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Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

CDPR sounds like a relatively progressively run game company tbh. A lot of game dev companies deny you overtime during the run up to a major release and massively layoff staff after releases.

Up here in British Columbia all technical workers[1] are overtime exempt because EA ran roughshod over our labour laws a number of years ago and people are too afraid to change them for fear of driving off businesses.

1. Vaguely defined - in practice includes anyone who uses a keyboard or has anything to do with the film industry.

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Something similar happened in NZ too under the "Hobbit Law" bought and paid for by Warner Brothers. Now everyone in the film and game industry is considered an independent contractor by default and aren't subject to the usual rights and legal protections afforded to company employees.

> bought and paid for by Warner Brothers

Hang on I remember mass protests by the artists themselves in favour of that law?

Could you find some details on this?

Also, "even a shitty job is better than no job" might lead to people campaigning for that law if that means they get to work on LotR in their home country. Of course this is not really a viable strategy long term.

For example http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/4279251/Jackson-I-feel-enorm....

I think the union leaders trying to block the law were getting death threats from the workers they were supposed to be representing. There's some documentaries about it online as well. I think the union were completely at odds with their own members. Bizarre situation and an example of why people should be cautious about unions.

Some of the people who showed up were colleagues. I wouldn't go as far as to call it a rent-a-mob but there was a lot of misinformation being spread on internal mailing lists leading up to the day.

Peter Jackson played a blinder on that one.

Indeed, when I worked at EA in BC we were promised comp time for working 'coverage' (overtime) and I even got into trouble for refusing to work on Labour Day! The comp time fizzled into nothing because they fired the Development Manager of our group on the DAY of shipping the game. He just disappeared along with all of his promises. I alone got paid for the overtime because I refused to work TFT (temporary full time - which they pressured me to do) and instead was a true contractor.

I dunno, my impression is that for a game company, CDPR is fairly employee friendly. Of course that's relative to the rest of the gaming industry, which is a well-known employee welfare shithole.

I'm not familiar with Polish labour law, but it could be that in Poland like in many other European countries concepts such as "denying overtime" are inherently illegal.

> I'm not familiar with Polish labour law, but it could be that in Poland like in many other European countries concepts such as "denying overtime" are inherently illegal.

Which explains why so many Ubisoft games are made in Canada...

No, the reason why so many Ubisoft games are made in Canada(and other studios as well, take a walk around central montreal, there's tonnes of games studios there) is that the Canadian government is giving out massive subsidies to the game industry to grow it there(last I've heard it's literally half of every salary - an absolutely ridiculous amount of money). If you compare the cost of having an employee in Canada to most other places, Canada works out pretty cheap, and it's an attractive place to move to and live in, without the ridiculousness of the American immigration.

I’ve always thought it was interesting that video games are the only kind of software that’s often made outside big tech hubs - not to mention the only kind an ordinary person enjoys using enough to emulate!

Does Canada not subsidize other tech work? I’ve heard the pay at Blackberry was terrible for instance. The only good thing is that Canadians will be impressed if you call yourself a software engineer because they think you have an iron ring.

Ubisoft, specifically, versus some of the other companies has the interesting added factor that with their upper-management being primarily based in France it is useful to them to utilize countries/provinces that can also speak French.

Yea Ubisoft is a rather special case. And their montreal studios have actually long be lauded as a pretty good place to work if you're in the game industry.

This depend on the kind of legal relationship one has with the company. If you’re working as independent contractor with a B2B arrangement, the notion of overtime does not really exist. If however you are employed through the “employment contract” (“umowa o prace”), the limits on overtime are really strict, and you must be paid for it, in fact 50% extra, and double pay for overtime worked during nights, sundays and holidays.

I don’t know what’s the typical arrangement in game industry, but in software engineering industry at large, B2B contracts are very common, due to rather preferable tax treatment. B2B gives 10-30% increase in net pay, and its downsides are lack of mandatory severance, mandatory time off days, overtime pay etc. In most scenarios these are not an issue, because if one can negotiate high pay justifying B2B, one can also negotiate time off and lack of overtime. Don’t know about game industry though.

> If you’re working as independent contractor with a B2B arrangement, the notion of overtime does not really exist. That's correct. But if you're paid for an hour of work ("time & material") you will get paid for your "overtime".

In Poland most of developers run own companies to pay linear income tax (19% flat) plus €350 a month for state pension instead of paying 18% tax for first €20k earned plus 32% for overages plus mostly hidden to employees installment for pension scheme. So when your cost to the employer is €100k a year: - under labour law you take home €5.7k per month - running a company you take home €7k per month

For a country with a minimal wage of €610 this is a significant difference.

Most of the companies will offer paid time off to contractors, end even companies offering high-paying jobs like pilots do in do the same: https://www.ft.com/content/b8f77f16-d865-11e8-ab8e-6be0dcf18...

> under labour law you take home €5.7k per month - running a company you take home €7k per month

I dunno about Poland, but where I live this type of employment has some caveats:

- You need save for your time off (holidays) yourself. - You save on social security taxes, but it means your salary is not compensated by it when you are ill (or your kids are ill and you need to take care of them), thus you need to save for this yourself. - I would like to say that you would need to save up more yourself for your retirement fund (as you pay less for state pension), but at these level of incomes, usually at both scenarios (self-employed vs being employed) you would like to do that, so it cancels out.

Also it may be illegal, i.e. if you are employed like a full time employee - you cannot work as an independent consultant/contractor. Though AFAIK this definition of "like a full time employee" is not very strict.

IMO problem is that income taxation should be treated (mostly) the same, no matter how you earn the money. Because now (where I live), the wealthier you are, the more elaborate schemes you can run to avoid paying taxes on your income.

> Also it may be illegal, i.e. if you are employed like a full time employee - you cannot work as an independent consultant/contractor. Though AFAIK this definition of "like a full time employee" is not very strict.

Polish here. It is like you described but a) not many people know about this (sometimes I surprise some guys telling them their employment form - independent contractor for one company where you are actually working full time - is illegal) and b) I've never heard of someone being caught practicing this.

> b) I've never heard of someone being caught practicing this

Yup. Me too.

It's not as bad with design/IT agencies anymore, but I know that lawyer agencies are still notorious for this. Big-ish lawyer agencies with dozens of lawyers have no employees, everyone is a "partner" (or whatever the term is).

I think that is kinda normal for lawyers though. In the Czech Republic (I've been here 16 years and work with a lot of lawyers) it's normal for lawyers to be "contractors", very few are salaried.

In fact it's a funny rite of passage for most lawyers: after graduation they have to work for 3 years for a law firm before they are allowed to take the bar exam and become "real" lawyers. During this time they earn a salary. When they finally become "real" lawyers by passing the bar, they get fired. :) And immediately taken back on as contractors.

The difference is a law "partner" is called that because they become a partner in the LLP. In other words they are given a very real ownership stake in the firm. They are paid a portion of the firms profits in addition to any salary.

Associate lawyers (what you are before partner) are paid a regular salary as employees.

Law firms aren't healthy workplaces, but I wouldn't worry about the legal rights of the lawyers working for them.

I'm also Polish, I know quite a few people in IT who used to do exactly that, but this year they all had to stop or figure out some workarounds, because the Polish tax office has started asking for proof that their company is actually working with more than one client. If they only have a single client in a year then they have to convert to full time employment. So yes, people are absolutely getting caught by this.

most of the countries now have something like that but for sole proprietship. if you have an llc, you can do basically whatever you want because it is taxed different, and somebody has to be employed there, so the country gets the taxes. its just that you can pay yourself some salary and the rest you can pay out at the end of the year as profit that is taxes different.

No, it is not illegal - I've been practicing this for the last 10 years, never had any trouble with tax office.

It all depends on how your contract is written - if you have clauses that put some of the business risk on you (e.g. you give 3 month warranty on the code you write, or have some bogus penalties for contract breach, or other things, which I've never seen enforced) then it cannot be treated as full time employment, even if you have just one client for which you issue invoices.

The only thing that is an actual red flag for tax office is when you start as a full time employee, and then switch to running sole proprietorship and your previous employer remains your only client - then it is too obvious that this is just employment in disguise.

EDIT: Also, those "independent contractor" contracts come in different shapes. I, for example have just an hourly rate set, and then I get paid for the hours worked. Some people prefer to have flat monthly rate, and even some paid vacations included in their "B2B contracts", which makes it more suspicious.

Other thing worth mentioning is that for full time employee penalty for malpractice is up to 3 monthly salaries.

Contractors are liable with all assets/wealth.

Sure but contractors just get an indemnity insurance for this exact reason, which you can't get as an employee.

Never understood why they tried so hard to be the destination for offshoring instead of fostering home grown studios.

That and pitching Vancouver as an ideal HQ2 location since tech workers are worth ~50K less than in America[0]. Is this something that Canadians approve?

[0] https://www.vancouvereconomic.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02...

You'd be shocked at what Canadians put up with. Look closely at any industry here and corruption/abuse run rampant.

Nope, and most software developers in Vancouver aren't participating with foreign companies at those rates. The laws remain how they are mostly to disenfranchise QA testers which remain a very hard labour segment to mobilize. There are thousands of "I can make money playing games?!?" folks out there that drown out the really good QA folks and insure that EA can maintain its churn.

For regular dev jobs, I think the market is less imbalanced than it appears on the surface. Cost of living isn't cheap in BC but free medical care is a big bonus and the city is quite pleasant. Senior devs will end up pulling senior dev money - it's mostly the entry level wages that are depressed.

Any decent software employer in the US will have good insurance that basically guarantees your max out of pocket health expenses won’t exceed a few thousand dollars. That doesn’t really account for the difference.

Out of pocket maxes in the 10-20K range aren't that uncommon in the US. Even when I've seen places with plans where it's <5K, that's only for single workers, and it doubles with a partner or family.

And I’d rather have extra 100k and pay the 10k for health.

I’ve never seen out of pocket maxes that high but I’m limited to my own experiences. I’d imagine the premiums would be super low for such a high deductible.

Even the high deductible plans I’ve seen are no more than $3500/single or $7k family per year out of pocket max. And those allow you and your employer to put money into a high deductible savings account pre-tax like a retirement account. And it can be used for any qualified health payment for the rest of your life and is passed down upon death. It’s really like a 401k for health payments.

My plan for a family of 5 has an out of pocket max of 4K with no deductible.

>>your max out of pocket health expenses won’t exceed a few thousand dollars.

Wait, that's meant to be good? What kind of insanity is this. Why do you have to pay anything out of your pocket at all??

In the US, there is no ceiling to your potential health expenses if you are without insurance. A few thousand dollars looks like a pretty good ceiling compared to infinity.

It depends on what type of health plan you have. For instance, a high deductible health plan allows you and your employer to put money into a savings account pre-tax (thus lowering your tax burden) to be used to pay out of pocket costs. As the money accumulates you can begin to diversify it in part with various investments. In years where you have few or no health issues the account begins to grow much like a retirement account. You keep the money after leaving the company and it can be used for healthcare any time in your life.

So yes it’s very good, or can be. Putting pre-tax money away and also lowering your tax burden while saving over time for healthcare matters is nice. Because you have a “maximum out of pocket” cost each year you stay ahead of it.

There are many different healthcare schemes in the USA that work best in different ways for people that have different circumstances.

Note that HSAs are not pre-tax in California, you still have to pay state income tax on them. Theoretically. In practice HSA providers don’t report your accounts, nor is there even a way to get the info you’d need from an HSA investment to pay the taxes.

Don’t Canadians also have to pay for prescriptions and dental work? Some of that is included in the US benefit cap.

Yes. But I've never worked for a company that didn't provide coverage for that as well. My current plan provides $1500/yr for routine dental coverage, $15k for dental emergencies and accidents. $30k/yr prescription coverage. Massage, chiro, accupuncture up to $1k/yr. Counseling for up to 6 sessions free, then 50% coverage. This is not an unusual benefits package as far as I can tell. My last company even provided a $400 wellness spending account on top of all that. Anything I could justify as 'wellness' was covered to that amount. Running shoes, ski passes, recreational classes. This isn't some special package for high value employees. This is standard for any FT employee.

My out of pocket expenses this year for all health related stuff is around $100. That is made up mostly of prescription dispensing fees ($10 for a 3 month supply), and massage fees that were over the per visit limit (they only cover the first $100/hour. My massage therapist is $115/hr)

Benefits in Canada blew my mind when I moved up here.

The downside is that I make $80k ($62kUSD) as a mid level web dev, and that is not really considered low for the position.

Hundreds out of pocket is better than thousands out of pocket though.

(I'm not Canadian, but here in Europe, without insurance, I've never paid more than a few hundred for dental work or tens for prescriptions. Even if its more in Canada, I imagine its still less than "thousands")

In Canada it varies. Dentists are terrible and always covered by private insurance. In BC pharmacare is capped out-of-pocket by the province but it's a high cap so you will generally have employer insurance just like you have in the US - while as Ontario has full prescription coverage.

Oh the same thing goes for vision insurance, alternative medicine (RMTs and acupuncture) and some medical devices - i.e. a CPAP for Sleep Apnea.

There is typically some out of pocket component to prevent moral hazard. A good plan will still be covering something like 90% of your costs until you hit the max out of pocket, then it becomes 100%. It’s so you are at least a little conscientious in choosing doctors and pharmacies and such.

I'm sorry, but $7000/year is not about "preventing moral hazard". NHS charging a flat £9/per prescription is preventing moral hazard so you don't request medicine nilly willy. The out of pocket expenses that people quote in this thread are insane - having to suddenly pay few thousand dollars for treatment would cripple my finances, and I'm a software engineer.

You’re very unlikely to spend that much. If you have multiple serious medical emergencies in the span of one year, $7000 is nothing for having your life saved and getting treatment. Also, the cap is usually much lower than $7000. Also, remember, they’re still covering ~90% of every individual expense. By the time you’ve spent $7000, the insurance company has put down many times that.

Our medical providers are competing private businesses. There are really good doctors, really bad doctors, and everything in between. Everyone wants to go to the better doctor, but there’s just not enough of them. Price differentiation is important.

There are $0 deductible and $0 copay plans and $0 coinsurance plans. They are also exorbitantly expensive because of the absurd moral hazard they create.

It’s a strange mindset to think that something should just be free. We pay for our cars, our housing, our food. Medicine is not free to provide. The America system is broken in many ways, but not because people have to pay for medical care. The problem is that it’s too expensive because of artificial constraints on the supply of doctors and other medical resources.

>>It’s a strange mindset to think that something should just be free.

When it comes to healthcare? Yes, it should absolutely be free to the recepient.

I don't know why it's such a strange concept to you - afer all, Americans are also used to receiving certain services for free - you don't have to pay the police for coming to help you, or the fire brigade for that matter. To me it's the same thing - if your house on fire, the fire brigade will come and help, free of charge - that's what taxes are for. So if I'm ill, I will be given any and all help needed - also free of charge, after all, that's what taxes are for.

>>They are also exorbitantly expensive because of the absurd moral hazard they create.

Like, sometimes I think Americans live literally on a different planet. Do you think that in countries where healthcare is free to use people have medical procedures without any reason and simply because they don't have to pay for it?

In general, it's simple - if a country wants to have healthy, productive citizens, it should pay for their healthcare, I don't understand why it's such a divisive concept. The crown example of how crazy the US system is, is the fact that you have to pay to give birth. Like.....so US cares so little for its citizens that literally the very act of giving birth to new ones is not covered by the government? That's....beyond mind boggling.

You have to pay for food. That doesn’t mean that eating isn’t important or that a society wants people to go hungry. By your logic, the private market would just be the domain of luxuries and useless trinkets. The government here provides health insurance for the very poor and subsidizes private insurance for the somewhat poor.

Police and fire are public services because they would not work as market systems. Fires spread from house to house, for example, regardless of who pays or doesn’t, so private fire brigades would have to protect non-payers in order to also protect payers. That’s a classic market failure that can be solved by public services. (Potentially, that problem could have been solved by requiring fire coverage, but then there's the further problem of a row of houses, each with different fire services, some better than others, with the better ones still needing to protect the houses insured by the worse ones to protect their own customers. Not to mention that a single house fire can lead to a whole city burning down. It's just not a service that the market can effectively provide in most places.)

And no, of course people don’t completely waste care in other systems either. That’s because it’s rationed by the government. Elective procedures have long wait lists, access to specialists is specially guarded, etc. Limited resources always have to be rationed by some mechanism.

Our system in the US is far from perfect: we let the doctor’s guild limit the supply of doctors, we are too uncomfortable with ending care for the very old and terminally ill, and the whole hospital and medical device industries could use an antitrust shakeup.

> if your house on fire, the fire brigade will come and help, free of charge

Unless you're in a "no pay, no spray" area and haven't paid your fire subscription fee. Wish I wasn't being serious.

Canadian living in USA. My brain is regularly fried by healthcare here, it ends up being a simple high level equation.

My out of pocket max per year is around $6000 USD, and my salary is double what I was (under)paid in Toronto, and taxes are a bit lower here (CA).

So the take home pay is mid-5-figures more, and worst-case scenario healthcare is mid-4-figures, so it balances out very favourably for my situation (anyone in tech with a full-time job, basically).

(Of course, those who aren't well-paid in tech have a much worse situation and I can't imagine how difficult that must be.)

Actually, senior dev money is half as much in Vancouver as it is in the US. The higher up the tree you go, the more the gap widens.

I wonder why. There must be a skill gap, else the senior engineers would simply drive three hours and double their earnings.

... No, The answer is immigration.

1. If you have a problematic history (which includes things entirely outside of your control, like being born in the wrong part of the world[1]), it can be nearly impossible.

2. If you don't have a problematic history, it's incredibly stressful. If you're on a TN visa, you can be turned away at the border at any time, for any reason whatsoever, including no reason whatsoever. If you're on an H1B visa, you can also be turned away from the border at any time, for any reason whatsoever, including no reason whatsoever. If you lose your job, you need to immediately start dealing with immigration issues, while looking for a new one, or you have to leave the country.

3. If you're married, your spouse can't work for a long time.

4. If you aren't married, your girlfriend/boyfriend/whomever can't even try immigrate with you, even if they wanted to.

5. Being three hours and a border away is not remotely the same thing as being three hours away from your friends and family.

6. There is a long, long, long list of cultural reasons for why a comfortably-living Canadian may prefer to avoid living in the US, even for double the paycheck.

[1] I had a friend whose family fled from Saddam's Iraq, due to their political activities, when he was a child. As an adult, he was consistently singled out for harassment, intimidation, and delays during his crossings at the US-Canadian border. [2] According to him, getting a work visa in the US was not remotely a possibility.

[2] Isn't it wonderful how passports list your country of birth?

That still doesn't explain the gap when they are working for the same company.

When you're working for the same company, the gap exists bcause the company can get away with it. What are you going to do? Go across the street to a competitor who pays just as little?

I worked for an above-market-rate firm in BC. When I got a job offer in SV, my boss could only counter-offer the financial gains if I relocated to their SV office.

That document is not saying they are "worth" less than in America but that they are undervalued which I imagine a lot of them would agree with.

Well, according to the market they are worth less.

Offshoring companies bring investment into the community, while funding startups costs the local community. Also if your startup needs skill and services not available locally that have to be sourced outside that’s more cost, whereas a company coming in will have to provide those services at its own expense.

If local salaries are depressed like that, this implies the outside investment is sorely needed. If there was enough investment available locally and local companies had the resources to hire more workers and were successful enough to pay them well, those salaries would be higher, but the resources to make that happen have to come from somewhere.

> while funding startups costs the local community

I'm not sure I completely understand.

> If local salaries are depressed like that, this implies the outside investment is sorely needed.

It's interesting because a lot of capital is flowing into Vancouver right now in the form of real estate speculation.

The theory goes that the big foreign corp (ie. EA) hires a bunch of locals, and over time those locals get good and leave to form their own company.

There's a fair amount of evidence that this works. It's not like Vancouver is solely populated by foreign studios. Local game companies like Kabam, Black Bird Interactive, Relic, United Front, etc would have all either had their roots in EA workers or would have hired ex-EA workers.

As a Canadian, Vancouver resident, and software developer, I certainly don’t approve of the discount all software companies get here, including ones based here. Not only do companies pay out 60 cents on the dollar, they can also qualify for large refundable tax credit subsidies from provincial and federal governments.

In other words, there are plenty of your “home-grown studios” here, who benefit from the manipulated market created by the multinationals that came before them.

Salaries won’t rise to meet parity until labour gets organized, but as a previous commenter pointed out about labour laws and overtime pay, it’s a massive uphill battle.

I am honestly not sure why Canadian developers are paid so much lower than our American counterparts.

Vancouver is a large market for tech as is Toronto, and now the rest of the cities in Canada are picking up. Anecdotally I have never seen this much recruiter activity in Alberta as we're seeing right now.

Not true of EA, at least in the United States. EA hires junior employees as non-exempt for their first couple of years. They are also in my experience among the most progressive big publishers when it comes to overtime and work/life balance. Not perfect, but certainly trying in a real way across most of its studios.

Source: Worked for, but not currently employed at, several EA studios over the last decade, including as a junior engineer paid overtime.

I worked at EA for five years (2015-2019) in Sweden and during that time I heard a lot of talk about minimising overtime and new measures to prevent it. Every game new alternatives and policies would be introduced. Then, when it became clear that we couldn't deliver on what everyone always said was over scoped, all of that was thrown out the window and we went back to ordinary crunch.

We did sometimes get compensated, but always in comp days, never money, and it was usually very uncertain ahead of time if and how it would work.

I work at Ubisoft(in the UK[0]) and overtime and crunch are heavily discouraged, to a point where as a matter of policy, we are asked to report to higher management if anyne is asked to do overtime - it just shouldn't be happening at all. I've worked on two big AAA releases in the last 6 years and my total overtime was statistically zero, I did some extra hours in the last 2 weeks leading to release, but that was mostly to watch over the server infrastructure to make sure the launch went smoothly.

We've had people join from Rockstar, EA, CDPR, and one thing everyone is always surprised by is how good the work/life balance is. I'm personally in around 8am and always done by 4pm(7.5 hours a day).

[0] - now, all Ubisoft studios set their own policies. Please don't extrapolate my experience in the UK to experiences in other Ubisoft studios in other countries.

Yeah the games company I used to work for has gradually improved over the years - I have one good friend who stayed the whole time, and it's gone from "mandatory unpaid weekends" to "a bit of paid overtime here and there".

The key part I think is just making overtime paid, then the incentives all align much better.

It's sad if that counts as "progressive" business practices in the games industry.

It really, really doesn’t IME. This is basically what the industry was like when I joined 15 years ago.

> deny you overtime during the run up to a major release

This made me stop. Do you mean deny you paid overtime, because actively preventing extra work in the run up to a milestone is absolutely not normal for the games industry. The opposite is far more common.

EA Vancouver might be more carefully watched, but one way of avoiding regulations like this is to make sure employees are only logging normal workday hours - if at all - regardless of how long they actually work.

I took it to mean you have to work, but they don’t pay extra for overtime, in the context of others not even being allowed overtime. In the US, that would be standard. I’m not aware of developers in the US getting paid overtime rate for overtime work in development, period, but overtime work is definitely expected a little too often, and if you work for a company where it isn’t, it’s either a large company with other ways of dealing with such things or they just haven’t had it happen yet or recently. However, the US isn’t a bad place to work; whenever overtime is expected, often times there are financial incentives. Just try not to burn out.

I believe those rules only apply to companies that are primarily tech companies (like EA of course). Tech workers at non-tech companies can get overtime.

Programmers in the non-gaming parts of the industry are treated better not because of any labour laws, but because of supply and demand.

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