So my answer to HR's answer is:
If we offer industry standard pay for games companies, we get industry standard hiring crisis and candidate quality, as seen at other games companies. Have you researched hiring success at other companies and not just salaries?
Experience suggests the answer to that from HR would be cultural inertia though, so it's not really them you'd need to persuade. It's a strategic decision for the company leaders, whether they think it's worth spending more to attract hires of the type who get better offers elsewhere.
Individual HR people may not all be critical thinkers, but HR people do salary research and keep up with trends in hiring. They have their own professional communities where they discuss this stuff. Even if they aren't all individually doing it, some within the HR communities look at such things and talk about it with others. They use this to advise each other and their execs if nothing else.
HR industry groups could, as a body, look into whether "the industry standard" is getting hiring results as well as employee churn, satisfaction, and company-reported satisfaction with their hiring outcomes and make that information available to HR people and then to whomever needs to take it into account in strategic decisions.
With a straight face they responded to my objection that i would get access to all their PC game catalog and a limited-discount for consoles.
I still laugh when i remember that conversation.
I think that statement is almost certainly false.
Offer better pay, conditions and interesting work that has career prospects for the people when they leave, and make it known you are doing this, and I think you will have plenty of interested, good candidates.
(Unless you make crappy games infested with 15s gameplay alternating with 30s brain-polluting ads, and that's for the people who paid for the "ad-free" feature. I jest not - I just turned down a recruiter for a games company looking for someone in a senior role, after I researched the company and the first few reviews I looked at showed the games fit the above description. I copied the reviews over to the recruiter and said this this is why I could not imagine myself working there in a salaried role.)
No, the main and only problem is pay, and it all stems from the fact that there are hundreds of applicants willing to apply for junior positions, some of which I am certain would literally chop their own leg off for the opportunity to work in video games - if it was legal they would literally agree to work for free. So they all start on some extremely low salary(especially considering that actually, our standard for hiring programmers seems extremely high and I have no doubts that those people could find much better paid jobs elsewhere), but obviously that leads to problems further down the line.
But, just because we have thousands of applicants for junior positions, that doesn't mean we have as many for say Senior roles - those see barely anyone applying, and yes, I'm 100% convinced it's purely because of pay. And the pay is what it is, because HR considers it unacceptable to pay new hires more than what we pay people who have advanced through the ranks naturally(which obviously cannot be a lot, seeing as your starting salary as a junior was so low, even if you somehow through some miracle managed 10% increase every year that's still not a lot by the time you get promoted to senior).
The same thing happens with teachers, nurses, firemen, police... I think the reason they generally don't make more money is many people have a passion for doing those jobs (ask ten kids what they want to be when they grow up), but they aren't super difficult, so there's a large supply.
Maybe there's something different going on there since government salaries don't respond normally to market supply and demand. Perhaps a better way to track the true value of those jobs is by looking at private sector counterparts, such as security contractors or teachers at private schools.
Teachers, nurses, firemen, and police officers would like to have a word with you.
Programming may be mathematically complex and difficult to learn, but it does not corner the market on difficulty.
Try adapting a teaching curriculum for online learning for fourth graders, working 16 shifts in an ICU during a pandemic while trying to keep people safe, planning and organizing a response to statewide wildfires, or de-escalating complex interpersonal issues dealing with crime, safety, and mental illness on the daily.
Do any of those sound easy to you?
We've been flooded with reports of how we are not adapting to the change to online learning well.
Working in the ICU during a pandemic is not a complex task; the procedures for doing so are fairly simple steps posted on charts everywhere. There are degrees of complexity to being a nurse depending on the level of certification you have. Physician's assistants have abilities fairly close to a doctor.
Planning and organizing responses to state wildfires is far outside the scope of a firefighter. There are a very small number of people that plan and organize, and a large number of people who implement.
I do not think de-escalating is well-embraced form of policing in the US. If it is, we are doing a terrible job. Police in the US kill drastically more people than other countries. It's not uncommon for European countries to go a full year without police killing a single citizen. There are, of course, more complexities to it than that, but it would be hard to reconcile a doctrine of de-escalation with the absurd number of police shootings we have.
Doing those things well is hard. The fact of the matter is that there is a distinct lack of expectation that those things will be executed well. No one is going to be punished for online schooling failing, botched responses to wildfires, or for shooting a homeless person. In the face of that, they're certainly not herculean feats of strength.
I think the large number of people who love programming makes getting an "elite" programming job difficult.
But, I think the vast majority of people think they'd hate or couldn't do programming, and so never consider it as a job despite how much demand there is for it. And that keeps our entry level wages safe.
Even ignoring that. Everything gets commoditized over time. How much does your typical PHP/Wordpress developer make now? Companies like make it easy for someone who doesn’t know anything about programming to make a decent website. There are companies now that make it easy to make a cut and paste iOS app.
So PHP/Wordpress developer is still a great job from that point of view.
But have you looked at what developers are charging on places like UpWork?
Even the simplest mobile app use to cost a lot. Now you have services like this.
I wouldn't live in a box with roommates to be one though. I think many of us would find regular engineering or analytics jobs instead. Slightly less interesting, but we could still program within those jobs.
People who love food are basically willing to live in poverty to do it.
Compare this to food. Beyond a very small scale (cooking for the immediate family, occasionally cooking for family events) there's a very fast, hard limit on what you can do as a hobbyist.