There's no easy way to say this
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I live in Mexico, I've never seen anyone in Mexico make minimum wage, ever. And I do know people from all walks of life.
As to what they earn, again, I live in Mexico, I am employed by a Mexican company, and work for Mexican clients. I make their yearly salary in 15 days or so. It really is disgusting that they would treat employees this way, specially when they were such a big success.
As yearly salary it is indeed atrocious. Still, worth saying, not an illegal salary. But yeah, I don't see many people enticed to work for that amount for a for-profit company they don't have significant ownership of. The point is not on whether or not it is advisable to resign in those conditions (of course it is), but on whether it is viable to sue (I doubt it is).
And... many people in Mexico do make minimum wage (around 13% of the country does), but usually not anyone in a specialized profession in a city.
"This is so shitty that the nicest thing that can be said is it's not actually illegal" doesn't merit the exculpatory nature of this sentence. And the sentiment behind it isn't really worth much in the first place.
We dont know how much the coders were making.
Much of that depends on specifics. Some of these devs traveled. Any work done while in other jurisdictions must have been done at local minimum wages. It doesn't take many days spent on the road promoting KSP in the US before you are legally entitled to more.
There are prosecuted cases of offshore firms sending below-minimum workers into the US. It is a crime.
(From British Columbia, a typical such jurisdiction.)
"If a third party is or will be indebted to a person who is required to pay money under a determination, the Branch may demand that the third party pay all or part of their indebtedness directly to the Branch."
"The Branch may seize personal or business assets of a person required to pay under a determination, settlement agreement or order to satisfy the amount owing and the costs of the seizure. The Branch may direct the Court Bailiff to seize assets to recover the amount owing. "
http://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/employment-business/employ...
The devs agreed voluntarily to accept this salary for a number of years. It is not ours to judge whether this it was too small, because for them it was not (until now)
Likewise, if you insist on "this salary is too small for them", you're saying that you know better what's good for them than they themselves. I would find that offensive.
Many of the other comments seem to be accusing the employer of acting in bad faith, or of immoral behavior. If the employees knew exactly what they were getting into, these accusations seem baseless.
Regarding immoral behavior on the part of the employer: I still don't buy that either. Someone can be a bad employer (ie, one that i would never want to work for), and still be perfectly morally upstanding. If someone, in a competitive labor marketplace, takes on a job which has low pay, I don't think they can accuse their employer of immoral behavior because of low pay. Such accusations should be saved for those scums that pull a bait-and-switch and refuse to honor their promises.
Squad is taking advantage of its developers. There's no other way to put it. It's over-working them with massive crunch times (that may not have been communicated clearly to job seekers up front) and paying them a very tiny fraction of what they could be earning elsewhere. Who knows how much of that is related to false promises. A lot of scummy employers will say things like "The pay will go up after an introductory period", or "We'll give you a raise soon", and then it never happens. Maybe it happened here. We don't know until we listen to the employees' stories. That's why my first instinct is not to look for reasons why it's their fault.
And working conditions are not an accident.
It's no different from people choosing a career in early childhood education. Some people insist on doing what they love, ignoring ugly financial issues caused by supply and demand.
People take very stupid decisions when they are desperate.
- Working on games is their dream job. They want to do it so much they'd do it for free.
- Long-term unemployment makes one desperate. I have personal experience with this: I once took a job that offered no benefits and low pay because I had been unemployed for two years and was desperate for a job.
- For the same reasons people don't get out of abusive relationships ASAP. They come to believe they deserve the abuse. Again, personal experience: working at a company with low pay and abusive management convinced me I wasn't cut out for anything better, and it was a long time before I broke free of that mental trap and eventually sought employment elsewhere.
- They think that the low pay is temporary and that it'll go up when the product takes off. And then the employer keeps delaying the salary increases by moving the goalposts. Hey, another trap I've fallen into... (and yes, all of my personal experience comes from the same company)
Sorry, but have you really met actual working class people that work in "maquilas"? It is not uncommon to see people earning around 600 MXN pesos a week which is barely enough to count as minimum wage.
I'm sure they aren't paid to work on international software projects.
Hmm, there are dead poor people in Mexico and even the US, including people that make less than minimum wage (from part time gigs they can manage to find, etc).
Also worth noting that at least half of Mexico's population lives below their own poverty line.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-economy-analysis-id...
EDIT: none of what I said applies; this was in Mexico.
Seems like that's twice the minimum wage where it happened (just from reading the post/comments), so it's extremely unlikely to be "illegal" where it happened.
(it's a curious question as to whether there's anything illegal, and if so, on who's part, if a Mexican business is paying above-local-minimum wage salaries to people who are not local. If you _accept_ a remote job where the renumeration is disclosed but below your local minimum wage - I wonder if any law has been broken, and if so, by who?)
Yes. That is a crime. The employee has committed a crime by negotiation/accepting the wage. The employer has too. Regardless of where they think they "work" they are employing someone standing in the other jurisdiction. If one allows offshore companies to bypass wage laws then every single local company would be run through an offshore shell, negating the local law. So it is near-universal that offshores must comply with local wage laws.
In practical terms, a flesh-and-blood 'employee' isn't going to be prosecuted. That side of things is reserved for sub-contracting entities that aren't real people. Negotiating a sub-minimum wage contract remains a crime for subcontractors. This is necessary to prevent one-person "companies" negotiating illegal pay for their one employee under the fiction that they are an arms-length subcontractor when everyone knows the person is effectively an employee.
I guess the question here (as per nine_k comment) becomes, if you are working remotely, for a position listed in country A, but you are located in country B, do country B's minimum wage laws apply? If so, does that mean the company in country A should pay you a higher wage, or simply means you don't qualify for the position (note that developer positions in Mexico with Mexican companies are often advertised with offer details such as the salary, in a way that is not common in the U.S.)
Edit: huge correction on the multiplier on minimum wage. For some reason I had been comparing monthly rates with annual ones and arriving at 24x. Upon careful examination, that is ridiculous, but the overall point remains. With the correction, this is actually hugely subpar wages for developers even in Mexico, but not quite illegal wages... for reference, entry level dev work at software companies might be around $20,000 MXP, which is currently $1,000 USD monthly.
> To be fair to Squad, the Mexican minimum wage is about $100 USD monthly, so they weren't technically paying anyone lower than the minimum wage...
As to what they earn, again, I live in Mexico, I am employed by a Mexican company, and work for Mexican clients. I make their yearly salary in 15 days or so. It really is disgusting that they would treat employees this way, specially when they were such a big success.
But what do you mean by that? Do they get paid less or more?
[1] (in Spanish) http://www.milenio.com/politica/salario_minimo-aumento_salar...
That sounds like what my friend made as a cashier here in Mexico.
Very shitty payment, even for this country. A good entry level job starts at about 10k a month.
July 2015 - Oct 2016: Lead Engineer, Squad
Delivered Kerbal Space program version 1.2 on time and on budget. Managed team of 5 geographically distributed developers and graphic artists. Reduced defect count by 17%
Reads way better than:
July 2015 - Oct 2016: Panhandler, Mission and 16th
Achieved 11% month on month growth in revenue. Exceeded all set goals and milestones. Migrated from crack to high grade Bolivian cocaine without incurring mob debt or serious personal injury.
;-)
(Though with a little more polishing and embellishment, I bet you could get that second entry past a typical recruiter... Maybe change to "July 2015 - Oct 2016: Growth Hacking Contractor, Bay Area Startup still in stealth mode (under NDA)... " and "Migrated from legacy processes to best practice agile methodology without incurring technical debt or serious downtime." - there, that ought to do it...)
Why would you ever choose to work there in the first place?
This is your competition.
The failure on the side of squad then isn't so much in not paying them more (although that would certainly be one way to solve it), it's in not realizing that there can't be a middle ground.
What I don't get at all, no matter how you spin the story, is how anybody could be forced to overtime etc on pocket change. Sure, that stuff happens millions of times each day, but it would typically involve people at the brink of starvation in an isolated mining town or so. Remote tech workers with enough leisure time to fall deep into the rabbit hole of gaming don't quite fit that pattern.
It's called capitalism...
We would not be talking about this if it were a number of unmistakable volunteers quitting after running out of dedication. Add 200$/month and you get a situation where both sides are prone to confuse a bit of thank-you-cash with an actual job.
This may not be popular to many people but I'm sure it's well known on on Hacker News by now. Long hours in startup companies are not new nor are they going away. This was a startup for all intensive purposes.
I gotta admit, that made me laugh.
I see a lot of posts in this thread that seem to be trying to whitewash the work hours and the pay as somehow reasonable. They're not, not even for the notoriously-bad-to-work-for game industry.
And you are saying that you want to hire people that will not complain when they are exploited. I'd not want to work for anyone like you, since you would think it is my fault that I was stupid enough to get screwed.
What this whole Squad developer thing tells me is there needs to be a way for exploited employees to retaliate legally, because nothing much seems to be happening at the moment.
The advice applies in the mental and emotional realm and isn't supposed to be an answer to "what to do in the practical realm to resolve the issue." People should go ahead and take whatever actions they can toward a satisfactory resolution. But that part is boring to me, because usually the actions to take are obvious, and because even when you do everything right, still the outcome might go the wrong way. You're forced to conclude in that case that the outcome was "outside your control." However, I would argue that even when it goes your way, the outcome probably was outside your control. This sounds defeatist but is actually empowering because you can focus on the things that are WITHIN your control, which is always the interesting part. Learning a lesson from a shitty thing or not, is within your control. How you frame it to yourself, is within your control. Actually it's almost (I'm saying ALMOST) better if things DON'T go your way, especially a few non-catastrophic things that don't ruin your life. But they need to be things that at least hurt a little. Because then you have the chance to practice the kind of magical alchemy I'm talking about here, where you make gold out of lead.
These developers would have been better off begging for money on the street.
EDIT: I'm not saying its right, I'm saying it happens far more often than it should (as long as people decide not to opt out of being exploited).
But yeah, programmers are hilariously underpaid, until they get to Senior level or above - there's just loads of people to fill junior positions.
Should i update my opinion? Has game dev gotten better?
To illustrate your excellent point about how companies exploit passion, there are still some extremely small minded self aggrandizing sexist bigoted loud mouthed horrendous toddler Neanderthals throwing tantrums and insults and lighting toxic waste trash fires and melting down in public out there, exemplified by the shamefully long and sordid track record of Alex St. John [1], who even his daughter Amilia deplores [2].
But fortunately most of the rest of the game industry deplores Alex St. John just as much as his own daughter does, so thanks to her and others like EA Widow bravely stepping up and speaking out, things are gradually improving.
Amilia St. John proves her point by quoting her father's own vile words in her article "I am Alex St. John’s Daughter, and He is Wrong About Women in Tech" [3]:
"And finally, here we are at this written hemorrhoid from my father’s blog:"
“Why do young white males tend to be the ones who pick up computers, teach themselves to code, start businesses in their basements with their friends and get rich? It’s an obvious opportunity to everybody isn’t it? If you are a different race, gender, or religion… what’s your excuse? I know of very very few successful bootstrapped tech companies founded by women or blacks.” -Alex St. John
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/alex-st-johns-sexist-recruitm...
[2] http://www.polygon.com/2016/4/21/11479710/alex-st-johns-daug...
[3] https://medium.com/@milistjohn/i-am-alex-st-john-s-daughter-...
On a brighter and more constructive note, I will also quote Amilia St. John's list of useful resources:
"If you are an individual interested in furthering the fight to improve ratios for women and minorities in the industry, there are so many opportunities to get involved! Start a female and minority hackathon, volunteer to mentor young women and minorities in computer science, or even just start by learning more.
Here is a {short} list of other resources to get you started."
http://girlswhocode.com/ -An excellent nonprofit with a focus on teaching women k-12 how to code. They make it relatively easy to start (or join) a group in your area!
http://www.code2040.org/ -An awesome site with a focus on blacks and latinos in the coding industry
http://www.2020shift.com/ -Focus on minorities in hybrid careers in the tech business. I love this website because it is all about entering the tech world if you ARE NOT in a technical career.
https://www.codecademy.com/ -A great start to dive in to the basics of coding.
https://scratch.mit.edu/ -This is an amazing tool for young children learning how to code. It teaches children to think logically while removing the syntax hurdles.
https://blog.hootsuite.com/four-inspiring-women-in-tech/ -Some killer tech giants who are making a difference.
http://ghc.anitaborg.org/ -Grace Hopper is a female and minority focused conference. I have unfortunately never had the opportunity to go but I constantly hear what an amazing experience it is. Students can earn scholarships to finance their trip.
http://codepen.io/ -This site is a personal favorite tool. It is such a fun playground for front end development. It allows you code while simultaneously working with HTML, CSS and Javascript and it is so flexible. It is all buffed out with preprocessors galore.
- If you want to continue the conversation, hit me up at anytime on twitter, my handle is @milistjohn
a) one of the "dinosaurs" who honestly believe things will get back to how they were when they first started while explaining how everything will change the moment I join
b) depressed developers who were supposed to explain what I would be doing but ended up explaining how chaotic everything works there.
It is also fairly possible that my resume is just bad and I've been interviewed just by the dysfunctional companies, but there aren't so many here to begin with.
By supply and demand, you should expect a price of roughly zero. In other words, it's a hobby. Enjoy it, have fun, and do something else to pay your bills.
It's half programming and half process optimization, it's amazing (unless you work in those places) just how inefficient a process can be before you automate it (I sometimes think that the process of automating a manual process is like when the rewrite is much better in a different language because all the edge cases are known from the first one).
I would be hesitant to hire anyone from KSP. From my admittedly limited experience interviewing people, those people who value themselves at the bottom end of the market generally are lacking in some manner that makes them unsuitable for working in a team in a professional setting.
They most likely make great hackers and I bet they are very capable in one particular way, but can they cope in a fast paced business with large responsibilities? I've found that people asking for way below the market rate are asking for a very good reason and that's that they are not up to scratch for this type of environment.
http://steamspy.com/app/220200
Absolutely shameful.
One thing that most people in this thread seem to be confused about: PDtv, the guy making $2400/year, was a "Media Director", not a developer.
As a generalization when a significant group from a successful game walks out en mass, it's because they feel the owners aren't fairly sharing profits. Letting this happen is usually a really dumb move by the owners.
A great example is the Medal of Honor franchise, which raised a studio best known for a nice quake expansion to the top of the industry. The owners did not treat the team in a way the team considered fair. The bulk walked out, signed a deal with another publisher to become their own studio, and the Call of Duty franchise was born. I think most people are aware that CoD has made an obscene amount of money. It's hard to believe that whatever selfish split the MoH owners were getting justified not having any split of that team's later work.
When you have a team that has proven they can hit the top, the last thing to do is treat them as disposable.
I wonder why this game hasn't seen a resurgence (in the West) on today's mobile devices yet.
Another key factor is often the owners stifling creative developments in order to chase $. This is particularly the case with long running franchises that are being milked rather than developed.
the project itself was a employee pet project (Harvester's) and he was about to quit to start it, but they convinced him to stay. Harvester should have seen it coming, since the very reason he was fed up to leave was the way Squad treated the employee as low quality tools, but hey, it's not an easy decision to start your own thing in a climate of financial insecurity
It's very sad seeing this happen since i love KSP and as a Mexican it was great to see sonething like this being made here. How is it that you lay waste to something as cool as KSP :(
I hope this development is not so much a product of internal company bullshit, but now I'm very worried it is. KSP is one of the most genuinely important games out there right now. I would be surprised if many less than 100% of the next generation of spacetravel-involved scientists and engineers counted KSP as part of their journey.
The original author quit several months ago.
Squad is a marketing company, and let him start KSP as a counteroffer when he wanted to quit.
That said, it's pretty sad to see development stops. At least they AFAIR sorted out the modding API issues, ensuring a stable platform for the community to work on. Honestly, that's what makes me believe KSP will be still improving in the coming years - the modding community is strong and have already pulled off incredible feats of programming and science (this game attracts a really specific crowd).
Honestly, this is one of the very few games I've enjoyed in the last 10 years.
Quake 3 Arena is a better example, which has open source code but proprietary graphics. OpenArena is the open variant.
Or HoverRace, where the developer released the source code but extremely late. The game was abandoned around 2000, community dead by 2004ish, and code released a few years after that. Too late to really save it, but it was still nice to play now and then.
This one: https://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/
Is a great example. This is the one game I've spent hours on as an adult. I wish the team the best.
THANK YOU GUYS ! you've made an incredible game with what you had, and inspired a lot of people to write amazing mods on top of it.
Wow, just wow. The company must be run by absolute sociopaths.
As a somewhat veteran player at this point, I confirm that this game is very important for space industry. It strikes the perfect balance between fun and science - making it easy to just eyeball your Mün missions and blow stuff up, while at the same time strongly encouraging learning real physics in order to figure out just what the fuck you're doing and how to hit your destination using less fuel.
Talk about your failed opportunities to pivot.
Generally, but not always, these kinds of stories aren't told about well-ran shops. But hey, it's video games, so who knows?
Mind, they're an advertising company by business: this is their first foray into games.
Who dose not immediately hire that team en masse has missed a huge opportunity.
IMO, NASA should hire those guys anyway. It'd be a good move.
For those who don't know about it, it's a spaceflight simulation game. You design a spacecraft from parts, assembling rocket engines, fuel tanks, thrusters, command modules, etc. into a design, and then test it and try to get it into orbit; or from there, to other planetary bodies. Multiple spacecraft if you want: you can dock and coordinate them, or build space stations or moon bases.
It's got an incredible amount of detail, modeling a whole solar system with various planets and moons and asteroids. Remember how the staff working on "No Man's Sky" made claims about how "all other video games are fake, they have a skybox, the planets and sun in our sky are real real and you can fly to them" (claims which turned out to be largely false)? Well, Kerbal Space Program actually delivers on that experience. You can rocket into space, dock in orbit with something you've put up there previously, gravity-slingshot yourself to another planet, parachute a lander down to the surface and roam around, etc.
The game has realistic space flight physics and orbital mechanics (though tuned to be very generous to players compared to real life). You can learn a lot about the basic mechanics of spaceflight just by playing it; you begin to intuitively understand delta-v, apoapsis and when to apply thrust, etc. If you want to dock with with something then you need to plan an appropriate launch window. Maneuvering in orbit is very interesting and initially counter-intuitive (if a spacecraft is "ahead" of you in orbit, in which direction should you boost to "catch up" to it? If you boost directly toward it, you'll increase your orbital speed and thus the shape of your orbit, taking you away from it in a different dimension!). Getting to other astral bodies is tricky and requires more planning. KSP manages to make all of this challenging but fun.
If you'd like to learn more about it, or are even just curious what the fuss is about (the game itself, not the drama), I'd direct you to videos by Scott Manley [1]. Here's a video of a fairly sophisticated mission starting with liftoff from the launch pad, made by another YouTuber [2] (skip to 13:00 to see him planning orbital maneuvers like circularizing his orbit). Manley's "Interstellar Quest" mission has even more complex orbital planning (5:00) [3].
The depth of KSP is astonishing and there's not much else out there like it. It's in the same ballpark as Minecraft in terms of the amazing creative sandbox it provides, with a world that has a ton of depth to explore. There's a wonderful atmospheric feel with the music and artwork that happens when you successfully lift off into space, going from the thrill of launch to the serenity of orbit. It's a beautiful feeling and one that isn't easily captured by recordings.
So it's sad to hear that the company and/or developers who made the game aren't carrying on. The game may not be a commercial success on the scale of Minecraft but the artistic and conceptual achievement are on par or greater.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/szyzyg [2] https://youtu.be/RzbDyx4Tpdc?t=10m7s [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSzj_uk1fRQ
Orbiter [0] is commonly mentioned. You trade a bit of the "fun" angle of KSP for more realism. The physics model is more advanced too: I believe halo/lissajous orbits are possible, it has lagrange points & more.
> with a world that has a ton of depth to explore
Very deep: on Duna's surface (KSP's Mars equivalent), there is a rock emitting an SSTV signal...
Still pre-release but very playable, 4/5 stars.
Space Engineers is a sandbox game about engineering,
construction, exploration and survival in space and
on planets. Players build space ships, space stations,
planetary outposts of various sizes and uses, pilot ships
and travel through space to explore planets and gather
resources to survive.
There's mod for KSP for that: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/62205-w...
Most interesting points: "Another point: Squad has been actively censoring the official forums. Any content related to the resignation of the 8 devs was immediately removed. This was done by Squad staff, not the regular forum mods. With this in mind, it's also pretty obvious that the latest Devnote is full of shit. They don't want anyone to think that something is wrong."
And: "Currently, there are 2-3 developers left. Two of them were not held highly by their fellow devs, and the third one is RoverDude, who only work part-time."
Fantastic. I love(d) KSP :(
I think it's pretty cool.
There. :)
Now it's _just_ "There's no easy way to say this"
Request granted, eh?
Dan could probably explain better than I. I don't have any information about whether this title was changed or why, but the current title strikes me as lining up with that approach. See also "I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words."
Quite an euphemistic way to say "clickbait", isn't it?
I first thought this was some announcement reddit was making. I don't mind working for the information, but I don't like misleading information.
> Dan could probably explain better than I.
Well done.
(Note that I am talking purely about titles, not the articles behind them.)
There's no need for every title to spell everything out. On the contrary, it serves reflection for readers to work a little, and 'reflective' (as opposed to 'reflexive') is the quality we most want here.
I wrote about this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11979596 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10161193 and a bunch of other places I can't find right now.
And in this case the title is written from the heart in the context of reddit, where it has "/r/KerbalSpaceProgram" automatically attached.
I cannot agree with categorizing the act of naming the company/brand as "spelling everything out". You have to work equally hard to understand this title with or without the name. It requires reading the post and putting in the same amount of mental effort. But the stripped-down version fails to serve the purpose of setting context. It might as well be a random ID.
The posts you linked both have titles that at least set context, whether or not some people wanted more information.