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Comment by btym | Hacker News Reader

>“$2,400 was my yearly salary working a full time eight hours a day, 40 hours a week job.”

Why would you ever choose to work there in the first place?

Yikes, that's only 60 sold licenses to pay for a whole year's worth of salary. They have sold over 1.5m licenses on Steam alone:

http://steamspy.com/app/220200

Absolutely shameful.

TO put this in perspective, they made about $60 million, and paid out probably less than $60 thousand total as salary here in the 1.5 ish years the game has been out.

I really don't get it. If the owners make that much, why would they want to be such total jerks? At this point it would cost them extremely little to pay a decent wage. It's not as if it's fiscally prudent either, since losing your good name and having all the developers walk out on you isn't exactly cheap.

Because you're 21, and want to make video games, and live with your parents?

For coders thinking they'll just build something cool?

This is your competition.

More reasons to evolve your career away from coding, it's a dead end by 35, you'll just be outcompeted on so many fronts.

And do what instead? Where is that not an issue?

Probably, yes. I'm guilty of taking jobs like these in the past as well.

Sounds reasonable. We might be talking about a modder or someone in other ways deeply invested in the community who is given pocket change each month as some kind of hobby stipend. Which is perfectly all right precisely up to the moment where anyone involved starts to think of it as a full time gig, maybe a career even.

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.

Well see humans unlike companies have this thing called dedication, they'll work insane hours for little pay because they believe in what they are doing. Companies who are dedicated to nothing, but money will lash a rope around them and ride it to the bank.

It's called capitalism...

> dedication

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.

Well, the obvious answer is that better offers weren't at hand.

To be honest, KSP's a hell of a resume entry. It's like asking someone why they might join the Peace Corps.

Except a version of the Peace Corps where the suits are raking in tens of millions of dollars on the back of your nearly free labor.

The Olympics and the NCAA.

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).

The NCAA is far worse. KSP was exploitative, but at least these employees could quit and get a different job. If you want to play pro football/basketball, the ncaa owns you. And they're gonna make sure that everyone around gets paid (coaches, universities, chancellors, shoe sponsors) while the athletes stay broke, poor, and never really end up getting that supposed education either. With free risk of life-altering injury!

Well, games don't really make a lot of money, unless you are King or another mobile giant, or make CoD or Fifa. I work at one of the largest games companies in the world, and all I can say is that for every game that makes millions of dollars, we have 20 projects that never even see a public announcement and eventually die, yet still cost us tons of money. That's where most of the money goes.

But yeah, programmers are hilariously underpaid, until they get to Senior level or above - there's just loads of people to fill junior positions.

No. That viewpoint is utterly toxic to anyone who wants to work as a game dev. The Peace Corps is not making a ton of money off your back.

I'm not a game programmer. As an outside observer, the whole game dev industry seems pretty toxic. That may be a wild misconception. My first inkling came from the whole EA widows thing. I don't actually go looking for opinions, so the few opinions i see come from these kinds of explosions. From my old stale point of view, it seems like companies exploit passion until the devs can't hack it anymore.

Should i update my opinion? Has game dev gotten better?

Parts of it have. Other parts are still very happily engaged in a race to the bottom that shows no signs of stopping. (Under no circumstances would I ever recommend working in mobile, for example, unless it's King or another hit machine.)

Yes and no.

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

Game dev companies I've interviewed in Germany were just bad. I can't name names because of the things they make you sign, but I've talked to a bunch of employees and they were

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.

Everybody and their dog wants to work as a game dev. Nearly every program to get kids interested in programming involves games. Nearly everybody who gets into programming does so because they like games and think that this makes game development a fine career choice.

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.

I'm the other way around, never been remotely interested in game programming I actually like solving 'boring' business use cases.

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).

And you are trying to force your view onto others. If I want to work for a minimum wage creating games, then let me.

Being a key part of the development of one of the biggest commercial success stores in indie gaming ever should be good for more than an entry on your CV though.

But nobody knew it was going to be a big success when it started, so that doesn't justify anyone's behavior.

Well now KSP is going to be renowned for paying developers less than fast food workers. Hell I know homeless people making more in street change than these developers.

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.

You wouldn't hire anyone who worked on KSP because of assumptions you've made?

You dangerously sound like you don't trust poor people. I bet such reasoning makes rising out of poverty harder than it otherwise already is.

The article states that the minimum wage in Mexico is $100/month ($1,200/year). My guess is he moved to Mexico to work on this and gain experience. Pay sucks but the game is successful and if he didn't publicly come out against the company it would have likely led to higher paying jobs in the states due to association.

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.

Did you mean "intents and purposes" or did some wordplay go over my head?

It's common usage, supposably.

*supposively

*supposedly

that's the joke...

whoosh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn

"mating name instead of maiden name"

I gotta admit, that made me laugh.

I always thought it was "in tents and porpoises".

Oh, the huge manotee!

So good.

Hah, we laugh at that one, but as soon as you point out that "performant" is not an English word, the HN "languages evolve!" guys come out of the woodwork with their pitchforks.

Squad wasn't a startup, it was already an established company when KSP was being developed.

Excuse me? For all intents and purposes $2400 a year is less than I spend on parking every year. This is not a "startup" salary, this is less than 1/10th the salary of your typical QA engineer IN MEXICO.

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.

There's a difference between whitewashing and seeing the bright side. Having been on the dev team of this popular game is useful. Presumably even the $2,400/yr was useful, though obviously only as useful as $2,400/yr is. I'm not saying it's fair, I'm saying "it happened, and what now?" It's Success 101. When you go through something that sucks, by all means enumerate what sucked about it so you can watch out for those things in the future. But the next thing a successful type of person does is take inventory of what positive and useful things they got out of it, or can make out of it. And then go do it. Cry if you want, have yourself a little outrage parade for your Facebook friends, but it's a waste of time. Maybe fester over it for 20 years and get an ulcer, that'll show 'em! Meanwhile if I interview that person I will stay far away, and hire the guy who found the bright side.

So you're saying that it is bad for people to complain when they are shafted. That they should look on the bright side for whatever they were subjected to.

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 words you're putting in my mouth are very imaginative, but no, I don't believe in exploiting people. I'm saying people on here pointing out upsides of this, don't deserve to be accused of trying to "whitewash," because finding the upside is actually a good way to handle shitty things that happen.

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.

Normally people take part of their "low" salary in shares in that case. Not here though.

These developers would have been better off begging for money on the street.

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