Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job | Hacker News Reader

Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

nytimes.com

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> For many kids who grew up with controllers in their hands, being a game developer is a dream job, so when it comes to talent, supply is higher than demand

This is basically the reason for low wages in quite a few 'passion' driven industries. If a job is something enough people want to do, then talent is cheap and plentiful and companies can provide low wages and poor conditions that for every person who quits, ten more are lining up for the 'opportunity'.

You can see this in all manner of arts or entertainment based fields, since there are far more people wanting to become artists/musicians/writers/whatever than there is demand for their services. You can see it in journalism, where in many cases organisations will try and get work done for free, and will pay so little that living off said wages is virtually impossible in a major city if you don't have a trust fund (though admittedly the huge increase in competition from the internet puts pressure there). And I even recall people saying it's one reason teaching wages aren't too high either.

Unionisation may help, but the only practical solution is for people to stop taking on terrible jobs because of some sense of 'passion', and to go where their skills are appreciated/where they're treated better/fairly compensated.

That's only one half of the solution, the other half is taking into consideration that there's less demand for video games critics than there's people wanting to do it, and possibly choose another less crowded career.

Well, the article mostly focused on game development rather than game journalism, but you're right, both fields have many of the same issues.

In fact, video game journalism may be the worst of both the game development and media worlds, since it's got all the downsides of both (low pay, long hours, unstable employment, companies struggling) plus an endless supply of newcomers who (like with game development) think it'll be their dream job.

Oh, and the basic skill requirements to get employed are really low too. So it's like a minimum wage career people are passionate about getting into where pretty much anyone can do the work.

Games journalism is filled with people who want to work "in games" and know they aren't capable of actually making games.

|Unionisation may help

By restricting the supply of talent, thus artificially driving up wages, but at the same time keeping a lot of people from being able to pursue their dream.

A lot of people from pursuing their dream who would be willing to do it for less. That's always the crux of unions, is the people left at zero wages who were willing to do the exact same work for less wages than the current person with the job.

Only if union membership is both required and restricted. In each of my workplaces, union membership has been optional and open to anyone who works there. It's weaker bargaining-wise than a closed shop with entry requirements, but we've still been able to collectively negotiate to better outcomes (the current round is UCU's dispute with the universities and their pension fund over proposed changes to the pension scheme, which we look to be fighting off).

Fair enough. I'm used to union arrangements where membership is required for the given profession, which is pretty common in the US.

There's been a movement to right to work, but even then, the non-union employees are forced to abide by the union negotiated contract, which is bullshit.

> There's been a movement to right to work

By which you mean, there's been a movement by employers towards the right to work for less.

> but even then, the non-union employees are forced to abide by the union negotiated contract, which is bullshit.

What's bullshit is that non-union employees get the same benefits that a union fought for, without having to do any work to get them.

|By which you mean, there's been a movement by employers towards the right to work for less.

Unions can keep people out of professions in a lot of places in the US. Right to work makes it so union membership isn't mandatory. Surely if the union is so awesome, voluntary membership would work just fine.

|What's bullshit is that non-union employees get the same benefits that a union fought for, without having to do any work to get them.

Take it up with the union leadership, not me pal. They're the ones agitating for this stuff.

Unions improve compensation by increasing the share of the profits pie given (or returned, rather) to labor, not by putting a stranglehold on new hiring.

You also don’t need a union to put a stranglehold on labor supply.

See: doctors

I guess you could say it's not a union, but it's pretty much the same thing. At least, it's pulling the same levers to get desired outcomes.

> Unions improve compensation by increasing the share of the profits pie given (or returned, rather) to labor, not by putting a stranglehold on new hiring.

How do you think they magically achieve this?

Surprise - it's by threatening to restrict supply (not working for the company if they don't agree to the union's terms.)

Threatening to strike is much different from restricting the people who can work for the union?

In both cases you could be happy with the offered compensation but be forced to not work for the company anyway.

Yes, they're different things. They're also the two basic tools in the union toolkit for driving up wages.

|Unions improve compensation by increasing the share of the profits pie given (or returned, rather) to labor

Revenue pie, not profits pie. A union will negotiate better terms for itself if the leadership thinks it's appropriate, regardless of the health of the company.

Part of the problem is that while there is a lot of emphasis on "following passion", "dreams" and "sacrificing for the project", there is very little emphasis on "actual working conditions", "reality of that dream" and "impact of such sacrifice" (or whether it is even reasonable).

It is changing a bit lately but to large extend, going through deadmarches was/is bragpoint. It gives you credibility and proves you are passionate. Ability to say no and negotiating for good conditions, scope control and good treatment is framed as weakness or laziness.

Can confirm this having accidentally ended up working in the Media industry (in a non-passion capacity).

More pertinently, I know someone trying to get an entry level role in a similar passion field and is struggling.

Adding to the problem is:

- Passion fields are quite insular and like to only hire from within the industry

- Nepotism is everywhere. In something like art, hiring so and so's son/daughter may cost you $30k but could close you a $10M deal which is good business

- Pulling up the ladder culture: "well I had to go through XYZ to get where I am so I don't see why this new person shouldn't also have to do it and maybe a bit more"

I think the real problem is we've somehow managed to glamorize work as an end rather than a means. Is spending the first 5-10 years of your working career doing grunt work which could be making coffee and doing photocopying really "living the dream"?

> Nepotism is everywhere. In something like art, hiring so and so's son/daughter may cost you $30k but could close you a $10M deal which is good business

This is so true, and why you always see royals/semi-royals/royal-hangers-on work in a gallery/auction/museum capacity.

I worked for a large cable company and nepotism was rampant there as well. It seems that if money is involved then nepotism follows.

Yes, nepotism is everywhere, but I would argue that for some of these very insular sectors like art, many jobs exist solely so they can be filled with the relatives of rich potential clients. That's slightly different than some management job being filled by someone who may be less qualified but is still expected to do the work.

That's the main appeal of being a dev by far - they can't just hire an incompetent family member, no matter how much they want to.

They do put them through the best schools and coding classes to hire them, but they still need.someone.competent.

Not really. They just need to hire someone competent to take work alongside the family member and take up the slack. Happens in all industries with a measurable work product.

At one point my dad was doing finance for a 20ish person company, where five of the employees were family members. He said that they basically did nothing all day, but all collected paychecks. As the finance guy, he could see how their results were compared to everyone else.

Seconded. Seen more than one software company with departments named something like "R&D" that were used as a playground for executives' children where they could screw around all day and collect a wage, while once in a blue moon releasing some sort of press release composed of a meaningless soup of last year's buzzwords.

There can also just be a lot of randomness involved. How many actors hit at least B-list status because of some TV show that ends up a big hit and then they never really get a significant role again? [ADDED: Or, for that matter, the many other actors of similar talent who didn't click with the casting director for that role for whatever reason and never got that break at all.]

I think the randomness comes from the mismatched supply / demand. After the people with a leg up (very talented and pliable, or with good personal connections) get selected, you're left with a reserve army of labour, so random allocation is a sensible strategy.

I know many actors of this class (irregular appearances on TV shows), and the casting directors simply don't care; they and the crew just try to remember a few names on the spot that fit the needed profile, make a few calls, maybe do a couple of auditions (often not even that), and they're chosen.

I'm thinking randomness more in the sense of getting a big break which may be pretty much the result of a dice roll rather than getting on the list for bit parts.

Of course, luck plays a role pretty much everywhere and those who really strike it big in tech and other professionals should chalk that up to luck to at least some degree. But, for the most part, if someone with a modicum of talent and educational background doesn't get a job at $TECH_COMPANY_A because the interviewer was having a bad day, they didn't have the right keyword for HR, or they choked on an interview question, they probably haven't blown their one and only chance to get a decent professional job.

Nepotism is so pervasive and so horrible that I believe it should be outlawed.

My SO is trying to get into the Media industry and I am myself incredibly frustrated for her sake by the amount of nepotism she experiences, when you've got assistants who are rude to everyone and lazy outright at a company but can't be fired because one of the producers knows their mother it's pretty freaking annoying.

How do you outlaw it?

Do you propose shutting down every small family-run business in the country?

In some cases, nepotism isn't even harmful. Plenty of cases where hiring a family member doesn't mean that family member is necessarily unsuited for the job.

> Unionisation may help, but the only practical solution is for people to stop taking on terrible jobs because of some sense of 'passion', and to go where their skills are appreciated/where they're treated better/fairly compensated

This. Unionisation is basically an attempt to reject the reality that there isn't enough demand for all that labor to be valuable at/above market-average.

Ultimately I don't think there is a right answer and which way you choose is up to you. But it sounds like a "you can't have your cake and eat it too" situation.

Lucky are those who are passionate about things the majority of the labor pool hates but many businesses need.

Edit: Just to prevent misunderstandings, this is my opinion on Unionisation in this particular industry where there are many (private) companies. It can be a different story if your only employers are not driven by profits and losses or are not in a competitive market (e.g. a government) and I wasn't trying to make a sweeping generic statement like "all unions are always bad"

You don't need to look any further than the film/TV industry in the US. There are any number of guilds with various rules and minimum pay scales, etc. It doesn't keep countless people from waiting tables in LA hoping for their big break.

I think developers are more like the background technical staff and startup founders are the big name actor equivalents. Founders move to SF, work hard, and generally struggle trying to become Zuckerburg as much as LA actors trying to become Chris Pratt.

But for every movie with the Micheal Bay or The Rock there are hundreds of unionized workers creating the explosions, car chases, and sets in the background. Just like developers they're the ones that make the production work but no one knows our name. (with few exceptions like John Carmack, but then again there are special effects experts with tv shows)

The job of the guild / union isn't to give everyone a job who wants one, though. It's to ensure that people who have a job are treated fairly.

Yes, but that's important to know if you're proposing unionization in the hopes that it will make it so that every qualified person who wants to work in game development is paid fairly. Like with acting, only a small fraction of people will find such jobs, even with unionization.

But the point is they often go beyond ensuring people are treated fairly, and artificially drive up wages by constraining the supply of labor. This is a very unfair system. It benefits those they have the privilege to get into the guild (which often entails having the right connections, and until the Civil Rights movement also had the requirement of "be White"), at the expense if those that don't get into the guild. It also drives up costs for consumers.

I think it's a difficult claim to make that there's no demand when they specifically state that unpaid overtime is the norm. Why would they need overtime work if there were enough workers?

They don't need it. They do it because it's more profitable. If you don't want those conditions they can easily find someone else willing to accept them due to the huge hiring pool available.

Edit: you're far less likely to risk burning out your employees if they are hard to replace.

I think the fact that they can get unpaid work, means they don't need to pay for it. Why pay for 10 people when you can get 5 to do it? No matter how little you pay for labor, free (i.e. unpaid overtime) is cheaper.

Which is why, in this case, unionization isn't just (to paraphrase) ignoring that there's not enough demand.

One intended result is that it would forcibly remove the option of externalizing the consequences of intentionally under-utilizing the labor pool. It prevents bad behavior (behavior that should already be illegal IMO). Freely exploiting your workers because they have no bargaining power should always discouraged.

While I certainly agree, the historical record suggests that unionization often requires a certain amount of labor scarcity in order to happen in the first place. Of course, enough scarcity and the workers won't see the need, perhaps because there isn't any, but in cases of superabundance of labor it is extraordinarily difficult (usually impossible) to successfully unionize.

I certainly agree that unions can make a big difference in the intermediate case.

You might be right here. In an ideal world, limitations on unpaid overtime would already protect these workers, and then there would be little or no perceived benefit for the unions they are talking about.

Because it's technically cheaper to have less workers and to work them for longer hours than to have more workers working for less time. Especially when you're not paying them for overtime.

>Because it's technically cheaper to have less workers and to work them for longer hours

That depends on whether fixed costs of hiring another developer (and coordination costs) outweigh the variable costs of the current developers working more. The variable costs could be lesser quality of work when the developer is overworked or overtime laws.

Overtime laws are supposed to act as a penalty on companies for not hiring enough labour for the required task.

You answered your own question. The fact that people will put up with all that overtime pretty much sums it up.

>Unionisation is basically an attempt to reject the reality that there isn't enough demand for all that labor to be valuable at/above market-average.

What a shallow definition of Unions.

How about it's about grabbing a larger share of the pie for workers, so the CEO of Activation isn't making 300x the average worker? Or are you of the mind he's "earned" that?

Pretty sure that comment is referring to unionizing within the games industry where there is an overabundance of qualified people who want the jobs available.

Living on a country where unions are horizontal to the industry, with a couple of them supporting people on the computing world, regardless of the company, this US point of view keeps surprising me.

I guess in that case it would come as a bigger surprise that I'm from the EU, and from a country where unions are quite well established, and have never been to, studied, or worked in the US.

> there isn't enough demand for all that labor to be valuable at/above market-average.

This argument would be stronger if the game industry didn't also feature a large number of insanely well paid executives.

Unionization in the game industry is not about magically thinking that higher salaries will appear out of thin air. It's about low-ranking employees coordinating with each other to correct some of the power imbalance versus executives so that rank and file can get a larger share of the pie.

> This argument would be stronger if the game industry didn't also feature a large number of insanely well paid executives.

But why would a surplus of developers need to correlate with a surplus of executives?

If anything it makes more sense to see a larger rift between workers and executives/investors because the costs for developers have been driven down by competition among them.

I may concede that overall it could be better with a union, but lets not pretend this will mean all current game devs will make more money. You will have less game devs who will be making more money (narrowing the gap to execs in the industry) while others get driven away from the profession.

The greatest difference is that in arts and journalism the companies are struggling. The videogame game industry have its troubles, but is full of money.

> the only practical solution is for people to stop taking on terrible jobs because of some sense of 'passion'

So the “practical” solution is to change human nature? That doesn’t sound right. It’d be like saying that the practical solution to human trafficking is for people to stop visiting prostitutes; or that the solution to gangs’ drug income is for people to stop buying drugs.

In all these cases, you can quash supply; or you can constrain and regulate the way that the supply supplies, so that it doesn’t hurt people in the process; but—even in the most totalitarian state you can imagine—you can’t quash demand. Humans gonna want what humans gonna want.

In this case, the demand is “the ability to express myself to a huge audience.” People are willing to pay to do that. Because of that, they see any job where they get to do it as a net positive, even if the job is horrible. Because, in essence, they’re taking the original trade they had in mind (paying to reach an audience) and then balancing out an increase in the troublesomeness of doing that, with a payment for dealing with that troublesomeness that moves the needle all the way from “paying for” to “being paid for.”

Careful with those analogies

>In this case, the demand is “the ability to express myself to a huge audience.” People are willing to pay to do that. Because of that, they see any job where they get to do it as a net positive, even if the job is horrible.

This is true for any job that is just an extension of a hobby. People put on local community theater productions in their spare time because they find it fun and fulfilling. You don't have to pay people to do that, so the pay for people to do it professionally would naturally be low in a free market system.

Do you know another profession like that? Software development. People spend countless hours working on open source software for free just because they like it. The open source community saves businesses billions in labor costs every year. Would anyone suggest we get rid of the open source community so developers could be better compensated? We are just lucky enough that the global demand for general software development is much higher than the demand for video game development or theater/TV/movies that it can offset these other factors.

And the type of software people make for free is not the same software people get paid to create.

I bet few people would be eager to develop banking software on their free time for instance.

There's a lot more overlap than I'd have predicted 30 years ago.

There are very good open source databases, content management systems, web servers, full text corpus search systems, operating systems, and 100s of other "kind of boring" things that a 20 year old version of me would assume people would need to be paid to create. (Some of those are a crossover where a substantial portion of the development was originally paid, of course, but many others are not.)

Operating systems and programming languages do come in the cool catagory

Every one of those things falls into the cool category for some subset of the programming population.

The common attribute is that these things are generic. That is not an attribute most software has.

They are often paid to create these things, by their employers. They then open source them to in the hope of getting free engineering resources from other companies that care about the same thing.

People would not want to build banking software for a specific company; however, if banks were to describe their problems in a sufficiently well defined way, people would cheerfully build various 'bank frameworks' for free. Some college student would happily have it on their resume.

This of course would have to have banks be more open about how they operate, so it probably won't happen.

This is to say, it's not really the type of software that is the issue, but rather lack of openness about the problem domain.

Might be starting to happen more than you think.

AMQP (messaging) came out of JPMC and other financial institutions

Financial institutions are also involved in blockchain projects

Another random example: https://developer.capitalone.com/open-source/

Also Goldman Sachs just announced they'd be releasing some additional software on Github: https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/goldmans-trading-floor-is-...

> This of course would have to have banks be more open about how they operate,

As someone for whom the day job involves working on projects for investment banks and other regulated industries, I'd say this is not the first problem that needs to be solved.

> if banks were to describe their problems in a sufficiently well defined way

THIS is often the problem. They often don't know exactly what they want. Well, many people in the company think know what is needed/wanted but most of them don't agree with each other (and if they do they probably don't agree on priorities) beyond the rules set by the regulators (which are usually deliberately "non prescriptive", which is to say "vague"). They often have long lists of what they don't want, but no proper specification of what they do want.

The larger organisations are often so siloed that the left hand doesn't know which foot the right hand is pointing a gun at and no one really knows which elbow they are collectivly sat on. When a project to clean things up starts it is usually populated by people seconded from elsewhere who either still have that job to do so can't commit themselves to the matter in the concentrated way required to deal with it properly, or are not close enough to the problem to have a full understanding of the nitty-gritty details and the interactions between those details. And sometimes those details are very difficult to find until they bite you due to the amount of legacy systems these groups have dotted around, especially in cases where organisations have formed from many mergers & acquisitions over the years.

They don't want to openly share this state because it would be a public embarrassment. Of course, it is hardly a well-kept secret: they all know what state each other are in, as do those of us slowly trying to fix it and the consultants (internal and external to the organisations) making piles out of part-way fixing it (often by reinventing the problem space in new and expensively interesting ways!). But still they don't want it to be any more an open secret than can be avoided.

I assume large organisations in other industries are similarly afflicted. It is human nature (we often don't individually know exactly what we want) magnified by scale.

"It can't be that hard, can it?" you would be forgiven for asking.

"Oh, but it can", I assure you!

As others have pointed out elsewhere in the thread: things are improving, particularly in specific areas where new ideas are forcing, or at least allowing, more radical rethinks. But overall it'll be a complete mess for some time to come.

> I bet few people would be eager to develop banking software on their free time for instance.

If a bank found someone who was eager to develop its software for free, it would have a pretty good reason to question their motives.

It's not about creating the software, so much as supporting it.

The way I look at it is that my employer isn't paying me to "make X", they're paying me so I'm not doing anything else.

I bet lots of people will contribute to open source banking software if creating a bank were not extremely regulated so creating public open source bank were legal.

In that case, banking software would be very useful for the community and people will help.

The fact that something is boring has nothing to do with it. There are few things as boring as developing operating systems like Hurd or developing Wayland and dealing all day with bugs and bugs and more bugs.

Of course, people is not going to create banking software if the only ones who benefit are private companies that give nothing in return.

There must be a good reason. Something that provides the sense of deep meaning for your work. Working for free so a private company could profit out of your work does not.

See also photography, writing, art, etc. Some professionals are in fact resentful to greater or lesser degrees of amateurs willing to work for free (either just for fun or because it's useful to them professionally for reputational or other reasons).

I asked a journalist I knew whether he minded the fact that people like myself publish articles/blogs for free in publications that also have paid staff/freelancers. His response was basically "That ship sailed long ago." But there are definitely people who feel more strongly that people having "fun" are taking food off their family's plate.

I’m a photographer by hobby and you very often see people wanting to hire someone good but who isn’t expecting to make a living at it with offers like “I’ll let you shoot my event to help build your portfolio, and all you have to do is give me a copy of all the photos.” Or alternatively offering something like $100 for four hours to do lifestyle street shoots.

I don’t know how often they are successful at getting photographers for these types of things but I know that if I were going to shoot for those kinds of wages I would rather donate my time to a charity that I support.

"For the exposure/to build your portfolio." Uggh.

To be clear, I sometimes shoot events for free as a favor. And I sometimes shoot concerts or sporting events just because I feel like it. And if you find my photos on Flickr I'll probably give you permission to use them for free. (Though if you want to pay me, that's fine too and I do sometimes get annoyed with the presumption that I'm not going to ask for a fee.) But I'm probably not going to take you up on a minimum wage offer unless it were something I was going to do anyway.

Do you _really_ think your photography job deserves the same hourly wage as an engineer or manager?

What quality freelance developer or manager in the US takes 4 hour jobs for even close to $25 per hour, in a customer choosen location?

I think his gist is that, of course a developer should expect to be paid more than that because they're special. But photographers just click pictures so they should be grateful to make anything at all.

There's a little more to being a photographer than clicking a button, but it might not look like that from the outside. It's like calling basketball "just tossing a ball around".

Programming is just glorified copy and paste, so it has more in common with photography than you think.

The general sentiment here seems (to me, anyway) to be that photography is one of those things that many people _are_ going to do anyway, which is why it's very difficult to be highly paid for it.

If so many people are willing to do something for free, is it really fair to vilify someone for inquiring as to whether you are one of those people?

For the most part, yes.

In general, my doing something that I want to do for free is different (usually) from you asking me to do a job that you want done for free.

Now, of course, there can be exchanges that don't involve money changing hands. Perhaps part of the deal is that I get into a concert (or whatever) for free and that may be perfectly reasonable. I do attend events on media passes on the (implicit) condition I'll publish a story about some aspect of the event.

"You can die from exposure, you know."

> Or alternatively offering something like $100 for four hours to do lifestyle street shoots.

I personally think that's not a terrible offer. $25/hour to stand around clicking pictures? It's a lot easier than most work people do for minimum wage, first, and secondly it's not like you have massive film costs or need a ton of technical knowledge anymore. 99% of the shots people want can be accomplished with stock or relatively cheap lenses, too; you don't have to be a gear-head who spends all their profits on their kit for no appreciable difference in how much people are willing to pay.

Most of us don't have $500-1000 to pay a photographer so we simply don't bother and rely on friends and family for it. I might consider getting professional pictures of my family if it didn't cost the obscene amount that it does. There's probably a market on the volume, low-cost side that simply isn't being tapped because photographers are often such dilettantes.

For someone who wants to break into photography, finding a steady supply of low-paid jobs to build up the portfolio and their name recognition for word-of-mouth marketing is probably the best way to go. You wouldn't want to be running at these wage levels for more than a year, but to start, well, there's certainly worse paths.

>$25/hour to stand around clicking pictures?

I'm going to assume good intent but that's an incredibly condescending remark. Just so you know.

How about if I offer a trained developer $25/hour to write me some software? It's just sitting and typing.

Why do you assume that the parent was talking about your photography ability, and not their own?

They were talking about the act in general.

Depends where you are. Pretty sure I've made under $25/hr most of my development career. And that was just fine, in the Atlantic City, NJ area, because the cost of living was pretty low and I had no interest in moving or commuting to a big city.

EDIT: Although I guess it might've been a bit more if you include the value of health insurance and such.

It's almost never a good idea to start by charging less. The people who don't want to pay your rates are just looking for the easiest excuse and weren't going to become customers anyway.

The bulk of commercial photographers' work are weddings. A run-of-the-mill wedding probably costs about 50k, so to have nice pictures from it you'll spend maybe 10% (?) on a photographer. So 5k for a day and a half of work? This puts a lower bound on other photo shoots as well, since there is never going to be a shortage of weddings.

I'm not sure exactly how to interpret "the bulk of commercial photographers' work are weddings".

Do you mean by total revenue, or for a given photographer?

I ask because in general people who do weddings tend to focus on those almost exclusively for their income (the same is true for some of the other categories I mention below).

The way I think of it is that there are perhaps only a few sources of steady income that pays a livable salary with photography:

- weddings

- headshots

- real-estate

- advertising / marketing

In many cases either photographers are being asked to do more these days (e.g. write the editorial that the photographs go with) or people who wouldn't traditionally have photography as part of their job are being asked to do the photographic work on top of their existing responsibilities (e.g. journalists who are asked to bring a camera along and snap some shots for a story).

[EDIT: I am not sure where the day and a half of work figure comes from, either. It is typical for something like an edited/touched-up photo album to be delivered a few weeks after a wedding shoot, with the photographer doing a few shoots in between and then sitting down and editing several in a batch over the course of a week or two until they are happy with the results.]

25 an hour might be a good rate for someone starting out. I do programming work that takes that long and charge less than that amount.

In all fairness, when I was an undergrad long ago I earned beer money doing various photography-related jobs for the alumni association and other such groups for not a lot of money. But, today, $100 to go somewhere, spend 4 hours doing something you otherwise probably aren't interested in doing, and probably spend the rest of the day editing? $100 for basically a day really isn't great money unless there were some reason you wanted to do the job and the money was just a little something extra.

Do yourself a favor and spend a few of those hours researching how much you can reasonably charge for programming work.

I'm not keen on how most professional photographers for these events don't point out they'll retain copyright on all shots. I know what that means, but they let their customers find out when they aren't allowed to get raw/negatives or prints from anyone else.

I'll take a work for hire option, thanks, without the attitude that it's an art and they're above that.

Exploitation, then.

You mean a straightforward negotiation.

Photography has been hit hard this last decade, with IG blowing up and everybody having a half decent camera in their pockets all the time, AND knowing exactly where to go to get high quality shots. For most people it's about replicating the exact formula, vs doing something original, but that's actually pretty common for every art form. It's simply more visible in photo than in other creative endeavors: https://www.instagram.com/insta_repeat/

Seems to me that if you want to "be special/be paid/be known" in your art form, you need to pick the ones that are enjoyable to you AND have a significant moat, or barrier to entry. e.g. making complex pieces of music, assuming you're not stitching together prefabs from Splice, is actually much harder than pulling your phone out. Same thing with shooting, color grading, and cutting a great video, that's MUCH harder than shooting a frame and applying a filter. Same with doing a beautiful sketch or painting, that takes years of practice.

Photo cameras used to be moats a long time ago, when they were bulky, expensive, a novelty, and the development of film was not as straightforward. But now, it's gotten 100% democratized.

I fully agree with all that. I was photo editor of my undergrad paper back in the day and just the mechanics of shooting film, developing it, printing it required quite a bit of knowledge just to get to output that was reasonably competent technically.

Of course, go back pre-35mm and that was even more the case but--as you say--even just a phone takes precent decent pictures for at least certain types of shots if you even halfway know what you're doing. I have tons of equipment and even I just default to my iPhone a lot of the time for casual "memory" type shots.

The sheer quantity of shots changes everything. Back in the day of film, a pro could burn a roll of film for a single usable shot (maybe). An amateur had development and printing combined (expensive) and had to make every shot count, leading to most shots being of a staged and unnatural variety.

For B&W, it actually wasn't quite that bad with 35mm relative to today. For something like a football game, I might have shot 5 rolls (so 200 frames or so). Random assignments for a given day a roll or two. You made contact prints and printed up what was needed.

Definitely a bigger consideration than today but it's not all about quantity.

> People spend countless hours working on open source software for free just because they like it.

Some people create or contribute as part of their job. If the job requires new software, the company doesn't want to sell the software, and the developer thinks others could use it, then why not open source?

Because open sourcing that code is taking work away from future software developers. The second company which needs that software would otherwise have to pay employees to build it or purchase it from third party software developers. The person open sourcing the software is therefore lowering the global demand for software developers which hurts the wages of all software developers.

For the record, I don't think this means we should abandon open source software. I simply thought it was a good analogy to illustrate why OP's argument was flawed and that we shouldn't be blaming people for taking these "terrible jobs".

When I walk by a window and don't break it, am I taking work away from glaziers?

That is stronger language than I would use, but yes you declined an opportunity to increase the demand for glaziers.

I imagine your are trying to allude to the glazier's fallacy [1]. However that is only a fallacy from the perspective of the entire economy. An extra dollar spent on a glazier is going to benefit the glazier. The problem for the economy at large is that the dollar might have otherwise been spent on the tailor, baker, etc.

To take this back to software development, the glazier fallacy is why I am not against open source software. The overall economy is made more efficient from it. However that doesn't change the fact that the increase in efficiency comes from not having to pay more money to software developers. That isn't great if you view the situation purely from the perspective of a (selfish) software developer.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

It's not like humans have a finite amount of wants and needs; if that were the case we would have stopped progressing thousands of years ago after agriculture was developed.

Creating open source solutions to common problems doesn't eliminate work, it frees people up to work on new problems.

Or maybe it just means the software developers are paid to do things other than reinvent the wheel.

> However that doesn't change the fact that the increase in efficiency comes from not having to pay more money to software developers

I propose to you a law that will increase the wages of all software developers: demand that no code can be written in a computer fabricated after 2010. *

* Hint: Bastiat.

Ooh, I like that for other reasons: all those electron apps and bloated web pages would start being painful for developers. Maybe 16 GB of RAM would start feeling spacious again.

I think you are all missing my intent if you are trying to point out the absurdity of my argument. I was simply pointing out the absurdity of OP's argument by comparing it to something equally absurd that would be more familiar to the average HN reader.

I beleive that open source software creates fiercer competition and helps newcomers, thus in general increases wages for software developers.

Majority of open source developers are paid or work jobs that gives them a lot of free time. Foss runs yearly polls to determine that.

The way I usually put it is "I'll happily code for free, but if you want me to code up your ideas, you have to pay me more than all the other folks that want me to code up theirs."

Interestingly this holds up even though I'm now coding up my own ideas - even though I'm calling the shots on what I work on, they're still constrained by what there's potentially a market for, and so it's still not really passion coding. If I were completely free of constraints, I'd do stuff that's more useless, more prestigious, more beautiful, with fewer corner cases and fewer dependencies on outside software. That's economically unviable (and kinda solipsistic, too), so I don't.

It works that way for me too. I’m (among other things) a game developer, and a few years ago someone asked me how much it’ll cost to make a game for them after looking my name up from one of the games I’ve made.

I gave them a quote without thinking too much (“$100/h, maybe a bit less if it’s something really interesting”[0]) and they were shocked, saying something like “I didn’t think you made that much money from these games!”. Well, if I did I wouldn’t be taking on contract work to begin with but you’re not getting the same rate as my own projects :)

[0] these days it would be more like $150/h.

>IT'd be like saying that the practical solution to human trafficking is for people to stop visiting prostitutes

I don't want to nitpick but a lot of the strategy surrounding ending human trafficking involves cutting off demand, which means trying to stop johns from buying prostitutes. This sort of `cut off the demand` strategy isn't entirely unheard of.

No, that's cutting off the supply. The johns demand sex even if they're being prevented from buying any because it's been made too risky to approach the areas where there's supply.

That is a common strategy but, as far as I can tell, a completely useless one. The US govt has been spending resources for years pushing messages that people should just not do drugs, or that by doing drugs they are funding terrorists, destroying families, etc. I haven't seen any evidence that such campaigns work, and given drug use rates across time and countries I'm pretty skeptical that they do.

People do less drugs then they did in the past. Especially young people.

i wonder how much of that decline is simply driven by changes in socialization. most casual drug use has always been peripheral to the spaces where people would congregate e.g; bars, concerts etc. now that kids pretty much have access to their ingroup basically on demand and entertain themselves differently than prior generations, maybe they're just less likely to end up in the kind of situations where social drugs are desirable.

Do they? There are many sources disputing whether DARE had any positive effect, and this specifically https://www.dualdiagnosis.org/drug-addiction/dare-program-wo... also shows growing use. (Then again, it depends what's "now" and "past")

I did not said that dare or any other specific anti drug program worked. It is completely irrelevant.

Simply, young people take less drugs and also have less teenage pregnancies then young people in the past used to.

> So the “practical” solution is to change human nature?

We could at least stop giving young people terrible advice like, "you can do anything, live your dream!"

"Get a practical job to pay the bills, and do your dream as a side gig," is a pretty reasonable compromise.

Most people are have a low tolerance for risk and it's a problem when they get into a field that requires being a risk taker. That tolerance for risk is a strong unconscious bias, so they go into hyper-competitive fields and wind up being the 99% who go nowhere.

Putting out advice, "don't do risky stuff" also doesn't harm real risk-takers because they won't take that advice anyway.

> It’d be like saying that the practical solution to human trafficking is for people to stop visiting prostitutes; or that the solution to gangs’ drug income is for people to stop buying drugs.

No, it's like saying not getting into prostitution or gangs is a good way to avoid those problems in your life.

My observation is that a lot of teachers knew they were going into a profession known for low pay but lacked the financial literacy and practical experience at college age to understand that “low pay” meant “struggling to survive” rather than “you’re not going to own the biggest house on the block.”

As a result they walk out of school with debt, find it difficult to find a position (because e.g. some high school level positions in the US have very few vacancies), and end up taking whatever they can get or if they cannot get anything in teaching take some other low-wage job after following their passion led them to a short-term dead-end.

If we're honest with kids, it's going to be hard to get them to do anything.

"Well.. Tina's going to get a great job whatever she does, and however little effor she puts into it, but it's because her mom's a doctor and they have a lot of money. It doesn't matter if she owns an iPhone X and doesn't do homework. You need to, and it doesn't matter if you really love cooking because chefs make like $10 an hour and you need to pay rent so you need to go into investment banking even though you hate math and Excel."

Then we'll wonder why teenage suicides are sky high... oh gee i wonder why...

Ah, but she's uphill on that investment banking job as well - she's looking at vast odds for getting into Harvard. Tina's mom went to Harvard, so she's legacy and has classes to improve her SAT and her grades from her private school Ivy League feeder are artificially inflated.

Investment banking is certainly metasyntactic here. You could just replace it with chemical engineering or B2B marketing or construction management or something else sufficiently dry and lucrative.

Ultimately the reason that we view some jobs as more fun than others derives to some extent from the natural human tendency to build a sense of identity by pretending our work is more interesting than everyone else's; the caricature of the soulless office worker is intentionally, not unintentionally, dehumanizing, because it's necessary to reinforce the narrator's pride in their own work. People in visible professions inevitably present their professions as being admirable while trying to present themselves as admirable. The age of mass media creates the illusion that whatever is being talked about is in fact more interesting than what isn't being talked about. Which actually makes the world a better place, Fallout or Tide? Which generates more fame for its creators? The only complete solution requires the nomenklatura to relinquish--or be deprived of--their privileged position in the collective unconscious. (Woe on the invisible.)

Not that that's particularly easy. The kids aren't stupid. Everyone knows that being, say, an artist, doesn't just pay off in terms of money, but in the way people interact with you. The people chasing these rewards aren't unpaid; in fact, they go to great lengths to ensure they do get paid, in precisely the way they seek to be. The lionization of indolents makes people seek indolence--and why shouldn't they?

Years ago, I had the occasion to drive across the country with a traveler in my passenger seat. We spent dozens of hours discussing philosophy, law, farm work, and how to determine which cigarettes in an ashtray are still safe to smoke. When we passed through Denver, hundreds of miles from either our origin or destination, he recognized some of his friends walking on the sidewalk of an overpass; we met up and enjoyed chips and soft drugs by a creek under the bridge. My erstwhile friend is still hopping trains and sleeping outside to this day. As they say, "be careful what you wish for--you might just get it".

If we'd be truly honest with kids, we'd tell them that most of them can't become investment bankers either...

i think maybe better advice is "work really really hard and find the closest commercially viable approximation to your dream"

there are plenty of stable, well paying jobs for all sorts of different skill sets in the entertainment industry. becoming a key grip or an audio engineer isn't a high risk career trajectory. the bigger problem with creative fields is that most of the advice kids are getting is misinformation coming from people who have to idea what the industry actually entails. the quality of art education in the us is fucking abysmal. imagine if you had english teachers who only cared about slam poetry and discouraged students from learning functional writing skills or a music teacher who never taught meter. i never had a single art teacher who taught any representative drawing fundamentals or even hinted at what was required to become an employable commercial artist. anything even remotely representative or commercial was frowned upon.

>Putting out advice, "don't do risky stuff" also doesn't harm real risk-takers because they won't take that advice anyway.

maybe but when you're only ever told not to do something it doesn't exactly give you a strong footing to take smart risks and further sets up passionate but under informed kids to be exploited because no one ever taught them how to value their work.

> i never had a single art teacher who taught any representative drawing fundamentals or even hinted at what was required to become an employable commercial artist.

Wow, never realized the schooling situation was that bad in the arts.

> because no one ever taught them how to value their work.

That's a great point, though valuing one's work is bloody hard at any stage of life.

Actually, prostitution is relatively safe and predictable way to make good money, in countries that have the appropriate legal framework.

You can probably make as much as a software consultant if you play your cards right, get a nice house in the countryside and retire at 30.

"passion-based career choices" are 80% of the reason that women make less than men in most fields. They have a reputation as being there as a passion, not as a mercenary, and with less aggressiveness, are more likely to stay at a lower salary level if passed over for promotions, too risk-averse to leave for somewhere new.

Also they can follow their passion because many see their career as a sidelight until they marry and become mothers.. Men don't have this backstop or alternate way to follow their "passion", for men, low income = no marriage.

Yeah you're going to need to provide a source for this incredibly sexist theory.

I'd say a better solution would be to universal income, or a freedom fund of sorts. So people can be free to go and do their passion jobs, be it making music or writing games.

Game development companies might become more like a collective where the developers who are all on universal income pool together and treated as equals. One can dream.

I’m interested why the dreamer was downvoted.

Cool idea, but how do you split the profit (assuming this is a world where games are still sold for money)? I'd imagine once you start having discussions about equity distribution and revenue split, it stops being a collective of equals.

Each collective would come up with it's own, or perhaps the games are done for free since they are getting paid via universal income. Or perhaps the games are sold at a sliding scale, pay what you want. Perhaps the profits all go back into the company which would/could provide for its employees non financial benefits, even living arrangements.

That's sort of the point of money - to convince people to do things that they wouldn't otherwise do, because they're able to spend the money to get things that they do want.

but—even in the most totalitarian state you can imagine—you can’t quash demand

Well, what you do is you subsume all of human discourse into a new, faster, online form which can use the powerful mechanisms of variable schedule of reward and monetized viral growth. Moderate and supercharge all of that with AI and Deep Learning. Make sure that you infiltrate all of the big tech companies with underpaid (thus easily radicalized) ideologues who would gladly violate company policies and laws for their cause, or at least exercise bias in the way they enforce them. Use this pool of radicalized confederates wielding this vast technological power encompassing and accelerating all of the industrialized world's most relevant discourse. Use it to control all thought and all discourse.

If people dissent, then use the power over all information online to enable your ideologue radicals to construct propaganda narratives to push your favored view of reality. Use the technological power to construct a hermetically sealed filter/search bubble for everyone willing to subscribe -- then make it addictive to them on top of it! At the same time, find, marginalize, and silence all of the dissenters. De-platform and un-person a few to make an example of them. Control all of the narratives, and if contradictions and inconvenient facts leak out, then craft narratives to explain those away. If pesky dissenters still persist, notice that toxic wacko fringes are unparalleled at drawing attention and generating vicious circles of outrage driven virality. Amplify and weaponize their messages. Start tarring the dissenters. Use unfair guilt by association. The more outrageous, unfair, and toxic the tarring, the better, as it will generate yet more toxic outrage.

Control all of the new digital media. Make it cool for young people to nullify "Free Speech." Make it cool and hip for them to say, "..then f##k your "Free Speech!" Control all of the speech. Control all of the ideas. Make it "uncool" or even socially unacceptable to have any kind of dissenting thought to the pushed narratives.

It's a scary sounding plan, with the potential for tremendous destruction of societal cohesion and culture. I don't think it will work in the end, however.

Will the influx of bootcamp grads cause the same effect on the supply and demand of developers?

I have my doubts. Maybe a bootcamp can prep someone to make apps (though I know very little about mobile app development), but at least in my job, I need a pretty in-depth understanding of how technology works. It's not enough to have used Spark a few times but I really need to know what it's good at and what it lacks and I need this understanding across all my tools. I need to know at least the basics of the implementation and to have that understanding across all my tools, I have to have a pretty strong theoretical grounding that I just don't see the bootcamps providing. Like maybe a few really bright people figure that out while in bootcamp, but I suspect most don't.

What field do you work in?

In app and web dev this theoretical grounding is less important.

Teaching is another such job.

Personally I would argue that in terms of education we need to encourage academia to give students a cash cow to milk prior to chasing their passion.

Learn the basics of a trade, THEN you can do Drama. There's this dreamy state of mind that bets way too much on making it and its important that "the worst case scenario" for an actor not making it isn't a dead-end job but a trade/profession they can also excel at.

This effect hits non-profit organizations really hard - people feel like they need to suffer to earn the right to make the world a better place, but the overall effect is that non-profit workers lead precarious lives, and their effectiveness suffers due to this instability. People with the ability to fix organizational dysfunction can rarely continue to make those wages, and so they move into for-profit industry.

This is not a good way to run a society.

To add to your list, aerospace is a big one. For senior stuff they usually pay ok but especially entry level jobs, even in software, they know that everyone wants to build jets, rockets, and satellites.

"Success often leads to passion." - The TechLead

when?

I don’t know, I think Jason knows a lot more about this stuff than we do.

The supply/demand thing, I wish he omitted because it lets people look at things way too reductionist.

It’s actually very difficult to look at a salary and have that tell you something about supply and demand for a job. It’s obviously not that simple. In particular, it would be impossible to look at that figure and try to make heads or tails of what the “supply and demand” for executives is, because they’re paid so much radically differently. And yet accelerators churn out CEOs every day! You’d point out that I’m asking the wrong question, “it’s not about supply and demand when it comes to executive pay.” I agree, and I don’t think it’s about supply and demand for game developer pay either.

From a strictly economic point of view, the bonus system is very distorting. You get paid a huge bonus if your game gets a lot of units sold after your crunch time. However, since the publishers own the studios now, that doesn’t happen as much, and the bonuses go to the “shareholder” (ie the CEO and other highly stock compensated executives). Seems like exactly the sort of thing a union could negotiate!

But making the low line developer sound like the antagonist? “People to stop taking on terrible jobs because of some sense of ‘passion.’” Like I know you didn’t mean to sound like the bad guy, but is your line of argument really to ignore how economic structures in the industry underpay people, and instead it’s the underpaid people’s fault for being passionate?

> I don’t think it’s about supply and demand for game developer pay either

If there was a shortage of game developers, employers would be forced to give much better benefits and compensation to retain and hire staff (and probably there would be a lot less games and studios). There may be more to the analysis, but I don't agree that you can ignore supply and demand and turn this into just oppressor greedy guy vs oppressed exploited worker instead.

I don't want to make it reductionist at all, you're right.

A more enlightened view of compensation, if you need a more general economic way of looking at it, is: "In a world where most of economic value exists in human relationships or in computation, compensation is more about (1) how accounting reflects that economic reality, and (2) how well the compensated individual extracts accounting value from whatever big picture the accountants came up with."

In that sense, unions are exactly the remedy, because they negotiate how these employees are paid relative to the accounting value of their business.

It's all accounting! I can't emphasize this enough--you can pay the employees 2x as much, or 10x as much, or 1/2x as much, and Fortnite will be EXACTLY as fun as it is now. That's what people are outraged about.

This is totally unlike another notoriously unionized industry, autos, where a lot of the value is tied up in really objective, physical stuff like gas mileage or maintenance. Most of the economic value of Fortnite is in the experiences it makes between friends and the computer code consistently delivering that experience, whether on your phone or in the servers.

Supply/demand as the framework is kind of a stupid point of view. We can't listen to too many finance/economics people, especially the rich ones we actually hear from as opposed to the poor ones who may be right but whom we don't give a shit about. The rich ones aren't in the ground level of humanity anymore. That's what the perspective on HN is really about: sorting out which rich person you agree with.

But if you want to do the right thing, you unionize because it will get these people paid better and feel happier at basically no economic cost.

> It's all accounting! I can't emphasize this enough--you can pay the employees 2x as much, or 10x as much, or 1/2x as much, and Fortnite will be EXACTLY as fun as it is now. That's what people are outraged about.

Yes, but there is a difference if it takes 20 devs to make it and there are only 10 available vs there being 200. Competition among the devs as to who gets to make it means each of them will tolerate worse conditions to get the offer over the other. Effectively driving down the costs of producing the game. With a union in play, the cost of production would be stopped from going down.

I'm not necessarily arguing that it is worse with a union than without. But an expected side effect of forcing high costs (high wages in this case) would be that it would make it much harder for aspiring game devs to enter the field.

> you unionize because it will get these people paid better and feel happier at basically no economic cost

This is not true. Again, unions might produce a better outcome, I don't know otherwise for sure. But to think that you can tweak the economic system to behave exactly as you want it to, producing all the positive outcomes with no negatives, is absurd. We can often fail to achieve anything similar with simple software systems, much less with something as intricate and complex as humanity.

I think the other dimension here is the number of people who equate passion with qualification. They enter the industry thinking that a lifetime of playing video games qualifies them, whereas you actually end up needing strong software engineering skills, often with an emphasis in graphics and other math-heavy niches, a strong work ethic and many other qualities. Passion helps. Years of being a customer helps. Doesn't replace other qualifications, though. I've seen more than a few friends on the losing end of some miserable attempts to create their own video game company (or graphic design business, photography business, etc.) because they equated interest with immediate ability.

The other practical solution is basic income.

In a basic income society people can do (if they want) the jobs they have a passion for without poor conditions.

And people who will want a higher income will do the jobs that a few people can do (highly skilled jobs..), or wants to do (picking up garbage, cleaning toilets...). These jobs will probably have much better conditions than now.

Who is going to pick up garbage in a basic income society and why? Don’t be surprised if you have to pay these people radically more than they are currently paid. In which case COL goes up significantly and the basic income doesn’t go as far and we are back to square one.

"Millionaires don't exist, because who would ever want more money?"

Are you suggesting garbage men will be millionaires? When we're talking about spending trillions and fundamentally changing the relationship between citizens, their government, and work, platitudes convince nobody but the choir.

No, I'm saying people will continue to be garbage men because they want more money. Basic income is not going to stop people from wanting more money.

> the only practical solution is for people to stop taking on terrible jobs because of some sense of 'passion', and to go where their skills are appreciated/where they're treated better/fairly compensated.

I worked a couple years in game industry (shipping an auto racing game for Playstation and contributing to a few other titles; I did sleep under my desk a few nights during crunch time so we'd have a demo ready for E3).

My overall experience was amazing. I have a passion for motorsports and loved gaming as a kid. Part of the overall enjoyment (read: value proposition) I derived from that position was that it was in motorsports and gaming. I loved going into a computer store and seeing "my" game on the shelf. I look forward to showing my kids the game [that will look like crap now by comparison]. (I also, without any hard feelings, left the industry because it was clear that it wasn't going to get me where I wanted to be financially.)

I don't think that people should be prevented (or even shamed) for taking on work that they are passionate about. I'm glad I did it; I had some great experiences [spending Speedweek in the hot pits as a business trip is great], worked with some amazingly talented and passionate people, and took away some great memories before moving on(/selling out? :) ).

You seem like the exception rather than the rule.. I don't think anyone is suggesting people not follow their passions, its more about people not knowing what they're getting themselves into most of the time.

If they were unionized it would be much easier to understand what they're getting themselves into.

Union contracts are typically public, unambiguous and well enforced; certainly better than relying on "company policy" to judge what work conditions will be like.

Consider this though, he's not doing that now.

He did that when he was young, dumb, and full of dreams...

He couldn't sustain that lifestyle. We do sort of glorify the past and lionize struggle as if there were some nobility to it.

There's not. There's no inherent nobility in struggling or being ignorant. Being a dumb kid willing to work awful hours for worse pay to get out a demo in time is not an ideal to strive towards.

I agree substantially with the first 3 paragraphs of your post and have way less agreement with the last paragraph. [0]

Just to be perfectly clear though: I'm glad I did it, have zero regrets, do find nobility in working a crunch period to ship [a demo] on-time as you promised you would [I was tech lead; that we weren't in a position to ship on-time without a crunch time was at least 50% on my shoulders], and would hope that I'd chase that same job/dream/experience if I had a chance to live my life all over again. (There are other things that I might wish to change, but that's not one of them.)

[0] - Technically, I surely could have sustained that lifestyle, but chose not to. Your overall point there remains valid, of course.

You got out before you found your limit. You think you could have sustained it, but you really don't know because you left. But leaving also means something.

And succeeding in the face of adversity is something to be proud of. There are many things I wouldn't change in my life even though they were difficult or caused me to struggle.

That's not the point.

If I could have learned all I learned, got to where I am, etc _without_ having to struggle, that would have been preferable. The struggle itself imparts no value.

I mean, would you rather have not had to crunch to get the demo out on time? Would you rather have hit all of your targets on time without working ridiculous hours?

> Would you rather have hit all of your targets on time without working ridiculous hours?

I don't know. Would I have rather run a 15 minute 2-mile instead of a 13:30 2-mile on my APFT in college and been less sweaty? Would I have rather gotten a B instead of an A on that digital design project while getting more sleep? (Obviously, no one but me could possibly really "care" about either of those scores at this point.)

Taking it specifically to that work topic, would I rather have worked sane hours and shipped an acceptable demo on time or worked ridiculous hours and shipped a stronger demo on time? Even though I know that nothing about my life changed as a result of the latter (because we didn't exceed our minimum units sold for the "monkey points" to pay anything), I'm happy I spent those nights in a sleeping bag at my cube and shipped the best demo and product we could.

For things that I care about at the time, I feel happier and more proud in doing more than the minimum (perhaps even my best), even at the expense of extra time and effort for which incremental compensation isn't tightly/directly linked.

That argument is suggesting a linear correllation of effort to results, which isn't really so with creative work: in a hypothetical "better industry", because talent is more expensive and less exploitable, management has to step up, grow beyond cheerleader/slavedriver metaphors, and find ways to create more force multipliers throughout the project. Quality to effort ratio goes up -- and given a sufficiently high multiplier, the workforce produces more while working less.

I think this is eminently possible within games, and the growing interest in unions is reflective of agreement of that fact, of a desire to professionalize and negotiate towards work arrangements that follow what our current science tells us is best practice. If most game workers believed in linear effort to reward they would see the status quo as OK: not staying late would simply mean you lack "passion". And indeed, that was very much the case throughout the early history of the industry - passionate people who became bosses and focused in Panglossian fashion only on the particular metrics they prized, resulting in exploitative, fanboy-heavy, butt-in-chair workplaces.

For an example of unionization and certification issues that deal with this, look at the medical field.

There are many more people that want to be doctors than there are spots in med schools (US-centric view point here). The AMA artificially keeps the enrollment numbers at med-schools low, so as to drive demand for doctors in general and therefore, increase their wages. The AMA is well aware of the current shortage of pediatricians and over-abundance of cardiologists. Though the employment dynamics of literal brain-surgeons are a bit different teachers or gig-bassists, they do largely follow the same patterns in terms of pay. Granted, most MDs in the US really are very good at their jobs, so I'm not all that put-off when they literally save the lives of my loved ones (money has no value there).

Compare this to nurses and their employment dynamics. Phlebotomists aren't paid badly, but they aren't paid well either. Their shifts are hectic, long, and erratic. Hospice nursing in the US is nearly criminal in it's underpayment and overwork, especially for the emotional labor that goes into it. The reason here is that there is a vast oversupply of people that want to be nurses and in medicine.

The core issue with both cases is that such jobs provide meaning to people that want to do those jobs.

They trade off different things for that value. MDs trade their 20s and a lottery ticket into med school for that meaning in their lives, nurses trade comfort and pay for that meaning in their lives. MDs have what amounts to a very strong union, nurses (generally, but there are many exceptions in the US) do not have as strong of a union.

Generally, any profession that provides meaning in the life of a human will either be very underpaid/overworked OR will have a very strong union/credentialing system to pass before becoming employed. We all regress to the same level of misery.

A more accurate term for what is 'required' is a Guild. Medicine and Law are the last two examples in the US. It is a crime to practice law or medicine without a license. And, for the most part, the amount of licenses dispensed each year is left up to the practitioners' professional association.

In short, you'd want to make it illegal to program for pay (or to distribute free software) without being a member of the guild.

That will never happen -- thank goodness. But, it is the model that allowed the economy to chug along through the Middle Ages.

Another example is the Professional Engineer (PE).

Bridges don't just get designed and built. A PE is usually required to sign off that these structures are safe and usable. Little Fischer-Price playhouses aren't the same as the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. Though not a guild in all but name, the PE acts just the same.

In fact, there is guild-like behavior in a lot of professions, come to think of it.

There are several that are guild-like. For instance, in my state it is illegal to hold yourself out as providing 'accounting services' without being a CPA. Likewise, it is illegal to assist in the sale/purchase of real estate for a fee without being a broker/realtor (or a lawyer).

It's undoubtedly the same for engineering.

However, there may be a subtle difference... A non-accountant can certainly help with your books so long as they don't hold themselves out as an "accountant." And, a non-realtor can certainly help you find a house, so long as they aren't paid contingency related to the ultimate transaction. I think -- and I may be wrong -- a non-engineer can charge to design a treehouse for your... so long as he doesn't hold himself out as an engineer. (Obviously, when it comes to roads, permit-related structures, etc., a governmental agency may require a P.E.... but, that's a different set of requirements.)

But, one may not practice medicine EVEN IF one refrains from holding himself out as a doctor. And, one may not dispense legal advice EVEN IF it is clear to all involved that the person is not a lawyer.

IAAD. Most of these points on medicine are either outdated or plain inaccurate. 1. The AMA had tight control on med schools 50-100 years ago. These days a mediocre score on the MCAT and a desire for $300k+ in debt will get you into a for-profit medical school. More DOs match with MDs, there are more foreign IMGs, and even US med school slots have grown in the past 10 years. The (over)supply of med students is a non-issue in 2019 except for the aforementioned bag holders that really had no business in med school.

2. Since the 60s the AMA continues a slow decline in relevance. Less than 25% of MDs in the US are AMA members. I was an AMA member. Why? Because they bribed me and my classmates with significant discounts on exam prep material. At some point there will be more student members than practicing physicians.

3. The AMA may be aware of pediatricians vs. cardiologists, but they have little to do with it now. One, the over-abundance of cardiologists isn't an indisputable fact. Regional maldistribution is a thing. There are many parts of the US where a cards referral will still take months. The AMA is not the reason pediatric specialities have relatively poor compensation relative to years of training and lifestyle. The ACGME and other interest groups, even big pharma, device manufacturers had much to do with setting the stage. These days, large organizations help maintain the status quo.

Consider that pediatric subspecialties are not competitive. Just about any average to slightly below average US grad that wants to do it can... it's not a labor supply issue!

In 2019 some doctors have it pretty good, and some not so much. Geographic disparities are huge. The public policy affecting medical practitioners is now a large number of independent special interest groups and public policy wonks. For instance, cardiologists have the ACC (their own body), but what is really powerful at this point is the motley group of pharma companies and interventional device mfrs, and huge HCOs... practitioners can benefit because obviously some interests align (A TAVR isn't too profitable without a doc to place it).

tl;dr medical professionals sort of bounce around in a Medusa head of healthcare organization and industry special interests these days... we're doing well insofar as we are useful idiots in this machine. The idea that we have unified representation is laughable.

Thanks for the update to my mental schemas! I had no idea it was that far out of whack!

In economics, there's the concept of a compensating differential[1]: when two jobs require the same skill and training, but one has an unpleasant aspect, so you have to pay people more to take that one.

The canonical example would be window washers on the ground level vs for a high-rise building. The latter -- even with appropriate safety measures -- is scarier, so they make more, as people willing to go up in those things are harder to find.

You can also have a negative compensating differential, where the job is so desirable that people take a lower wage to work in it, which is what's going on in the game industry; compared to developers and QA for other industries, they make less.

Another example might be astronauts, which make a lot less compared jobs requiring similar qualifications (i.e. extensive education, training, memorization, and fitness).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensating_differential

Also, there are a crap ton of people who think lazily: “i love playing video games / i am so good at playing video games, that i should be a game designer. Look at how stupid these developers are compared to me!!”

Ive known several of this type. And they are terrible at understanding the grueling tediousness it takes to develop a good game.

Basically they operate on the superficial end of things and think they can grok the actual reqs to develop something.

(Same thing with pipe dream “app designers”)

> artists/musicians/writers/whatever

I've met a lot of girls who want to be fashion designers, and a lot of guys who want to be sports announcers.

> teaching wages

On the other hand, the retirement and health care packages for public school teachers is quite generous

Retirement benefits for government employees typically also rely on the current government adequately funding those liabilities. There are several examples of governments that consistently failed to do this and then reducing those benefits when they need to be paid out.

Another way of saying that is the benefits package is so large it often throws the city/state government into a crisis.

Pay for pilots is also poor. I've seen the sentiment from fighter pilots many times: "I can't believe they're paying me to fly!"

Being a pilot is not only a dream job, it's high status.

+1.

Many of us working jobs we don't really have 'passion' for are doing it to fund the things we are passionate about.

I really hate it when people talk about how they need public subsidies to follow their self-gratifying dream, like that money comes from people who aren't following their dream. I'm not going to work harder on stuff I don't like to support you having fun.

The solution is lowering the salary of jobs in the field until people stop applying. It's already solved.

Adam Smith literally mentions that wages and profits of industries where people can do it as a hobby, for pleasure, or part time, will go down.

1776.

It's weird but even in sub-sectors of the gaming industry (like server/back end developers which are in permanent short supply) the experience of working in that industry is terrible - there is a general assumption that if people actually might enjoy part of their job you should treat them like crap. So, I partially agree but there is another factor there.

I don't think that's necessarily true. Sports are another passion-driven job thay many, many more people want to do than are able to. Unions are the answer, but not just because they're effective tools for equalizing relative leverage between labor and owners. It's because unionization engenders a self-respect for one's employment - "THIS job that I do in particular" - that forces cooperation from management. It helps in this analogy that athletes are bona fide top-of-the-class performers, but the success of unions in other creative areas, including ones involving only moderate skill, shows that this principle extends further than that.

When people leave for greener pastures, they take their experience with them. There is no one that knows the tricks management uses to squeeze working hours out of employees (often unjustly and unfruitfully). The real solution is to unionize and force management to weed out the incompetence that creates inefficiencies that crunch is used to correct. Contrary to popular belief, unionization has thr potential to increase overall expertise.

What is life if getting rid of passion is sensible? It's a better goal to create systems where passions can flourish.

passion isn't always productive to society.

Some passion is, but i would argue most passion isn't. That's just simple economics, and i dont think humanity can get away from that - at least, not until we reach post-scarcity.

It is appalling that the top 3 comments (at time of writing this one) are victim-blaming. "They should get better jobs". "There's a high demand so they should go elsewhere". "They should have known before they went there".

Where have you been in the last few years, and how have you not learned anything about abusive practices which entrap people? These companies are basically abusive — they abuse their staff with long hours and low benefits, taking full advantage of the cool-factor to entangle them. As anyone who has the slightest empathy and has read anything in the news cycle in the last few years would know, people caught in this situation are often unaware they're being abused, blame themselves, and don't realize there is better elsewhere.

If you're one of the people who are, right now reading this, thinking "That's a load of BS these people are idiots and they deserve what they get", then I implore that you think again and realize you are essentially blaming the victim. That's almost never the right side to be on.

What we need to do is expose these companies for what they really. Put all these things out in the open and air them for all to see. Perhaps at some point we can have all the major studios unionized, and perhaps once their internal cultures become less toxic, their external one will likewise clear up a bit. Here's hoping.

Unionization is never going to happen, and won't have much benefit.

Excessive overtime and crunch need to be outlawed. It's not a matter of whether or not it's paid, beyond a certain threshold it's a question of health. Nothing will change until people start suing. If companies can just abuse and then terminate people once their lives are ruined, they will continue to do so.

Just out of curiosity, which people (or perhaps, organizations) do you think first pushed for overtime laws in the U.S.?

Collective bargaining will never happen, but outlawing overtime will?

Apparently, everyone is a victim these days simply by making life decisions they end up regretting. Nobody is responsible for anything concerning themselves anymore.

The idea that these people are entrapped is a bunch of nonsense. We're not talking about people that have zero alternatives besides scraping at the bottom of a barrel. We're talking about people that are already well-paid and would be even higher paid if only they decided to switch industries. They can switch jobs and they do switch jobs.

That's simply the truth. It's not victim blaming. The allegation of victim blaming itself is dishonest. These people aren't victims. These people have jobs they don't like. Welcome to adulthood, comrades!

>>Apparently, everyone is a victim these days simply by making life decisions they end up regretting. Nobody is responsible for anything concerning themselves anymore.

No one makes decisions in a vacuum. People's behaviors are informed by their upbringing and circumstances, most of which they have no control over. Studies show that people are deeply affected by those around them, and their role models (whether those be friends or family members) have a deep impact on the paths they take in life. For example, arranging regular interactions between kids in school and young, successful white collar professionals drastically increases the likelihood that those kids end up picking similar careers. In contrast, if they are surrounded by high crime and poverty, they tend to not do so well.

This is why one should not rush to judgment when discussing these issues: things are never as simple as "well, they made the wrong decisions in life." Even if the decisions were indeed wrong in retrospect, at the time they might have looked like (or actually have been) the right ones, or simply the best ones available.

> No one makes decisions in a vacuum.

Of course not. It's still their decision. It's their responsibility what to do with their lives. It's not like we tell young children that they absolutely must become game developers or that it's the greatest job in the world. It's rather the contrary.

It doesn't make you a victim.

Even if we were to agree that this makes you a victim, who the hell cares? There's millions of workers that work far tougher jobs at lousy pay, with no upward mobility. Let's start there.

The point is, these jobs still pay an average of over $90k year. They may come with serious hours but that's not unheard of in many white collar industries (e.g. finance, medicine, law). To turn around and call these people victims is really not valuable, and seriously degrades what it means to be a "victim" of labor practices. There are jobs that are a lot harder to do and pay a lot less that nobody bats an eye about.

The video game industry has been nothing but transparent about the working conditions, at least from what I've seen. Every game Dev I've talked to has been clear that working on X field in the game industry is going to be more stressful and less lucrative than applying the same skills elsewhere. The slogan in my CS department was that the game Dev industry is twice the pay for half the work.

While many do have fulfilling careers it was common sense to me and my peers that going into the game development industry was not worth it unless your passion seriously outweighs practical interests. Some people think they belong in that group and later find out that they misjudged their priorities. They made a life decision they regret but they are not victims. No more than my sister is a victim of biology because she studied biology and discovered after graduation she didn't like biology and changed to working in tech.

Enh... They're not victims. They're just people who picked a profession that doesn't have great terms. By changing professions they may get better terms. That might also change the supply in the industry and help others too.

One lucky thing about game dev is that your skills do transfer. Whether to graphic design or programming or marketing or whatnot. It's not like they got a gamedev license and are locked in.

Exactly. A victim can't get out of whatever situation they are in. Each employee probably signed an "at-will" employment agreement, so they can leave at any time, for any reason.

I take issue with your definition of a "victim" as someone who can't get out of a situation they are in. If we are speaking counter-factually about what any victim of an assault could have done, let's look to the "why didn't they leave?" question to those in abusive intimate relationships. Surely, you're not claiming it's all on the abused spouse, as they could have left at any time? Could they really have, when their emotional, financial, and personal livelihood is wrapped up in this relationship? Could they break their psychological barricades and escape? Some can, some do, and some can't.

It just comes across as a very callous definition, the 22 year old brain is much more idealistic and hopeful, and far less experienced/knowledgeable about workplace rights/conditions. Surely, you see the difficulty of these naive, youhtful video game makers' situations, who get exploited with unpaid overtime, unrealistic demands, and being cut from their company with little cause?

My point is 100% of the blame can not fall on an employee here, there is agency on both sides. Companies can be better to their workers, and workers can save money more diligently, improve their skills, and apply around for other jobs to improve their situation.

I never understand this kind of black and white thinking. So I either have to believe that people are total victims of circumstance with no control over their own situations or my opinions are "appalling"?

The reality is that there are obviously unfair elements to how these industries are operating and it would be desirable to most people to figure out how to improve that situation. It's also a reality that at the end of the day people have a big incentive to understand the big choices they are making in their lives regardless of subjective fairness. Regardless of your moral position it certainly seems they have paid a price for entering the industry and they entered the industry on their own free will(I doubt many people are being coerced into video game dev through threats of violence, blackmail or extortion).

Like literally everything else, the truth lies in the grey area and it's not "appalling" to have other opinions.

The idea of being so unable to believe that there may be validity to an opinion you don't like is a whole lot more appalling in my opinion.

I agree with this and think there's been a really good effort lately to shine a light at the problems. A good example are the articles by Jason Schreier of Kotaku.

However, I'd also like to add my own data point. I'm someone who grew up dreaming about developing games and taught myself programming as a kid, with the idea of spending my days as a game developer. However, after having heard so much bad stuff about the game industry and then experienced it first hand when doing a summer job at Starbreeze, I decided to stay away from the game industry after I got my Master's.

Nearly four years later, I ended up switching jobs and entering the video game industry (at an EA studio). I've been there for four years, now. Every week I actively turn down headhunters trying to recruit me for all manner of jobs outside of game development. A lot of things could, and should, be better in game development. But all in all, I still love making games and am much happier with my day to day job now than before becoming a game dev.

> For many kids who grew up with controllers in their hands, being a game developer is a dream job, so when it comes to talent, supply is higher than demand.

That's the crux of this entire article in one sentence. This might be an upopular opinion here, but right now the supply of developers overall [across all industries] is much lower than demand. No one is forcing a developer to work for a game studio. It might be your dream job, but if you're not treated well you're a highly talented skilled worker, go work for someone else. Let the supply diminish because of the working conditions and alternatives and suddenly studios won't have the option to treat their employees this way.

edit: typos

I know one guy who is like that, he realized his dream by doing it as a side job and it look like he's been successful so far (released one game, worked as a writer for a handful of other games)

Apparently the game he's worked on made at least 300k $, to split between the publisher (WE Games) and the guy and his two collaborator. And he used a good chunk of his share to fund games on kickstater

When I was in college a few years back I had many colleagues that wanted to get into the game industry. Most all were pretty serious gamers and many seemed to have false expectations of what the industry was like, namely that: Playing Video Games === Creating Video Games. While I'm not one to tell someone what they should or shouldn't do with their careers (hell my mother wanted me to become a lawyer), I always made a point to tell them they should research the industry a bit more before making the leap. I know quite a few that ended up pivoting what field they went into after learning how brutal the gaming industry can be.

Making games might be your dream job, just make sure you are fully aware of the realities of your dream job and decide if you are willing to accept that reality day in and day out.

You're right. I have sympathy for game developers: no one should have to endure those conditions. But I also don't understand them. The state of the industry is so widely publicised, and there are so many amazing jobs outside of gaming for people with that skill set.

Probably the reason I don't get it is that I'm not really "into" games. I like playing Civ or overwatch a few times a month, mostly to keep in touch with old friends, but there must be people out there who care so much about video games that they can't imagine working on anything else. Maybe these are the people who choose to endure the awful conditions.

The state of the industry is so widely publicised...

The people ensnared & abused the most, genearlly seem to be very young developers, fresh out of college or high school. That age group is, through no fault of their own, never particularly worldly or in touch with current working conditions.

Game development is more than just programming.

> In many of these cases, laid-off employees had no idea what was coming. One developer at a major studio told me in February that he and his colleagues had been crunching — putting in long hours, including nights and weekends — for a video game release, only to be suddenly told that security was waiting to escort them off the premises.

Man, that really sucks, if you think about it. I'm sure many people here on HN have worked very hard on something in their life. I know I have, and in a couple of cases I ended up being acutely unhappy with the outcomes. But, DAMN, at least none of my moments of extreme toil were punctuated like this.

In a civilised society, it would be illegal for an employer to behave like that.

(Yes, I know, I'm imposing my view of what it would mean to be "civilised", and not everyone will agree.)

There are plenty of countries where all employers are required to give certain notice, and you can't suddenly fire someone. It is outrageous that your ability to eat and pay rent can be taken away with zero notice in America.

That just means they have to pay you for some time after they fired you.

You can still be fired in an instant and be escorted out the door, especially if you have/had access to critical systems

They could, and after that time you fall back on 'unemployment wage' by the government. Which is less than what you'd normally earn, but by the time that happens you probably have another job already.

Actually, at least in the UK, you can't be fired without cause.

Normally you'll have to be told that you're underperforming, be put on a "performance improvement plan", and have to be given time to improve yourself, or demonstrate that you are performing well.

You can be made redundant for no reason, but you have to be warned the moment management are considering redundancies that your job is at risk, and you are able to make a case for how redundancies could be avoided, or how your position could be changed to fit into the new structure. If you are made redundant, you have to be paid extra (although it's a tiny amount and only after 2 years)

> ...you can't be fired without cause. Normally you'll have to be told that you're underperforming, be put on a "performance improvement plan", and have to be given time to improve yourself, or demonstrate that you are performing well.

This is de facto the case in the United States as well. Employers will put employees on a PIP before letting them go to prevent them from claiming that they were wrongfully terminated (due to discrimination, retaliation, etc.).

In banking industry its fairly common to have an HR talk about you being let go/fired, and just collecting your stuff at desk and walking home. Not logging into computer anymore. This obviously comes with additional mandatory salary being paid (where I am currently its 3 monthly salaries), but employer won't risk having disgruntled employee doing some last minute hacks/deletions of important data/repos etc.

And in that industry, workers are lucky that this is the contractual norm. In my industry, enterprise software, it is common for contracts to have "at-will" clauses that let the company cut your employment short at any time for any reason with immediate cessation of pay and benefits.

Word has it, this is the norm in video games as well.

> It is outrageous that your ability to eat and pay rent can be taken away with zero notice in America.

Also your healthcare in most cases.

Not true. It's stupid expensive but you can use COBRA.

> Eligibility for COBRA. In general, employees who were previously actively enrolled in health insurance coverage for at least one day, but lost it due to a change from full-time to part-time employment or termination(both voluntary and involuntary), are eligible for COBRA

https://help.zenefits.com/COBRA/Understanding_COBRA/01_Emplo...

Your ability to eat and pay rent should not be dependent on your income as a game developer. You know there are some professions where the pay is so low that yes, people really need to live paycheck to paycheck. Game developers do not, sorry.

That's kind of a blanket statement don't you think?

For what it's worth, you shouldn't have to end statements with 'sorry'. I this kind of context it typically implies that you're making the statement with the intent to belittle someone.

Well, unemployment is supposed to be the protection against this. It is basically mandatory insurance that an employer is required to pay premiums for so that if they fire an employee that employee still gets money to live.

It is not a perfect system in practice, but I don't think it is conceptually incorrect.

No name calling is necessary - you can replace "civilised society" with "Europe" and the sentence will hold true for the most part.

My video game developers need unions story:

I was a core developer on a major feature of Sleeping Dogs/'True Crime: Hong Kong' for 2+ years. At one point, when the game was still being published by ATVI under the title 'True Crime: Hong Kong', ATVI cancelled the game and 100+ developers were laid off including me. Fast forward a few months and miraculously Square Enix decided to pick up the publishing rights for the name, invested a few more months in polish to finish up the title and released it as Sleeping Dogs. I was of course delighted that this canned game saw the light of day and people were able to play it.

In Sleeping Dogs, despite the significant work I put on the project my name appears in 'Special Thanks' instead of being listed as part of the development team. This is very unfair and inappropriate.

Enforcing a clear set of crediting rules would be one of the things that a game developers union could do.

This is a bit off-topic, but a lot of my friends and peers who have Cantonese-speaking heritage (eg: Chinese-Canadian) have spent a lot of time playing Sleeping Dogs and I think deep-down there's a representation they resonate with in the game. Kotaku even did an article on the topic years ago.[1] Thank you for investing (uncredited!) time and work into the project, as I think it's likely given something special to a group of people.

[1] https://kotaku.com/what-sleeping-dogs-gets-so-right-about-be...

Did you use skookumscript? Just curious because they say it was heavily used in Sleeping Dogs.

I like skookumscript and miss it now that I switched from unreal to unity.

Yes. The primary author of skookumscript worked at UFG.

I helped designers debug many failing skookumscripts and built a lot of hooks for them for specialized missions.

Sleeping Dogs is one of my favourite games of all time. It got me hooked immediately from the login screen with the unforgettable soundtrack. Thanks for your contribution to the game.

I'm all for protecting the vulnerable and underprivileged. I'm all for universal healthcare, increased minimum wages/EITC, and increased taxes on the rich.

But I'm very skeptical of the idea that white collar professionals earning well above the median, are somehow in need of "protecting". They have every opportunity to quit the video game industry and take up very lucrative and easygoing jobs in other industries. They are expressly choosing not to do so. That is their choice, and their burden to bear.

Anything that reduces competition in the marketplace is bad for society as a whole. This is why I'm all in favor of anti-trust regulations and breaking up the tech giants. This is also why I'm not a fan of unions. Maybe a case can be made for specially disadvantaged demographics. I just don't see it for programmers.

Those were my initial feelings as well. I guess the issue comes down to focusing on software development as a skill and having that skill rewarded in manner you can count on.

Our industry is really similar to actors. They have SAG and their guild negotiates with the MPAA. So every studio needs to belong to MPAA. Every year they negotiate the daily/weekly minimum rates for actors with SAG. They are pretty flexible with different rates for indy films vs big budget films.

It's not so hard to imagine a software developers guild where they negotiate for a daily/weekly minimum for developers, dba's, qa's, devops, and such...

https://www.sagaftra.org/production-center/contract/810/rate...

If you are celebrity equivalent of a developer, then you can get paid more. There are no real restrictions. You don't see famous actors getting paid below the daily minimum. When they work for a big budget film they typically get x multiple times the daily rate. Also, if they want to work on an indy film they can agree to those minimum daily rates as well.

I think its flexible enough so if you want to work for a nonprofit you can just accept the daily/weekly minimum vs asking full price if you work for FAANG.

I don't think it's a crazy amount of protections but it sets aside a basic set of standards you can expect from job to job.

If your are over 120k they suggest actors create a loan out corporation at that point...

https://firemark.com/2015/01/12/should-you-have-a-loan-out-c...

Can you imagine all the FAANG companies having to setup a Software Industry Association to negotiate with a Software Developers Guild every year? It seems plausible. It's probably in their best interest as well. These companies could just dump any social issues on to the union and just focus on making profits. The ability to lock out competitors might force other big software dev employers to join the association as well.

>Anything that reduces competition in the marketplace is bad for society as a whole

Just like engineering, every economic design has tradeoffs. There's no ideal solution to the problem, and if there is it certainly isn't unbridled competition.

Labor protections have to exist in order to humanize the commodity that it is, especially when demand dips below supply. Otherwise labor will be exploited. The difference between labor and oil as a commodity is that labor is people with unalienable rights. Unlimited and unregulated competition cannot always guarantee those rights, it can infringe on them for no fault of the individuals affected.

That's why there can never be a truly free market for labor that is also moral - all the upsides of the S/D curve are mirrored by the downsides. Competition is amoral; it's neither innately good or bad for society. The effects of competition can be good, which we should encourage, but they can also be quite negative, which is why we need consumer and labor protection.

For developers in all industries, I see major upsides to unionization. It's not synonymous with reduced competition or salary schedules. Think more in terms of minimum salaries, work and vacation schedules, healthcare/pension funding that isn't tied to your employer, standardized NDA and non-competes, standard FOSS contribution policies.

And yea, I think a lot of us in a hypothetical union would want to codify stuff like a meritocracy and salary/equity negotiations. People on the whole are reasonable. The idea of a union is not to ruin competition for developers, but to provide some benefits developers who don't work at the top of the game for the biggest companies out there. There's a lot of bullshit people at small and mid sized shops deal with that we could fix if we unionized.

It's incredible reading through the comments on this post and nobody seems to see the game industry for what it is: the canary in the coal mine.

Programming within the game industry is sliding rapidly toward blue collar, and you'd be a fool to assume the problem is contained. The problem for programmers is simple - Supply and Demand.

Thanks to a massive publicity push from big tech, the public is being sold - hook line and sinker - a story about how we're in a "shortage of developers" and how everyone needs to "learn to code". Combine that with the plethora of boot camps, and online materials, and it's never been easier to pickup JavaScript on a weekend and be coding a website.

I've never seen people shoot themselves in the foot more. For god sakes, you're sawing your foot off at this point. There is now a massive wave of young developers, just getting their footing who will be entering a work force near you in the next 10-20 years. And don't forget about remote workers, they gun for your job too. It's becoming more and more technically feasible for a software shop in the US to hire a dev team based in, I dunno, China. I've seen it happen to a group of incredible devs. At the end of the day, the numbers didn't pencil in their favor.

Ask yourselves if you really think the good times will always roll. Really ask yourself if Obama standing up in front of the nation beckoning for everyone to "Learn to Code" was really good for you, or good for the big tech companies that got him up there? Wake up, and smell the ashes. There are industry and economic forces actively working AGAINST you. Don't help them. Stop parroting the narrative that there is a "shortage of developers", for starters. And hedge your bets while you're at it - get really good at something. Specialize. Maybe it's firmware, maybe it's iOS AR, maybe its machine learning, find something niche, and get world class level good at it. In 15 years, hopefully you'll be one of the few still making "6 figure salaries".

This. It's coming for the rest of the industry. Amazon and Google aren't encouraging young people to code for the good of the world. It's so the can hire people for less money once the pool is larger. The intent is to drive down the cost so that devs will do the exact same work and the company will take a larger cut of the profit. Once this gets to a point of exploitation like in the games industry a union is necessary unless you are lucky enough to choose the right speciality but this is a gamble.

I hope the future is not so terrible but I can't really disagree with you. I had one executive tell me "programming is becoming a blue collar job". And general programming companies are adopting the bad practices that were pioneered by gaming industry.

20 years ago when I started programming I had my own office, and that continued for a few years. Then I shared an office with a few people. Now we have open-floor plan factories and Agile fanaticism, and many companies that expect >40 hours of work per week from their salaried programmers. Fortunately I work at home now so I don't have to deal with this, but I take a salary penalty to do so.

It definitely seems like in terms of people and jobs, churn and burn is the future of programming. But maybe not just programming. It seems like there is an employment culture based on "exploit the millennials". Consider the weird "Hustle Harder" posters in WeWork offices.

The impression I've gotten is the exact opposite. Game development has never been a good career, at any point between the Atari and today. No matter what year the story is set, stories of game development always seem to have the same stressful backdrop. No game developers are reminiscing about the good old days, before the supply of programmers increased.

Following this logic further, should we try to fight against education initiatives in general too? Educated people are more likely to be able to pick up programming, or take one of many other white-collar jobs. We could team up with people of other white-collar jobs and work on slashing funding for public schools, etc., to make sure future generations don't replace us too soon.

Somehow that doesn't seem right. I think it's a horrible zero-sum view of the world.

Or you could have a more nuanced perspective... Maybe computer science should remain where it belongs - higher education.

Not everyone and their mother needs to "learn to code".

While that may be true, I can't but think of the scribes. Mass literacy has destroyed the scribe occupation (think of their children!) but overall it has been a benefit to mankind. I'm thinking the same with computers and programming. Computers and programming have so transformed the world (much like literacy and numeracy) that I have to think the same should be true of computeracy (computer literacy).

And just like there are people who have an affinity for literacy (we call them "writers") and numeracy ("mathematicians" or "accountants" depending upon the math work), I think we're still working through what it means to be computerate.

Seems to me like you've kinda cherry picked scribes. Among other reasons why that doesn't really apply here, could be pointed out that scribes as a profession evaporated HUNDREDS (thousands?) of years ago, so I hardly see the direct analogy to modern life. There are plenty of examples that are more relevant.

Take metal working. Or, coal mining. Post-industrial revolution during the "boom" of the early 1900s, metal working was seen as the end-all of careers. Everyone needed to "learn to work metal!". In fact, it was pushed so much as the best career, that it became integrated into the educational system (shop). It was believed that everyone needed to learn to work with metal.

What has that done for the industry? Honestly, can you look at the metal working industry, or the coal industry, and tell me that they (or us?) are better off because of it being integrated into our educational system. We could probably argue all day about whether or not that was a smart move for mankind, but one thing is for sure - all those people ended up with depressed wages as two effects took hold - over supply of workers locally, and cheap labor abroad.

Similarly, I think we can debate all day about whether or not everyone knowing how to code is going to be a good thing. I don't think I have the same perspective as you on that, but neither of us can really make a definitive statement of fact. We can probably both agree however, that software faces the same destiny as other professions which went through the very same life cycle.

Jason Schreier has been pushing for game developers to unionize for a while now.

In the case of programmers, it really doesn't make much sense. There's a lot of BS that can come with unions. They have transferable skills. It's just easier to change jobs.

For more specialized workers a union probably does make sense, eg: 3d artists, game testers.

But I think union organizers are really only interested in the programmers, because they'll probably generate the most dues.

It certainly makes sense for game developers. They're being exploited with super long working hours, being let go at a moment's notice once a game is out the door, and their pay usually isn't that good. They'd benefit greatly from unionization same as everyone else working on these games.

Jason Schreier has never worked as developer or in the gaming industry. It's insane how so many people give these people so much credence and attention. The guy literally doesn't know what he is a talking about. Also 3d artists and game testers/QA/etc are transferable skills just like programmers.

What does it matter that he isn't a game developer? I don't need to be an industrial revolution era child factory worker to understand that the conditions they labored under were inhumane.

Programmers need it the least. They are paid the highest and have the best alternatives employment options. I think we should be talking about the production artist and testers in a completely separate breath from the programmers. In fact, this could explain why people are arguing in circles here, they could be talking about separate groups in completely different situations as far as compensation & leverage goes!

Not anymore no. It used to be when I did it in the 80s and 90s. It grew up and it is hell now (if I may believe my friends in the industry).

Edit; come to think about it: I made games a few years ago; educational games for government, utilities, zoos and education for money, so a job and that was still fun and really quite a dream job imho. But not big open world fps ofcourse :) Nice 2d games which is like the most anyway.

Edit 2; what I liked about game dev in the 80s and 90s was the limitations of the machines: you could lock yourself up in the basement for weeks, eat and drink and dream optimizations while writing the most rancid (but in my eyes genious) code and in the end ship it and never think about it again. I would say it was far more of an intellectual challenge than (for most devs) now as all was always from scratch; engines did not fit in memory or were just too slow if they they did. Also; there was a clear end to deathmarches: after a while nothing fits anymore and you cannot optimize it further so you ship or just scrap it. Now you can continue forever marching, which must be hell.

Heh, I wouldn't say grown up. The work environment I had in games was an hr nightmare.

In the early 80s, you could be a 15 year old and make a ton of money making a computer game. This got harder as time went on and computers got more complicated (and expectations rose).

I think in general software developers can use something like SAG to enforce a basic daily minimum rate.

https://www.sagaftra.org/production-center/contract/810/rate...

Daily rates for developers, dbas, qa's and such...

The same guild could make special rate sheets for different stages of a firm. For example SAG has a daily rate sheet for indy films, a software dev guild could have one for startups as well. This could at least prevent abusive startups.

https://www.sagindie.org/signatory/

If you are a star developer equivalent to a celebrity actor, these would just be the minimum rates. There is nothing preventing a studio from paying more.

If anything this would resolve the use of contract labor 1099 misclassifications. If you are good enough to get paid above 120k you could have a loan out corporation and deduct more of your costs while still paying union fees.

https://abspayroll.com/loan-out-companies/

https://firemark.com/2015/01/12/should-you-have-a-loan-out-c...

This wouldn't be a an factory type union. It would be something like a professional union like SAG.

Read the rate sheets to get a better understanding.

Throughout my childhood I enjoyed playing and making games. I eventually studied a mixture of CS and digital art in college in order to join the game industry. It was a dream job to me in so many ways - I imagined an open, friendly culture of people working together to create an immersive experience. The reality: minimum wage entry level, planned for "crunch" time >3 months long, constant fear of running out of "runway" (money), etc. All of this culminated with the company simply stopping paying people for a month before eventually shutting down. I tried one more game company (really just a fb/ios thinly-veiled gambling app) before I quit the industry for good. That was roughly 5 years ago - at this point I'm _just_ starting to re-kindle my love for games and creativity.

For tech workers, I think that making video games is "not a dream job" is an understatement. Except maybe for a select few.

That's what I wanted to do. A short look at what the reality looks like was enough to make me run away really fast.

I suppose the industry manages to lure in new talent who don't know any better, that's how they still manage to get people to work for them despite the terrible conditions. They project an image of an industry that is young (no shit, "old guys" jumped ship long ago) and fun to people who grew up playing video games and want to see the other side.

That's not just the big studios. On the indie side, the good thing is that you are not exploited, the bad thing is that it is even harder, with low chances of success. The only team that I've seen personally and was somewhat successful are the guys who made Crosscode (I highly recommend the game BTW), and the process looked like hard and stressful work. The others ended up doing gigs completely unrelated to game dev in order to eat.

I left an engineering job at a finance startup in the mid 90's to take a "dream job" at a video game startup. It was.. awful: all the fun and creativity was being done by on the production/game design part, and the engineering was... both demanding and boring at the same time.

It was weird realizing I was happier and feeling more creatively engaged when I was figuring out how to price derivatives.

If you're into this topic, I highly suggest How BioWare's Anthem Went Wrong by Jason Schreier, published on Kotaku this week. A deep insight into game development culture, and one particular AAA game. It's a long read (11,000 words), but worth it.

https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964

Making video games is a dream job because lots of people want to make video games. Amazing that some people choose jobs for reasons other than high salary, job security, and low stress. Shocking that some people are actually motivated by oh, I don't know, actual interest in an industry!

We can force employers to treat game devs differently via unionization or laws. If people want to discuss these kinds of measures, that's fine. But these people ought to recognize that these regulations will involve trade-offs. If you think the trade-offs are worth it, cool, but please acknowledge them.

My feeling is that highly skilled programmers who are incredibly in demand in every industry do not need unions or special legal protection. They have options. Only by denying the existence of their free will can we pretend that this is a serious problem.

The comments here have a fair number of people baffled at why folks would stay at jobs like this for any period of time. Here’s my thought based on working in games for around a decade; I left after that, in part for quality of life reasons.

For folks that want to work in games, there can be a strong feeling that it is a quixotic quest; there aren’t a lot of jobs relative to the applicants, you’re chasing a dream, and the big places of employment often made the games that made you passionate about everything in the first place.

Once you get that first job, you’re taught that you are not only one of the best, but that you’re lucky to be there. It’s easy to quickly bond with your comrades around the shared, stressful experiences. And to internalize that this is all ok because what quest doesn’t involve some pain?

My first game job was in 2002, and my long, slow falling out of love with the industry started after shipping the first game I’d worked on. Once it had gone gold, we all took a couple weeks at 40 hours a week. After that, I was told by my boss that we all had to go back to 60 hour weeks. I asked why. The answer was, “that’s how we work.”

That was when I started looking for a new job.

I got to say, reading the comments as someone who currently works in games, I don't understand why people think there's such a divide. Game development at this point is really not that different from other development. Do some studios suck at management? Yes, do some do management well? Yes. Just like other tech games has it's share of good and bad. Personally I don't work overtime and haven't since my first game job. Some people do, sometimes it's because they're covering for others work, sometimes it's because they want to put something special in they can call their own.

Is games as an industry harder? Probably, games push current tech in every way possible. Does it mean you'll have to work harder to accomplish your goals? Also probably. But with games at least you're trying to do something no one else is most of the time. And when it hits it's something you can be proud of. Not everyone cares about that, but people in games often do.

I resisted spending any time on game development for a long time because I knew deep down how games are consumed extremely quickly. You can spend tons of effort to build a utility app that might prove its value every day for years and years, and may never lose all value. You can spend tons of time and effort developing a game that may become boring to players in a matter of weeks or months and never be used again.

Ultimately I decided that game development is useful for building certain programming skills as a hobby, regardless of the “value curve” of the product. And if you expect nothing (i.e. you’re competing in a huge field of millions of games, nothing is special anymore), you can focus on what you’ve gained, which may be primarily the experience.

I emphasize the hobby part; it’s useful to try it but it’s extremely backwards economically. I would always advise “other” programming jobs, with game dev. on the side.

"because I knew deep down how games are consumed extremely quickly"

Those are called "casual games".

Most gamers will have games with (much) over 1000 h played .. I would not call that "consumed quickly"

Game development draws a more artistic developer, I think, and artists are somewhat accustomed to having to give up money and security for doing what they love. Have you ever seen a successful union for musicians? And unions sometimes suck all the creativity and great making out of an industry—-think Detroit in the 70s. I personally would like to see more of the industry spread out across startups, with more employees participating in the stock packages that can potentially create truly life-altering one-time payments in the 6 and 7 figures. But the working conditions are very hard. I’ve accepted that, however, as the price I must pay to focus on what I love to do and get paid well for it.

Jason has done great work exposing the dysfunctional and exploitative parts of the game industry.

However I am not so sure the issues are unique to games; bad management, product re-designs/pivots, underpaid support staff, investors with deadlines and expectations of ROI.

For a while I taught introductory programming to bright-eyed prospective game creators. The analogy I would use up front: driving a car is very different from building one; just because you liked playing games doesn't mean you'll like creating games - whatever part of "development" you're involved in.

Of the hundreds I taught, I'm only aware of one who went on to "making video games" - and yes it was his dream job, he's willing to put in the insane effort & hours to make it happen, and he was duly rewarded. Killing Floor 2 FTW :-)

I feel like the video gaming industry is kind of like working for SpaceX. You dream as a kid of working on rockets, so you will take an incredibly difficult job for less money and perks than google. But it’s worth it if you love rockets.

Good thing that the NYTimes is finally raising awareness about this issue. There are so many alternative sectors that these highly-skilled workers could pivot to, not just the developers/coders but other roles as well, e.g. graphicians, 3D artists, UX designers etc. The pay and conditions in the rest of the industry are so much better, there's really no comparison.

This seems all too often the case with development work in general. I see the same type of unreasonable expectations in devops.

Maybe it's compounded by the software industry liking to hire young people with less experience but more free time. They may not yet have the soft skills to navigate unreasonable demands and give hard answers, and logistically a single person can more easily pull extra hours.

I've found that as I get older it has become easier to push back on unpaid overtime type work (or simply not do it). Because it would be damaging to my family and relationships if I didn't, and that's a powerful motivator for me.

But at the same time it's hard to compete with the output of people who somehow can grind all day every day, and through the weekend. I don't know if there's a way to level the playing field as long as employers are allowing and even encouraging this kind of unpaid self sacrifice.

This is objectively wrong. DevOps continues to be the best paying field to work in. This is also accommodated by the fact that employers do not hire inexperienced people to DevOps because you probably don’t want them screwing up the whole release pipeline. Look up latest SO survey results and you’ll see that DevOps is very nicely paid even across Europe.

Oh... But I wasn't talking about salary, and Junior DevOps is most definitely a thing.

In high school, (mid 90's) I desired to be a video game developer, because I thought hey I like to play video games so maybe that should be my career! That all changed when I read the Next Generation (greatest gaming mag of all time) issue on working in the gaming industry. After reading about conjugal visits on the office floor because husbands would be stuck at the office for weeks trying to the game finished, that was enough for me. As someone who wanted to get married and have a family this turned me off of going into the gaming industry and led we towards more a much more family friendly career.

As for unionization, I don't think it will help. I have a good career, great salary, working from home 4 days a week and only commute 1 day but can come in after rush hour. I don't see companies being able to provide benefits like that if unions are involved.

Unions seem to try to solve a problem to make sure everyone is treated fairly but they really just make sure everyone gets the same thing. If everyone gets the same thing I lose my motivation. It might be a character flaw but I know I'm not alone. I suppose it might not make a big difference in some industries but in the ones I've been involved in the few difference makers on a team kept us in business.

I’ve never worked on games professionally, but I work in games media and have been able to watch this industry change up close. Video game development is really a different beast than the rest of development. They branched in the 80s the way apes and chimps did genetically. They don’t follow the same tech trends that the rest of the industry follows. I doubt a majority of game devs even know about HN. They socialize with different people. All it takes to appreciate this is to remember how caught off guard the whole industry was by mobile gaming being a thing.

I’m not convinced supply/demand is really the reason why the games industry is the way it is. I compare it to the non-games tech industry and see the conversations, communities, and struggles they’ve had and the games industry is only starting to, and wonder if there is a connection.

I don't really understand why unions are the answer to what should be basic and universal ethical labor standards.

Because, what, if you aren't in a union or unionized job you don't deserve to get treated decently? Because industries where unions and workers have less leverage should be able to treat workers worse? Or is the union thing just a reaction to lack of faith in other institutions?

I don't hate unions, but I don't get them either. And I often suspect that structurally they're much more incentivized to containerize reforms rather than universalize them.

I figured it out just in time. I wanted to be a game developer just to realize that compared to normal software dev, you are underpaid and with worse work conditions (and very little to say on game design). And coding practices tend to be worse. My spinoff was to be jusy a software developer and it turned out so much better (at that point I also figured out that my passion was software development, not game development)

Uncertainty is the killer. There are many studios that are a dream to work for, make no mistake about it. The worst studios and the best studios, always require you (mostly on the software side) to at some point, work for free. Work unpaid hours to meet a deadline. Which would be ok, if there was some kind of profit share, there however is NOT that kind of compensation. What there is, is an uncertainty that you will have a job tomorrow. You could wake up with no job and zero return in your investment of your many hours of free time. It is though for employers, no doubt, but running a games studio as a standard business leaves a trail of disenfranchised people in its wake. A better approach, if possible, is to run a project as an individual business, each worker with some kind of performance compensation and responsibility for the product...imo

For the interested Italian speakers out there, we have a recurrent podcast happening at www.gameloop.it and we had an episode right after the Blizzard layoffs to which both a Technical Director at Activision (Canada) and a researcher in the field of Industrial Relations (who worked on an EU report of unionization in the creative industry) participated, the discussion that sparked was very interesting in my opinion, here is the episoda page: https://gameloop.it/2019/02/26/gameloop-podcast-gl22a-activi... (Italian only :( )

Based on the recent article by Jason Schreier (Kotaku) about the complete disaster of Anthem game development, it puts into light the mismanagement and the exploitation of these developers to churn out games as if it were a factory floor with little time and pressured to deliver.

These developers are talented but you can only do so much with that talent when you have no time to demonstrate that talent and are being asked very unreasonable demands to deliver. Only to deliver a half baked product and asking their customers to dish-out $60+ to be a "beta" tester for a company racking up billions.

This unionization is a must. This exploitation has to stop.

The market discounts the coolness factor of being in the game industry, so you effectively pay for being a game developer by crappy work conditions.

Regarding the unionizing unions, I don't think I can express this better than RMS: "All in all, I think it is a mistake to defend people’s rights with one hand tied behind our backs, using nothing except the individual option to say no to a deal. We should use democracy to organize and together impose limits on what the rich can do to the rest of us. That’s what democracy was invented for!"

He was talking about human rights but this argument applies as well to work conditions.

I'd love to understand how many people who frequent hacker news have actual experience with a union directly beyond what the have read? The anti union rethoric is strong in the US and it seems like a lot of comments start with the position that unions are bad and go from there without really understanding what they do or thinking through what things good unions can do well.

Companies have spent a lot of time and money spreading this message so it's not suprising but it seems like a default position of many tech workers I've met in the Bay Area while they also grumble about many aspects of their job.

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that making video games for a corporation is not a dream job? I've entered 8 game jams and generally enjoyed the experience. It sucks when you can't complete your game but when I did it felt like I landed on Mars! I'd love to make games professionally put as is made clear in the article and comments, 'passion jobs' tend to suck.

This turned out to be an article about tech workers unionizing ... which I just don't see that as a solution in the tech industry in general, especially when companies have the choice to offshore their staffs. At the end of the day, we developers are well compensated, and have great mobility. If you find yourself getting a raw deal, just pickup your keyboard and go somewhere else.

To what extent is the video game industry crunch culture driven by non-negotiable deadlines? (trade shows, Christmas, movie releases)

It is a dream job if I’m my own boss.

Exactly.

My dream scenario is to be in a situation like Tarn Adams, who works on a game he loves and lives off donations. Ideally, by that point I'd have enough to sustain myself without donations so that source of stress is gone.

I don't want to work in the AAA game industry, I want to work for myself in the indie game industry on a project that both I and my supporters love.

I made Flash games part time in college that made enough money for me to [barely] live off. I took it for granted and now wish I had committed to it full time. It was some of the most fun I’ve ever had.

Unfortunately, that situation caught up with Tarn recently. They've had to change their whole model due to rising health care costs and are now hoping for actual sales to keep them afloat.

I think that just shows how all of the factors in the article (work conditions, health care, "crunch") are intertwined. People are torn between doing what they love and doing what pays well so they can stay afloat.

The silver lining is he's probably going to be rich as hell after it launches on Steam.

Want to be? go for it.

Cost of entry for macOS/iOS/tvOS is ~$1000 for total basic development & distribution hard costs on par with AAA studios; to wit a refurbished MacBook Air, Xcode, and Developer registration gives objective core tools to go from blank project to worldwide distribution. (Detail, talent, and advertising extra.)

YMMV for other platforms.

Time is the significant cost. Everything you mentioned is trivial. Unpredictable returns is another important factor.

I've made profitable games previously.

These problems could go away if games are considered an extension of software industry instead of the grey area of art/media.

Also, the barrier to entry into games is very low. This leads to mass influction of less than capable people, who still wrongly dream of making games.

I have a hard time feeling any sympathy for someone that follows a career path in which supply is higher than demand, and then they whine when they have to deal with the economic impact of supply being higher than demand.

Supply and demand aren’t perfectly measurable values.

Supply and demand change all the time, and can even shift while you’re in school, or over the 40+ expected years of most careers.

Telling someone to pick a career where demand > supply forever is impossible because if you believe in the market, supply will rise to meet demand.

* being hired ruins everything

as with every other craft, doing it on your terms is quite different and between kickstarters and the others there's plenty opportunities for the enterprising developers.

I don't know if this would work or could work but what about capping salaries? Something along the lines of you can only make 2X of the average from the bottom 50% employees.

"Making X Is Not a Dream Job" -> It's almost as if you are building something cool and exciting then some people find that as an additional reward as well.

The video game industry has the same problem a lot of creative jobs have: the work force is large. Companies can afford to treat employees like shit because there are so many fresh grads who want to be game devs lined up to take the place of anyone who complains. Compare that to writers/graphic designers who are often undercut by their peers who are willing to work "for exposure". Hopefully unionizing helps these guys out, but I think as long as there is such a big pool of people willing to suffer to have a shot in the industry, it's going to be an uphill battle.

Becoming a gamedev was my childhood dream.

After I finished my CS degree I saw how horrible their lives were. And I noped and moved on to web dev.

A good life. No regrets.

Even when doing something you love if you have to do it at the command of someone else it can be misery inducing.

Literally playing video games is now a dream job and people are still complaining smh

Game developers let themselves be exploited with low pay and unpaid overtime. They should grow a spine and say no to ridiculous work conditions. I am tired of hearing about it. They don’t need to unionize, they need to realize that they have a unique and valuable skill set. If we are talking specifically about programmers, we have the fortunate leverage to tell our employers to go piss up a rope with the weekly job offers we get.

Edit: grammar

If every single employer has the same work conditions, then what? If the state of the industry as a whole is low pay and unpaid overtime, then it's not like a developer can just go to a better job.

A developer can go make crud web applications like the rest of us. There are options to get out of it they just don’t want to take them. I don’t know if this rings true for graphics artists, game designers, etc. But a programmer who develops game code can probably write a web app too without too much struggle

I did exactly what you described. Unfortunately there is an endless supply of fresh grads (and even very talented amateurs with no schooling) willing to work absolutely slave-like conditions to "live the dream".

Fair enough and 100% true. It almost feels like we need to police up the expectations of junior developers and teach them proper work life balance. But they are going to do what they are going to do I suppose.

This should absolutely be an expectation set early on ... I often wish that our industry had an apprenticeship model, so that our senior talent would invest in training newcomers. Coming from the IC level would remove a perverse incentive for employers who offer on-the-job training to teach them to be compliant early on.

This is also why being an aspiring actor comes with terrible pay, hours, conditions. And it doesn't seem likely to change. There's a long line of people who dream of trying, and they bid down the price at the auction.

Out if interest is writing games any more fun than writing web / database apps?

In that case, you pay for it with a lower salary.

If that's not an acceptable tradeoff, you can always make your dream indie game on weekends.

I work as a freelance web dev and typically have a week (or even a month) between contracts to chase that indie game dev dream. It’s a tough juggling act, but it’s better than trying to moonlight

Yes and no. Some things are more fun, a lot of things feel about the same (solving logic issues or UI issues or database issues are just about the same no matter what subject it's about), some things are harder and more frustrating (debugging graphics issues can be very frustrating at times).

But I feel much, much more proud of the games I released than anything I've done outside of the games industry, even applications/services I've worked on that have been used by millions of people.

In corporate dev it just feels too much like I could have been replaced by just about anyone and those applications would have been basically the same, or only mattered for a few years before the company decided to throw everything out and rewrite everything, letting my old code disappear whereas with games my own ideas and creativity and how I determined the mechanics should feel and I have something at least partially unique to show for it after that people can go back and play decades later.

Games have their own problem, in that there's so many games out there that unless you've made a superhit, your game will fade to the point where probably no one is playing your game anymore anyway, in place of one of the hundreds of other games coming out all the time, but at least there are people out there that try to preserve as many games as they can, and there's a chance someone will run into your game, dust off the cobwebs, and share it in a video with the world, and a few more people will discover it and enjoy it.

Like for example I'm currently collecting and searching for obscure, fun puzzle games on the original Game Boy and Game Boy Color. All sorts of cool games there that probably only a handful of people in the world are playing right now.

A really cool surprise I can only find a couple of videos for online is Klustar for Game Boy Color. It's Tetris blocks coming in from all sides and you move a central mass around and rotate it, and try to make those blocks connect somewhere on that mass, which alters its shape, and make large squares to clear them and shrink your cluster, meanwhile some blocks slip past and land on the opposite edge of the board and stay there for the rest of the game, blocking you and other pieces, until eventually your cluster is too big and ungainly and oddly shaped that you can't place the blocks in good places anymore and all the pieces attach in bad spots and you fill up the board and the game ends. Really addicting. I don't know of another game like it out there right now. And probably no one is playing it. But at least I found it and I'm enjoying it.

Unions is a solution we got kinda nailed long time ago.

I’m not knowledgeable enough of unions to take an informed position on their merits. My impression was that unions are often an image of protection and nothing more. I could be wrong about that though.

Not unionized since unions cannot seem to stick to protecting my rights and always expands into supporting socialism and meddling with foreign policy.

That said my views on unions have become less negative: as someone pointed out - at least around here the construction companies with highest percentage of unionized workers are generally the most profitable ones year after year.

Why? I can only guess but I guess people work better when they know they are safe and also get a fair pay based on their work.

"Not unionized since unions cannot seem to stick to protecting my rights and always expands into supporting socialism and meddling with foreign policy."

Seriously?

You honestly think your employer, who you support with your daily toil, does not contribute to any political causes you might find objectionable?

Their money. Their choice. I don't care as long as they aren't to annoying about it.

It's factored in when I accept my job.

I've worked for next to nothing to support causes I find worthy so I am allowed to hold opinions on this.

But with my money, I choose.

Yeah, I can respect that. No one else seems to empathize with this stance though.

Unions are a tool for workers to come together and collectively negotiate working conditions and compensation with their company. That's it. Allowing Unions to collect fees such that they can donate to political blurs the original intent of the Union in the first place. I would support a bill banning Unions from donating to political causes so that we can all get back to remembering that Unions are a useful, narrow, and focused tool that does one thing super well.

The answer is, get a valuable skill set. If you are the only neurosurgeon in the world, and somebody needs a brain tumor removed, I'd like to see them try offer a minimum wage for the operation.

It's people's own responsibility to make themselves valuable. It's nice if some people offer pathways to becoming valuable (education, traineeships, whatever), but I don't see how anybody would be entitled to it. That would imply somebody would be responsible for delivering it, and who should that be? Why would anybody be responsible for it?

Not every employer has the same conditions, and even within a single employer there can be a wide variance of the work conditions (generally based on project and the mid-level management's competency).

The success of a studio does not seem to correlate with how poorly or well they treat their staff.

In CA overtime is always paid for more junior staff (QA, junior artists/designers) as there were a number of high profile lawsuits against games companies back in the early 2000s. For senior staff and most programmers the salaries are (in my experience) competitive with general development work outside of the Bay Area and FAANG space.

Then don't be a game developer. Luckily, the skills are readily transferrable to all sorts of better paying specialties in software engineering

Having worked in the industry they believe it's necessary. I got yoked into a mandated long weekend and was laughed out of the room when I demanded a retrospective. Long hours is a failure, we should know what failed so it doesn't happen again. Their response? That's just the way it is in games. Absolutely zero desire or acknowledgement that it should be different.

It’s toxic culture at the leadership level. When my employer asks for some outrageous development on a compressed time schedule I speak my mind. Maybe that’s why most AAA games suck these days.

If you can still compensate or halt it by speaking your mind, your leadership still has a long way to slide down the toxicity scale.

You are right. And to be clear my current work environment is not toxic which is why I can do this as you said.

In my experience it was the ic level. Leadership would say, what's a reasonable timeline for feature x. The engineers would spend two hours arguing that estimates are bullshit, then give a trivially small (and obviously wrong) estimate.

Leadership would say, are you sure? Engineers would basically flip them the bird and say yes. Then inevitably be late.

I get it, estimating is inexact. But there's a clear difference between "I broke this down into little tasks, and I think we're looking at x" and "implement multiplayer? Four days."

Why wouldn't they give a trivially large (and very safe) estimate? Telling someone you will be finished tomorrow puts the onus on you to explain why your estimate was wrong.

Insecurity combined with spinelessness causes people to give the answer they think their superior wants. This is a response that is trained by managers using microaggression.

Great question. They have pet features. Features with long estimates are targets for being cut. Give a long estimate, you risk not being able to build your feature.

I once asked, how long to add analytics to your code? (I wrote a one line utility that could bundle up objects and fire them off for you.) The response was "three weeks per event". Guess which part of the code didn't have analytics.

Now, at some level this is leadership's fault. They own the culture, but many of the engineers I worked with in games were the least interested in being a part of a team I've ever seen.

If the people you hire refuse to build what you hired them to build, and you insist on paying them anyway, you've got a lost cause.

This and so much this.

To elaborate on your point, say a programmer and a designer brainstorm an amazing new jetpack feature for the game. They spend a day (when they should be working on less interesting but planned features) on a quick first pass and show it to their PM.

The PM asks how long it will take to complete, they say 3 weeks (2 days of UI/UX time to add the fuel bar, a week to tweak the feel and mechanic, 2 days of FX artist time, 2 days of artist time to make the rocket pack model). The PM says that the feature is unplanned and that is too long, so they say they can cut some corners because they really want the feature in and its more interesting than working on their planned tasks. The PM agrees because he wants the team to be creative and take control and pride over how great their game is.

In the end the feature stays in and takes 2 months of development time since it requires modifications to world collision geometry, each selectable player needs a differently modeled jetpack to fit their geometry, a jetpack upgrade system is added, loot box unlockable color customization gets introduced, bots need to be able to fly too and so pathing and behaviors need extensive modification, a tutorial needs adding, sound effects need designing and adding, QA has to do a pass of finding everywhere in the world that the jetpack can be used to get out-of-bounds and to avoid gameplay trigger volumes, and someone has to triage and fix all those issues. And I realized I probably vastly underestimated... do we slip, missing being part of this quarters revenue and cancelling our ad-campaign or have we just pushed into development hell?

This is why grownup software companies have milestones like “requirements freeze” and “feature freeze”, and strong project management leadership who enforce these things. Adding or changing requirements mid-project (or mid-sprint, if that’s how you roll) is very often harmful to a software program’s success.

I've seen people put low estimates on things so they would be able to start something knowing that once started it was likely that we would continue working on it until completion.

A good project manager will wrestle a more realistic estimate from their developers before forwarding it to leadership.

If the engineers are obstinate in acting in bad faith, who consider the pm the enemy, there's only so much a pm can do.

A good PjM won't wrestle anything; they will measure.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-sch...

That’s not my experience. When asked for an estimate you usually already know the politically correct number. I have never got away with giving the number I think will be realistic.

If you give an incorrect estimate, you'll be the one to blame at the end of the project. Remember estimates aren't promises, so better to deal with hurt feelings at the start of the project.

The way it usually works is that I say it will take 12 months and the response is "we need it in 6". So I say "fine, we'll give it a go but I am not making any promises" and off we go.

The scope must then be cut, or the project careens into Fantasyland. That happens at some places understood, a sign of incompetent management.

I think the game everybody is playing that it's easier to ask for more money when something is already half done than asking for the whole budget upfront. And you can also cut/adjust scope in the middle.

I think AAA scale in general leads to some of the "suckage" issues since the problems occur in all large productions. With the capital comes risk aversion and to recoup the costs they go more lowest common denominator in addition to coordination issues with large teams and scaling. Even less overtime intense efforts like live action movies show these flaws.

Now they certainly do have unique pathologies related to their "cheap" talent pool churn - the lack of experienced people leads to some shockingly bad mistakes reoccurring, and lack of attention to detail from passion often shows.

Later Civilizations (V and later) for instance often came out with some shoddy AI doing things like pathing algorithms clearly designed before they added the one military unitn one civilian unit per hex limit, spamming absurdly bad trade deals, or deciding the proper thing to do against a technologically advanced power who thanks to game mechanics gives research points for every technology they lack is embargo them over conquest of one militant city-state, making it even harder to catch up.

And earlier Civilizations had game-breaking exploitable bugs. People have been pining for the mythical good old days since the age of Pliny.

The issue isn't that they had flaws - it is that they had them despite the budget and man-hours involved showing 'they just didn't care' aspects.

Whereas the older ones did it with smaller teams and more constrained resources where seeking efficiency had some weird side effects - granted there were also plenty of 'shovelware' examples from the past.

> Maybe that’s why most AAA games suck these days.

This comment shows lack of historical perspective.

All of these complaints have been hot topics since before the term "AAA game" was invented.

AAA games "suck" (if they do, which the customer base's wallets seem to to think so) because they have gotten too good at making money even against their customers' stated preferences, not because they are bad at anything.

Popular and profitable isn’t always the same thing as good.

If they're wrong in thinking that it's necessary, then anyone who comes in with an enlightened view will put them out of business and take over the market.

Some shops are doing well and are crunch free. Not sure at the AAA level yet, but definitely at the big indie level.

I’m glad to hear that seeing as “big indie” is where all the best gameplay innovation tends to come from. Many AAA titles are actually quite dull and repetitive affairs. They get wrapped in a super pretty and eye candy laden veneer so you don’t notice the underlying mechanics and gameplay are actually exactly the same as the previous 400 entries of whatever franchise

Game developers don't stay in business by being great places to work. They stay in business by staying afloat long enough to get one .. more .. game to market. I know Firaxis (makers of Civilization) has at least once laid off large parts of their development crew once the game is substantially complete.

Isn't there an element of supply and demand to it - lots of gamers become programmers and want to work as games devs. Databases on the other hand aren't cool, but businesses need them.

Long hours is a failure, we should know what failed so it doesn't happen again. Their response? That's just the way it is in games.

In my experience, that attitude is common and not limited to game developers or even programmers in general. American working culture tends to respect those who go above and beyond, or at least maintain the appearance of doing so.

You hit the nail on the head!

I've only worked at two places that were like this and they were both shit shops. I think people who stay at these places don't understand it isn't by any means normal.

Sad that working free overtime is seen as a virtue

The tech industry in general has a bit of a toxic machismo problem, but it seems to be far worse in games. Probably it's coupled to the wider culture there.

LOL, WTF do machismo and the tech industry have to do with each other? That seems a bit of a stretch to try to connect two disparate topics into a connected "issue". I get the whole problem with Rockstar Games (if that was where you were pointing - I can only assume), but that was a singular studio. As someone who works in the game industry, and has for almost 20 years, that is not representative of the vast majority of game studios. Meek is the work you are looking for, when it comes to game studio employees, at least on the west coast. And that falls in line for most of my acquaintances in the tech industry in general. The only ones who approach "toxic masculinity" (and even then... a hard stretch) are the sales guys.

I only spent ~3 years in the games industry on the west coast. I was surrounded by machismo and toxic masculinity from the engineers. It wasn't everyone, but it was definitely present to a non-trivial degree.

While you come off a bit rough on victim blaming you do have a point. Video-game developers should have formed a union long time ago but here we are.

I somewhat lack sympathy when the industry is clear as water about abuse like this yet people still go into it without precaution.

Fair enough and you are probably right. I come from the position that you can only beat a dog so long before it bites back. But I feel like this could have been prevented if developers weren’t so enamored with the idea of developing games. Yeah it’s cool but it’s not cool enough to throw your dignity away.

And so you kill the dog and get another. People who want to make games are not in short supply.

Can’t argue with that.

Software engineering for video games is pretty darn complicated. Surely it must be hard to get hold of the next John Carmack or at least someone remotely close to that. Is demand for good talent really filled here?

Game studios aren't filled with and don't need to be filled with hundreds of John Carmacks.

If your "about-to-release crunch" involves building an entire engine from scratch with no help John Carmack style, you have much bigger problems.

The whole talk about "talent" is bullshit. Big corps don't want John Carmacks. They want replaceable, predictable drones that do what they are told to do.

“ I come from the position that you can only beat a dog so long before it bites back. ”

If done right you can beat the dog for a very long time and if the dog actually bites back you get rid of it and get another one.

Very easy to say, a lot harder to do

Equally, finally leaving the games industry was one of the better things I did.

same, unfortunately ... I loved my time in the game industry, but I also loved spending time (and more money achieved elsewhere) on my family.

What is the best way to leave?

I look at the experience required on the 'Who is Hiring' threads and sigh -- how am I supposed to get two years' professional experience using a technology that has nothing to do with games, or, how do I pick which tech to invest my time in, given that everything seems to be changing so quickly?

If you're a good developer, and it seems like a lot of people leaving the games industry are, it's not hard. Study up on your Cracking the Coding Interview, HackerRank, Leetcode, and similar stuff, and then just interview for Software Engineer positions. On your resume, list your previous experience as something like "Software Engineer, EA Games, 2016-present" (and include the names of any big games you worked on that people might know and be impressed by).

This is necessary only if you apply to Google and co. Most companies will never ask you to reverse a binary tree. Especially if the company is not in the US.

Apply for a generalist position at a company that doesn’t hire for specific technologies (there are lots and lots of these, basically any of the big famous companies and a lot of smaller ones too).

I've moved from games to web development basically by winging it.

If you can code in C++, then becoming competent in JS/PHP/Python/Ruby is a matter of learning their syntax quirks and basics of the standard library. You don't have to worry about the framework-of-the-month churn. These things get popular because they're easy to pick up and well-documented.

Companies recognize that general programming knowledge is the hard part, and happily hire for it. Just avoid recruiters, as they're usually clueless keyword-matchers.

>They should grow a spine and say no to ridiculous work conditions.

YES! You're absolutely right!

> They don’t need to unionize.

Err... Why on earth not? That would literally be the definition of growing a spine and saying no to ridiculous work conditions but also having it be effective.

I probably jumped the gun on the unionization part. I don’t know a lot about it but my impression of unions is not so bright. Maybe my ignorance is showing with that regard

It's all the propaganda corporations have been feeding you about how evil unions are. The wage stagnation of employees and stratospheric rise in senior management pay can be directly correlated to the decline of unions in North America.

How can you tell you haven't been fooled by all the union propaganda about evil corporations are? Maybe the truth is in the middle? Unions died in the US by a mix of suicide and overreach. Unions are still glorified to kids as saving us from child labor (which they did!). The bulk of the negativity around unions comes from people old enough to observer the decline of the manufacturing industry. The unions weren't the cause but helped accelerate the decline.

My knowledge of unions is based entirely on the UK. They allow groups of employees who are subject to poor conditions to group together and participate in collective bargaining. Most programmers in the UK are not a member of a union as pay is fairly high and conditions relatively good, but the majority of public-sector and a lot of private-sector workers are. Unionising would be an excellent first step for employees fighting back.

I see a lot of anti-union talk on HN, I don't think a lot of the criticism of unions I see here is fair.

> I see a lot of anti-union talk on HN

That's because most people on HN are from the U.S. where a century of propaganda has convinced most people not only that poor people are lazy, but by extension that unions are evil, corrupt and lazy organizations infiltrated by organized crime. While this propaganda has a minority basis in reality in some cases, as all propaganda will have because propaganda can't be 100% fantasy and make-believe, it's an ignorant basis to take when discussing broad and general questions like unions as a concept.

If you ask someone from Spain or Germany about unions and attempt to explain why they're "evil" from the US perspective, I can guarantee you will be met with complete disbelief. Most people in Europe may not actively be a part of a union, but they normally recognize them as beneficial entities in the labor market, and as something that will help balance the scales against employers of normally vastly larger influence, both politically and economically.

There are/were some excesses, though. And if you ask an european about (union supported) rubber rooms, s/he would also express some disbelief.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rubber-rooms-in-new-york-city... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rubber_Room

>If you ask someone from Spain or Germany about unions and attempt to explain why they're "evil" from the US perspective, I can guarantee you will be met with complete disbelief.

How can you possibly guarantee (no less!) what someone, regardless of where they come from, will say about any subject? You cannot complain about generalizations and broad statements, as in here:

>...a century of propaganda has convinced most people not only that poor people are lazy, but by extension that unions are evil, corrupt and lazy organizations infiltrated by organized crime.

And then try to fit reality into your own narrative at the same time without being a hypocrite.

I will tell you this, though: CCOO and UGT (the two major trade unions in Spain) are publicly funded, which I find absolutely wrong. Moreover, they tend to be incredibly incompetent and useless in most cases. Of course, I'm drawing from my own personal experience and others' accounts of their own.

You can always join CGT [1]. They take tech workers seriously and they have presence on most tech companies.

Leave the more general, "politics" side of unions (calling for general strikes, and so on) to CCOO and UGT, and make use of another union to protect you when your company tries to abuse you. Also, if you're not satisfied with what the unions do, you can always the works council. A workmate of mine is in our company's works council and she isn't even part of any union.

Also, in my experience CCOO and UGT are not nearly as bad as the media paints them (again, I'm talking about what's going on at companies I've worked at). This may sound like a cliché, but really, there is an awful lot of propaganda against them because there are plenty of rich people interested in having an exploitable work force. The only real complain I have against CCOO and UGT is that they sometimes don't fight as hard as they should. But in many other cases they do. I've seen cases where these unions have successfully sued companies upon wrongful termination of workers, for example.

[1] https://www.cgtinformatica.org/

+1, this is a political question and, as with every political question, there are of course plenty of different opinions in Europe about it.

Pointing out singular words when making an argument is just petulant, clearly I was speaking in general terms and referring to the general difference between the US and Europe. That anyone would claim that it's impossible to find someone with a pro-union opinion in the US is as nonsensical as saying you couldn't find one with an anti-union opinion in Europe. We're talking about hundreds of millions of people.

The main point of my comment, which I made very clear, was that specific examples of "bad unions" is not a helpful or constructive basis upon which to have an argument about the theoretical place of labour unions in a market, no more than you would base an argument about where to go for dinner in the nutritional value of a carrot.

Are you arguing that most people don't think that poor people are lazy? In the context of this conversation, the poster is right about what most people believe.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newsweek.com/why-are-people...

>but by extension that unions are evil, corrupt and lazy organizations infiltrated by organized crime.

That's because, in the US, it's all true, historically. Auto unions were a big reason why Detroit's automakers were so uncompetitive against the Japanese automakers in the 80s; autoworkers got ridiculous pay for menial work, which is why Detroit moved a lot of their production to Mexico and Canada, and other automakers moved to Southern states where unions didn't exist.

The simple fact is that unions in the US in the latter half of the 20th century and beyond were nothing like unions in Germany, where by almost all accounts they seem to work out extremely well.

>Most people in Europe may not actively be a part of a union, but they normally recognize them as beneficial entities in the labor market

Yes, in Europe that's true. In America, it just hasn't been the case. It's just like public transit: in Germany, trains and subways are fantastic: they're inexpensive, clean, and efficient; whereas in America, they're an utter disaster: dirty, expensive, constant maintenance problems, and just a miserable experience. Try riding the subway in Munich, and then riding the subway in NYC or DC; there's just no comparison. The problem isn't that subways are bad, it's that subways in America are bad. Same goes for unions.

We've had singularly successful industries like Hollywood rely on unions as well - SAG, WGA, IATSE, etc. Their work bears a lot more similarity to software development than the auto industry does, so hopefully that is food for thought.

It's fair enough to say that American auto unions (and very importantly, auto company management and ownership) would do well to model themselves after Germany's system. It's not a universal truth that all our unions are ineffective.

Exactly. People on here treat companies with nuance and analyze their pros and cons but often with unions they get lumped into the all unions are bad bucket without considering what aspects of unionizing are good and bad with any real depth.

I could compare all companies to the worst examples too (e.g. all startups are Theranos) but that would never be taken seriously nor would it be fair yet somehow with unions that level of analysis is taken seriously.

>It's fair enough to say that American auto unions (and very importantly, auto company management and ownership) would do well to model themselves after Germany's system.

You could say that about many different things: if we just did it like the Germans, everything would be better, right? But how exactly do you actually do that? We're not Germany. You could go to Zimbabwe or El Salvador and tell them the same thing ("just be like the Germans or Japanese and you won't have all these social problems!"), but that isn't realistic; if it was that easy, every country would be copying the Germans and Japanese.

As for a universal truth, I haven't seen any evidence yet that unions in America actually work well. In Germany, yes, but this isn't Germany.

>which is why Detroit moved a lot of their production to Mexico and Canada

Well, I'm pretty sure those auto jobs in Canada were also high paying and unionized.

Source: I worked for one through University.

>Well, I'm pretty sure those auto jobs in Canada were also high paying and unionized.

That just supports my argument even more. It's not unions that are the problem, it's unions in America.

Don't know if it is still true but almost everyone at Boeing is part of the union, my college co-op student peers in the 1980's said they had to join the union even as electrical or aerospace engineers to work for a semester.

Auto Unions were blamed by corporate execs in the 1970s-2000s but the fact is the yen was undervalued at 250/dollar to 300/dollar in the 1980s up until 1999. Execs needed someone to blame or the board would fire their asses for not having the political connections to keep the car imports out..

The other big problem was that American cars at the time were poorly-designed, unreliable junk, and Japanese cars were great.

Just a minor note: Our terrible public transit is due to our society revolving around the motto "a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage." In my city, you can find overpasses that were purposely designed to not let buses fit through to further emphasize how "terrible" public transit is, and how we all need our own car. Those with money & power then moved into the Suburbs, and thereby even more legislation was made to ease suburbian transit.

I'm from Portugal (where we've had somewhat similar experiences to Spain with the mentality for unions).

When I was young I believed they were good as it was what I was taught and fell in the socialist-leaning mentality of much of the country.

Having started to learn about economics, entering the industry, and seeing the arguments many people make for unionization have definitely led to me to swing much harder to the "unions are evil" side of the argument.

That said I do believe they are a double edged sword of sorts. When the only employer for a certain profession is the government for example (i.e. not driven by profits and losses, or not a part of a competitive market) unions can actually help make things fair and get a point across that otherwise would not be visible. But in general they are much less efficient than profits and losses in a competitive market and in those situations will lead to a decline in growth that you would otherwise not get.

Unions are just reverse corporations. They cannot be any more good or evil than a corporation.

A reverse corporation of sorts, but with only a single source of revenue. A corporation is a collective that works together to produce something. A union, on the other hand, seeks to extract as much value as is possible/reasonable from the host organization, but not so much that they destroy it.

I'm not sure if I'm being poe's law'd or this is going to turn into a recursive thread but... this is also describing a corporation:

> seeks to extract as much value as is possible/reasonable from the host organization, but not so much that they destroy it

I guess my main points were that corporations differ in that their “host” is basically all of society and they must produce things of value or they die, but a union’s “host” is either a single corporation or industry and they do not directly produce things of value.

Unions consume goods and use services to make a loss?

The easiest way to debunk your claim that it is purely propaganda is to give easy counter-examples. In this case, may I present to you New York's finest: The MTA and LIRR. where rampant abuse of the system is everywhere and somehow, amazingly, have one of the highest disability claim rates out of any group of workers in the country.

Either working for the MTA or LIRR is one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, or this is quite literally "organized crime"

And who could forget this story? Is this "25 years of propaganda"? https://nypost.com/2013/12/20/ex-lirr-union-boss-in-gravy-tr... https://nypost.com/2014/08/06/nearly-all-lirr-workers-have-d...

Anyways, not saying there aren't good, hard working people in unions out there, and they don't provide some functional value, but like anything in life they have become corrupted.

Unions can certainly succeed if the the employee side also has a vested interest in the success of the company just as much as the company has, and that balance is maintained. Then, you truly have a collective.

An "employee owned organization" seems like a better alternative to unions, in my opinion.

Really I don't think you need unions at all, at least not now in the information age. If all employees across various industries simply shared salary figures (adjusted for cost of living, of course, to be fair), it would have the same effect as most of the benefits of union membership. That knowledge by itself would be incredibly empowering. The late Alan Kruger pointed this out when reflecting on the famous "Card and Krueger" experiment.

> An "employee owned organization" seems like a better alternative to unions, in my opinion.

This statement is completely and utterly nonsensical to anyone that has even a shallow understanding of the history of labour struggles and unionizing.

Oh I do understand the history. But with modern employment laws for overtime, safety, harassment, etc, workplace conditions are no longer an issue in the United States. In the meantime employee ownership aligns incentives l to operate efficiently and profitably.

Well, as someone from Russia and before that, Soviet Union, despite having the polar opposite message in propaganda, I've seen it again and again to be exactly true. I haven't seen a single competent, able-bodied and hard-working man staying poor in my life. What I've seen though was a lot of laziness, entitlement and horrible work ethics.

Additionally, in many European countries, union agreements affect the whole company, regardless from whom is actually an union member.

Which means IT also benefits from the work hours agreements that affect everyone, just to give a basic example.

I’m all in favor of private sector unions, because a union that is too greedy will kill its host. For the same reason I am against public sector unions, their host is the government and “killing” that results in severe consequences for all of us. Look at the pension crisis in several states.

I was part of a union and was even on the union board that did the bargaining. Bargaining was incredibly stressful and a really terrible experience. Each time it made me want to quit my job. You learn just how little the company actually cares about you. Then you can't help but let the other members of the union know, and morale plummets overall. This happens every year...

I'm lucky at my current job that my employer does care for the employees. We are paid well, have amazing benefits, they are open about earnings and such. I much prefer this scenario rather than a union, but I can totally get why some companies need a union -- companies that treat their employees terribly. I just feel bad that it has to be a thing at all :(

Would be interesting to know exactly why you think (even if you know you don't know) unionization are not so good.

So far on HN, I've noticed that people from the US seems to not like the idea at all about unionization while people from EU (me included!) see unionization as something good that protect workers. I do know that efforts around unionization are very strong in Europe, and helpful for the workers. Maybe there was a previously unsuccessful attempt in the US and peoples impression comes from that?

It’s a combination of multiple reasons.

First, culturally, US Americans are much more individualist than most Europeans. (Obviously I am painting with broad strokes here, but it’s true in a general sense, on average). US Americans are somewhat less likely to feel solidarity or a sense of common cause with coworkers, and more likely to value the freedom to negotiate their contract on their own.

They are also much more likely to distrust large organizations and bureaucracy, sometimes to an extreme extent that would be puzzling to Western and Northern Europeans. Rather than being on their side, many would perceive the union as just one more large bureaucracy trying to screw them.

Third, there are many current examples of unions in the US that have made industries meaningfully less efficient. And highly-paid US Americans are less likely to see themselves as oppressed by their employers and more likely to see themselves as making common cause: after all, they have a common goal of making a lot of money. If my company, say, found it harder to fire low performers (an almost certain consequence of a union), it would be less efficient, make less profit, and be less able to pay me my current high salary.

I hope I’ve genuinely answered your question and given you some insight into the mindset without implying either side is right or wrong. Just different viewpoints...

Some sensible (IMHO) responses:

> US Americans are somewhat less likely to feel solidarity or a sense of common cause with coworkers, and more likely to value the freedom to negotiate their contract on their own.

No one is negotiating their contracts on their own. A negotiation requires at least two parties, and when it comes to negotiating employment terms, one party typically had no problem incorporating and using that to their advantage.

> They are also much more likely to distrust large organizations and bureaucracy, sometimes to an extreme extent that would be puzzling to Western and Northern Europeans.

Yet some of the largest and most powerful organizations in the world are US based. For a place where so many buy their food at large restaurant and store chains, buy their internet and phone plans from large national service providers, trust large organizations like Google or Facebook with information about their browsing and communication habits and depend on large credit organizations and banks, this just doesn't strike me as true. Large, bureaucratic organizations thrive in the US and people love them. Maybe not meaningfully more than in European countries and probably even less, but to call it an extreme distrust is a mischaracterization IMO.

> Third, there are many current examples of unions in the US that have made industries meaningfully less efficient.

IMO this is an important point, but in a country with the GDP per capita of the US I think that there is some margin to improve conditions in a lot of industries, of course at the expense of some very rich people. The problem is that consumers cover that margin instead of shareholders.

Again, my perception might not be reality. I don't really like the idea that I have to pay some organization to protect my rights as an employee. I have heard of unions strong arming people to register with them as well. I believe we should have a unified front for healthy working conditions but something about being a card carrying union member rubs me the wrong way. Now I work for the hypothetical toxic employer and a union. What happens when my opinion deviates from the union? Or maybe I just have trust issues.

This comment right here is why I love HN so much. Nowhere else on the internet do I see such civility and humility. Thank you for actively being a part of making this community so wonderful and inclusive.

Not to say that the mods don't work hard at this as well nor that there aren't others who contribute positively here. This is just such a perfect example that I'd like to draw attention to it.

This is not unique to or typical of HN.

Inclusive is an interesting way of putting it.

“Maybe my ignorance is showing with that regard”

I commend you for saying this. Usually people just keep digging in and stick to their previous statement.

I originally downvoted that comment, but removed it based on this comment. It takes a lot of character to admit making rash generalizations. Kudos!

Back on topic, I think unions are like anything else; if they are not well managed/maintained, they can become top heavy and easily corrupted. The key (much like any other organization) is consistent involvement from membership to keep the top honest... and move leaders along that don't have the organization's best interest at the forefront.

While unionization is the formalized structure of collective bargaining, there is nothing keeping these individuals away from collective bargaining without forming an official union to do so.

> there is nothing keeping these individuals away from collective bargaining without forming an official union to do so.

I think this is the main reason why I just "don't get" unions. Why do we have to put a name to it? Trying to understand unions, I guess it provides some sort of legitimacy to the organization. Or perhaps unions are more efficient at bargaining multiple issues simultaneously. I guess I am just really hung up on paying a union money.

> Why do we have to put a name to it?

To set up a communications and decision-making structure.

> hung up on paying a union money.

Agreed.

Am open to unions, but their worst tendencies such as significant monetary collection and (everyday) work obstruction should be against the rules. Just as anti-employee corporate policy should as well.

Because without putting a name to it, you don't have the same level of organization. If you have a group of workers who organize collectively but don't have a real organization with a leadership structure, how do you vote and decide what your goals are?

I know someone who's in a union as a mechanic. Her union dues are $50 and she gets fantastic benefits, that more than pay for the union dues.

Probably because you end up reinventing unions from first principles. You start off with a group of employees organising together. Then they realise some of the things they need to do require money. Then they realise you need some contingency to pay for big expenses. Then you realise you can use your bargaining power to help members in other ways for example here unions offer lots of services, discounts and funds for things like education. We’ve also just been through a period of labour renegotiation with some strikes which has ultimately ended up with the government getting involved with promises of reform to resolve them.

Plus many countries have laws surrounding how unions can operate and protections for employees organising them. In a less enlightened society employers will just lay off anyone attempting to organise.

So in general Unions are typically formed explicitly because people have lots of existing evidence of the benefits.

In the UK at least, there's also quite a few people working on 'reinventing the union' (e.g.: https://www.organise.org.uk/ [1]). There's definitely an element to which old-school unions aren't particularly well suited to the modern workplace.

For example, they don't work very well for freelancers/gig economy type jobs; and their traditional focus on job safety in factories/assembly lines doesn't really apply in the same way to programmers sitting at desks.

[1] I'm not affiliated with them, but have met the team, and they seem like smart people.

If you like weekends and holidays, you like unions.

A big part of the root cause of sucky gamedev working conditions (and I'm speaking mainly about developers here, as that is what I have first hand experience with) is the fact that a lot of people just really want to work on games and choose to put up with it. This is especially true for developers; there are plenty of developer jobs out there that are nothing like your typical game studio, and the skills that game developers have are not so unique to that industry that they couldn't find work elsewhere if they wanted to.

So yes, unions are one way to try to solve that problem. But if you choose to advocate for that, just be aware that attempting to solve these problems via a union would result in trading one set of problems for another: you'd probably end up with better working conditions, at a cost of new, artificial barriers to entry for all those people who want to work in that industry. Maybe it would be worth it, I don't know, but given the root causes, it definitely seems like this tradeoff would exist.

Unions do not exist to protect potential members, they exist to protect actual members. Saying "it's harder to break into the industry" isn't going to discourage someone already in the industry.

This actually does hit on the major difficulty in unionizing, which is that people want to make games. It seems fun. It feels rewarding to point to something bringing joy to your friends and family and go "I helped make that!" Because this feeling is so common, it's extremely easy to find someone to to do the job for less. If you're a cost minded manager (instead of a results minded manager) you might be willing to take on 3 dirt cheap juniors to do the work of one really expensive senior dev.

> Unions do not exist to protect potential members, they exist to protect actual members.

Yes. Often (though not always) by increasing barriers to entry. Either directly, for example by requiring union membership, or indirectly, by increasing the cost of labor, which could mean that companies in the industry will higher fewer people in aggregate.

Forming a union is not growing a spine. It's combining the wish of a spine with 100 others until you collectively have a spine.

I'm not against unions, but his suggestion is about the individual.

If you have two people equally passionate and capable about doing a job, but one wants more money for fewer hours and the other is happy with less money for more hours, why should the more costly, less productive person get the job?

Exactly! And of course this ought to go further and only the desperate are ultimately deserving of that job. They won't even demand safe working conditions. They'll be grateful for the opportunity. It's not slavery if the employer doesn't "own" that person.

I'd prefer our improvements and working conditions come through the political process. That way it remains fair across the board without the lucky few who make it into unions, which nearly always become a good 'ol boy network, handing out favors to someone's cousins first, or beating the crap out of people who dare to not join them.

they need to realize that they have a unique and valuable skill set

The competition to be a low-paid drone in game development is huge; significantly more than in non game dev. The games industry is powered by huge numbers of low-experience software engineers. They get paid in glamour and the thrill of being able to tell their friends they work in games. They could leave and go somewhere else for more money, but they don't want more money as much as they want that glamour. I've seen it myself; people take low-paid QA jobs at games companies for the love of spending 12 hours a day following mind-numbing instructions, repetitively playtesting a greyscale wireframe without sound or graphics assets. For the glamour of it.

These people have skill sets that are unusual amongst the general population, but not in the realms of software engineering job candidates and even less so in games, where strongly talented people take Godawful jobs for the glamour of it.

Yes, there are highly skilled, experienced software engineers in the industry too, but they're not the ones being fucked over in huge numbers on a daily basis.

> The competition to be a low-paid drone in game development is huge.

That's precisely why unionization is the best course of action. Game development companies aren't threatened if individual developers demand better treatment because they can be replaced by the next starry-eyed young dev seeking prestige and glamour. But if enough of them unionize and collectively bargain for better conditions, the industry has to listen.

In the absence of other protections (and frankly, even in the presence of other protections), I'm a fan of unionisation, but I am from outside the USA; I understand people inside the USA commonly have different opinions about unions.

People say that, but what's the glamour? Do you have friends in AAA gamedev? Do you think that's cool? Do their parents? Their little brothers?

You know who is cool? the 2-3 people who designed and built Pac-Mac, or Legend of Zelda, or Braid, or Papers Please. Not the people making guns for Call of War 7 that's a clone of a dozen other AAA games.

Exactly. I thought I wanted to make games professionally for a long time, then realized that I'd just be a cog in the machine if I worked for a large company.

Yeah I think it’s cool that extremely powerful game engines are available for free to developers. There are many a reason why EA and others are taking a big hit, but the swell of really good games being produced by those 2-3 person teams has to be a big part of it. I haven’t played anything that could be considered AAA in quite some time (anything from FROM software being a very strong exception - I love their work)

You mean, do I know who you happen to think is cool, which pretty much by definition has to be a cultural and personal opinion? Good for you. Lots of people think working on big flashy modern AAA games is cool and glamourous. I don't. You don't. Presumably that's why we won't work for glamour in the games industry. Lots of people are prepared to work for glamour in the games industry; they think it's cool.

working on a AAA game that everyone has heard of is going to get you more kudos than some hipster indie title(looking at you Papers Please)

Yes. I see this a lot. There's a testing facility for one of the major studios nearby. Lots of people try to get jobs there and say they work at "X".

But it's all QA. So I'm like "Cool, so you make minimum wage running tests".

I mean, you may never see my name in lights, but I ain't hurting to pay the bills if you know what I mean.

> they have a unique and valuable skill set.

They have a valuable skill set, but making big games takes large groups of testers, tool programmers, texture artists, etc. Who are talented but not unique.

Like movie productions, games depend on a lot of skilled labor. And like movie productions, they tend not to be steady employers. So like film production in the US, it makes a lot of sense to have guilds or unions to protect work situations. Maybe also to create a framework for long term benefits, though I guess that is more debatable.

Collective bargaining is the most effective way of "saying no to ridiculous work conditions". Unions are as imperfect as any human institution, but they serve a purpose.

The main problem with the game industry - I believe - is that for a lot of people it's a dream job, which means the supply for people to work in the industry far outweights that of the demand - meaning, if you're not doing crunch time, there's ten others waiting in line to take over. This is I think the problem in a lot of big employers with dubious worker practices - think Amazon, Uber, etc. They get away with it because the people are easily replaced. They can just fire any Amazon worker who even thinks about joining a union. In the gaming industry, they can - and will, and have - replace a voice actor with one that isn't unionized. Because they can. Because if not everyone is in the union, it is powerless. Because if they can offer a job to someone not in the union, who is willing to get underpaid to just have a job, they will.

This was my thought exactly! It is awfully pretentious to tell someone else what their "dream job" is. People value different things and there are a ton of people who value the ability to work on a game over better working conditions.

As a society we do want to protect people from exploitation, but a game developer is significantly different from the other 2 examples you used: amazon (I assume you meant warehouse) worker and uber driver. Those are low skill jobs so employers have all the leverage, I don't think many of them want to be an uber driver or warehouse worker.

Contrast that with a game dev, which is a very high skill job. They can take those skills into many other fields and make money, but they don't want to. Is that exploitation? I don't know, but it doesn't feel like it is to me.

You know what happens when you're in a saturated job market and you "grow a spine and say no to ridiculous work conditions" without a union? You get fired.

I was fired from a shop that made a game backend and asked workers to continually crunch, work long hours on salary with no overtime. There were some big bonuses, but it didn't make up for the bad planning and management.

I refused to work over 45 hours a week. I worked one 13 hour Sunday and said no to the 2nd one and was fired. Another dev/ops person left two weeks later.

The others: almost all of the team is still there, working over a year later, with the same crazy hours (80+ for 6~8 weeks at a time) and same constant crunch. I really really really wish I had at least used the word "union" in a meeting or e-mail while there, so I could claim I was fired based on trying to organize. I've even considered taking a day or two off, standing in front of the building and handing out unionization pamphlets, just to see if I could help make a change for the people left there.

Everyone else let themselves and continue to let themselves be exploited. I honestly don't understand why many of them haven't gotten new jobs yet. Do they not realize that type of work isn't normal? I've worked at a lot of places and maybe I can just see bad management when others can't?

I love your story! There is always a risk standing up for what you believe in. The fact they fired you over this shows their lack of respect for their employees. How long did it take you to find work after being fired?

I honestly didn't try very hard at first and I was trying to avoid job recruiters. I took two months off before even looking, so in total, I was out of work for five month.

> Do they not realize that type of work isn't normal? I've worked at a lot of places and maybe I can just see bad management when others can't?

As you can tell from the fact that they have chosen to stay there and keep doing it, they apparently don't mind it that much. Certainly not enough to leave anyway.

As long as individuals try to out-compete each other for desired positions, they won't form a block, in the form of a union, to achieve a common goal.

It's prisoner's dilemma.

>They don’t need to unionize, they need to realize that they have a unique and valuable skill set.

Without unionizing, even if all of current employed and poorly paid game developers realized this, there would be no shortage of people coming in to undercut them.

Yeah, I'm surprised the parent comment is upvoted so highly. If they had a unique skill set they would be paid more. Supply is just greater than the demand, simple as that.

This is effectively how the game industry works. Young idealistic people get hired and work for a few years; and eventually realize this is shit deal burn out, quit and get replaced.

A union can protect against scenarios where a studio hires a bunch of people, the publisher pulls funding, and they're all laid off several months later with no severance or healthcare or assistance.

Movie crews are constantly rolling on and off projects and are unionized. This is hardly a foreign concept.

No, they need a union. Leverage only works if everyone uses it, and collective bargaining is how that happens. If the word “union” bothers you then call it something else. Otherwise you get what we have now: highly mobile individuals able to pull themselves out of bad jobs as individuals, but otherwise unable to affect the industry as a whole.

Every game development job I’ve had has been terrible by any measure... but I still crave to go back.

It’s easy to put in long hours when everyone else does and you genuinely enjoy their company.

It’s easy to forgo pay, when you have equity.

You’re just never going to get the opportunity to work creatively with a talented team at Wells Fargo. It’s a totally different experience.

If you’re concerned about a work/life balance or compensation, it’s not for you. I’d hate if game development turned into a typical corporate 9-5, and was inclusive of all skill levels.

Pay is decent, if you’re established and are at the top of your game.

>>I’d hate if game development turned into a typical corporate 9-5, and was inclusive of all skill levels.

Why? If the quality of the games stays the same, what benefit is there for the employees to work 20 hour days during crunch? How is that inherently "good"?

How would you make it better than "terrible by any measure"?

How would gamers feel with 2x longer release cycles and higher cost and/or less features?

Lower profit and higher expenses is the only way, but given the risks of any ambitious title, small studios are nearly always flirting with bankruptcy as it is.

There’s no easy answer, but time to market and risk will suffer.

In this highly competitive industry, you cannot expect someone to just stand up and demand to not be exploited when they can be simply fired and replaced within minutes. So no, it is not as simple as just growing a spine.

You don't seem to understand what a union is. It's a group of people getting together to "say no to ridiculous work conditions". A union is literally how you join together to say no when you don't have individual power. The level of straight up anti-union rethoric on here without really understanding what a good union does is revealing.

Grandma's Boy made it look pretty cool :P

i've worked as a developer for 2 different gaming companies. it is most definitely not a dream job.

They are not being exploited. They are free to take on another job. Especially coders could certainly find jobs in other industries.

And "Fortnite" is not the games industry. There are a variety of ways to make a living making games.

Of course you can stop being exploited as a game developer by leaving the games industry---but why should people be forced to change their career in order to avoid exploitation?

They are welcome to jump in independently, produce their own games, and compete with the rest. They will then learn the realities of "GET IT DONE", that those whining at management about >40hr work weeks get trounced by those viewing projects as "24/7 with bio breaks".

It's not about whether you have a right to follow a chosen career. It's about that chosen career being chosen by many more people than the market can support, the competition being ferocious, and the reality that those wanting to get it right get run over by those getting it DONE.

There's only so many jobs available in a career field. If there's far more people clamoring to take those jobs than positions available, why should employers bother to pay them more than a pittance? The employer who pays extremely well will be uncompetitive compared to the other employers.

If employees don't like this, they should stop trying to get these terribly-compensated jobs, and go to other industries. There is a shortage of qualified developers in other industries. Salaries are very high, working conditions are generally good, so why do these masochists insist on "pursuing their passion" in the games field where this isn't the case?

I'm sorry, I have no sympathy. It's not like these people don't have options. This is seriously a "first world problem" here.

The big problem is that too many people seem to think that people have some kind of "right" to a career. They don't. As a society, people should have the right to a decent job and livelihood, I will agree. However, no one has the right to do their dream job, and get paid a fortune for doing it! Careers are subject to the laws of supply and demand like anything else, and games are not something vital to society where the government has any business stepping in with regulation to keep things running smoothly, as it does with things like electric utilities, infrastructure, education, or aviation safety.

Because nobody is entitled to a job. Nobody should be forced to give you money. If they don't need your services, why should they?

I guess game development is more like wanting to be an artist.

What if I want to make a living making paintings? Should people/society be forced to buy my paintings? I don't think so. It's my job to convince people to buy my paintings, and if I fail, too bad. Back to selling fries.

It is also worth noting that many of the skills in the games industry are highly specialized to the games industry.

Games is kind of like a 'galapagos island' to its own. Most games developers won't know any language other than C++, won't know anything about the web, won't know anything about databases, etc....

C++ is consistently one of the most popular programming languages [0].

Large-project, high-performance C++ programming that a game developer likely possesses is probably one of the most broadly portable programming skills a person could have.

[0] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/cplusplus/

> but why should people be forced to change their career in order to avoid exploitation?

"change their career"? come on, it isn't as though they're being asked to become coal miners or journalists. just go compete for some of the jobs doing scientific visualization software, or take some other high paying software job.

> but why should people be forced to change their career in order to avoid exploitation?

You've got to be kidding, right?

Don't know why someone is entitled to a particular career. Change can be hard but I certainly wasn't ever promised an easy life.

And they're also free to, rather than leave their dream career, push for unionization instead and fight to remain inside it.

Just leaving is one choice, but fighting is another.

But the company was there first. If the company sucks, than those devs could also found a better company instead of trying to change the bad company.

So fighting, yes, but maybe for something solid.

I don't see why that matters.

It's legal to go find another job. It's also legal to unionize. Who are you to tell other people what to do? It's fine if you would just leave, but maybe others don't want to. Maybe they've poured their heart and soul into that company, or it's the best job around and if they leave it they'd have to move. There's plenty of reasons why people who are not you would choose to fight instead of give up and leave.

It doesn't make sense to criticize others for doing something that's perfectly acceptable just because you wouldn't do it.

" It doesn't make sense to criticize others for doing something that's perfectly acceptable just because you wouldn't do it."

So you criticize me for criticizing? And that makes sense?

Sure, they are free to do that. I mostly take issue with the framing by the NYT, talking of "exploitation" and unionization as the only choice/way to fight back. Especially the "exploitation" bit - game developers are not slaves, by a long stretch. If work conditions are bad, it is because many people fancy their job over the alternatives.

You could also "fight" by creating your own game studio with better work conditions, for example.

In my personal view, unionization is just blackmailing. That's my personal opinion, though (guess that doesn't make me better than the NYT, but at least I state it as my opinion, not as absolute truth).

I am not sympathetic to unionization, because I think it probably harms the game developers who are currently unemployed, and it is not really fair play imo (it is banking on arbitrary laws that are not rooted in economic reality).

> If work conditions are bad, it is because many people fancy their job over the alternatives.

What lol? No, working conditions are bad due to deadlines and management being unwilling to hire more people / move deadlines / cut scope / etc.

They get away with it because people are queuing for the job.

And you can't assume there is infinite money available to spend, either.

Of course there is no need to make a job horrible just because it is in demand. I'm pretty sure there are some pretty good jobs in game development, too. For example indie developers who hit it big (Mojang...).

Yes, we know they are getting away with it, but that's not the subject...

Making videogames is a great hobby though. One of the traditional appeals of writing roguelikes is that you can spend minimal effort on graphics and related cruft and boilerplate, and jump straight into implementing any fun mechanic you can think off. If you like the idea of creating games, do something less stressful as a day job, and make games as a hobby. A single person can release a game made as a hobby. This way you have full control, no stress, and don't need to take financial risks.

These conditions don't seem to be very different from many other American businesses. Unpaid overtime, minimal notification during layoffs.

Video games get a lot of attention because they are the ultimate consumer product. Workers being treated similarly at a glass factory or an accounting form wouldn't make the news.

Unionisation isn't going to solve fundamentally poor corporate performance or mismanagement. Ultimately people need to be willing to walk away from bad jobs.

The best thing that has actually happened recently for game developers is the creation of the Epic store on PC - giving 88% of revenue to developers, instead of the 70% of many others stores. Its odd so many people seem to oppose that store on one hand, and support unionisation on the other.

I thought everyone knew this already. And its been true for decades. When I was a CS major, everyone told me not to go into game development because you worked the most for the least amount of pay.

Not sure why why this is so high up here. I'd think that the HN community would already know this by now. If not, there are plenty of game developer testimony all over social media and the internet.

This is not at all reflected among the actual workers in the different game development groups I'm in. People post polls about unionization all the time and "yes" never ever wins, not even close.

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