|
| [0]: https://www.indeed.com/career/police-officer/salaries
|
| [1]: https://www.indeed.com/career/teacher/salaries
|
| [2]: https://www.insider.com/some-police-academies-require-
| fewer-...
| wcarss wrote:
| Unions can at the least increase the standard of pay for
| everyone other than those few top performers who also know how
| to negotiate well.
|
| Having to adversarially game out every interaction just to
| thrive in the world, especially those interactions with
| entities that have a lot of power to make your life good or bad
| for a long time, is a serious burden to place on people, and
| unions can help to alleviate it.
|
| I have also seen and read about the significant disparities in
| different demographic groups' (e.g. gender) willingness to do
| things like negotiate, and it can result in broad differences
| in outcomes.
|
| (There's a lot of ways to work on that kind of issue, and I'm
| not necessarily trying to claim "unions" is the only or the
| best one, but they _can_ help to mitigate problems of pay
| disparity.)
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Unions also increase the standard pay for the few top
| performers. If you are worth 10x a standard programmer, than
| the average programmer salary doubling doubles your value
| too. Most unions that represent jobs with vastly different
| skill levels raise the rate of everyone.
|
| Unions don't necessarily eliminate pay disparity, but they
| work for increased worker benefits in total.
| dv_dt wrote:
| And by seriously enforcing minimums and medians, they can
| negotiate rules that don't impact out top performers -
| doubtful that SAG rules limits top actor pay for example.
| chowells wrote:
| Many people lack the cold-bloodedness necessary to be that
| mercenary. Especially game devs, who are almost always in it
| for the love of the product, not for a paycheck. Corporate may
| not be their friend, but the product they're creating is
| _their_ creation. Every person working on it knows a hundred
| things they could do to make it better, and they want to do all
| of them. They just need a bit more time.
|
| Unions are about protecting everyone from predatory employers
| like most game publishers. You go in and negotiate? You're
| fired; there are 100 more people out there with a compulsion to
| create and share with the world.
|
| So yeah, unions. They address the issue of the party with money
| exploiting the non-monetary incentives. That's strictly better
| than assuming the problem is that people have non-monetary
| incentives.
| caenorst wrote:
| You're probably downvoted by people that don't quite understand
| a notion that is more than 200 years old, which is called
| "Suppy and demand". The article is literally saying that
| "speaking up" helped their salary and HN comments are all about
| unionization (which is letting union speak for you) and
| claiming that if you negotiate you get fired, that's absurd.
|
| Nobody forced them to work, they can leave, negotiate, refuse
| an offer, and there are still a lot of video game companies, so
| this is a market that doesn't need any regulation or
| unionization. They made a choice to get this job at a low
| salary.
|
| The only complication is for young student idealizing the
| environment without knowing that the salary is bad. Well that's
| what this twitter trend is helping at. It will inform the high
| performer and keep them out of the field and companies will
| have to either raise salaries to re-attract them or accept
| lower performer.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Teacher performance is difficult if not impossible to quantify,
| especially given how much student performance depends on
| factors external to the classroom. But more to the point, most
| teaching jobs are government jobs, and government jobs have
| salary bands set by legislation. You can't individually
| negotiate with legislators. That has nothing to do with having
| a union. Most government jobs are not unionized, but still have
| narrow, standard pay bands that cannot reward differences in
| performance.
| munk-a wrote:
| On this point in particular, most of the routes we've tried
| to use to quantify teacher worth have resulted in bizarre
| scenarios where teachers actively want to avoid certain
| classes of students. Early metrics usually punished teachers
| that were assigned underperformaners - while no child left
| behind had an expected grade growth formula that could result
| in a teacher needing to get a student a score above 100 to
| avoid being weighted towards getting a pay cut.
|
| It's honestly a lot like development - it's hard to
| distinguish someone being lazy or bad from someone who's
| gotten stuck with difficult problems - or, more likely,
| problems that looked easier on the surface than they were in
| actuality. But, unlike development where these measures could
| potentially be discovered by reducing efficiency and forcing
| multiple devs to solve problems in parallel - that's
| impossible to do when every student is different at a basic
| level.
| ralph84 wrote:
| Most of the highest paid athletes and actors are union members.
| Union membership doesn't have to mean everyone is paid the
| same. Teachers having the same pay has more to do with them
| being interchangeable than being union members.
| myfavoritedog wrote:
| People bring up actor and athlete unions - but programmer
| unions wouldn't work that way to allow high-performers to
| shine, be heavily recruited, and highly compensated.
|
| Actors and athletes have extremely high visibility. They are
| singled out by fans who will show up to movies and games on
| that star power alone. A similar dynamic will not develop in
| the game programming world where even phenomenal developers
| labor in obscurity.
| Context_free wrote:
| > bizarrely then talks about unions, which are known to depress
| wages for top performers
|
| I guess that's why top performing movie stars, NBA basketball
| players etc. have their wages depressed?
|
| Maybe companies lowballing salaries, or being in secret,
| illegal cartels to drive down salaries of high earners like
| that lawsuit showing Eric Schmidt and Steve Jobs did, can
| depress wages too?
|
| > Negotiation is an extremely important skill in life
|
| Yes, which is why companies have scores of lawyers, HR
| personnel etc. to draw up IP assignment agreements etc. In fact
| the company has people who specialize solely on negotiating
| salaries. Your advice is for workers to shun working in concert
| with their fellow workers since they're so high performing, and
| walk into this phalanx arrayed against them solo. You also
| advise someone spending the time to become a top performer to
| spend their spare time becoming better negotiators, in order to
| get over on the team of negotiating specialists they will be
| facing.
| drdec wrote:
| > I guess that's why top performing movie stars, NBA
| basketball players etc. have their wages depressed?
|
| I can't speak to movie stars, but as for the NBA, there is
| absolutely the concept of a maximum salary (depends on years
| of service plus other things besides the point) in the
| collective bargaining agreement. This limits the compensation
| a player may receive from a team for a particular year. The
| top players like LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry,
| would no question receive higher salaries if this limit did
| not exist.
|
| As to whether or not the top players or even the players as a
| whole are better off or worse off for having a union, that's
| a horse of a different color. My gut feeling is that both
| classes are better off.
| munk-a wrote:
| Wealth inequality seems like it's a pretty serious societal
| problem right now so I don't really see a problem with
| depressing the salaries of top earners so that less skilled
| folks can get some more. I'd really love to see UBI but since
| socialism=bad we're unlikely to see that anytime soon.
|
| I consider myself to be pretty skilled and would be happy to
| take a pay cut if I knew that money was mostly going to more
| junior folks (and not just being pocketed by corporations to be
| funneled into stock dividends).
|
| Negotiation is an invaluable skill, as is a knowledge of self
| worth, but it's something that a lot of people have real issues
| with - it isn't taught in school and a lot of introverted
| people (this goes double for people on the autism spectrum)
| will have real lifetime issues developing it. I can't argue
| that negotiation is a large part of financial success in the
| modern world but it seems quite counter to how we'd like
| society to operate - I'd rather live in a world where wage
| transparency was a thing and wage advocacy could be contracted
| out.
|
| IMO leaning on negotiation for compensation adjustment creates
| an unjust world.
| o_p wrote:
| >I truly do not understand why anyone stays at these game
| studios for 5+ years and allows themselves to be absolutely
| robbed blind by pitiful wages and cost-of-living raises.
|
| Maybe thats why your advice is "just be good"
| danielrpa wrote:
| 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 employees, otherwise many people would simply work
| elsewhere.
|
| There is a myth that working at FAANG is amazing for everybody,
| but most people I know there are actually kind of miserable and
| doing fairly dull work for which they are massively
| overqualified. Nonetheless, these companies have money and they
| want the "best" (in their eyes) people for everything, so they
| pay for it... Well, it's a decent deal.
| thewarrior wrote:
| 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 many people in detail. It's a juicy target for
| recruiter raiding. And just like you can't get fired for hiring
| IBM you can't get fired for hiring FANG. This attracts yet more
| talent. But yes the level of the engineers is not as great as
| the salaries would suggest.
|
| But on the flip side for anyone doing hiring. If you want some
| wicked smart devs who don't ask for as much then look at game
| devs.
| paxys wrote:
| You are adjusting too hard in the other direction. "Most"
| people at FAANG companies are absolutely not miserable. The
| typical engineer at Google/Facebook works 40 hours a week, gets
| a good salary and is content with their life.
| flakiness wrote:
| In Japan, the game and anime industries are called "aspiration
| industry" because of the reasons discussed here.
|
| There is also a term "aspiration abuse". That is because it's not
| only about the market dynamics (supply vs demand) but also a
| information asymmetry involved. It is considered more like a
| problem of immigration brokers: They sell dreams, but many of
| them are fake.
| yummybear wrote:
| I'm not from the US, but is 150k considered a bad salary?
| twodave wrote:
| It's heavily dependent on the region one lives in. In
| Jacksonville, FL, for instance, $150k+ is mostly reserved for
| SVP/C-level folks.
| bb611 wrote:
| It's about 50% above average for the country, but HN tends to
| have a very coastal crowd, in particular a lot of SV talent
| where average pay is much higher. Experienced people easily
| break $200k, at my (non-FAANG) company the entry level package
| for Bay Area devs is more than $150k.
| julienb_sea wrote:
| 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, which
| is that working in a gaming context is something people actually
| value and are willing to give up potential compensation for. This
| seems especially true at the junior level, which depresses junior
| salaries relative to other tech companies.
|
| Also, comparing compensation against US FAANG hiring is beyond
| insane. They pay ridiculous salaries due to the extremely limited
| and competitive market for hires that meet their caliber. This
| has driven up salaries, but should NOT be treated as an indicator
| for what "reasonable" pay looks like across the entire industry.
| StreamBright wrote:
| And the locations FAANGs are operate also tend to be the most
| expensive parts of US.
| xtqctz wrote:
| This is fact which feels related, but doesn't have much to do
| with labor market wage equilibrium.
| Retric wrote:
| High cost of living areas push people away when the local
| job market slumps. So, the equilibrium does end up relating
| to high housing costs just indirectly.
|
| Aka, if they paid less the local population drops which
| would reduce supply.
| [deleted]
| jaaron wrote:
| It's not just that.
|
| Google (and a few others) dealt with retention issues from
| startups and other companies in SV who's sole recruiting
| strategy was poach from Google, ie- use Google as a filter and
| let them do all the work finding great talent and then we'll
| just hire Googlers (or one of the other major SV tech
| companies).
|
| So retention is a significant factor for Google and other FAANG
| companies. They can simply pay enough to make sure other
| companies can't come in and take their talent.
| n42 wrote:
| you just described supply and demand. supply is limited,
| recruiters poach, demand increases, salaries increase.
| bedhead wrote:
| This is fairly normal for certain "glamour" industries. Back in
| the day when it was relevant, MTV was infamous for paying
| people almost nothing, for no other reason than they could
| because MTV had a coolness factor associated with it that
| people sought. Same is generally true for a lot of the
| entertainment industry.
| jedberg wrote:
| Apple still uses that line to underpay people. Their
| compensation is famously lower than all the other FAANG
| companies.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-05-10 23:00 UTC)