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Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

Video game developers are underpaid because they have an undying love for video games and are willing to work for less than they could make elsewhere.

I suspect this becomes a problem in the context hiring devops people, because whereas you can make the argument that writing game engines and working on game logic is more fun and justifies working for less, it's hard to make the argument that a devops job at Epic running game servers and websites is any more exciting than running servers and websites anywhere else.

This puts epic in the situation of having to pay market rate to attract devops people, but below market rate for attracting developers, which fucks up their pay scaling completely. What ends up happening is they just don't adjust their pay scale at all, which means they're hiring cheap devops people.

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This. I interviewed for a role with a game studio and the pay was 40% lower than what I'm making.

I was just curious since they approached me and I had fun with the experience and saying I didn't play their games/had no idea.

The recruiter had no idea of local wages.

I interviewed with epic games and got all the questions answered, though I used generic term to describe each aws product and drilled down into specifics/fundamentals of the questions, protocols, configuration gotchas, etc. Got rejected with "no experience with aws".

Now seeing this I'm sure I dodged a bullet.

> Video game developers are underpaid because they have an undying love for video games and are willing to work for less than they could make elsewhere.

I'm not sure that love lasts forever though. I'm childhood friends with a lot of people that went into games and left by their 30s because they couldn't justify the pay difference. That said, maybe the games industry doesn't need these experienced people.

I work as a devops in the games industry. It’s true that it’s underpaid, and by quite a bit. But it’s not as bad as the programming teams, IME devops pays more.

Epic pays very well compare to the rest of the industry and way above your average dev compagny, your comment is out of reality because it's def not gameplay dev that manage certificates, they have central team like Google does.

When people say video game doesn't pay well, it does not apply for the like of EA, Activision, Epic, Unity etc ...

> ... your comment is out of reality because it's def not gameplay dev that manage certificates, they have central team like Google does.

The main point of my comment is that there's a natural downward pressure on the salary of their software engineers due to being in the games industry, which makes it difficult to find devops people (which, for the purpose of this conversation, are distinct from software engineers) at a similar rate, and makes it difficult to justify paying devops people at the market rate.

Epic doesn't pay below market rate. They can't offer stock because they aren't public but offer cash bonuses 2x-4x salary.

I do agree with OP that (some) game developers undervalue IT. Oculus had a similar and pay rate was equal to FAANG (because it is FAANG!), so it came from culture, not pay.

I’ve never worked in a place that gave more than a few thousand dollars in bonuses :/

Yeah I know FAANGs and investment banks can be impressive on the bonus front too

But the prevalence of this just seems disconnected from what is considered normal or bragworthy in the rest of the private sector and world

Can you elaborate more on the bonuses? Is bonus based income common for these sorts of companies?

Probably also explains why so many games with online components (or online-only gameplay) completely shit themselves the first weekend after launch. The servers can't handle the load, the game is bugged to fuck, and the poor souls stuck in crunch time are stuck in firefighting mode for a while longer. At best they make it look like false exclusivity.

And it continues because as much as people complain, they are holding these game publishers and developers to the lowest possible standard.

I think the model also has to contribute. If you charge a fixed price up front for a game then the infrastructure for online play is almost pure cost.

Are sysadmins "devops people" now? I'm a bit confused with the terminology, I thought devops was a strategy making developers and sysadmins work together.

Devops has 50 definitions. One of them is "What we call Sysadmins these days but with more scripts and APIs and less manually logging into machines and running commands"

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