Why should I go through the extra effort, financial loss, etc. Typically to help support engineers less productive than I to keep their jobs? No thanks.
I'm an engineer and in general if I want to work in the game industry I will end up taking a salary that is significantly less than I would if I joined any non-game tech company.
Case in point, I've worked with someone at a game company that compared to the rest of the industry treats its employees very well. He was making at most $110k a year as a lead senior engineer (not including bonuses). He left the game industry and joined a well known soon-to-IPO startup as a senior engineer. He is now making $175k base with additional bonuses and stock options.
I'm not complaining, but trust me, the game industry is a different beast. It's much worse if you aren't an engineer -- artists, designers and QA are often treated as disposable.
Workers have more power now due to the red-hot tech job market. This will not be true forever.
On the other hand, I've never seen a deserving and talented software engineer out of a job for very long. And if you're talented you will get paid much much more than average.
The only software engineers that want or need a union are the ones that need artificial barriers to keep them employed.
These dues can be very significant if you factor in the pay you lose as an above average employee, when you can no longer negotiate your own salary.
Unions are not a good thing for everyone in a highly competitive market with big differences in employee performance.
But I'll note that even engineers who are less productive than you deserve stability and some level of control over their work lives.
So maybe consider it part of your moral imperative as a "winner" in the current economic environment to make sure other people can taste the benefits you enjoy -- even if you have deemed them "less productive."
At whose cost? Do developers even less productive than that next tier deserve stability? Does the worst employee deserve stability?
All those protections have a cost borne by someone.
Yes.
They don't deserve the best jobs at the fanciest companies, of course, but every single human being alive deserves stability. That's the baseline. If we as a civilization cannot provide that, then we need to keep working at it.
If that is your goal, software developers in western nations should be the least of your worries.
The ones who are not productive are usually the ones that interfere with my ability to be productive.
Although, we just took on an intern who absolutely kicks ass, and runs circles around people who've been doing it for 10 years. That kid makes me nervous lol.
It's at least partially because it's so many programmers' "dream job." So many people get into programming because of their interest in games, then take jobs in the industry. They then are willing to tolerate/justify worse working conditions because they are doing something they are passionate about and the company culture has evolved to exploit that.
Theory: Because people like developing games, the industry has gotten used to overworking workers and replacing them with fresh meat once they burn out. There's more than enough replacements eager to work on games.
Maybe. Ask all those immigrant workers.
> unlimited vacation(s).
lol. rhetorical b/s.