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Comment by ashtonkem | Hacker News Reader

My standard advice to every graduate CS student is to stay the hell away from professional video game development. If you want to make games, turn it into a hobby instead.

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I say the same about art and music to my nieces and nephews: when you make art, people will really appreciate it, but you won't earn much financial currency - you will earn a different kind of currency...a social currency, which you can exchange for other things, but not rent.

So make art as a hobby or as a way to meet people, but not for money. The same applies to game development, which is art.

Eh. It depends on if you want to make art or be an artist. Artists make art. People who make art make art. But if you want to be an Artist you cant really do something else full time and do art on the side. Maybe at the start but eventually you have to be an Artist full time. Otherwise the other thing will take over.

To be fair I give people the same advice. Just that the people who want to Artists look at me like I'm insane because nothing I say would stop them from living that life. The people who just want to make some art realize that it's not that bad to get paid well in a career and do art on the side.

Same here.

At very least, understand the tradeoff you're making. If you love the creation of games so much that it's worth the stress and lower pay, go for it. Money isn't everything if you're doing something you love.

But if you want better compensation for your time, look for something more corporate.

The more unsexy a software field is, the better the pay and work conditions are.

Sewage treatment plant software is probably an awesome field to have a career, aside from when you want to explain what you do at cocktail parties.

Video game development is the most glamorous showbiz part of the industry, so working there is, on average, really awful.

Really? I think FAANG, which is generally the highest paying in software, is percepted as sexy, at least to the layperson and to recruiters.

If there are really sewage industry jobs that pay better than FAANG, please tell me more cause I'm interested

Seems like FAANG is seen as less sexy by industry insiders nowadays. Amazon in particular seems to be a “see you in a year!” Kind of situation.

As someone who does industrial controls wastewater treatment is one of the worst industries because it's so low-margin. It's a 'barely pay for it the first time and run it until it breaks down' type of industry because municipalities and rate payers are usually quite cost sensitive, but pedantry aside your point is largely accurate.

As a side note - In my experience the best paid but most mind-meltingly dangerous industrial controls work is in oil refining. The most low-stress (and somewhat less well paid) work i've experienced is in designing control systems for hydroelectric facilities for private utilities. I wouldn't consider either glamorous but the hydro work does have a more environmentally friendly image and does have a correlating lower pay!

I’ve done private and Public hydro and the private projects were still stressful with liquidated damages hanging over my head if i caused a delay in the project and all of the environmental considerations which dramatically complicated the machinery and the controls.

Oh, right as a contractor it's no doubt still stressful. I'm talking from the point of view of an owner's engineer - utility companies tend to be pretty relaxed for internal employees.

I work for a medical device company in the midwest. So definitely meets the "unsexy" criterial - slow-paced embedded development in an "unsexy" location. Definitely low on the pay side even when factoring in cost of living. Work conditions are pretty ok, especially if you are not ambitious. I doubt this kind of work gets much more than a CoL bump on the coasts.

Would you be down to give an approximate range for salary?

> The more unsexy a software field is, the better the pay and work conditions are.

I don't know... tell that to everyone who rebranded their statistics degree as "Data Science" starting ten years ago and got a huge career boost, or all the fresh-outs with multi-hundred-$ grant packages because they got an A in their Machine Learning class.

In fact, I can think of glamorous places that do pretty well for their software engineers (Pixar, Apple, ...) and I've seen firsthand how unglamorous companies can also be shitty and low-pay.

Apart from video games, I think there's not many examples to bolster your claim.

I dunno. My friend is making $250K working for Roblox. He’s 15yrs into his career - all game dev. Doesn’t seem too bad.

15 years in software could get you a lot more outside game dev

Most dev in the US don't make 250k after 15years.

Most devs in the US don’t care about maximizing their career.

Pay isn’t even the main reason I’d avoid gaming, it’s the tendency of game companies to grossly abuse their workers via crunch time and sudden studio closures that worries me. The same dynamics that suppress game dev salaries also lead companies to treating their workers as replaceable, which is a pretty bad situation to end up in.

Yes, but I think of Roblox like a FAANG in terms of success and money. If you moved to a FAANG with that experience you would likely make a good chunk more

I was shocked at the pay at Roblox. I was on levels.fyi the other day and came across a list of companies with the highest pay for new grads and it was in the top five I believe.

It's a recent IPO, and a social gaming platform company rather than a game studio.

Roblox's competition is TikTok and Snap rather than traditional game companies.

This is because of recent IPO inflating TC

Their cash compensation is more like Netflix than Google.

It was near the top / at the top even a year ago.

So is he making games, or making a game platform? There's a big difference.

This is a good point. He works on the platform.

That's great, but most FAANG eng make more than that by their 2nd or 3rd year. With 15 years of experience, they could be making at least 500k+.

edit: for the skeptical, this is what an L4 makes at Google[1], L4 is easily attainable within 3 years, pretty likely in 2 years, that's assuming you start at L3 (straight out of college or very little experience).

1: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...

Most FAANG eng in their 2nd or 3rd year are not FAANG anymore by their 15th year.

Interesting hypothesis. Where do you think they go?

I’d say it might seem this way because of the hyper growth. Most people at FAANG haven’t been there long, because they haven’t been big that long.

In my network:

- early retirement

- founding their own companies

- landlording

- teaching for fun/enjoyment/fulfillment, not because they need money

Some have done all 4 of these.

I've had plenty of coworkers who've been at Google or Apple for longer than 15 years, but what I've seen is people will usually jump after 4 years for even more comp or go the startup route. So those FAANG salaries are like the lower bound for most. Of course, some people will just save/invest and retire after 6-10 years, that's fine too.

Citation? Even in the Bay Area the median is considered somewhere around $150k.

I've worked at one of the FAANG for 6+ years, have coworkers/friends at each one of them and people openly talk/compare their compensations.

edit: I'm not surprised about the median, big tech has roughly around ~200-300k engineers, probably slightly less of it in Bay Area which has a population of ~7.7M, so it probably doesn't affect statistics all that much.

I looked into bay area jobs and FAANG was worth a minimum of $40k premium over working at other companies.

Here you go: https://www.levels.fyi/

Judging by levels.fyi it's exactly what I said, L4 at Google makes ~$157k a year. If you're talking about TC that has to be said; most people when they are talking about "making X amount" are talking about salary.

Total comp is what matters, and that's what people talk about. Bonus and RSUs are just cash.

L4 SE makes $266K: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...

And L4 is one rung above entry level, 1-2 years at Google, right out of college.

>If you're talking about TC that has to be said; most people when they are talking about "making X amount" are talking about salary.

Not in tech.

So what’s the recommended way of talking about how much you make when you are at a startup which only has stock options, where the stocks may eventually be worth hundreds of thousands but are currently worth 0?

If it's an early-stage startup, "base salary (+ bonus if applicable) + paper money". If it's a late-stage startup where you're getting RSUs and the company is likely to go public soon, people usually give a TC number that assumes equity pricing at FMV with the understanding that much of it is illiquid (I'd personally put a 30-40% discount on that kind of equity offered by late-stage startups to compensate for the illiquidity, uncertainty, and risk, but different people will have different numbers, and obviously the specific details of each situation are also important).

go ahead and count them if you work at robinhood or stripe

you could also just lie if it's that important to you

Well the question was more around what to count them as since there’s a wide range. In my experience people typically just mention salary and count stock options as 0 but everyone in this thread seems to disagree.

The answer is that it differs between public and private companies. It's exceedingly difficult to value the equity in a startup that may not IPO for years. Its exceedingly easy to value RSUs that vest each month and then are immediately sold for cash.

That's definitely off the mark for the Bay Area.

The median software developer nationally, with a pool of 1.47 million developers, is $110,000 as of 2020 according to the BLS. That median developer is going to be in places like Atlanta, Des Moines or Pittsburgh.

It's simple; most bay area, like most everywhere, is not FAANG. Treating a non-unimodal distribution as if it were unimodal leads to all sorts of silliness.

I agree. Why compare game developers to FAANG at all? When deciding if it’s worth it, the main thing I want to know is how it stacks up to an average software job.

I don't entirely agree, averages are useful for decisions like deciding if I want to move to a new city, or deciding what type of job I want. But I want a great fit when I'm looking for a new job. If I have an average job that I don't have strong feelings for, I don't need to accept the first good offer. So I can wait for something I'm really excited about.

I've got friends at Roblox. 250k sounds really low for a senior engineer that started pre-IPO.

And some college athletes will eventually end up in a Tom Brady situation, that doesn’t mean I would recommend anyone bank on getting drafted as a career.

weird comparison since even a regular 3 year professional will make millions in their short career.

250K is not unusual money if you are regularly advancing on oppurtunities (and for the people around here, it wouldn't even be seen as impressive). Whether you want to wait a decade to move to that point or 5 years at FAANG is up to the individual. But the topic here seems to assert that you can't make good money at all in the industry, not how fast you make it.

Good for him. But that's an exception.

How much does the average roblox dev make?

You can see for yourself here: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Roblox/salaries/Software-Engi...

IC1 Software Engineer (Entry Level) $221k

IC2 $249k

IC3 Senior Software Engineer $285k

IC5 Principal Software Engineer $422k

I'm not sure how Levels.fyi work but those are great despite being paid in part with stock grants and bonuses.

However, Roblox itself is an exception. I'd guess the average game developer income to be much lower.

I love levels but the self-selecting group who reports their comp there cannot be used to reliably estimate the average, since they are not a random sample. I would guess propensity to report is correlated with higher TC.

Friends at blizzard are paid well too, but a lot of them didn't start out in games - they started in devops. Lots of need for that skillset for big MMOs.

Roblox is a very different kind of game company though. I've noticed the more service oriented game companies have better wages and work life balance. The more old school, content heavy ones have lowe pay and longer hours.

Ultimately it's working on game tech and companies like Roblox also hire for other roles that don't have exact equivalent in web or mobile development (art and game design roles mostly). Limiting your definition of "game development" to content heavy games with low pay and longer hours, especially when the industry is moving away from that type of game with a few exceptions, doesn't make sense.

Roblox is an exception. I am in a similar situation, at twitch, where I work, but these companies are the exception and not the rule, for game dev stuff.

Epic games probably pays highly, as well as riot, and value. But I can count on maybe 1 hand, the number of actual good "video game" companies that I would want to work for.

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