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Comment by bb88 | Hacker News Reader

If you think about employment as a business transaction, then you should insist on "Cash Up Front", e.g. signing bonus, higher salary, or immediate stock ownership to offset your personal risk. Joining a company is more of a risk to you as an employee than it is to them in hiring you.

Basically it comes down to asking for "Cash Up Front". Expecting a cash settlement on the backend of a failed business transaction is fraught with perils of not getting your investment back in the company. And asking for severance is no different.

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In an ideal world this would be feasible. Few people have the pricing power for their labor to do this. I'd classify what you call a failed business transaction as a failure of government to enact necessary labor laws.

So in a world where there's a glut of labor, you're absolutely right. We, however, are not in a glut of labor for software engineers and game designers.

And besides, if you explained to the employer the risks you forsee in joining their company, they will most likely understand that reason for asking for a higher salary than the norm.

We, however, are not in a glut of labor for software engineers and game designers

If that's true, why are you folks working in open offices and are wearing noise-cancelling headphones?

Because the price of rent in major city centres is ludicrous, I assume.

I’m thinking beyond software engineers. I’m thinking about people who don’t have pricing power for their labor and are not at all in a position to negotiate. They have to rely on government to help them with unequal balance in power when it comes to pricing for their labor.

I have a game design degree... And there are waaaaay more of us than there are companies to hire us. I ended working with other things because all game companies I tried wanted to offer minimum wages because there was tons of people trying to get into the industry so no reason to offer more

There absolutely is far more labor than positions available for game designers. Same for game programmers, many of whom have education and background so specific to games that they are effectively unemployable outside that industry. There are a bunch of schools that train hundreds of students on nothing but how to build high-level game logic in Unity.

Almost everyone directly involved in production of game titles (i.e. not middleware) would be financially much better off taking the skills they already have and working in another industry—e.g. management for game designers, tech for programmers—with the possible exceptions of artists and musicians.

To some extent, you're right. Point taken, there is a glut of game engineers. However, your comment about people being virtually unemployable outside the game industry rings hollow.

In the course of my career, there have been many people from a variety of backgrounds that became full fledged software engineers. One was a truck driver who became a top Java coder at the company I used to work for.

And the game engineer has a step up on that guy, since he actually understands how to code. He just needs to understand the way the web works.

Yes, this is something that can be fixed by law. At least my native country Finland has a sort of public bankruptcy insurance (“palkkaturva”) that extends automatically to all employees.

In the event of a bankruptcy leaving you with unpaid wages, you file an application with the same office that handles unemployment benefits, and they will recompensate you. C-level managers are exempt.

But taxes!

This is something entirely different. And FYI a strong incentive for companies to never offer any kind of severance in these situations since it's all socialized.

Better to just be transparent about things so employees can properly consider the risk in the situation.

Better it be required by law and provided by the government than you hoping you'll get severance and being beholden to a company's "generosity", and the company include the additional tax payments as cost of doing business (same as the other employment taxes they're required to pay).

The issue is severance during company bankruptcy.

Nobody ever expects companies to be 'generous' that's not a thing - the issues are in contracts like anything else.

Severance is never guaranteed though, bankruptcy or otherwise. If a company is going bankrupt, of course they're not going to have the funds to pay severance when closing up shop. Unless I'm misunderstanding the point (and the quotations around generosity were intended to convey that in bankruptcy, that doesn't exist).

Regardless, I suppose the end result should be to make unemployment kick in faster so you don't need an insolvent company to provide a severance they don't have the funds to provide.

Severance can be put in a contract like anything else, so it's as 'guaranteed' as any other obligation so long as the company can pay for it.

If severance is in your contract, and the company is insolvent, you are SOL. It is not like any other obligation, as an example, unemployment: your company pays into unemployment funds every month (mandated by government), which is what allows you to collect if you're let go, regardless of their solvency situation.

A severance agreement with a bankrupt company is worthless.

Yes, severance is like every other obligation, different only probably in seniority.

Obviously if the company is bankrupt they cannot pay.

Don't work for companies that are going, or could be going bankrupt. In the vast majority of the cases the writing is on the wall long before that happens.

Payroll taxes are just another form of income tax, the company doesn't really pay it, the employee does, economically speaking that money would go to the employee were those payroll taxes not to exist. The the co. does pay it is just an accounting issue.

And for most software companies, seniority is irrelevant. There aren't any assets to split up, so you'll be the first in line to get your slice of nothing.

The issue here is that a bankrupt company is breaking the contracts it made with employees — and you suggest it can be fixed by having employees enter into another contract with the same company. Do you see the problem?

No. There's little that can be done when a company goes bankrupt.

I'm suggesting if people know that the company could go bankrupt, it helps them make decisions.

And that severance is a normal part of a contract otherwise

What company is going to advertise months in advance that they might be going bankrupt? That's the surest way to make it come true.

This seems like some kind of weird libertarian fantasy where companies and employees have access to the same information and use it to make rational economic decisions. In reality, almost any failing company will use its payroll obligations as a bank of last resort to squeeze out that last chance of turning things around, and there's no contract that would protect employees from that.

"This seems like some kind of weird libertarian fantasy"

It's called the world we live in.

If a company's revenues are in decline, if there have been recent layoffs, well then the writing is on the wall.

A company folding should not come as a surprise to any of the employees unless the are utterly in the dark with respect to product development, revenues etc.

It's not a 'libertarian fantasy' to expect that employees etc. will have some idea of these numbers.

There's not much that can be done about solving the 'insolvency severance' deal. Severance beyond legal requirements is a bonus opportunity, and like all bonuses, it's subject to risk.

A privately held 100-person game studio doesn't share its evolving revenue numbers with creative staff. Why would the business owners do that, really?

Most private companies are strictly compartmentalized and keep production employees in the dark about the business side. Some startups do the "anyone can peek at our sales numbers and cash flows internally" thing, but that's definitely an exception even in the startup world.

game industry workers don't have the same bargaining power that people in other industries have.

> "Cash Up Front" ... or immediate stock ownership to offset your personal risk

so a grant with no vesting schedule? please enlighten us as to what employers are actually giving out such favorable deals.

Why have game industry workers not unionized? If now isn’t the time, I don’t know when is.

EDIT: I stand corrected.

Only 7% of private sector laborers are in a union of any kind in the US. That rate has fallen sharply for several decades, and the political apparatus of the United States, especially the Republican party, has been deliberately eradicating labor unions since WWII. That's the whole "Right to Work" thing.

umm, maybe start here and just ... I dunno, click around a bit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_Sta...

There are ongoing efforts to fix this.

Some organizations for the curious.

https://www.gameworkersunite.org

https://techworkerscoalition.org

https://techsolidarity.org/events.html

https://siliconvalleyrising.org

https://www.iww.org/pt/unions/dept500/iu560

I don't mean to be callous, but the game industry is one where much of the benefit comes from the fact that one gets to work on games as opposed to B2B SAAS apps or other banal businesses. In exchange for getting to work on games, you are taking a lower salary, higher competition, and much less stable working environment.

It's very similar to sports; there are many more people who want to work in sports than there are jobs available, so the ones that do end up with jobs working for a team are overworked and underpaid despite being in the top single-digit percentile of applicants. I imagine the same is true for other entertainment industries, but I don't know enough about them to comment.

There are, of course, people in these industries who do have bargaining power, but it's a very small minority of those with outstanding reputations.

much of the benefit comes from the fact that one gets to work on games as opposed to B2B SAAS apps or other banal businesses

I’ve sometimes wondered if that’s true. I mean debugging a race condition in C++ is going to be the same in a game engine as in a trading engine right? Except the latter will be well paid and secure.

For some people, the mere fact that what they're working on produces joy rather than ??? is worth the pay/security difference, even if the everyday work itself is nearly the same.

I can imagine quite a few benefits, to be honest. You get to work with other people who decided to make the same sacrifice, meaning you have something more in common with your coworkers through your work than just picking the highest paying job. You get to say "I did this" and point to a part of a game that potentially millions of people are playing.

If I were evaluating two otherwise equal jobs, I could see myself taking a $5k or maybe even $10k lower salary for those kinds of benefits. The cost is much higher, though, (in terms of salary, job security, and overtime requirement) which is why I've never worked for a game company and probably won't in the future.

> For some people, the mere fact that what they're working on produces joy

Besides joy, games can also bring social alienation and stunted development for kids and teenagers. I for one am not sure if games are making the world better or worse.

If you view your work through a lens of pure abstraction and intellectual curiosity, what's to stop you from working on something that hurts people, just because the problems are interesting?

There are dark sides to every industry, for example when does a game cross the line into being a Skinner box? I don’t think it’s as simple as industry A unalloyed good, industry B unmitigated evil.

A company is not either "good" or "evil"; it's not binary, there's no evil bit in corporate ethos. Some companies are more evil than others, and to pretend everything slots into either "good" or "evil" and all "evil" companies are equivalent is an act of cowardice. Working for IBM during the Holocaust is not comparable to working at Zynga during the peak of Farmville. It is dishonest to look at your own life from a standpoint of pure rationalism and reject your own humanity, your own human experience, and how your actions affect other people's lives.

It would depend on that person’s moral preferences and perceived value of benefits/drawbacks a company offers. Your “harm” might be someone else’s “good” (see: other person in this thread condemning games).

of course it's not callous, you're describing purpose as a motivator. Most people in most industries in most societies in most parts of the world are at least partly motivated by purpose. It's the opposite that is callous: to see every C++ programming job as being equivalent. Seeing programming jobs only through the lens of "what programming problems am I solving" and "what tools am I using" is nihilist.

Callous would be working for a company that hurts people when your labor has enough optionality that you could work elsewhere.

Callous in that my comment might be read as “the people who got fired with no severance deserved it.”

I’m closer to “The people who got fired with no severance knew what they were getting into with this industry, and if they didn’t that ignorance is their own fault,” which might also be read as callous.

While I agree, there are probably a handful of people who could actually make that happen. Most others would be told "I'm sorry, the position has been filled." It's a product of the vast power disparity between companies and individuals.

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