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Comment by 0xy | Hacker News Reader

It's really weird how this article starts by showing how through negotiation and job searching you can increase your salary, but bizarrely then talks about unions, which are known to depress wages for top performers (just look at teachers unions, where pay is totally disconnected from competence and performance). If you're a really good game developer, artist or animator then you should learn the skill of negotiation and asking for what you want.

Negotiation is an extremely important skill in life. So is knowing when to leave companies. I truly do not understand why anyone stays at these game studios for 5+ years and allows themselves to be absolutely robbed blind by pitiful wages and cost-of-living raises.

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Unions can at the least increase the standard of pay for everyone other than those few top performers who also know how to negotiate well.

Having to adversarially game out every interaction just to thrive in the world, especially those interactions with entities that have a lot of power to make your life good or bad for a long time, is a serious burden to place on people, and unions can help to alleviate it.

I have also seen and read about the significant disparities in different demographic groups' (e.g. gender) willingness to do things like negotiate, and it can result in broad differences in outcomes.

(There's a lot of ways to work on that kind of issue, and I'm not necessarily trying to claim "unions" is the only or the best one, but they can help to mitigate problems of pay disparity.)

Unions also increase the standard pay for the few top performers. If you are worth 10x a standard programmer, than the average programmer salary doubling doubles your value too. Most unions that represent jobs with vastly different skill levels raise the rate of everyone.

Unions don't necessarily eliminate pay disparity, but they work for increased worker benefits in total.

And by seriously enforcing minimums and medians, they can negotiate rules that don't impact out top performers - doubtful that SAG rules limits top actor pay for example.

Many people lack the cold-bloodedness necessary to be that mercenary. Especially game devs, who are almost always in it for the love of the product, not for a paycheck. Corporate may not be their friend, but the product they're creating is their creation. Every person working on it knows a hundred things they could do to make it better, and they want to do all of them. They just need a bit more time.

Unions are about protecting everyone from predatory employers like most game publishers. You go in and negotiate? You're fired; there are 100 more people out there with a compulsion to create and share with the world.

So yeah, unions. They address the issue of the party with money exploiting the non-monetary incentives. That's strictly better than assuming the problem is that people have non-monetary incentives.

You're probably being downvoted because you mentioned unions in a negative light, but your points are factually correct. Unions have a place for protecting unskilled workers, but what happens in game development is quite unique, because these workers are in-demand software engineers who typically have better options working in a less glorified field.

Seems pretty analogous to a union like this one: https://www.sagaftra.org/

Actors are certainly not unskilled, many are well paid, and some of the most vocally supportive of the SAG are the extremely well paid ones. They're also involved in an artistic pursuit, and similarly have various other options for converting their talent into cash ("selling out").

Most unions in the US are in fact only made up of skilled workers. Your point is just wrong.

I think you'll have a hard time sourcing that claim.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/07301...

The top 5 appear to be teachers, steelworkers, public service workers, autoworkers, and electrical workers. How many of these would you describe as "unskilled"?

Eh yeah, you're right. I was really thinking about white collar vs blue collar unions.

The games industry is notorious for crunch hiring and firing, low wages and exhausting work regimes. When work conditions like that prevail, people unionize (good for them imo). If there's anything surprising about it, it's that people put up with it for this long.

Yeah, it's a good idea to learn how to negotiate and good advice to leave a failing company if you can.

But "just learn to negotiate" is really a non-solution if the goal is to transform unacceptable industry wide labor practices.

Not just actors, but pro athletes as well. Unions have been tremendously good for them, forcing owners and leagues to commit to a specific guaranteed revenue split with players. It has not prevented rewarding of outstanding individual performance or even individual contract negotiation (just like actors). Some rules are set by by the union, including at least minimum pay, possibly maximum pay (in sports that have salary caps, it's to promote competitive balance, which acting doesn't have to worry about). But you can still negotiate quite a bit within the allowed bounds.

> bizarrely then talks about unions, which are known to depress wages for top performers

I guess that's why top performing movie stars, NBA basketball players etc. have their wages depressed?

Maybe companies lowballing salaries, or being in secret, illegal cartels to drive down salaries of high earners like that lawsuit showing Eric Schmidt and Steve Jobs did, can depress wages too?

> Negotiation is an extremely important skill in life

Yes, which is why companies have scores of lawyers, HR personnel etc. to draw up IP assignment agreements etc. In fact the company has people who specialize solely on negotiating salaries. Your advice is for workers to shun working in concert with their fellow workers since they're so high performing, and walk into this phalanx arrayed against them solo. You also advise someone spending the time to become a top performer to spend their spare time becoming better negotiators, in order to get over on the team of negotiating specialists they will be facing.

> I guess that's why top performing movie stars, NBA basketball players etc. have their wages depressed?

I can't speak to movie stars, but as for the NBA, there is absolutely the concept of a maximum salary (depends on years of service plus other things besides the point) in the collective bargaining agreement. This limits the compensation a player may receive from a team for a particular year. The top players like LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry, would no question receive higher salaries if this limit did not exist.

As to whether or not the top players or even the players as a whole are better off or worse off for having a union, that's a horse of a different color. My gut feeling is that both classes are better off.

Teacher performance is difficult if not impossible to quantify, especially given how much student performance depends on factors external to the classroom. But more to the point, most teaching jobs are government jobs, and government jobs have salary bands set by legislation. You can't individually negotiate with legislators. That has nothing to do with having a union. Most government jobs are not unionized, but still have narrow, standard pay bands that cannot reward differences in performance.

On this point in particular, most of the routes we've tried to use to quantify teacher worth have resulted in bizarre scenarios where teachers actively want to avoid certain classes of students. Early metrics usually punished teachers that were assigned underperformaners - while no child left behind had an expected grade growth formula that could result in a teacher needing to get a student a score above 100 to avoid being weighted towards getting a pay cut.

It's honestly a lot like development - it's hard to distinguish someone being lazy or bad from someone who's gotten stuck with difficult problems - or, more likely, problems that looked easier on the surface than they were in actuality. But, unlike development where these measures could potentially be discovered by reducing efficiency and forcing multiple devs to solve problems in parallel - that's impossible to do when every student is different at a basic level.

well a good teacher could probably notice whether his colleagues are good teachers quite easily (at least if he had access to their classes etc.). Now that I think about it: colleagues probably are the best metric even for jobs like programmers (at least if they work on the same project/codebase) etc. However, it would be socially problematic if your colleagues were responsible for deciding your pay raises.

> but bizarrely then talks about unions, which are known to depress wages for top performers (just look at teachers unions, where pay is totally disconnected from competence and performance).

Public sector unions are an entirely different ball of wax because negotiation power and strike power are both limited. The management for public sector jobs doesn't determine budget; neither does the amount of revenue generated by the business. It's 100% a decision of a legislature, and that decision will often have absolutely nothing to do with the quality, performance, or demands of the actual faculty, staff, administration, or schools themselves.

For example, teachers are unioned and do have generally low pay[0]. However, I could point to police officers, which are also nearly ubiquitously unioned as well and they have high salaries[1] in spite of a training program that is generally less than a year[2].

The difference? Increasing police funding always looks good for both parties (or has historically). For teachers, half the political landscape has a plank that's all about de-funding public education in favor of 100% private education.

Furthermore, there's another factor: Teachers are generally women while police officers are generally men. That means the structural gender bias in salaries is going to be higher here than in careers where the genders are more equally divided.

In short, it's much more complicated than you're making it out to be.

[0]: https://www.indeed.com/career/police-officer/salaries

[1]: https://www.indeed.com/career/teacher/salaries

[2]: https://www.insider.com/some-police-academies-require-fewer-...

> just look at teachers unions, where pay is totally disconnected from competence and performance

I think this is a poor example because the challenge exceptional teachers have is that it's really hard to prove their outcomes in a short time-span. It might be 10, 20, 30 years before it becomes clear that a teacher had a large positive impact on the world, and by then they likely won't be around to collect a bonus.

Compare this to say, a trader who can point to hard PnL numbers over the previous quarters, or a sales person who has shipped X units.

You're probably downvoted by people that don't quite understand a notion that is more than 200 years old, which is called "Suppy and demand". The article is literally saying that "speaking up" helped their salary and HN comments are all about unionization (which is letting union speak for you) and claiming that if you negotiate you get fired, that's absurd.

Nobody forced them to work, they can leave, negotiate, refuse an offer, and there are still a lot of video game companies, so this is a market that doesn't need any regulation or unionization. They made a choice to get this job at a low salary.

The only complication is for young student idealizing the environment without knowing that the salary is bad. Well that's what this twitter trend is helping at. It will inform the high performer and keep them out of the field and companies will have to either raise salaries to re-attract them or accept lower performer.

Most of the highest paid athletes and actors are union members. Union membership doesn't have to mean everyone is paid the same. Teachers having the same pay has more to do with them being interchangeable than being union members.

People bring up actor and athlete unions - but programmer unions wouldn't work that way to allow high-performers to shine, be heavily recruited, and highly compensated.

Actors and athletes have extremely high visibility. They are singled out by fans who will show up to movies and games on that star power alone. A similar dynamic will not develop in the game programming world where even phenomenal developers labor in obscurity.

>I truly do not understand why anyone stays at these game studios for 5+ years and allows themselves to be absolutely robbed blind by pitiful wages and cost-of-living raises.

Maybe thats why your advice is "just be good"

Wealth inequality seems like it's a pretty serious societal problem right now so I don't really see a problem with depressing the salaries of top earners so that less skilled folks can get some more. I'd really love to see UBI but since socialism=bad we're unlikely to see that anytime soon.

I consider myself to be pretty skilled and would be happy to take a pay cut if I knew that money was mostly going to more junior folks (and not just being pocketed by corporations to be funneled into stock dividends).

Negotiation is an invaluable skill, as is a knowledge of self worth, but it's something that a lot of people have real issues with - it isn't taught in school and a lot of introverted people (this goes double for people on the autism spectrum) will have real lifetime issues developing it. I can't argue that negotiation is a large part of financial success in the modern world but it seems quite counter to how we'd like society to operate - I'd rather live in a world where wage transparency was a thing and wage advocacy could be contracted out.

IMO leaning on negotiation for compensation adjustment creates an unjust world.

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