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.
My theory is that while work is dull, people are not overqualified. They need smart people not because logic they write is complex, but because navigating total chaos of internal system complexity needs smartness. If they could refactor and get internal systems in order they could lower qualification bar, but that refactoring requires super duper overqualified people, etc.
I think that's about right, and the "mess" isn't just code, but organizational. You might be hired to maintain some simple widget, and then 1–2 years later be writing a large scale job processing service, or designing a new front-end rendering system, or any other number of high-impact, challenging projects. Theoretically, these could be different sets of people (like techs vs engineers or something), but since companies are constantly re-orging and don't know what they need, it's the same people doing both.
I have to say however, that for engineers this is a massively good thing, both in terms of being able to work on lots of different stuff, and the compensation implications.
My theory is FANGS pay more because it's a casino like setup.
Yes, their employees are making lot of money but where her money ends up going? A large part of that ends up paying rent in a region where there are many others making similar wages like you, and trying to outcompete you out of the best property you can choose to live.
Mostly people at headquarters or major offices get paid large salaries.
Executives make decisions where to open office, they've upphand on the info and have access to money, they buy the land in and around the region where office will be setup, where their employees will want to live.
That way half the money they pay ends right back into pocket of executives while FANG employees have statisfaction of making highest engineering wages.
It doesn't matter how much you make, if you still find yourself doing the same thing you were doing 5 years ago, perhaps, all that money didn't bring you much.
Now, there are exceptions to this where people saved up their salary and launched another business into huge success, yea those benefit the most. But most of the FANG employees will find themselves doing similar job after 5 years, so...
How exactly that extra money has changed your life? Are you driving Buggati or Bentley to your office? Do you have celebrities (male/female -depending on your orientation) caressing your hair while you hack on the code? Did you start a school to teach underprivileged kids?
As we can see most of these luxuries are still not available to majority FAANG employees regardless of how much they make. It's the money on paper, it doesn't buy much power. To have real power in society, having more money than your peers is not necessary - what you need is vastly more money and influence over other people.
I mean, FAANG compensation lets you trivially retire (or achieve financial independence) by ~40 (if you're single), and that's assuming you're budgeting for 200k/year with an extremely conservative withdrawal rate (3%). If you're willing to resettle somewhere cheaper and live a somewhat less extravagant lifestyle, you could do it by your early 30s no problem.
And, again, this is if you're single, i.e. no second income, paying a single-filer's tax rate, and no benefit of cheaper housing by having someone to split the expense with, etc. A partner earning any real amount of money speeds this up dramatically. (Kids do cost money, if you have them, but they don't cost enough money to offset having a second SWE income, even if you pay for extremely expensive daycare, unless you have like five.)
I don't know about you, but having "fuck you" money after a decade in the workforce, or "no, really, fuck you" money after 2 decades is a pretty good deal. It is, in fact, much easier to make this happen working at a FAANG (or comparable) than elsewhere. People like to complain about the cost of living, and yes, those complaints are valid, but working at a FAANG it's entirely possible to save more after taxes and expenses than software engineers in other parts of the country make _before_ taxes; trying to equivocate between those situations is really quite silly. The first is in a dramatically better financial position than the second.
I imagine this is true in theory. The math checks out. But every FAANG company has been around for at least 15 years now and we don't hear many stories of their early hires retiring. Where does it break down in practise? Is it just too hard to give up the high paying role? Is it that retirees don't talk about it? Or is it that the theory is actually wrong for some reason, and working for $200k for 20 years doesn't actually leave you with fuck you money after all?
Divorces are ridiculously expensive. That was the major culprit for my generation. Only one peer of mine has actually retired before 50 (that I know of), and he stayed married. Everyone else ended up splitting up, which wiped all their savings. Or they went another path.
I followed the other path - total mental breakdown, severe depression followed by "non-retirement" - working freelance, as a co-founder and in interesting jobs while travelling. Turns out that being a well-paid employee for years and years isn't something I can actually do without getting depressed about it.
Both the divorce rates and the divorce cost are thanks to the divorce industry and the divorce lobby. We have a massive industry set up to encourage and profit from divorce.
Most countries don't have this problem, but it's a bigger problem than even the US' ballooning medical costs.
I'm not American :) The UK and Australia both have this problem.
I think it's less to do with the actual costs of the divorce, and more about converting one household into two. All the equity in the house gets split up, which usually gives a decent deposit for another house for each partner, but nowhere near enough to pay off the whole mortgage. Each partner needs enough rooms to host the kids during their shared custody, so a family of 4 goes from needing a single 3-bed house to needing two 3-bed houses. They need two cars, instead of being able to survive on one. If one of the partners gave up their career for the kids then there's alimony to pay. And so on. The legal bills are like icing on the cake.
Luckily I observe this from the perspective of having a happy marriage, which happens to be incredibly frugal compared to two single people living alone. A house for two people who enjoy being together does not need to be larger than a house for one person; although you need a larger house when you have kids. Of many objects you only need one piece, because you are not using them all the time. Cooking is cheap; it requires time, but if you spend that time talking, you don't really mind. Minus those expenses you had in the past simply because you felt alone or bored.
The expenses of two people living together are almost the same as of one person living alone. The extra expenses are mostly for the kids (including the mortgage for the larger house). Which means that if one person has a good salary, the other can "early retire" immediately. Or if both have good salaries, they can save half of the income, and perhaps retire as soon as the kids become independent.
I will argue against a system where there is a lobby designed to glorify and encourage divorce and stoke marital conflict, followed by a litigation which costs around $200k between both sides to bring to completion, which ends when one side or the other runs out of money.
At that point, in most cases, the custody and financial arrangement is designed to be ridiculously complex and inequitable.
Maybe the retirees feel less pressure to talk about themselves on blogs/twitter, since they are retired they don't have to try and stay relavent and instead can just enjoy life.
Sorry, when I said 200k, I meant withdrawing & spending 200k/year, not earning 200k/year. In today's environment you're more likely to be earning (at least) 400k/year by the time you retire if you're following that playbook.
If you take a pretty standard estimate of career and comp growth for an engineer that joined a FAANG company as a new grad and stuck around, generally speaking they'd get promoted to senior-equivalent within 7-8 years (faster for Facebook - 5 years there). Over that time, assuming annual expenses of ~50k/year (single, renting a 1-bedroom in the Bay, leaving you with 20-25k to cover everything else), and sticking everything that's left over into the market, you'd have well over a million by year 8. Let's then pessimistically assume your compensation never grows after it reaches 400k - at that point you'll be taking home ~225k after taxes, or 175k after expenses. Stick that into the market for another decade, you end up with ~5m.
You might say that 50k/year in expenses is unrealistically low for someone living in the SFBA - it's not, really, you aren't even living with roommates and you have five figures to play with after housing and transportation (remember, food is close to free, since most of these places will feed you 3 meals a day M-F if you want). But even if you bump that up to 60k/year that pushes out your retirement date... by a year. Maybe.
This is all inflation-adjusted, mind you. 5m in today's dollars is enough to retire on extremely comfortably, and unless you decide to drastically increase your spending in retirement it'll be growing faster than your draw-down.
I imagine most people who do this either keep working or start working on their own projects. I'm not aiming for this just so I can watch TV all day, let me tell you :)
And most who could will in fact keep working in some capacity, either because they’re excessively paranoid about the capital markets or they enjoy work too much to quit.
Many people (including this comment) severely underestimate the sheer volume of information processed everyday by those staff level engineers in big techs.
Imagine that each day you need to review 1~2 design docs, read and reply tens of mails, attend at least 3 meetings and make non-negligible engineering decisions each, keep the lights on, manage and mentor some junior engineers. And write some code and design docs for your own projects upon all the crazy stacks of technical and procedural complexity.
Time is limited resource, so you cannot really have enough time to understand everything needed as scopes expand. You will eventually need to embrace ambiguities and uncertainties stemming from the complexity. And this needs more than just willingness and patience. Perhaps having some level of smartness can help, but this alone might not be sufficient though.
We're paid well because we have to shift gears a lot, learn a lot, fake-it-till-you-make it, and put up with oodles and oodles of BS.
From a technical standpoint a 16 year old could do my job. We're getting paid for patience and the ability to "code switch" in the socio-linguistic sense.
I think this might be about right. Google's internal tools were built by very smart engineers for use by other very smart engineers. (I'm thinking especially of the Producers Framework as I write this, but there are other examples.)
I've seen plenty of intelligent people struggle to get their heads around Google's abstractions. The tools are powerful enough, though, that once you get it you can pretty easily build stuff that scales to ridiculous levels.
It could be that better design will make these kinds of tools more accessible in the future.
FAANGs/large companies in general have a ton of accidental complexity. A lot of the work devolves into "make this work in our complicated environment". Its just more pronounced at FAANG due to the scale.
> but that refactoring requires super duper overqualified people, etc
Yes, and it needs super duper overqualified managers to understand that the super duper overqualified engineers actually are on to something with their suggestions.
The picture seems to be different here in Sweden. It's possibly related to the difference in wages being less extreme overall.
The best salary I ever had was as a software engineer at a AAA studio, and I used to work outside the game industry and had offers from a consulting firm which I know offer competitive salaries.
I did end up leaving for a smaller studio who couldn't offer quite the same level of compensation, but the difference is still less than 20%.
I've thought about it a lot and even if the pay difference was much bigger I couldn't imagine leaving the game industry. Being surrounded by people who love games, getting to spend my days on serious technical challenges in the service of making something which brings joy to millions. It is an amazing feeling. I make enough that money isn't something I need to worry about and I love what I do in a deep and intense way. No regular frontend/web/dev ops/ whatever development job will ever be able to compete with that.
Anecdotally the way to achieve a high salary in the software industry in Sweden is to do solo consulting. Most companies seem to keep the salaries from inflating by getting seniors from consulting agencies or freelancing consultants; which comfortably segments the high earners from the internals.
This does match what I have seen as well. It's part of why I myself briefly considered a consulting gig.
I also know two people who, when we worked together at one studio, were unable to move from junior designer roles to producer roles. They quit and started a consulting agency together, and now get contracted as assistant producers.
Yep. How is a startup supposed to compete when today's economy has resulted in fresh grads commanding $200k total-comp? Of course the answer is "you raise money!" so you can pay them "market-rates" at which point you may as well say fuck it and just get a job too because now you've given up so much equity and have such an aggressive burn-rate you're pretty well screwed from day one.
Not sure where you are that fresh grads get compensated with $200k but please, as a fresh grad who spent 6 months job searching and just accepted a software engineering job for $50k, let me know.
It's refreshing to see someone pushing back on this narrative a little. FAANG employ a cumulative total of about 100,000 software engineers globally (can't find US-specific numbers).
There are 4.4 million software engineers in the USA. I'm sure the graduate -> $200k move happens, but it's only an extremely small number in terms of the occupation as a whole. People on this forum seem to casually mention it as if it's some kind of default.
Google, Amazon, and Apple together almost certainly hit 100k by themselves. Facebook is a bit smaller than those 3 in terms of engineering headcount but not by much. Netflix is tiny, relatively speaking, I'll give you that.
But, I mean, new grads at MSFT can get pretty close to 200k, even though the comp scales up poorly with career progression compared to FAANG. There are a bunch of other companies where you can hit numbers that are in that ballpark, and they also employee a non-trivial number of engineers: Snapchat, Uber, Lyft, Twitter, Square, Stripe, Doordash, Roblox, etc, etc, etc. Sure, add them all up with FAANG and you probably barely touch 200k. But, uh, 200k is roughly 5% of the software engineers in the country (_very_ broadly classified; I think a more reasonable classification would put it closer to 10%). So, sure, it's not the _default_ outcome, but "top decile" is hardly shooting for the moon.
Also this is specific to the Bay Area - they don’t pay these rates internationally or even everywhere within the US. And finally, it’s not every grad & stocks massively inflate this number.
I’m sure some people reading this will have done it - it’s not ‘common’ and definitely isn’t the pay of the top decile of developers in the world, the West, or I bet even in the US.
Yep, they don't even hire mid-level engineers. They hire seniors and above. But their size is tiny compared to the rest of those top tier tech companies, so Netflix could be ignored for all intents and purposes here.
>Also this is specific to the Bay Area
Not really. Seattle has pretty much the same level of comp and no state income tax. And pretty much all of those companies discussed above have significant presence in Seattle too (minus Netflix afaik). But yes, still an expensive place to live in.
>stocks massively inflate this number
How is this "inflation" or an issue at all? You can sell stocks immediately as they vest and treat it just like cash comp. Or you can hold and hope they grow in price (which a lot of times is a valid strategy). But for all intents and purposes, stock compensation at publicly traded companies is just as valid as cash compensation. It isn't some stock options that "might be worth a lot when we go public, but currently is just a monopoly money you cannot do anything with" in a privately held startup.
>it’s not ‘common’
It depends on how you define "common". Among my peers who applied to those top tier companies and got the offers, around $200k starting out of college was way more common than not. And no, I didn't go to Stanford or anything like that, it was a public state college in Georgia (albeit a very good one, but still, nothing "exclusive" like MIT/Stanford/etc.). There were a couple of people who were truly exceptional, and their starting offers reflected that appropriately (closer to $300k than $200k), but $200k seemed to be the baseline.
And no, none of those companies require some wild credentials or experience to interview. Pretty much anyone can get a Google interview at some point (everyone I know from my school who tried applying, got at least one shot at the Google interview process; I also know a lot of people with either no college education at all or those that went to colleges that no one has even heard of, and they all got invited for Google interviews), the problem is that most don't pass. But it doesn't seem to be just pure luck (even though it is a non-insignificant element of it), given that the people I know who studied the hardest were also the ones who had the highest pass rate for those interviews (as well as the highest offers).
> Google, Amazon, and Apple together almost certainly hit 100k by themselves.
No way. Amazon might be coming close (I don't have a very good idea of their size, but my guess is they have like ~75k software engineers); Google probably has about 50k, Apple has like 10k.
How about we stipulate that you can convince Facebook to pay you $70k to work for them. But they’re also happy to pay you $300k, so if I were a fresh graduate I,would benefit from taking that on board and adjusting my goals and strategy accordingly.
After all, if someone on a forum is talking about $300k graduate salaries while the Bureau of Labor Statistics thinks the median pay of programmers in the US is $89k [1] I gotta take both of those numbers into account in my world view.
Otherwise you end up being out of touch with reality, thinking that bananas cost $10.
That's what I'm getting at. The BLS has told you that lots of people make $90k programming computers. Whereas Facebook has shown that they are willing to pay some people four times that much to do the same thing.
From your perspective, they only ever need to do that _once_. To you.
The takeaway is "Facebook will pay me $400k if I work on convincing them to do so." That's a much better thought to have in your head than "maybe somebody will pay me the median developer salary."
Of course, you're welcome to approach life however you choose. Personally, I chose that higher number for myself (for the handful of years it took to retire). And I'd recommend anybody reading this do the same.
Edit: I see this same argument coming up every time salary is discussed here. Somebody will say "look how much you can make", and somebody else will pop up saying "sure, but look how _little_ you can make!".
It's as though they're trying to justify not having to ask for more money by convincing themselves it's impossible. But it's not impossible, and all you can accomplish by thinking negatively is to make less money.
You misunderstand my post - perhaps we have different ideas about what "pushing back on the narrative" means?
I'm not talking about setting personal-level goals used to guide your career planning. I'm talking about knowing the broader, population-level facts in order to inform discussions about public policy and advise the actions of others.
After all, knowing your country's median bodyweight is 170 lbs doesn't preclude you setting your personal goal weight as 135 lbs.
Yeah, this is sorta why you sometimes find the same big box store within a few miles of eachother. It's not that they think they need that other store, it's that they think they need to keep that location out of the hands of competition.
Something that also plays a big factor in the general over qualification of FAANG employees is that mistakes can be very very costly. It’s worth paying one engineer that gets things right 99.99% of the time twice the salary of engineer that gets things right only 99.9% of the time.
From what I recall of the training I received from a somewhat well-known Chief Quality Officer, you don't get things right more often by getting better people, you get things right more often by making better processes for people to follow (the latter of which isn't as directly tied to better people as you may think).
Frankly, I don't get the hype. I've interviewed FAANG engineers and have given a thumbs down almost as often as I did for engineers from other companies.
Re: the hype .. what I would say is, as an employee of a FAANG, is that I work with really smart people. Some of the smartest and most competent people I've ever worked with. Most much smarter than myself.
But after 9 years, I'm not convinced that their intelligence always yields results that exceed that of other companies I've worked at. In some ways, yes, but in other ways no. So, I dunno.
But in my experience striving for consistency means that before improving something you have to go and change everywhere that pattern appears in 400 different code bases going back 20 years (and all of the documentation across however many platforms). As a result nobody ever improves things.
This is something that gets parroted A LOT, and has been for at least 20 years now.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but I'd really, really like to see some actual numbers on this.
My biggest gripe with this theory, is that it assumed all responsibility and decision-making on a single worker. In every other industry I've worked, where employees have the access to some extremely costly "kill switch", where you can basically bring down the whole system, it's always - ALWAYS something that needs to go through multiple people.
That also goes for more fundamental roles, like design and implementation. These things go through multiple people, reviews, and later audits.
I'd be amazed if internal guidelines and regulations at FAANG behemoths allow potential multi-million decisions to rest on single employees.
Is the "costliness" because of the scale the systems operate at?
It's not a knock on the companies or employees, but my initial reaction was that embedded code in safety critical systems like what operates infrastructure, cars, airplanes, etc. would be less forgiving in terms of mistakes
And also at this point where else would they be spending money? They make so much that waste isn't too big of an issue. So in the end some money ends up with employees.
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.
Theres no reason to not pay for the best. Engineer's provide so much value compared to an individuals cost. I can give an a example of what I'm working on. I'm doing maybe 2-3months of work, the project cut a one time cost in half saving 10million dollars. I make about quarter million in a year. A tiny fraction of the value I provided this year alone. Why penny pinch on pay and risk having employees that might not be as good? 100k is 1 percent of that value.
Now that I type this out I feel like I'm getting ripped off. BRB to demand a raise lol
>Why penny pinch on pay and risk having employees that might not be as good?
with regards to the game industry: because outside of maybe a dozen studios worldwide (EA and Rockstar studios level of profit), most of the games industry literally cannot compete with the salaries FAANG offers.
all those trillion dollar companies have dozens of services and products to monetize off of (indirectly or directly). Games need hundreds of employees to deploy one short lived project in a few years minimum. And attempts to monetize in a service format (the default for FAANG) has been met with much criticism. So games operate on razor thin profits.
FAANG needs good employees because of how big and complex everything is. A lot of work is just integrating the 100s of services that already exist into whatever new product is coming out.
Is the work novel, not really, but it is difficult and very complex.
> if the pay in the game industry was higher I'd have stayed without a doubt.
There are exceptions. Roblox has a reputation for being competitive with FAANG. You should check them out. It's also a platform company, so it has all the technical challenges of the gaming industry without the crunch-time that comes along with releasing a major game.
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.
I'm not sure if you're trying to say that is too much or too little. In my experience at several such companies, no one is putting in more than 2-4 productive work hours a day.
It's all about finding a company that's small enough so revenue per employee is north of a million and your work is visible to your entire organization and the quantity of work far exceeds the number of people. With these three conditions, you will get both meaningful work and high pay without even trying (except trying to get into the company).
I left games 24 years ago in large part over pay. The work itself I loved doing, but it was never going to let me buy a house nearby or retire. I’m glad I did as I don’t think the was enough extra enjoyment over being able to enjoy other work (albeit less) but have some amount of financial security.
As an outsider looking at this it seems like you can just work a decade in that job and earn what you'd earn in 2-3 decades in the game job. Even more if you can invest.
Unless you're truly miserable, it seems like the obvious choice. You can always go indie or head back after that first decade and at that point it's all gravy.
A decade is pretty long. Long enough to not be into video games anymore, long enough to raise your life expenses to match your income, long enough to burn out, long enough to have children and other interests …
Going back to lower income is really difficult, a lot of people bore themselves to death, dreaming of another job but stay just because they are well paid.
I’m not saying you are wrong, but how can you be sure that the « you » in ten years will have the willpower to follow your initial plan ? Good pay can sometimes be a trap.
A decade is a huge portion of your life and I certainly wouldn't want to spend what little time I have doing something I'm less fond of in the hope that I'll be sitting on a pile of money one day and maybe then I can go do what I actually want.
This was my experience at FAANG as well. I had some terrible game industry jobs, but I've been at a few studios where I had a much better experience than FAANG even if pay was lower
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.
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.
Not really, the parent didn't say anything about overall supply, just that its cheaper to let someone else sort the diamonds from the dirt than do it yourself.
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.
The coolness glamour factor in the entertainment industry goes away when you've been a PA for 10 years. That being said, there are a lot of industries and fields where you spend like your entire 20s just treading water and suffering, and only after that when you emerge, bloodied and standing on the pile of your burned out former coworkers, do you get a crack at the lifestyle you envisioned that profession being like as a kid when you began the process of cementing yourself into this life.
As a kid I thought this included some obvious jobs, but now as an adult I realize a lot of professions are like this. Some of my doctor and lawyer friends have been dealt the worst hands of all.
Apple also famously hires from non-prestigious schools compared to the “elitism” at FB and Google. I have been in meetings at Apple with multiple people and not one of them was from an elite school (remember schools from Iowa and other parochial places). In contrast at FB and Google there were all the elite schools like Caltech, Stanford, MIT amply represented. I am not sure if Apple deliberately targeted such “lesser” schools or was just less elitist in the hiring process and the filters associated with it.
The salary expectations from Auburn (where Tim Cook is from) is a lot less than from say UC Berkeley or Stanford.
I suspect that this is not just about paying a bit less salary. Steve Jobs is known to value liberal arts and non-formal education talents which might have become part of the Apple culture.
After all, being MIT or Stanford means that you passed specific type of filter but that filter might not be the silver bullet and even bring monoculture.
Despite the fact that the elite schools have elite opportunities, more often than not, the most impactful things don't come from elite alumni.
Steve Jobs never cared personally much about that, he dropped out from a less know school, worked menial jobs and traveled the world. Wozniak even managed to be expelled from Colorado for hacking the university system. For them, their colleges were not their entire life experience and social life when they founded apple.
It is very different from Brin and Page, that basically catapulted from campus to become billionaires. Their life experience before becoming founders was entirely shaped by Stanford, their identity tied to it. It makes sense that their company reflects this.
A lot of previously elitist companies have discovered that top %1 candidates from most schools are pretty similar. And since hiring is much easier today, they're more open to looking around.
Everyone I know who moved from another FAANG took a pay cut (and everyone who left Apple to another FAANG got a fat raise). So my data is anecdotal but consistent.
I think Microsoft is up there and competitive in the same landscape, and calling out their lack of inclusion in the original acronym is just pedantic. Everything discussed in this thread applies just as much to MSFT as it does to any of the other FAANG companies.
It's not pedantic, MSFT does not pay as much as other FAANG companies. MSFT isn't by any means a bad company to work for, but it's not in the same league.
pedantic, tangential rant: I still don't understand why people include Netflix in that calibur. From what I heard and researched, Netflix doesn't hire junior talent and their scope of work is a fraction of Microsoft/Apple/Google. If competitive pay is the only distinction here, I'm sure we can expand that acronym to include a dozen more tech companies
My understanding is that the 'Flix pays straight cash -- big ole sacks of money twice a month.
The other orgs pay in things like bonuses or RSUs.
Total comp may be as good or higher, but those aren't locked in a specific rate the way a direct deposit to your bank account is; e.g. you could get less bonus, or the stock price could drop, etc.
I might be downvoted to hell, but it's more likely because of same supply-demand thing. Teacher is not a high skilled job, not to mention most teachers are outright bad at their jobs thus not producing much value anyway.
Bollocks. Most teaching requires as much training as several other degrees.
I'm a solution engineer and only made it here with a BA in English. I learned a lot of code, but I haven't had to much else formally.
My wife is a teacher, and she has to jump through hoops for a teaching certificate, do regular, on-going re-certs, and be covered in basic first aid.
Plus there is a shit-ton of other issues to stay abreast of, like mandatory reporter status -- on top of learning new teaching tools, like integrating with the tablets they use in science class.
I spend 4 hours a day in meetings, and 3 hours a day doing basic code stuff that a fairly bright 17 year old could figure out. Her job is WAYYYY harder than mine.
> Teacher is not a high skilled job, not to mention most teachers are outright bad at their jobs thus not producing much value anyway.
Attitudes like this are why the state of education in the US is abysmal.
>Attitudes like this are why the state of education in the US is abysmal.
sounds like a death spiral. The attiude is teachers are unskilled jobs, but you also propose that teaching is more involved than engineering (which I don't disagree with: the thought of dealing with minors undergoing puberty increases my stress levels). But if they don't get enough training, the quality suffers and the reputation of the profession and education as a whole is "abysmal".
However, are teachers getting the proper training for that? is 2 years of certification post undergrad and a few more years acting as a TA enough to prepare them for these conditions?
Compare that to university professors, who need a PH.D and much more research to teach. Should that be the low bar for teaching even more rambuncious students "lower down"? The answer is ultimately theoretical, because I imagine the issue is similar to police; there requires a LOT of positions to fill, more than what they could hope to get if they set such high requirements.
> should NOT be treated as an indicator for what "reasonable" pay looks like across the entire industry.
Hard disagree. The comparatively low salaries in other sectors are just that, below what workers should be earning. Things are fuzzier in the indie space, but companies like Blizzard, Activision, EA, Epic, Ubisoft, Rockstar, CDPR, etc. all pay low and absolutely rake in profits.
We should call worker exploitation what it is rather than calling fair compensation at FAANG companies "ridiculous".
When we talk about FAANG companies in this context, we do so with the subtext that there are so few companies that pay this way that they'd fit into a short acronym. The idea that the top of the market rate is the moral floor for compensation is hard to take seriously.
Besides, people trade compensation for all sorts of things: working at a nonprofit, working in their rural hometown. Why shouldn't problem domain be one of them?
FAANG companies also underpay their workers. It can simultaneously be the case that they pay their workers best in class wages AND those wages are less than the workers deserve. Apple has immense cash reserves built from the labor of their employees. That is essentially the difference between what value those employees generated for Apple and what they were paid. More of it should go out to the employees, and we should push to make the wages of workers at any company be higher percentage of the value they generate for that company.
What does it mean that they underpay their workers, except that they pay them a smaller percentage of the economic value produced by their labor than you think they should? Is that just a deontological claim? Because I imagine "my moral system says software engineers should be paid more, no, don't worry how much more, I'll tell you when to stop" is not very convincing as an argument.
> What does it mean that they underpay their workers, except that they pay them a smaller percentage of the economic value produced by their labor than you think they should?
That's easy to measure. These companies have a per-employee revenue which is easily a 5-10x multiple of average total compensation paid per employee, and in some cases it's also much less than the per-employee profit.
So they could pay a ton more while also making a healthy profit. Apple is the worst example of this.
I'm of the opinion that workers should retain 100% of the value they produce. Not for deontological reasons, but because I hold the belief that the outcomes of paying the "leaf nodes" in an organization maximally results in a healthier economy, a healthier population, and more democratic workplaces.
This is not limited to software engineers. I believe the same is true for any worker, from fast food to manufacturing to engineers.
How do you imagine this working, in practice? Do you want to force companies to have 0 cash holdings at all time? That seems like it might lead to some, ah, undesirable fragility.
How much workers deserve is based on profitability of the company they work at? Do workers who are equally talented and hardworking but work for a failing company deserve less?
That's a complicated question. My answer is probably they will get paid less. They are producing something for which there is less demand.
However, in today's economy the situation you describe would have the workers being paid less and the owner trying to keep as much of the surplus value from their labor as possible.
So, even in a failing company, I'd expect the wages to increase for workers if they received 100% of their value.
>My answer is probably they will get paid less. They are producing something for which there is less demand.
and this is how gentrification works. Not because a company starts to pay less, but because other companies pay more and make just the act of existing close to those companies (even if you were in fact there first) more expensive.
Your solution is great for tech workers, but ultimately means a large swath of society would suffer.
I guess if all the profits go to the workers, who provides the investment necessary to start the company in the first place? You could say it's the employees, but then we get in the weird situation of people having to pay to get a job.
It’s unworkable at a market level, but ideally, yes. Working for failing companies means you’re just wasting your time and not contributing to the society.
What you're saying really boils down to whether or not you think capitalism makes sense, which is a much bigger argument, but ignoring that --
Who defines "should be earning"? You?
Currently, we let the market determine it. It's fine to say you don't like that system, but that's the argument you should make, not "Big game companies are unfair". They're just playing the game the way we set it up.
Alternatively, you could maybe argue "I believe it is possible to make AAA games, pay high salaries, and actually make profits all at the same time", which would be an interesting take, and you could maybe explain how.
But saying "this is worker exploitation" is an uninspired, unproductive argument, IMO.
I'd argue that hiding behind "we let the market determine it" is much more uninspired and unproductive. Economic research now a days is constantly showing that markets are extremely flawed. One example of that is society pressuring employees to not share their wages, which is exactly what this whole article is about.
I think this sets some dangerous thinking because it gives this idea that "you are underpaid" if you happen to fail to make it into those 5 specific companies out of college.
I don't think the situation in tech is as black and white as "FAANG or QA tester". I have friends working at non-FAANG, non-gaming tech companies that seem fine with their salaries. Ticketmaster isn't as pristine a name but they seem to pay well.
Also, pedantic point: CDPR isn't American. I'd rather not get into the details on international salary because that's a whole other topic.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Disagree. There’s a lot to love about a job at Wendy’s relative to the alternatives (alternatives that don’t realistically include a programming job at Google).
You seem to be having trouble grasping the core concept here.
There are some jobs people really want to do and would do to some degree anyways even if they weren’t employed to do them. This is not the same idea as ‘there are worse jobs out there’.
Making games is one of these things. Working at a fast-food joint is not.
I daresay I enjoyed my job at Wendy’s a great deal. Mostly I left because I found better paying jobs elsewhere, but Wendy’s was a lot more enjoyable than those jobs (cart wrangling at Costco, car detailing at a Ford dealership)… until I finally broke through into office work.
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.
Game companies lose a ton of great developers due to their atrocious salaries and this is (IMO) reflected in many ways, from ever-lengthening development cycles to quality issues at release to feature cuts and crunch. I believe this affects the bottom line pretty significantly, and game publishers would look at the problem more seriously if they weren't making profits hand over fist due to the expansion of the industry as a whole lifting pretty much all boats. Seriously, for every one dev I know who actually works in the industry I probably know 10 who would much rather work there than their current job if the salaries were even close to competitive.
> "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.
> 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.
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.
The phrase "six-figure salary" is so strange. We're almost always referring to slightly above $100K. Does anyone ever say "I make six figures" and mean $900K, or even half a million?
> The whole "do it for the love of the craft not money" is bullshit propaganda
Or you could just value things about work apart from salary. No need to shame people for going for not doing for the absolute highest paying job. You can try to do the best you can comp wise, but if you're only chasing money your whole life, it won't lead to much satisfaction and is generally bad advice
It's not nice to shame people, but it is helpful for the greater good of software developers if people would change their mind about being willing to work gruelling hours for lower pay. Because if there aren't enough developers willing to do it for low pay, the multi-billion dollar companies would have to pay more for game developers.
This is why groups like actors needed a union. There is an endless supply of wide 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.
>but it is helpful for the greater good of software developers if people would change their mind about being willing to work gruelling hours for lower pay.
As a former dev (but I still work games adjacent), I'd never tell someone about the industry without telling them about pay and work hours. But at the same time I feel people who are interested in this are likely somewhat aware of this already, and ultimately experience will be a better teacher than me saying X is better. It's not like kids these days can't google.
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Ironically enough, google and the like is likely the biggest reason gamedevs don't have unions. Despite the stigma, most devs aren't trapped the same way a fast food worker may be. I've had several friends laid off (including myself) and we then pivot to a "boring job" making more money than we were making before being laid off. few other industries can boast this. Even a similar industry like VFX can't just pivot to a whole other sector of work once they get laid off (after making a movie billions).
Given a situation where labor supply is in excess, one could say "let them work for pennies because they love the craft, i.e. let the company pay them nothing because they're easily replaceable." Or one could say "they should unionize so they can bargain for better salaries, and still do what they love."
I suspect that since game devs still make above the national average for salaries, there's less incentive to unionize and demand wages that actually reflect the value they bring to those multi-billion dollar game publishers. It's like "well 50k-60k is good enough" even though the industry they work for is flush with cash and could easily compensate more if they were made to do so.
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.
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.
(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.)
If you’re working to achieve a goal you’re not really working for free are you?
I’d question the merits of your method if it means working a lot of overtime to make other people rich. Mostly because “experience” extremely rarely has any real value in corporate land where everyone, and I do mean everyone, is replaceable once you zoom out enough to a top management perspective. And any extra time you put in for free is really just you getting taken advantage of.
Now I did specify company, because I’m not against volunteering for NGOs. I still don’t think you should spend 80 hours a week doing it, but by all means volunteer to do things. Help your neighbour build a roof, go join a soup kitchen, knit little hats for newborn babies, whatever you want. That’s not really working for free though, it’s working to better your community.
Putting in overtime, that you are not getting paid for at Coca Cola is not only foolish, it’s downright undermining the foundation of our society. It’s you trading away pieces or your life, so that stock owners and corporate managers can become a little richer, and no, you should not really be free to do that. Exactly because it ruins it for every other worker. Especially in America, where you working 80 hours a week, means you’re quite literally keeping someone else from having a full time job and the access to healthcare it provides, and for what? So the billionaires can billion?
After reading the parent comment, I have a feeling they didn't mean it as "nobody should work overtime for free [even once or ever]", but more like "nobody should work overtime for free [as the norm, on a regular basis]".
If that was indeed what the parent comment truly meant, would you still disagree with it?
Because I am of the same opinion as you that complete outright rejection of overtime, even if it is only once in forever during a critical time period, is not the move. I am absolutely ok with overtime once in forever and for a great reason. But I am absolutely against overtime being the norm or a regular thing.
Do you reject volunteering for non-profits? What about non-profits that have some paid employees? What about for-profit companies that you believe have a net positive effect on the world? What about jobs that you think are fun, I dunno maybe white water guiding, that happen to be for for-profit non-benevolent companies?
The whole idea of "you shouldn't work if you're not getting paid" is a category error.
If you want to do work, do it. If you're getting paid, great. If you're not getting paid but you want to do it anyway, great. If the only reason you want to do this work is because your current alternatives suck, well, I'm sorry to hear that, but you should still pursue your best alternative, which may be working unpaid overtime.
Mind you, in some cases, it makes sense to say "because I am part of a bargaining collective, I will eschew personally-beneficial options, as part of our collective negotiation strategy". Respect! But that's only sane if you're actually part of a bargaining collective. It is (usually) completely idiotic to imagine that you have solidarity with other people who do not see themselves as having solidarity with you.
All of the above comments are super generic, because moksly made some very generic comments, including "never work for a company for free", and I think moksly's advice, when taken as written, is utterly wrong. Now, specifically in the case of working paid or unpaid overtime, as with any other question about workplace environment or about compensation, the only reasonable thing to do is ask what your alternatives are, both short-term and long-term.
Tell me, if you're against overtime being the norm or a regular thing, what advice would you give to a hypothetical person who has no known alternative employment and a dependent to support, and who knows that their boss could hire others to replace them? Would you honestly say to them "never work for a company for free"? Surely instead you would say "do what you gotta do, and also btw try to find a different job, and also btw good luck buddy I feel for you".
The sentence "never work for a company for free" is utterly wrong-headed.
No, I don't. My reply was in the context of full-time employment, not part-time volunteering for some cause on your own free time whenever you choose to.
"Volunteering" for your employer isn't really volunteering, I hope you realize that.
>The sentence "never work for a company for free" is utterly wrong-headed.
It is about as wrong-headed as saying "I refuse to make extra profit for my employer on my own free time on a regular basis without receiving extra pay in return" is.
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.
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.
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...
>The entities on top are large multi-billion dollar corporations who are running a business, just like any other industry. And this has been more and more apparent in recent years seeing just how anti-consumer the video games industry is getting.
depends on the studio. Everyone focuses on the EA's, but most game studios aren't these huge billionaire ventures cranking out 12 games a year. It's certainly not the modern EA or Naughty Dog or Blizzard that give devs the low salary reputation.
I worked at one for 3 years, and it was <300 employees. I was still surprised at how much money they can bring in after talking to producers (spoiler: maybe it varies in other studios, but the most profitable games worked on weren't console games), but it was very clear that this wasn't a studio that could pay everyone even 100K/year and expect to be in business next year.
> 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.
I don't get why you care about the company. Most of the time the sole purpose of existence of that company is making its owners and investors rich. That 100hr probably let them get an important contract, so they got a bit richer, but in return you were given food scraps (some time off). If it was me, I'd approach the owners and said "look, if this shit is so critical for your business, I can spend some extra time and try to fix it, but in return I'll become an LP with a small stake."
Any value they provide is incidental, an annoying necessity they have to put up with. If owners and investors cared about that value, they'd hire more personnel. Instead, they pocket salaries of that unhired personnel and take a free ride on a couple dudes who work 100hr overtime. I'm sure after they signed the contract, they had a nice party where the owner cracked a joke about two losers who did all the work for free.
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.
I think you misunderstand the parent's post. It's not about critiquing someone's choices, it's about recognizing when you are being exploited.
And yeah, maybe the game devs being exploited think the situation is fine. The long hours for low pay is paid back by the intangibles of working on a game.
The point isn't that the dev made the choice, it's that it was ever framed as a choice in the first place. Many games studios are making billions in profits and absolutely could pay FAANG salaries and still turn profits.
So it's less about individual choices, and more about ensuring the workers are getting compensated fairly for the work they love doing.
> 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.
Just to be clear, you're saying that crunch time can be up to 1/3 of the year, and you get maximum 4 weeks of additional leave off as a result. Compare that to anywhere overseas, where 4-6 weeks leave per year is the minimum. Moreover, if you're working 50 hours a week on average during that crunch time, and you get 1 week off per month of crunch, you're already marginally behind on equivalent compensation since there's more than 4 weeks per average month.
That sounds like an awful agreement and I don't understand why you're trying to hold it up as a great opportunity. I'd instead describe it as an abusive working relationship that further shifts the benefit to the corporation at the employee's expense.
I wonder why you got downvoted as you're basically spot on. Can someone check my calculations, because I'm getting ridiculous numbers, not "marginally behind"
He remembers 1-2 times of 1-2 months of crunch of "not being expected to work _more_ than 60 hours". My bet is that this means people usually stayed _at least_ 60 hours during the crunch time due to social pressures created by the employees themselves. Sort of like "unlimited vacation" usually means that on average everyone takes less vacation, because they don't want to be the one with the most vacation taken. So to me this means the _lower_ bound is 60 hours, not the 50 you put as the average.
1-2 in this context tells me: it's definitely 2, if not more, but let's take the lower bound, i.e. 2. The following uses some generous rounding:
That's 4 months, so the 1/3 of the year you mentioned of 60 hour weeks. 4.33 weeks per month on average times 4 months is 17.3 weeks of at least 60 hour weeks =~ 1040 hours of work over a period of time that they should've worked ~690 hours. That's an extra of about 345 hours of work they did, which is a whopping 43 8-hour days. Even if after each of the crunches they got 2 weeks off, that's 20 days of vacation to compensate for 43 days of unpaid crunch time that also wreaked havoc with their actual lives.
Is my math off somewhere? Because otherwise as this was the lower bound from an idealized remembering of "the good old times" I'd call that exploitative.
Sort of like "unlimited vacation" usually means that on average everyone takes less vacation, because they don't want to be the one with the most vacation taken.
If you have defined vacation, the company has to pay you for any unused days when you resign. With "unlimited" vacation they do not. So it's a win-win for the company to offer this supposed perk: peer pressure not to use it, and no financial liability.
No one expects the comp time to exactly equal how much extra time you worked. It's just like a little thank you for working hard, and so you can decompress and take care of whatever you've been neglecting in your life during crunch.
Would I have enjoyed this if I wasn't a 20-something with no kids who who lived and breathed games? No. So I don't honestly expect everyone to understand this either.
If you love your work, it's not work.
Never once did I feel like crunch "wreaked havoc with my life". I think you are imagining the worst case scenario. Sure, it could. And the people who worked there who were parents with kids, I felt bad for them. I don't think I would have made that choice. But for me and many of my childless colleagues, the reality is that we loved working in games and getting that experience was vital to our careers.
And the people who worked there who were parents with kids, I felt bad for them. I don't think I would have made that choice. But for me and many of my childless colleagues, the reality is that we loved working in games and getting that experience was vital to our careers.
Those people with kids were once people like you, say 10-20 years ago, and they didn't fully understand the precedent they were setting by accepting and normalising those working practices. I would bet if any of them could go back, they would undo it.
I would be careful with such blanket statements. I would agree with you that companies do not expect people to expect that and will do everything they can to make people believe that exploitative relationships are OK.
Personally though yes I do expect tit for tat. And there are employers out there that understand this very well. At one of my previous places for example we had a few major traffic days which required a sort of "all hands on deck" for the day and part of the night. You probably worked an extra 2 hours in total but you were looking at the chat and production monitors regularly while going about your day and evening/night otherwise. You got an extra day off for that.
Also for production support via 'pager' any call from the NOC to you, even if it took 5 minutes of you just telling them 'yeah restart service X' was an automatic 1 hour billed at overtime rates.
No not contractors. Internal employees.
Also I do love my work and it's not work in that sense. But that does not preclude me from wanting and working actively towards a proper work environment. If you pay me for 40 hours you get 40 hours. 40 hours of 100% of me. Not 60 hours of 50% of me.
We're not overseas though, we're in the US where we get 15-25 vacation days a year. So an extra 5-10 days each time you crunch is pretty significant. Also this is extra vacation. I get the equation is still in favor of the employer but whatever, I thought it was fair, because of my next point:
I loved working on games! It wasn't bad at all doing this back in my 20s. You're doing something you love! With amazing people who also love games! I learned so much back in this period. I was able to tackle super hard challenges and really work on a huge variety of really interesting problems. Why would you not want to work extra hard if you have this kind of opportunity where you also love the work?
What if you could work on things you love AND be compensated more fairly for it, through something like... collective bargaining?
There are other creative careers, like acting, that have union representation for exactly this reason. If there were no actors' union, film companies could abuse an endless supply of wide-eyed hopefuls trying to get famous. Collective bargaining makes sure they can earn a real wage while they work on their dream career.
In any case, I'd expect someone named "socialist coder" to be less willing to hand over their power as a worker to their company ;)
Are we pretending most non A-list actors make 6 figures entry level? unions help to prevent abuse, but it won't solve the "undrepaid" argument.
in this regard, crunch time with a max work per day, with actual overtime compensation and post crunch vacation sounds about as fair as the situation can be (you know, short of avoiding crunch). whether the final amount made is enough is a compensation issue, not an abuse issue. I doubt unions formed would eliminate crunch as a whole.
I never once took any position for or against collective bargaining in the game industry. I would say I have not looked into this enough to fairly have an opinion on the matter.
Plus, I do think my own experience has been with the "good" game companies who didn't work you down to nothing. I really don't think a union vote would have had a chance at all at the places I worked.
It does seem like the industry as a whole has gotten worse since I founded my own game company in 2010. Or, maybe the companies I worked at really were the "best" ones for worker quality of life.
As for my own politics, I'm not so much pro-union as I am pro-worker cooperative. Unions today do a lot of things for their own benefit at the expense of the rest of society. I see it locally with the teachers union in my school district. It's awful, they are bankrupting the school district and their demands are completely out of touch with reality. So I don't think just having a union is the silver bullet here. Unions pit workers against management. In a hugely creative and cooperative venture like making a video game, that is a pretty big negative.
I would love to see more employee owned businesses. Unfortunately video games are hugely capital intensive and very risky. You need to be able to throw away tens of millions of dollars. Very unlike manufacturing where at least if your product fails, you still have a valuable factory. If your video game flops, you literally have $0 in assets to show for it.
So, we need to come up with different ways of financing capital and organizing labor so that everyone's best interests are at heart. Very difficult problem to solve and capitalism isn't very interested in solving it. But, I guess it does work for the film industry so what's to say it wouldn't work for game development?
Also I want to say, I only wanted to share my view here because I felt like my perspective was missing from this discussion. It's not all unholy crunch time and rock bottom wages. I personally had a great experience in the game industry from 2000 - 2010. With that said, I don't disagree at all with the premise that most game companies take unfair advantage of their employees.
Lastly, I want to add that at my own startup, we practice what we preach. In the 10 years we've been going, the amount of days we've asked our developers to "crunch" is in the single digits.
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.
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.
You can't avoid some level of exploitation when you have little power; and you have little power when there are 5 other people willing to do the job at a wage you think is too low.
Agreed (if you'll accept a couple of extra conditions: not just willing, but also able and available), but I don't see that as a simple supply-side glut driving lower prices, because people are not widgets. The willingness to accept the lower pay in specific sectors reads more like an abusive status quo maintained by a cycle of exploitation, one I suppose those sharing their salaries are hoping to break.
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.
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.
The problem here is that (aside from the usual "FAANG or nothing" sentiment): you assume everyone can get a FAANG job to begin with. Apple never called back after my campus interview, I didn't make it past Google's automated programming test. I had no link to Microsoft so I just have a online resume in the virtual void.
That first job hustle is painful. I definitely wouldn't be where I was today if I didn't spend a few years at a local studio, if only because it gave relevant work experience to what I wanted to do. Even if it was paying me half my current salary it was well worth the experience.
Far from it; this advice is from my current perspective as a bootstrapped co-founder, but concurs with all my prior experience, including that at other startups and ordinary enterprises, as both manager and job candidate.
Funny how people assume that just because you’ve been at one of the tech giants, that it was either the only experience you have, or that it’s the only experience you valued, or speak from. The assumption is a category error, and seems to be mostly invoked dismissively.
1. No. I'm also speaking from both sides of the table, as a hiring manager I could never be offended by someone simply looking to gain the greatest benefit from their employment. I won't say it can't happen, however, because every service team is different.
2. Well, over the course of the last few decades, I think probably most of them, having started out building dialup services in the '90s on shelves piled up with USR Sportsters, to principal engineer for a multinational service provider; developing various appliance products; developing global-scale provisioning & monitoring tools for transit and hosting services; helpdesk; operating a LIR; dating RIR staffers; standing up new IXPs; SRE; hiring; designing data centers; M&A due diligence; post-M&A systems convergence; webdev; postmaster. My concept of "full stack engineering" starts with racking the servers, or perhaps even before that: getting the business case approved and running the RFP. Never been a peering coordinator, though, I'm not demonic enough.
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.
> The gaming industry has been playing the same card movie studios play
FWIW, the mobile games industry takes a different route. Unfortunately the media loves to shit on them while not being too hard on how the AAA movie-like industries operate.
I would also argue freemium mobile games aren't nearly as fun as PC/premium games. Freemium developers are a different crowd and more like a typical SW engineer. I've done both. I'm looking forward to going back to premium games from freemium.
>they are operating on profitable business models such as subscription and micro-transactions.
some do, many don't. Not even all AAA companies have gone this route. Let alone all the mid sized studios out there contracted to make games. I'm sure Rockstar and Blizzard could, but the industry isn't just those two companies.
> 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.
Sorry but I'm going to call bullshit on your bullshit. Spent ~5 years in the industry and every place I worked crunched like hell and every place that my coworkers came from crunched like hell. There are companies that limit crunch but they are few and far between.
My experience was that those who survived crunch perpetuated a culture of needing to "pay your dues" and you weren't a "team player" if you didn't put in the extra hours on salary.
I also worked in the industry and would agree with your assessment. Many of the senior folks I talked to even agreed that crunch was a 'mandatory, necessary' part of game development.
You can even perceive it from the vernacular of how you refer to "crunch" - it has a feeling of something often talked about, a term used in the industry.
Me: I worked 3 years, had a total of 6 weeks of crunch @50-55 hours/week, compensated 1.5x and with "free" dinner (AKA they actually complied to state law due to staying after 6PM). This was after literally cutting the content of the game in half due to client deadlines (A certain Big Tech company was not going to delay their product just because they set unreasonable deadlines to the studio). Attitude wise, no one liked it. Manager didn't pretend to be pleased with the discussions.
No extra vacation, but overall it wasn't one of those death grinds people talk on the internet about. I think both tales are valid, but of course one of them gets a lot more attention.
I've worked in games, I've worked out of games. The workers in games are absolutely being exploited because they think the work environment is unique.
And yes, there's something cool to see people at PAX or elsewhere praising a project you worked on. But saying people are making a tradeoff, or giving up salary to work on games is a defeatist attitude -- big game devs should be paying what big tech companies pay.
You should not have to give up pay to work in games, and it absolutely kills me every time I see an engineer claim that it's somehow noble to do so.
In the indie space, sure, pay is going to be weaker. But there are thousands working for Blizzard, Activision, EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar, CDPR, etc. etc. etc. who are all being grossly underpaid for the value they bring to their company.
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.
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.
> 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.
>I don't get paid anywhere near FAANG salary, but I bet I get paid more per hour than most game devs.
if you include the small studios, sure.
if you are focused on the big AAA studios like most of this topic is, I would doubt it. Blizzard may not be paying Google money, but the engineers there aren't making peanuts either.
60 hour work weeks as the norm is still crazy to me, though I am in my mid thirties as well and might have been able to pull that off in my 20's as you said. Maybe that's why start-ups usually end up burning me out because I've never really cared that much about the product like I imagine game devs care about theirs, and 50-60+ hours a week is kind of normal for a small start up.
Since you are a game developer with kids, I have to ask... what about the addiction? Have you seen your kids getting addicted to games? Does that bother you? Have you pondered your own contribution to that problem?
Just saying, I'd rather have kids be addicted to games than drugs. At least there's a high possibility you can recover game addiction without major effects to your health. And you learn very abstract things in games you can use IRL too.
This is on point and similar to my experiences in game companies.
That said, I'm in music/audio, and from my side of the fence there seemed to be a sort of higher respect from management for programmers (and to a certain extent, art) in that they really tried to slowly ramp up their crunch and not keep it sustained for too long. In my experience, the truly crazy crunch tends to be borne by audio and QA.
Audio is hardcore, Naughty Dog being the most hardcore (but they wear this as a badge of honor and everyone who works there knows it before going in).
This instantly raises a question for me: what companies did you work for that did not leave you feeling like you were being abused? Do they still exist, do you have any impression of how their work environment has changed since then? I know my friend who worked at Popcap sure did like it a lot less once EA bought them, for instance.
60h + 1-4mo of crunch sure sounds like more than I'd wanna do for anything. Maybe if I got a piece of the IP/profits - as someone with 'socialist' in your username I'd assume you'd be interested in companies that let the workers own more of what they produce; were any of your workplaces unusual in that regard?
> Crunch time is like 1 or 2 times a year, for maybe 1-2 months each time.
If it is 2 times per year and extends for a period of 2 months, that is almost half of the entire year.
That sounds crazy to me, I would never ever work 60 hours a week without getting paid for it. Many game companies make ridicolous amounts of money, there is no reason why they shouldn't pay a reasonable salary for it.
60 hour work weeks are insane and you should never accept that.
>You don't work in gaming because you want to make the top salary. You work in gaming because you love games
That's just rationalization. Gaming companies earn ridiculous amounts of money, especially the ones that do it through microtransaction model. These companies would have no problem paying FAANG-like salaries if they had to do so, but they pay less because they can get away with it.
Maybe that was true 20, 30 years ago. Right now outside of a handful of studios that release quality games the rest aren't that good or innovative. I find it hard to believe people are happy to work on games with heavy elements of microtransactions or reheated elements (e.g. Ubisoft games are basically the same)
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).
I've always been very open with coworkers about salaries. And in my experience the underpaid people were always not like me ( white and male ) and frequently better at their jobs than me.
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).
A previous employer explicitly stated in their contract that disclosing your salary was a disciplinary offence!
It's a tragedy of the commons situation. You can share yours and nobody shares theirs, so you lose a bit. You need a large number to make it work effectively.
I personally never feared sharing my salary, but even after that not a single person ever in multiple jobs shared their salary with me.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
And furthermore, it's how it compares to the profits of the company. If an engineer is returning $500,000k annually in profit to a company from their work, and getting paid $75k of that, they are being exploited. (Or at the very least are undervaluing their labor.)
If the engineer provides $500k value per year, and they get paid $500k per year, the company makes $0 profit. By that logic, the only way to not be underpaid is for the company to be in the red; but if that happens, there won't be a company to pay you!
Plus, it's likely any other engineer could provide the same value. So (as always) it's about supply and demand. In this case, there are a lot of qualified engineers that want to work in games, and relatively few positions.
Unions could affect that, but I think it'd do more harm than good at the high end (it would definitely help lower paid positions like QA though).
Maybe if Epic wins their case against Apple, it'll unleash a tidal wave of anti-trust lawsuits against the likes of Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Google, etc. and the game industry will explode with new business opportunities, new investments, and new jobs to balance out the supply/demand curve for game developers at all levels!
It's not unnatural at all, or at least it's not any more unnatural than someone getting to keep a portion of your labor's profit just because they put the most money down when they started the company.
A workers co-op, for instance, splits all the profits between all the employees in an arrangement that is basically "we collectively produced profit X we all get an equal share of that profit."
While "unnatural" is the wrong word, imo, I think it's fair to say that it's "unfamiliar" to most folks and "uncommon" out in the world.
There are no laws against worker co-ops. They are just a pretty inefficient way of running a business in that it's difficult if not impossible in most cases to raise sufficient capital. This is particularly true of software companies, where firms with 20 or 30 employees raise tens of millions of dollars. There is no conceivable way the employees would be able to put up that kind of money by themselves.
It's why many existing co-ops such as Bob's Red Mill were founded, funded, and built by capitalists but later gifted to the employees once mature.
it's unnatural because that's not how a business builds. Even with profit sharing, you need to put a portion back into the business (not the CEO, not the worker, but into a metaphorical savings account). if you're giving 100% of labor back to the workers, there's no room for the company to grow and eventually everyone gets $0 when the company shutters.
Even a mom and pop shop of 1 needs to operate on these parameters. Heck, even a personal checking account. You keep some money in reserve for a rainy day, and some in the deep reserves for retirement (401k). You very rarely get 100% of your money in liquid (regardless of if you feel underpaid or not), nor do many desire to.
$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.
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.
I think you're misunderstanding his post. "Marginal" doesn't mean "small", it means "at the margins/edge". He's saying the same thing you're saying, that's how a progressive tax rate works: there are multiple tax brackets, each of them is taxed at an ever increasing tax rate, but always lower than 100% (so the more you make, gross, the more you get, net, too).
In your example, even in Germany, the total tax rate for someone making more than €274 612 is not 45%. It's lower because the lower brackets get taxed less. Realistically, it seems like the actual tax rate for someone making over €274 612 would be somewhere around 36-38%.
And anyone making that much in Germany will live like a king, anyway.
I understand very well thank you. I have lived in both tax systems ;)
Germany does not in fact have tax brackets but instead has the aforementioned progressive tax. I think there's a problem of translation in the as well as the bracketing system used in many if not most countries are also technically progressive taxes. But progressive is the literal translation of how the taxation system is called in German ;)
As the OP mentioned the 40% marginal tax rate only applies to the income above the threshold for that bracket. He is absolutely right about that and that's how I'm taxed where I live now.
In contrast the German tax is applied to your entire income after the basic free amount and it is applied. To quote Wikipedia:
> The German income tax is a progressive tax, which means that the average tax rate (i.e., the ratio of tax and taxable income) increases monotonically with increasing taxable income.
The bracketing is only done above where it reaches 42%.
>... use geometrically progressive rates which start at 14% and rise to 42%. This means that those rates are calculated as a linear evoving ratio rather than a straight percentage as typical in most other countries around the globe.
Matching varies by employer and isn't a legal requirement. The legal minimum employer contribution is just 3% if you put in 5% and it's arguable whether 8% is enough for a comfortable retirement.
For most 40% tax bracket earners (earning less than £100K) once you get beyond your employers match, there's not much benefit to a workplace pension. A £100K earner sacrificing 10% in to a workplace pension scheme is only £200/year better off than someone taking home that 10% and paying it in to a self-managed scheme (provided they reclaim the tax).
Things change dramatically over £100K. Someone earning £120K and sacrificing £20K in to an employer scheme ends up £4400/yr better off than with a self-managed scheme.
$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.
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.
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.
I would say this is probably not too close to reality. Artists, writers, actors, qa can drop into a new game a lot easier than spinning up software developers. From my experience they're treated less like a commodity than the other disciplines.
That said, not all games are services yet so once the game ships anyone can make it to the chopping block.
I'm not saying that software developers are more, or as replaceable as creative talent. I'm just saying that from the employers perspective, much much more has to go right than just software development to make a successful game.
Google/FB know that if they get the best engineers, they will have a top-tier product. But games don't have anything close to that same guarantee. You could have the most efficient, elegantly-written, perfectly abstracted game, but if the game-play sucks, it's not going to sell.
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.
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.
I saw it more in that it's not the early '00's anymore where every company had their own custom engine. you can hire devs into a company with experience in UE4 or Unity and skip a significant amount of onboarding, especially if they are hired early into a project. There are certainly hard parts, but this means you can pay junior engineers to worry about "easier" parts of the game while letting the seniors/leads worry about architecture, infrastructure, and optimization. Not too unlike a front end web dev from what I've hears.
And for "street cred" I've worked in all 3 environments, unity projects, UE4 projects, and custom engines.
Unity famously hired Mike Acton (a minor hero in parts of the C++ world, and a major hero if you restrict to games). I am quite certain they pay people like him, doing infrastructure engine work that scales across all users of Unity, something in the ballpark of what he could make at a tech company. But most game programmers are not doing anything with that kind of leverage, and I think that's largely contributing to the business' ability to pay them substantially less than they could at a FAANG.
This is another issue with the passion hypothesis that Carl Newport coined. It makes one blind to other opportunities where the pay and the treatment is better. You aren't born with passion, you just love doing things that you're good at. So why waste precious time and be miserable at these awful companies in this awful business.
I've worked in the Games industry since 1997. I got my first year-long job fresh out of high school in QA at EA in Canada, worked summers over the following years while getting my degrees, transitioned to a programming role after university, and ultimately moved to the US in 2013 for work in games at one of the big tech companies.
1997-2003 - QA @ EA, ~$9-12 an hour (CAD), 1.5x for hours 40-48, 2x > 48 hours. We worked a lot of 90 hour weeks, and I had no life outside of work, so I had a lot of spare cash.
2003-2008 - Game Dev in Eastern Canada. Started at 40k a year, ended at 62k a year (CAD).
2008-2013 - Game Dev in Western Canada, started at 80k a year, ended at 100k per year (CAD). Got promoted to "senior" in 2010 and managed a team of 6 programmers during my last year and a half prior to leaving.
2013-present - Moved to the United States at a big tech company that does games. Took a role-demotion to be a non-senior IC for a wage-promotion of 135k a year USD. Presently have a similar role to the one I left in Canada (albeit a much larger team) and make >350k USD a year.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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"
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)
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.
Second this. Have worked at several AAA studios as an engineer. I am currently hiring for junior and senior engineering positions. The number of candidates for the former is two orders of magnitude greater than the latter. The good senior engineers in the game industry don’t have to worry about work, and the compensation largely accounts that. It isn’t FAANG level for the most part, but closer than it was a decade ago and a lot higher than what you would think from the hashtag.
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.
In my experience(again, I'm sure it doesn't apply everywhere) - a lot of people think they want to do games, but actually leave and do something else after a year or two - not enough to get to senior level, so not at the level when they can actually start seeing decent salaries and have that leverage I mentioned. So they are easily poached by software development/consultancy firms with better money. Then people who do stick around and advance to senior actually show very high level of loyalty, I work surrounded by people with 15-20 years of experience at the same company, they aren't interested in going anywhere, mostly because they still enjoy what they do and after that much time the money is usually more than decent so....why would you leave. But obviously people still do, and again, I see people leaving after 20 years making games to "try something else" and they actually leave the games industry entirely when that happens.
What I also see is people leaving due to crunch and burnout - companies which are famous for it seem to lose a large number of employees every time they finish a project, I see that in applications. They aren't being fired, they are just burnt out and they look for a place with better work life balance. We have a bit of a reputation for being really good about it so we see those people apply to us.
And then finally, the "I really wanted to work on X all my life" still applies regardless of seniority and if the opportunities appear people take them no matter the compensation.
I work in a AAA game company, and see similar to GPs comments. I guess the reason is that so many people also leave the games industry early on (relative to career span). From my experience (In in the programming dpt, at-least), lots of devs just aren't good enough, or want to improve enough to become senior devs.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually I sometimes answer recruiters from companies that I am not interested at working from, just to tell upfront how much I am getting paid and how much I would need to be convinced to change, just in the hope that the next guy they call and that actually needs this job will have a better initial offer.
Incidentally, that's why I don't like those "transparency" initiatives too much. Most people willing to share their salaries on twitter probably are on the lower side of the pay scale, thus biasing the results down.
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.
> I've had exactly one person I coached ever have their offer pulled
I've never seen an offer pulled, but it's common for companies to move on to other candidates when someone wants to draw out the negotiation process too long.
This comes as a shock to some candidates who forget that companies can't wait around forever while they decide who to work for. The position must be filled someone quickly.
> The position must be filled someone quickly.
Some positions must be filled by someone quickly. There are many many many positions that are not urgent or the candidate pool is limited enough that moving on is more akin to restarting the interview process.
Expecting someone to make a major life decision in less than a week is frankly silly.
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.
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.
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.
2. other comparable companies would pay you as much
then why would you negotiate further at that point? It’s obvious that your interview partner is looking for someone cheaper. If they do want to hire you, they will make you a fair offer.
Negotiation skills are about negotiating 180k in that situation.
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'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).
I always see the advice never give your asking salary upfront.
Recently I want to move work and willing to take a pay cut just to move so gone in with the honest approach which I am told is bad for maximizing salary. Right now I'm not to fussed about maximizing, it's just moving.
The conversation normally goes:
Company: What is your current salary
Me: $XXX,XXX, that is negotiable as actively looking to move and will take less for the right company. *(I understand it's a high salary to the rest of the market where I am even though I am not in the US so salary is still well below US Junior FAANG)
Then it's been one of two things:
1) Get offered 30-40% less (20% less is my ballpark, 25% for a company that really interests me)
2) Bye
I've been told the job market is booming where I am but in 15 years it's the first time I've struggled to find a job although my skills are in demand overseas. I feel I'm fairly competent, I get told good things by people I work with and my salary has naturally grown through promotion based on my skills/performance yet I'm starting to question is it just me and I'm not that good why I am now struggling to find work despite going in to large orgs as a small dedicated team to do projects they couldn't deliver.
It seems if I take a big paycut to where I was 5-10 years ago, forget 15 years of career and revert back to writing NodeJS/Python apps my luck will be better.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
That sounds like a nice environment, but it just doesn't hold a candle to working in a place where everybody from the office staff to the devs to the artists to the managers just lives and breaths gaming.
Let me put this another way: there's a gaming group like you have where you have to drag everybody to the table occasionally at lunch time for some casual games, and then there's gaming groups where 6 of you show up to play Twilight Imperium every weekend and every person memorized the rules on their own time. Working at a game company is the later.
It's a lot of fun, and conditions across the industry vary a lot. I burnt out in the games industry (twice), but it was the most fun I've had at work. Intense.
All-expense-paid trips to GDC / San-Francisco from Toronto, Canada were nice. Having people recognize my T-shirt and come up to me to tell me they loved our game ... superficial, but enjoyable. In your '20s you're basically doing what you'd be doing anyway (as a gamer), but getting paid.
As an intern at a startup I got an all expense trip to California and a higher salary than some of the mid level game dev positions I saw today. Game dev is a ripoff
Did you miss the part where I said I enjoyed the kind of work? It's like you're talking to a pianist, and you say "Piano is a ripoff, I made more money playing oboe -- you should play oboe." But I don't like oboe. People can like different things. I have artistic skills and interests that don't get used on some rando CRUD or SaaS app, and I like being around creative, artistic people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 £100k/year. It happens, but it's very rare(in my experience).
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)
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.
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 £60k 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 £200k at 25. But earning £60k in your 20s puts you so far ahead of almost everyone else in their 20s in the UK.
> It's fairly easy to be on £60k outside of London with a few years of experience.
Yeah, but that is the point isn't it - in the US and some other countries you have the potential to earn a few hundred K per annum. That sort of money just isn't available to software people here. In fact you're more likely to be offered around £50k for a 'senior' role somewhere.
IMHO it's partly because here in the UK we don't really regard software engineers as skilled professionals, most management structures seem to treat us as generic office folks, and unruly, childlike ones at that.
The UK does treat SKILLED software engineers as skilled professionals. It's one of the highest earning professions here. What other jobs do you know where there's an earning potential of £80K+ outside of London while working regular 8 hour days? Not many I'll tell you that. If you want to be earning £200-300k then set up your own company. Almost no one is going to be employed by someone else on that money. And those that are, big law firms etc., are working 16 hour days 6-7 days a week.
Many US developers are overpaid. That's the reality. The pay floor has been shifted too high and so the ceiling is even higher. We mustn't kid ourselves, the skill floor in software development is relatively low. Why should a graduate front end developer get paid 6 figures? There's some good ones that deserve it, but there's also some really shit ones who will never learn and grow as a professional.
I've worked with good graduates and I've worked with shit graduates. The good ones get rewarded. The unskilled ones who don't learn, don't. I think that's fine. 6 figures for entry level grunt work is just an unreasonable amount of money and the only reason the US gets away with it is because of the pay floor.
> What other jobs do you know where there's an earning potential of £80K+ outside of London while working regular 8 hour days?
Woo, £80K, for people in the top 2-5% of the game (going by salary distribution). Such rewards. Just don't look over the pond...
> If you want to be earning £200-300k then set up your own company. Almost no one is going to be employed by someone else on that money.
And that's part of the problem right there. In the US you can aspire to getting salaries in those sorts of ranges, one day, if you're good at what you do and make good choices.
> 6 figures for entry level grunt work is just an unreasonable amount of money
Sure it is! But unless you either strike out on your own as a contractor (which I have) or leave software behind and go into management/consulting/whatever, six figures is effectively unattainable at all.
I'm not disputing there are a lot of really not-that-great software people around, or claiming we should just hand a bag of gold to every new grad. But there is vanishingly little in the high end for the better people to aspire to. Which is why people either transition to management, go independent or just plain leave.
>Woo, £80K, for people in the top 2-5% of the game (going by salary distribution). Such rewards. Just don't look over the pond...
I'm not sure of your point. Become one of the top 5% of skilled workers and earn in the 95+ percentile. If you want money that's comparable to over the pond then go over the pond.
>And that's part of the problem right there. In the US you can aspire to getting salaries in those sorts of ranges, one day, if you're good at what you do and make good choices.
I don't think you realise how much money the average person in the UK earns, or even what the average american earns. Become an average developer making 50k and you're in the top 15% of earners in the country. That's a lot of money!
Just because the US has higher tech salaries doesn't mean you can't aspire to be a higher earner in the UK. Anyone who sees a £60-80k salary here and scoffs at it has unrealistic expectations.
Yeah, if you want to stay as a developer and not transition into a hands off management role then your earning potential will flatline pretty quickly. But I think that's just the nature of tech jobs in the UK, we don't have the high tech start ups that the US has. It's not like you can become an expert in creating distributed storage engines and have 10 companies knocking at your door here like you can in the US. There's not many companies outside of FAANG where expert software development knowledge is actually applicable and so the job market is less competitive.
> I don't think you realise how much money the average person in the UK earns
I'm well aware thanks, I've looked up the numbers.
> Become an average developer making 50k and you're in the top 15% of earners in the country. That's a lot of money!
Not really, and certainly not in the context of this conversation, if you head back up to the very top of the thread - "The massive gap between UK and US gamedev salaries seems to keep getting larger"
(FYI average dev compensation is under £40k)
> Anyone who sees a £60-80k salary here and scoffs at it has unrealistic expectations
> if you want to stay as a developer and not transition into a hands off management role then your earning potential will flatline pretty quickly
> I think that's just the nature of tech jobs in the UK
All of this is precisely the problem I'm describing, that realistic expectations in the UK are pretty poor in comparison to what you can make elsewhere, in other English-speaking nations. The nature of salaried tech jobs in the UK makes them relatively unappealing. So the most motivated people either go contracting, where they can make 3 times that if they do it well but companies don't really get to build sustainable teams, or they just plain leave the country in droves. Meanwhile British industry complains it can't find skilled people to work for it. There is a systemic problem with poor rewards and poor results in the UK in this area.
So to come back to this -
> I'm not sure of your point.
The point is that your earning potential as an employed software developer in the UK is severely curtailed compared to the US and some other markets, to the extent that it causes industry problems.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Lawyers too, though there is a similar bimodal salary distribution, so it only applies to the top lawyers. Outside of those two fields nothing in the UK compares to US wages.
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
I think you're a rarity, if you're being paid rates comparable to US software folks. I do know a bunch of tech folks doing comparably to US money, but we're all contractors.
UK perm roles looking for the sort of experience I have tend to pay somewhere in the region of 33%-50% of what I can make as a contractor. Even in London perm, roles almost never break six figures AFAICT.
> Even Doctors in the UK get paid less than a senior engineer at a decent company
They may well do, the comparison I was making was between the US and the UK.
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.
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.
It is if you take the US health insurance cost and compare it to the uk employees NI.
And UK has 20k PA ISA allowance (put 20k beyond tax) and a 12.3 k CGT Allowance and we don't get crucified on employee shares, if my EMI shares vest I pay no income tax and 10% CGT
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?
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 100€ nothing is deduced from my salary.
One year of prestigious university is less than 600€ in fees...
Cost of living, education, transportation, etc... also are a factor.
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 $144,000 job in Europe (before you get into housing and food prices etc.)
The health check is paid for out of taxes though, in the end money/goods/services aren't free.
I mean sure, France's government and health care system is probably a bit more efficient than America's, but I doubt it's order of magnitude different. Maybe more importantly, but in the other direction, as a developer in France you're probably paying more for healthcare than you use (subsidizing the average person who pays less taxes). Quite arguably differences like those are things that you are purchasing with your salary by choosing to live in the US instead of France, I don't think it's either desirable or really possible to eliminate them.
62k€ = 75k usd, 150 - 75 = 75. so assuming both numbers are before tax (and neglecting things like bonuses, benefits, equity, etc that you probably need to add into both numbers), there's your comparison.
Now the question to you is "is Lyon worth 75k/year over California". That's not a question of compensation, that's just a question of how much you value the difference in culture and society. Do you want to spend 75k$/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.
> 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.
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.
Yeah, I was surprised by it when I first looked it up also. I think partly because most people who are demographically similar to me are on private health insurance, so I think of the US as having mostly a private system. But a little over 40% of the U.S. population has public coverage: 20% are on Medicaid or CHIP (lower-income), 18% Medicare (age 65+), and 5% military/veteran.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the U.S. I don’t think it’s really possible to (legally) segregate benefit packages by pay range. What they do is segregate based on part time/full time, and barring that, use contractors for their low paid positions.
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.
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.
> The profits may be capped but US healthcare is still insanely expensive compared to other first world nations.
Number 1: It's not the profits that are capped. Profits plus operating expenses are capped. Operating expenses (like paying folks in the call center to answer questions about coverage, adjudicating claims, etc.) come out of the insurance company's 15/20% (national/regional). If medical claims are less than 75/80% of premiums, the insurer is legally obligated to issue rebates. If the cost of administering the plan is more than 15/20%... too bad, so sad: the insurance company is legally obligated to loose money and (eventually, if they don't fix it) go bankrupt.
Number 2: I never said that it wasn't more expensive in the US. Just that health insurance companies are not the reason it is so (which was the reason you cited for the US's high healthcare costs). Mathematically, even if you assume it's entirely graft and profit (and it's not--processing claims is not free), the very best you can do is a 20% reduction in costs. What accounts for the rest?
Bear in mind that medical doctors in the USA earn as much as FAANG engineers. The average doctor salary across all specialties in the USA is $300k. Many earn 2x that. By way of comparison, it is unusual for a doctor in the UK to earn even as much as $200k, and the average is around $100k.
Unless the UK is somehow finding people who will pay money to the NHS in exchange for the honor of answering phones and administering claims, I find it difficult to believe that health insurers are anywhere close to the biggest driver of healthcare costs in the US.
When you include residents in the US pay the "average across all specialities" is way less than $300k.
> Specialists range £41k to £76k.
You've misunderstood what they said. They said "speciality doctors", not "specialist doctors". In England the trainee ranking is Foundation Years, Core Trainee, Speciality Trainee.
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.
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.
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
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.
> It's not a lot of money if that's your household income and you have kids.
Its about 50% above median family income in California for a family of four, and most of those families of four aren’t getting by with just a single worker.
> 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.
Yeah, it is. I mean, its not “eat out every day” money, but its quite comfortable.
> Sure 150k is a great salary if you're fresh out of college and share an apartment with other people
150K is almost the median household income of households headed by a Ph.D. holder (not the single personal income of someone who just graduated with a Ph.D., but the median of all households headed by a Ph.D. holder.)
> 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.
Then don’t stay in the big city; Sure, SF the Bay Area core cities are quite expensive, but you can drop to a much lower CoL within a reasonable commute distance, either within the 9-county Bay Area or adjacent, such as southwestern Solano County; that’s how plenty of people with families get by making far less than gamedev salaries working outside tech in core Bay Area cities.
>Its about 50% above median family income in California for a family of four
You're missing a key point, that this thread is about game dev salaries and most of them tend to be in major cities (and require you to go in). Sure you can central California and work on a farm, but that's irrelevant.
>Yeah, it is. I mean, its not “eat out every day” money, but its quite comfortable.
It depends on where you are and for most game devs, I wouldn't consider it "quite comfortable".
>150K is almost the median household income of households headed by a Ph.D. holder
Sure, but they'd still won't have it easy if it's a family of 4.
>but you can drop to a much lower CoL within a reasonable commute distance, either within the 9-county Bay Area or adjacent, such as southwestern Solano County
I used to work for Ubisoft in San Francisco and let me tell you there isn't a single county within "reasonable" commute that is cheaper to live in. My commute was one and half hours each way and was still paying $2200 for a single bedroom apartment (two bedroom was unaffordable).
There's no denying there's people in California who make way less and live far from the big cities. But there's a reason why the limit to be considered "low income" is $120000 in San Francisco for a family of 4 (and similar in other big cities where game studios have offices).
> You’re missing a key point, that this thread is about game dev salaries and most of them tend to be in major cities
That’s where (to within viable commuting distance) the majority of the people in California live, so, no, that doesn’t make the statewide aggregates inapplicable comparators. More than 20 million of the just under 40 million state population lives in the 9-county Bay Area, LA County, or San Diego County, and that doesn't even cover all the major cities or the full reasonable commute distance from those it does.
> I used to work for Ubisoft in San Francisco and let me tell you there isn’t a single county within “reasonable” commute that is cheaper to live in.
Almost every other Bay Area has a substantially lower cost of living; within a 90-minute commute radius you can be in a place with literally half the cost of living (e.g., Vallejo.)
If you're living in a more expensive area, its because you prefer a more expensive area, not because its all there is within a reasonable commute radius.
> There’s no denying there’s people in California who make way less and live far from the big cities.
There’s plenty of people that make way less and live in the big cities (not just their commute radius); per capita annual income in SF is about 70K, median household income $112K. [0]
> But there’s a reason why the limit to be considered “low income” is $120000 in San Francisco for a family of 4 (and similar in other big cities where game studios have offices).
It’s actually $146,350 in SF. (Including Marin and San Mateo; the San Francisco HUD Metro FMR Area).
But just next door its $109,600 (Oakland-Fremont, CA HUD Metro FMR Area, which includes Alameda and Contra Costa Counties)
Out to Solano County its $77,600.
In Sacramento County, where EA’s Capital Games studio is located, its $72,500. [1]
And, again, those are all household thresholds; supporting a family on a single earner’s pay has been a luxury for decades; that you can only just barely do it above the local “low income” threshold on the game dev salary you quote if you choose to live in literally the single most expensive place possible, despite other less-expensive places being close by, isn’t a sign that the pay in your field isn’t great.
How do people who aren’t a software developer, doctor, or in a high paying financial sector get buy in CA metros. From what I’ve seen, even other highly technical engineering fields rarely make it to $150k
The short answer is, it's tough to do it on a single income that's 150k as a family. The lower you are the tougher it gets. There is a reason why even the lowest of the city employees get paid six figure salaries, a plumber charges you $250 and driving lessons are $60/hour. For example, in the city of San Fracisco, to qualify as "low income household", the limit is almost $120k for a family of 4 or $82k for a single person.
> There is a reason why even the lowest of the city employees get paid six figure salaries
Er, they don't. The median, not lowest, pay for employees of the City and County of San Francisco is barely into six figures. [0]
The lowest pay categories (calculated by annualizing the biweekly max,so this is probably a slight overestimate) pay
$36,114/yr, which is far short of 6 figures. [1]
Okay, maybe lowest was not the best word to be used. What I meant was a lot of the city employees get paid six figure salary. And that's because it's expensive to live here. Comparing game dev salaries from the bay area to UK kind of misses that point.
Sure those numbers exist, because the city has to have pay scales for every job category, but I think the more important thing to ask is what percentage of the workers are actually low paid employees.
I couldn't find a report that would easily displays that info, but here's a news item from a couple years back where 75% of the bay area city employees were earning 6 figures. [0]
Another question you want to ask is what positions exist in that excel spreadsheet, do people even take those jobs full time and what percentage of people do sit in that spectrum? For example here's another story that reports a starting wage of almost 50k for a Janitor. Of course there's going to be a few jobs that exist in lower end of the spectrum, but that still doesn't take away from the fact that it's expensive to live here and therefore, you shouldn't compare high salaries in the bay with others elsewhere one to one. [1]
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.
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.
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.
Only if you're uninsured. Any halfway decent health insurance plan has out of pocket maxes that a software engineer can easily cover.
I'm general, QOL is going to be better in Europe if youre in a low income bracket because you get so much as a public service. But if you make real money, you're going to be better off in America.
I have never seen a health-care plan in the US with real out-of-pocket maxes. The fine-print is crazy on those clauses. We got burned by going to an ER while traveling, and while the ER bill was covered under out-of-pocket maxes, both doctors who saw our son in the ER were not employees of the ER, and so counted as neither in-network nor emergency room care. Basically 90% of the bill was not subject to the out-of-pocket maximum on our plan.
Washington state passed a law making this sort of balance billing illegal, effective Jan 1 2020.
It's a huge problem nationwide, though, and ultimately needs to get addressed at the federal level. It's absolutely insane and fraudulent that an in-network hospital has out-of-network providers within it.
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.
One chilling exception I found with a previous employer was in the small print with "premium" cancer treatment medications. I kept thinking cancer is a primary case where I really do not want to worry about if my chemo drugs are on the premium list or not to avoid out of pocket costs.
Anyone feeling like sharing insights about what it's like in the EU? It will probably highly depend on the country/region (wild guessing that salaries in eastern EU are lower) but these salaries are beyond my wildest dreams.
I live in Belgium, work for an international company, I have a master's degree in computer science, speak three languages fluently (French, English, Spanish) and have been working for 10 years as a software engineer, I currently get paid 2500 EUR net per month (+ a company car, fuel card and some other minor benefits [lunch ticket and such]).
Quick back-of-the-envelope calculation:
2500,0 EUR (net, started at 1750 EUR)
× 1,7 (various taxes)
x 13 (everybody has a "13th month" in this field)
--------
55250 EUR (gross)
Yes, anything related to health is cheaper here but even if you factor that in...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Oh, right as a contractor it's no doubt still stressful. I'm talking from the point of view of an owner's engineer - utility companies tend to be pretty relaxed for internal employees.
> 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.
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.
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.
weird comparison since even a regular 3 year professional will make millions in their short career.
250K is not unusual money if you are regularly advancing on oppurtunities (and for the people around here, it wouldn't even be seen as impressive). Whether you want to wait a decade to move to that point or 5 years at FAANG is up to the individual. But the topic here seems to assert that you can't make good money at all in the industry, not how fast you make it.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I don't entirely agree, averages are useful for decisions like deciding if I want to move to a new city, or deciding what type of job I want. But I want a great fit when I'm looking for a new job. If I have an average job that I don't have strong feelings for, I don't need to accept the first good offer. So I can wait for something I'm really excited about.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
The answer is that it differs between public and private companies. It's exceedingly difficult to value the equity in a startup that may not IPO for years. Its exceedingly easy to value RSUs that vest each month and then are immediately sold for cash.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I love levels but the self-selecting group who reports their comp there cannot be used to reliably estimate the average, since they are not a random sample. I would guess propensity to report is correlated with higher TC.
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.
When making games are hard and make huge profit why are the salaries low?
I doubt the argument that there are vast number of game developers who are passionate and are willing to take low salary. The reason is if that is the case why don't they make their own games?
My hypothesis is to make game only few people in the team need high skill and the majority need low skill hence the compensation is low as the entry is easy and supply is high.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
This is a good observation. You can have a feature list for a game and complete every one (hah, who am I kidding!), but if the end product isn't fun, so what? It's not going to be successful, and all your effort is wasted.
There's the in-principle estimatable work to implement all of the game systems and then there's all the other unpredictable work to actually make the damn thing fun.
Feature-creep is endemic because creative directors/stake-holders can just move the goalposts or insist on their pet features / vision.
>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
I'd say they are harder to *succeed* than a few decades back. Especially for indies. Development is easier than ever with tools and assets available for no cost (during development at least).
e.g. If you make a platformer in 2008 and get it on a store for $20, you would probably get a decent following just because you managed to get it on the store.
If you make the same game in 2020, even if it was a really good game, it's harder to be noticed and gamers will always have "but is it as good as Hollow Knight/Celeste" in the back of their heads. Games that each spent years refining their mechanics and ultimately sold for $20 each. Games that right now sell for $10. It indirectly buries and caps your market to try and compete there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The easy fix to this is to not exempt “IT Professionals” from overtime in a bullshit rider on a completely unrelated law. Pay overtime, make it expensive to drive employees over 40 hours, and the problem disappears overnight.
That’s exactly what EA did in response to the “EA Spouse” episode. New grad employees are hired as hourly, non-exempt workers and paid overtime for their first couple years. The financial incentive alone doesn’t eliminate crunch, but it is one of many factors that has improved the culture at EA over the last 15 years.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
> 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.
1. it's a multidisplinary effort that involves interfacing not just with engineers, managers, and maybe clients, but with artist, writers, sound designers, and sometimes voice actors. Very, very few people will have the full scope of a large game in their mind makling a game. It also means one of these pieces can vastly slow down the entire pipeline if they get slowed down/behind schedule.
2. many traditional games operate on movie schedules; i.e. timing is everything. missing a launch at November vs. January can cost millions, and most sales are recuped in the first few months. So the pressure to hit deadlines is heavier than some continual service brining in a steady revenue stream. Granted, the rise of Games as a Service through the free-to-play model is starting to change this, for better or worse.
3. even within programming, there are so many topics that games delve into. Graphics programming, netcode, UI/UX design, (basic) AI, etc. you need some very specialized people to make these games, up there with a FAANG despite most studios making nowhere near that much.
4. you can't schedule "fun". Game design is almost a black box. If you flesh out this system and it just doesn't feel good, what do you do? delay the game and overspend on the budget? release it anyway and take the critical panning (spoilers, most games do this option)? this mixed with #1 means it's harder than usual to schedule, even with the widsom of "double the time needed".
5. more of a personal take here, but based on #4: games are much more "in tune" with the consumer audience than other media. core gamers watch games like hawks and it seems like everything being worked on is covered in NDA's. some onlooker would think these studios are hiding governemt secrets with how tight lipped industry keeps devs.
This leads to many psychological factors, but as a TL;DR it means a) devs may have internal pressure to impress the audience compared to other sectors and b) consumers, being blacked boxed out of the process, underestimate how much work it is to make a game. A consumer base more internet saavy than any other medium before it, since gaming basically grew up with the internet side by side.
It's many factors and I'm sure I haven't even covered half of them in that wall above.
>I'm just in awe of Roblox, Minecraft, Fall Guy and all these other successes.
I'm sure minecraft and roblox are impressed too. they took years to get to where they are, so they are some of the counterexamples to the traditional model I listed.
Fall guys truly proves point #2. it came out at the perfect time (a time no one could predict far out enough to take advantadge of) and blew up for it.
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!
Am I supposed to feel sorry for games developers? Like they are some exploited sweat shop workers? One example in there a person was earning 150k+. They started off low and due to experience increased their salary. We keep getting told how awful the games industry is. I'm doubtful, why would so many people continue to work in it? At the very least any of the programmers could move to other sectors.
I'm guessing the answer is the type of work. It's highly creative unlike business programming.
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.
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.
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.
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
Don't spend a lot on school for becoming an artist, find another job (welder) and then do art on your spare time as a hobby. The creative arts are rarely rewarded and there's stiff competition.
Are there just too many games? I basically rotate my time between a space mmo called Dual Universe and Red Dead Redemption 2 on the ps5. That’s it - I pay a monthly fee for DU and paid 60 bucks a few years ago for RDR2. That’s it. That’s all the gaming I really need for months.
Go to the web or steam up and see a plethora of games and realize how little share of wallet most of these games get. Unfortunately it’s not enough to pay some designers any decent salary. Sad to say but it may be a problem that works itself out through survival of the fittest. Only the best games will get the most bucks and the rest will languish. But if there isn’t enough time for them, should they really exist in the first place?
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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").
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.
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.
The top 5 appear to be teachers, steelworkers, public service workers, autoworkers, and electrical workers. How many of these would you describe as "unskilled"?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
well a good teacher could probably notice whether his colleagues are good teachers quite easily (at least if he had access to their classes etc.). Now that I think about it: colleagues probably are the best metric even for jobs like programmers (at least if they work on the same project/codebase) etc. However, it would be socially problematic if your colleagues were responsible for deciding your pay raises.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.