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Comment by socialist_coder | Hacker News Reader

Just to have a bit of a counter argument from me, a game developer who loves games and has worked in the US games industry for the majority of my 20 years career:

If your argument is "You can make more at a FAANG company" - well yeah, you can. You don't work in gaming because you want to make the top salary. You work in gaming because you love games and you enjoy having all your coworkers also love games and being able to talk to all of them about games and having your company culture revolve around games and gaming. It's games all the way down! It's a completely different work environment. As someone who loves games, the best years of my working career were when I was working on game teams, not at tech companies.

Also, developer salaries in games is still plenty good. It's still great money. I never felt like I was losing out.

Also the argument that it's "grueling 80+ hour weeks day in and day out is" is bullshit! The only time I ever worked 80 hours in a single week was when I was starting out in Quality Assurance and I was getting paid hourly so I was happy to make the extra overtime. As a salaried developer I don't think I was ever expected to work more than 60 hours a week, and then after the crunch was over we always got 1 or 2 weeks of extra vacation ("comp time"). To be clear, the normal working schedule was 40 hours per week. Crunch time is like 1 or 2 times a year, for maybe 1-2 months each time. And like I said, depending on how much you crunch, you would get extra paid time off afterwards. So for me, that was a pretty good trade. I'd much rather work my ass off for a couple months and then get an extra 2 week vacation at the end of it.

Maybe some game companies treat their employees like dirt and work them into the ground, but the ones I've worked for, I never felt that way. Don't work at those terrible companies! There are plenty of "good" game companies out there who pay good salaries and have good working conditions.

As someone who is older now with kids, my priorities are definitely different than when I worked in games during my 20s and early 30s. I would no longer be happy working those 60 hour weeks. I want a better work life balance. So I don't know if I could work on a game team like that anymore. But do I regret working there before I had a family? Absolutely not. #gamedev4life

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The whole "do it for the love of the craft not money" is bullshit propaganda that only serves to keep labor costs low. The entities on top are large multi-billion dollar corporations who are running a business, just like any other industry. And this has been more and more apparent in recent years seeing just how anti-consumer the video games industry is getting.

If a Google recruiter told me "take a low salary and work 70+ hours a week because you love writing software and all your coworkers love writing software and it's a great environment" I'd (justifiably) laugh at their face – enough though I really do love everything about software. But somehow this is completely fine in gaming.

This is ultimately a supply and demand issue. Google pays high salaries because they have to in order to hire the talent they want. Game devs apparently do not have to, because they are able to fill their roles for lower salaries. Don't pretend like all tech companies wouldn't love to lower dev salaries, they just can't because they wouldn't be able to hire.

Game companies apparently have a meaningful differentiator, which is that working in a gaming context is something people actually value and are willing to give up potential compensation for.

Well getting minimum wage at Wendy's is also a supply and demand issue, but that job isn't sold as "do it for the love of the fast food industry". Ultimately a large chunk of game developers do have the skillset to be able to get better pay and working conditions elsewhere. They like making games, sure, but the tiniest amount of collective action among workers in the industry could ensure that you get to do what you love and get paid for it.

The problem then is that if the industry pays above market wages, then there will be too many prospective game developers for the roles. Then the question is how do you choose who gets to be in this industry where you can do what you love and get paid well for it? Things have a way of balancing out, and labor organizers will see this surplus and capture an ever increasing portion of it through fees or other means. This leads to nepotism or favoritism as you see in some jobs that pay above market wages.

Game companies lose a ton of great developers due to their atrocious salaries and this is (IMO) reflected in many ways, from ever-lengthening development cycles to quality issues at release to feature cuts and crunch. I believe this affects the bottom line pretty significantly, and game publishers would look at the problem more seriously if they weren't making profits hand over fist due to the expansion of the industry as a whole lifting pretty much all boats. Seriously, for every one dev I know who actually works in the industry I probably know 10 who would much rather work there than their current job if the salaries were even close to competitive.

> minimum wage at Wendy's is also a supply and demand issue, but that job isn't sold as "do it for the love of the fast food industry"

That's a fallacy, no one goes to work at Wendy for the love of it. Some people do really want to work in video game for the love of it, they know that their salary will be lower, and they still do it.

The whole thing is apples to oranges because Wendy's is a specific business whereas the game industry is an entire industry. Many people enjoy working in restaurants, maybe just not so many at Wendy's. I'm sure many people who work at abusive companies such as EA love the industry they're in, but maybe not as many love working at EA. Probably explains the high turnover rate.

> game industry is an entire industry.

And it's crazy to hold up the restaurant industry as some kind of model of reasonable work hours and fair compensation.

If anything, game developer war stories pale in comparison with fine dining kitchens.

> That's a fallacy, no one goes to work at Wendy for the love of it.

I don't know, there are a lot of jobs that are worse than Wendy's out there. "Love" is a strong word, but the same forces are at play.

I daresay I enjoyed my job at Wendy’s a great deal. Mostly I left because I found better paying jobs elsewhere, but Wendy’s was a lot more enjoyable than those jobs (cart wrangling at Costco, car detailing at a Ford dealership)… until I finally broke through into office work.

You seem to be having trouble grasping the core concept here.

There are some jobs people really want to do and would do to some degree anyways even if they weren’t employed to do them. This is not the same idea as ‘there are worse jobs out there’.

Making games is one of these things. Working at a fast-food joint is not.

Disagree. There’s a lot to love about a job at Wendy’s relative to the alternatives (alternatives that don’t realistically include a programming job at Google).

I think you have the cause and effect reversed. If there were more competent software engineers out there available to be hired, you wouldn't have a choice but to accept that Google recruiter's offer.

There are so many people that want to work on games, and there are many positions where these people are capable of doing the job, that that is the situation in that industry.

There are a subset of game development positions that are just like FAANG: well paid, good working conditions, with high skill requirements. Just like FAANG is a subset of the software industry. As big as FAANG is, the median software developer is not that.

Educating people on available options at different companies is crucial. Everyone should know what companies pay well and what is required to join them.

However, we need to stop shaming people for having different career priorities than our own, or assuming that people are only making these choices out of poor judgment. As the parent comment explained, some people really do prefer to engage in non-FAANG career paths for various reasons. For many, it's as simple as not being willing or able to relocate to a location with a FAANG office, as few FAANG companies offer remote positions even after COVID.

> "do it for the love of the craft not money" is bullshit propaganda that only serves to keep labor costs low

It's not, it's simply reality.

When deciding where to work, people don't just myopically look at the $ amount on the salary and nothing else. The company reputation, industry, culture etc. all have intrinsic value.

That's why SpaceX and some game dev's studios can get away with lower salaries than the market rate, because working there in itself has value for some people. And that's why Morgan Stanley and Facebook can't.

Good old supply and demand.

Sure, but "most of the industry can't pay FAANG salaries" is also true.

There is a lot of room between that your characterization.

There are plenty of games companies that are billion dollar businesses. They absolutely can afford to pay FAANG salaries.

> The whole "do it for the love of the craft not money" is bullshit propaganda

Or you could just value things about work apart from salary. No need to shame people for going for not doing for the absolute highest paying job. You can try to do the best you can comp wise, but if you're only chasing money your whole life, it won't lead to much satisfaction and is generally bad advice

The kind of insight into the gaming industry tells me my job in tech outside of gaming is far more sane, and rewarding than the absolutely grueling schedules gaming companies foist on their devs week in and week out.

80+h weeks will absolutely kill any love or value you can get unless you're also a masochist.

I think your advice is only solid as far as pay goes. Nobody should work overtime for free. If you want to throw 80 hours a week on game development, at least make sure you own part of the company.

But for anyone working normal hours with normal benefits in a decent environment you are absolutely right. Money can be an excellent goal, but so can working on something you like, or working less to spend more time on something else.

Just never work for a company for free.

> Nobody should work overtime for free.

> Just never work for a company for free.

Screw you, buddy, I'll do what I want to!

(Okay, my aggressive tone is a joke, but I do actually mean the underlying point. I've worked for free many times, for at least two totally different reasons in different situations, and I'll do it again, and it's ridiculous to say that people should "never" do this. Different people have different goals.)

After reading the parent comment, I have a feeling they didn't mean it as "nobody should work overtime for free [even once or ever]", but more like "nobody should work overtime for free [as the norm, on a regular basis]".

If that was indeed what the parent comment truly meant, would you still disagree with it?

Because I am of the same opinion as you that complete outright rejection of overtime, even if it is only once in forever during a critical time period, is not the move. I am absolutely ok with overtime once in forever and for a great reason. But I am absolutely against overtime being the norm or a regular thing.

Do you reject volunteering?

Do you reject volunteering for non-profits? What about non-profits that have some paid employees? What about for-profit companies that you believe have a net positive effect on the world? What about jobs that you think are fun, I dunno maybe white water guiding, that happen to be for for-profit non-benevolent companies?

The whole idea of "you shouldn't work if you're not getting paid" is a category error.

If you want to do work, do it. If you're getting paid, great. If you're not getting paid but you want to do it anyway, great. If the only reason you want to do this work is because your current alternatives suck, well, I'm sorry to hear that, but you should still pursue your best alternative, which may be working unpaid overtime.

Mind you, in some cases, it makes sense to say "because I am part of a bargaining collective, I will eschew personally-beneficial options, as part of our collective negotiation strategy". Respect! But that's only sane if you're actually part of a bargaining collective. It is (usually) completely idiotic to imagine that you have solidarity with other people who do not see themselves as having solidarity with you.

All of the above comments are super generic, because moksly made some very generic comments, including "never work for a company for free", and I think moksly's advice, when taken as written, is utterly wrong. Now, specifically in the case of working paid or unpaid overtime, as with any other question about workplace environment or about compensation, the only reasonable thing to do is ask what your alternatives are, both short-term and long-term.

Tell me, if you're against overtime being the norm or a regular thing, what advice would you give to a hypothetical person who has no known alternative employment and a dependent to support, and who knows that their boss could hire others to replace them? Would you honestly say to them "never work for a company for free"? Surely instead you would say "do what you gotta do, and also btw try to find a different job, and also btw good luck buddy I feel for you".

The sentence "never work for a company for free" is utterly wrong-headed.

>Do you reject volunteering?

No, I don't. My reply was in the context of full-time employment, not part-time volunteering for some cause on your own free time whenever you choose to.

"Volunteering" for your employer isn't really volunteering, I hope you realize that.

>The sentence "never work for a company for free" is utterly wrong-headed.

It is about as wrong-headed as saying "I refuse to make extra profit for my employer on my own free time on a regular basis without receiving extra pay in return" is.

If you’re working to achieve a goal you’re not really working for free are you?

I’d question the merits of your method if it means working a lot of overtime to make other people rich. Mostly because “experience” extremely rarely has any real value in corporate land where everyone, and I do mean everyone, is replaceable once you zoom out enough to a top management perspective. And any extra time you put in for free is really just you getting taken advantage of.

Now I did specify company, because I’m not against volunteering for NGOs. I still don’t think you should spend 80 hours a week doing it, but by all means volunteer to do things. Help your neighbour build a roof, go join a soup kitchen, knit little hats for newborn babies, whatever you want. That’s not really working for free though, it’s working to better your community.

Putting in overtime, that you are not getting paid for at Coca Cola is not only foolish, it’s downright undermining the foundation of our society. It’s you trading away pieces or your life, so that stock owners and corporate managers can become a little richer, and no, you should not really be free to do that. Exactly because it ruins it for every other worker. Especially in America, where you working 80 hours a week, means you’re quite literally keeping someone else from having a full time job and the access to healthcare it provides, and for what? So the billionaires can billion?

It's not nice to shame people, but it is helpful for the greater good of software developers if people would change their mind about being willing to work gruelling hours for lower pay. Because if there aren't enough developers willing to do it for low pay, the multi-billion dollar companies would have to pay more for game developers.

This is why groups like actors needed a union. There is an endless supply of wide eyed actors out there willing to work for nothing just for the chance of maybe becoming famous one day. The union keeps the big players from taking advantage of this endless supply.

Even with their union, actors make a median salary of around $40k. The top 25% best paid make closer to $60k median.

That is an excellent example.

Given a situation where labor supply is in excess, one could say "let them work for pennies because they love the craft, i.e. let the company pay them nothing because they're easily replaceable." Or one could say "they should unionize so they can bargain for better salaries, and still do what they love."

I suspect that since game devs still make above the national average for salaries, there's less incentive to unionize and demand wages that actually reflect the value they bring to those multi-billion dollar game publishers. It's like "well 50k-60k is good enough" even though the industry they work for is flush with cash and could easily compensate more if they were made to do so.

>but it is helpful for the greater good of software developers if people would change their mind about being willing to work gruelling hours for lower pay.

As a former dev (but I still work games adjacent), I'd never tell someone about the industry without telling them about pay and work hours. But at the same time I feel people who are interested in this are likely somewhat aware of this already, and ultimately experience will be a better teacher than me saying X is better. It's not like kids these days can't google.

----

Ironically enough, google and the like is likely the biggest reason gamedevs don't have unions. Despite the stigma, most devs aren't trapped the same way a fast food worker may be. I've had several friends laid off (including myself) and we then pivot to a "boring job" making more money than we were making before being laid off. few other industries can boast this. Even a similar industry like VFX can't just pivot to a whole other sector of work once they get laid off (after making a movie billions).

(Opinions are my own)

> The whole "do it for the love of the craft not money" is bullshit propaganda that only serves to keep labor costs low

If this is good or bad is up to interpretation but some people actually enjoy different work cultures. I just joined Google after a ~5 year career at various startups, 2 of them YC backed through Work at a Startup & Bookface.

Google's culture and the culture at startups I've worked at are extremely different. Even the scales of your work are entirely different.

One of my first projects at Google was a "minor" change that resulted in migrating a majority of our users code. This involved a high level design doc, another doc sent to a committee, and for me to actually write the code which involved a series of reviews from my TL. What was essentially a very complex "find and replace" operation took ~2 weeks and it consumed a large percent of my bandwidth so I was operating at ~10% speed on other tasks while this was happening. After this we were planning another "medium sized" project and we were talking about timelines. I was confused about why we don't "just do it" and it turns out this task was going to be taking years.

This is a very different pace to what you get at a startup. At a previous job I rewrote how our entire CI worked. I essentially setup a demo, had another coworker I liked working with look at it and raise concerns, I fixed them, and then I pulled the trigger and migrated us a few days later. This also involved switching us from BitBucket to a self hosted Gitlab (which I setup runners, backups, etc for in ~1 day). We essentially changed the entire way we did development over a week because I decided it was the way to go, one other coworker agreed, and I executed on it and made it happen.

Another time we had a client identify a bug in a build we were going to ship them last minute. This was a "we're going to drop you as a client if this doesn't work" thing. Me and the same coworker had to fix this in 2 weeks or the company was screwed. I found this out as soon as I signed on to slack when my coworker who had been up till 6AM talking to our contact at the other company filled me in. I told him to go to bed and I'd start working on a fix. 1AM rolls around and he wakes up and I'm still working on a fix and feel like I've made no progress. I talk to the coworker and say "We're not going to make it, we're screwed". He tells me to go to bed and he'd work on it assuring me we'll be fine. I wake up the next day and he calls me saying we're screwed and I told him to catch some sleep and he'd I'd work on it and we'll be fine. We trade off like that every day for ~2 weeks including weekends. We pull off a fix using some new tech I was working on and by using standards we were pushing for others to use (unit testing, TDD, my automated deployment pipeline, duct tape, etc). It was exhausting and we both worked like 100hr/week for that time period. The next week the client was pleased, management was like "take whatever time you need that was amazing", and we went on our merry way. I basically vegged out for a week and, whenever I did do work, it was stuff I wanted to clean up anyway due to being bored.

You'd never get what happens at Google to happen at small company (years for a speculative project that may/may not help), and you'd never get what happens at small startups to happen at Google. Is that bad? No. Different people want different things. Honestly, the most fun I've had working in my career were those 3 weeks and working with that coworker. I still talk to him every week to catch up and about how our lives are going (he just bought a house, I'm moving, etc).

Obviously no one wants to work 100hr weeks but I want to work with people who care about the company, what we're doing, where we're going, and who are incentivized to do so (significant stock allocations, etc). I've been lucky enough to find a team like that at Google and at a few of the startups I've worked.

In short: it's not "bullshit propaganda" if you enjoy working with people who care, lack of bureaucracy, management structure, and actually like what you're building.

I don't get why you care about the company. Most of the time the sole purpose of existence of that company is making its owners and investors rich. That 100hr probably let them get an important contract, so they got a bit richer, but in return you were given food scraps (some time off). If it was me, I'd approach the owners and said "look, if this shit is so critical for your business, I can spend some extra time and try to fix it, but in return I'll become an LP with a small stake."

This is a pretty cynical take. Often, companies provide value in some way to some people in the world.

Imagining who those people are and how you are helping them can help provide context to what you are doing.

Any value they provide is incidental, an annoying necessity they have to put up with. If owners and investors cared about that value, they'd hire more personnel. Instead, they pocket salaries of that unhired personnel and take a free ride on a couple dudes who work 100hr overtime. I'm sure after they signed the contract, they had a nice party where the owner cracked a joke about two losers who did all the work for free.

> The whole "do it for the love of the craft not money" is bullshit propaganda

A bunch of people already responded to this, but I'm going to add my two cents anyway:

I currently make 6 low figures in a relatively boring but non-stressful systems administration job. The company is a dinosaur in Internet Years and has its idiosyncrasies but is ultimately a very decent place to work. My manager gives me my priorities and then gets out of my way to let me do my work. I work 40 hours a week, sometimes less. The company is mostly software devs and QA, so there's no such thing as on-call because nothing we manage needs 24x7 uptime. In 10 years, there have been about 3 times I've gotten a call on the weekend to help bring something back online.

I could very easily double my salary in under a year if I really buckled down and tried to pivot to DevOps role in some rapidly growing biotech or fintech (read: crypto) company instead. The tradeoffs being: 1) sacrificing basically all my free time and time with my family in order to adequately grok the ever-changing world of DevOps 2) that feeling of being out of my depth for 6 months to a year that comes with moving to a new company 3) almost certainly being part of an on-call rotation 4) taking a risk on a new company that may go bankrupt or get bought out a few years down the road, and so on.

I'm making an active choice to keep my stability and work/life balance while making what I consider to be a reasonable wage.

Right, and that's a perfectly reasonable choice to make. But that's not what this thread is about. It's about being paid at a similar level as your pay, but being expected to work 60+ hour weeks for several months out of the year.

No thanks.

But hey, each to their own, I guess. If a game dev wants to work more and get paid less because they love building games, that's their choice.

> I currently make 6 low figures in a relatively boring but non-stressful systems administration job.

For context, I was contacted by a game dev company recently. The max they could pay me was 5 figures.

Doing a gaming job for 40 hours a week for low 6 figures is fine. However, it's not the reality for many, if not most, game devs.

The phrase "six-figure salary" is so strange. We're almost always referring to slightly above $100K. Does anyone ever say "I make six figures" and mean $900K, or even half a million?

It's a convenient floor for the time being. At some point inflation will probably render it useless and we'll come up with a new phrase.

I’ve heard people say mid six figure (400-600) and high six figure (700+). If people just say six figure I expect 100-300k.

You seemed to have missed the entire point of the comment you're replying to, which is that this is not about money.

> If a Google recruiter told me

But it's not google telling you... it's literally the rank'n'file staff telling you that there's more important things than "money".

I'll not argue that many of the big players are garbage and are "anti-consumer"... but to dismiss how workers feel because you don't like some companies seems like you're missing the trees for the forest...

>The entities on top are large multi-billion dollar corporations who are running a business, just like any other industry. And this has been more and more apparent in recent years seeing just how anti-consumer the video games industry is getting.

depends on the studio. Everyone focuses on the EA's, but most game studios aren't these huge billionaire ventures cranking out 12 games a year. It's certainly not the modern EA or Naughty Dog or Blizzard that give devs the low salary reputation.

I worked at one for 3 years, and it was <300 employees. I was still surprised at how much money they can bring in after talking to producers (spoiler: maybe it varies in other studios, but the most profitable games worked on weren't console games), but it was very clear that this wasn't a studio that could pay everyone even 100K/year and expect to be in business next year.

Outside of HN, most senior engineers understand that they can relocate to an area with a FAANG office and earn more money. It's not a secret. Many choose not to pursue this option, despite knowing it exists.

And that's okay. The incessant drive to obtain FAANG employment and FAANG salaries at any cost is not common outside of internet forums like HN or Blind. For many people, there is more to life than chasing the highest paying careers.

FAANG is absolutely a great option for anyone who can make it work. Some FAANG companies are opening up more offices and even considering remote work, but for many of us who aren't willing to relocate our families to FAANG office cities, it's not really an option any more.

And of course, it's fine if someone willingly chooses to work a lower paying job to work on something they enjoy. We shouldn't criticize people for not seeking out the maximum salary they can find if they're actually happy with what they're doing.

Careers are not one-size-fits-all. It's fine to share options with other people, but let's not criticize people for choosing career paths that differ from our own personal priorities.

I think you misunderstand the parent's post. It's not about critiquing someone's choices, it's about recognizing when you are being exploited.

And yeah, maybe the game devs being exploited think the situation is fine. The long hours for low pay is paid back by the intangibles of working on a game.

The point isn't that the dev made the choice, it's that it was ever framed as a choice in the first place. Many games studios are making billions in profits and absolutely could pay FAANG salaries and still turn profits.

So it's less about individual choices, and more about ensuring the workers are getting compensated fairly for the work they love doing.

> As a salaried developer I don't think I was ever expected to work more than 60 hours a week, and then after the crunch was over we always got 1 or 2 weeks of extra vacation ("comp time"). To be clear, the normal working schedule was 40 hours per week. Crunch time is like 1 or 2 times a year, for maybe 1-2 months each time. And like I said, depending on how much you crunch, you would get extra paid time off afterwards. So for me, that was a pretty good trade. I'd much rather work my ass off for a couple months and then get an extra 2 week vacation at the end of it.

Just to be clear, you're saying that crunch time can be up to 1/3 of the year, and you get maximum 4 weeks of additional leave off as a result. Compare that to anywhere overseas, where 4-6 weeks leave per year is the minimum. Moreover, if you're working 50 hours a week on average during that crunch time, and you get 1 week off per month of crunch, you're already marginally behind on equivalent compensation since there's more than 4 weeks per average month.

That sounds like an awful agreement and I don't understand why you're trying to hold it up as a great opportunity. I'd instead describe it as an abusive working relationship that further shifts the benefit to the corporation at the employee's expense.

I wonder why you got downvoted as you're basically spot on. Can someone check my calculations, because I'm getting ridiculous numbers, not "marginally behind"

He remembers 1-2 times of 1-2 months of crunch of "not being expected to work _more_ than 60 hours". My bet is that this means people usually stayed _at least_ 60 hours during the crunch time due to social pressures created by the employees themselves. Sort of like "unlimited vacation" usually means that on average everyone takes less vacation, because they don't want to be the one with the most vacation taken. So to me this means the _lower_ bound is 60 hours, not the 50 you put as the average.

1-2 in this context tells me: it's definitely 2, if not more, but let's take the lower bound, i.e. 2. The following uses some generous rounding:

That's 4 months, so the 1/3 of the year you mentioned of 60 hour weeks. 4.33 weeks per month on average times 4 months is 17.3 weeks of at least 60 hour weeks =~ 1040 hours of work over a period of time that they should've worked ~690 hours. That's an extra of about 345 hours of work they did, which is a whopping 43 8-hour days. Even if after each of the crunches they got 2 weeks off, that's 20 days of vacation to compensate for 43 days of unpaid crunch time that also wreaked havoc with their actual lives.

Is my math off somewhere? Because otherwise as this was the lower bound from an idealized remembering of "the good old times" I'd call that exploitative.

No one expects the comp time to exactly equal how much extra time you worked. It's just like a little thank you for working hard, and so you can decompress and take care of whatever you've been neglecting in your life during crunch.

Would I have enjoyed this if I wasn't a 20-something with no kids who who lived and breathed games? No. So I don't honestly expect everyone to understand this either.

If you love your work, it's not work.

Never once did I feel like crunch "wreaked havoc with my life". I think you are imagining the worst case scenario. Sure, it could. And the people who worked there who were parents with kids, I felt bad for them. I don't think I would have made that choice. But for me and many of my childless colleagues, the reality is that we loved working in games and getting that experience was vital to our careers.

I would be careful with such blanket statements. I would agree with you that companies do not expect people to expect that and will do everything they can to make people believe that exploitative relationships are OK.

Personally though yes I do expect tit for tat. And there are employers out there that understand this very well. At one of my previous places for example we had a few major traffic days which required a sort of "all hands on deck" for the day and part of the night. You probably worked an extra 2 hours in total but you were looking at the chat and production monitors regularly while going about your day and evening/night otherwise. You got an extra day off for that.

Also for production support via 'pager' any call from the NOC to you, even if it took 5 minutes of you just telling them 'yeah restart service X' was an automatic 1 hour billed at overtime rates.

No not contractors. Internal employees.

Also I do love my work and it's not work in that sense. But that does not preclude me from wanting and working actively towards a proper work environment. If you pay me for 40 hours you get 40 hours. 40 hours of 100% of me. Not 60 hours of 50% of me.

And the people who worked there who were parents with kids, I felt bad for them. I don't think I would have made that choice. But for me and many of my childless colleagues, the reality is that we loved working in games and getting that experience was vital to our careers.

Those people with kids were once people like you, say 10-20 years ago, and they didn't fully understand the precedent they were setting by accepting and normalising those working practices. I would bet if any of them could go back, they would undo it.

Sort of like "unlimited vacation" usually means that on average everyone takes less vacation, because they don't want to be the one with the most vacation taken.

If you have defined vacation, the company has to pay you for any unused days when you resign. With "unlimited" vacation they do not. So it's a win-win for the company to offer this supposed perk: peer pressure not to use it, and no financial liability.

We're not overseas though, we're in the US where we get 15-25 vacation days a year. So an extra 5-10 days each time you crunch is pretty significant. Also this is extra vacation. I get the equation is still in favor of the employer but whatever, I thought it was fair, because of my next point:

I loved working on games! It wasn't bad at all doing this back in my 20s. You're doing something you love! With amazing people who also love games! I learned so much back in this period. I was able to tackle super hard challenges and really work on a huge variety of really interesting problems. Why would you not want to work extra hard if you have this kind of opportunity where you also love the work?

What if you could work on things you love AND be compensated more fairly for it, through something like... collective bargaining?

There are other creative careers, like acting, that have union representation for exactly this reason. If there were no actors' union, film companies could abuse an endless supply of wide-eyed hopefuls trying to get famous. Collective bargaining makes sure they can earn a real wage while they work on their dream career.

In any case, I'd expect someone named "socialist coder" to be less willing to hand over their power as a worker to their company ;)

I never once took any position for or against collective bargaining in the game industry. I would say I have not looked into this enough to fairly have an opinion on the matter.

Plus, I do think my own experience has been with the "good" game companies who didn't work you down to nothing. I really don't think a union vote would have had a chance at all at the places I worked.

It does seem like the industry as a whole has gotten worse since I founded my own game company in 2010. Or, maybe the companies I worked at really were the "best" ones for worker quality of life.

As for my own politics, I'm not so much pro-union as I am pro-worker cooperative. Unions today do a lot of things for their own benefit at the expense of the rest of society. I see it locally with the teachers union in my school district. It's awful, they are bankrupting the school district and their demands are completely out of touch with reality. So I don't think just having a union is the silver bullet here. Unions pit workers against management. In a hugely creative and cooperative venture like making a video game, that is a pretty big negative.

I would love to see more employee owned businesses. Unfortunately video games are hugely capital intensive and very risky. You need to be able to throw away tens of millions of dollars. Very unlike manufacturing where at least if your product fails, you still have a valuable factory. If your video game flops, you literally have $0 in assets to show for it.

So, we need to come up with different ways of financing capital and organizing labor so that everyone's best interests are at heart. Very difficult problem to solve and capitalism isn't very interested in solving it. But, I guess it does work for the film industry so what's to say it wouldn't work for game development?

Also I want to say, I only wanted to share my view here because I felt like my perspective was missing from this discussion. It's not all unholy crunch time and rock bottom wages. I personally had a great experience in the game industry from 2000 - 2010. With that said, I don't disagree at all with the premise that most game companies take unfair advantage of their employees.

Lastly, I want to add that at my own startup, we practice what we preach. In the 10 years we've been going, the amount of days we've asked our developers to "crunch" is in the single digits.

Are we pretending most non A-list actors make 6 figures entry level? unions help to prevent abuse, but it won't solve the "undrepaid" argument.

in this regard, crunch time with a max work per day, with actual overtime compensation and post crunch vacation sounds about as fair as the situation can be (you know, short of avoiding crunch). whether the final amount made is enough is a compensation issue, not an abuse issue. I doubt unions formed would eliminate crunch as a whole.

Don’t get suckered by this argument, folks. It’s the start of an abusive relationship. Whatever your sector, you should expect to be paid for your time and your skill. No-one pulled this shit at my FAANG or global ISP gigs, despite the fact I love working on high scale infrastructure. There is no special magical wonderland industry that intrinsically bathes its staff in so much joy that you can lowball their pay and it’s just fine.

TBH a lot of people don't have that many choices. I mean if a dream company gives me an offer with a reasonable salary, I'd jump for it without hesitation. A lot of people are OK with median salary.

Putting my hiring manager’s hat on, I recommend asking for more, without hesitation. There is practically no downside. Especially if it’s your dream company, because you are likely to be extra motivated, and this is a case you can genuinely make. Once an offer’s already on the table, the worst possible outcome from asking will be “sorry, that’s as high as we can go right now” without any rancour.

If instead the response is in any way affronted, then run the fuck away because that’s a clear early warning sign of toxic, bullying management; avoiding such environments is also on my list of good outcomes. The only exception context being, if you don’t currently have any income at all.

In your previous experience with FAANGs, were your requests for a higher offer taken as an affront?

Also, what was your role with regards to ISP infrastructure?

1. No. I'm also speaking from both sides of the table, as a hiring manager I could never be offended by someone simply looking to gain the greatest benefit from their employment. I won't say it can't happen, however, because every service team is different.

2. Well, over the course of the last few decades, I think probably most of them, having started out building dialup services in the '90s on shelves piled up with USR Sportsters, to principal engineer for a multinational service provider; developing various appliance products; developing global-scale provisioning & monitoring tools for transit and hosting services; helpdesk; operating a LIR; dating RIR staffers; standing up new IXPs; SRE; hiring; designing data centers; M&A due diligence; post-M&A systems convergence; webdev; postmaster. My concept of "full stack engineering" starts with racking the servers, or perhaps even before that: getting the business case approved and running the RFP. Never been a peering coordinator, though, I'm not demonic enough.

The problem here is that (aside from the usual "FAANG or nothing" sentiment): you assume everyone can get a FAANG job to begin with. Apple never called back after my campus interview, I didn't make it past Google's automated programming test. I had no link to Microsoft so I just have a online resume in the virtual void.

That first job hustle is painful. I definitely wouldn't be where I was today if I didn't spend a few years at a local studio, if only because it gave relevant work experience to what I wanted to do. Even if it was paying me half my current salary it was well worth the experience.

Far from it; this advice is from my current perspective as a bootstrapped co-founder, but concurs with all my prior experience, including that at other startups and ordinary enterprises, as both manager and job candidate.

Funny how people assume that just because you’ve been at one of the tech giants, that it was either the only experience you have, or that it’s the only experience you valued, or speak from. The assumption is a category error, and seems to be mostly invoked dismissively.

It seems like you can’t even imagine that someone might not be interested or willing to work at FAANG?

If those aren’t an option, then it might not be a lowball offer anymore. FAANG compensation is in an entirely separate category, from what I can tell.

The point is about not allowing yourself to be exploited, just because it’s what you love, and in any context. I earned as much in enterprise and consulting as I did in FAANG and ISP; there is sector median disparity, but to paint the differences as somehow magically intrinsic and inevitable would be as false for FAANG as it is for game dev and any other industry besides.

You can't avoid some level of exploitation when you have little power; and you have little power when there are 5 other people willing to do the job at a wage you think is too low.

Agreed (if you'll accept a couple of extra conditions: not just willing, but also able and available), but I don't see that as a simple supply-side glut driving lower prices, because people are not widgets. The willingness to accept the lower pay in specific sectors reads more like an abusive status quo maintained by a cycle of exploitation, one I suppose those sharing their salaries are hoping to break.

The GP is not telling everyone to go to FAANG. They are telling fellow engineers to not get themselves exploited by low paying companies.

This is a fair take, but modern gaming companies have similar margins as other consumer tech companies since they are operating on profitable business models such as subscription and micro-transactions.

The gaming industry has been playing the same card movie studios play which is “This is a passion industry. Come and work for us but we can only offer this range of compensation and this type of contracts because we are making this single thing that needs to first break even before it can even generate a profit”.

The problem with that idea is that gaming in general doesn’t operate that like that anymore. Game developers can now tap into scalable royalty programs like Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Now and Apple Arcade. Or they can build free games with micro-transactions.

Building AAA games is still a huge investment. But gaming companies nowadays have way more avenues to generate revenue. So it’s sad that they still play that card to pay lower wages than in other tech-verticals.

If your love for games is such that you are willing to get a lower salary just to be part of that creation process, that’s fair. But expect to be dealt the same “do it for the experience, not for the money” card even when you reach levels of proficiency and skill that deserve higher wages.

> The gaming industry has been playing the same card movie studios play

FWIW, the mobile games industry takes a different route. Unfortunately the media loves to shit on them while not being too hard on how the AAA movie-like industries operate.

I would also argue freemium mobile games aren't nearly as fun as PC/premium games. Freemium developers are a different crowd and more like a typical SW engineer. I've done both. I'm looking forward to going back to premium games from freemium.

>they are operating on profitable business models such as subscription and micro-transactions.

some do, many don't. Not even all AAA companies have gone this route. Let alone all the mid sized studios out there contracted to make games. I'm sure Rockstar and Blizzard could, but the industry isn't just those two companies.

> Also the argument that it's "grueling 80+ hour weeks day in and day out is" is bullshit! The only time I ever worked 80 hours in a single week was when I was starting out in Quality Assurance and I was getting paid hourly so I was happy to make the extra overtime.

Sorry but I'm going to call bullshit on your bullshit. Spent ~5 years in the industry and every place I worked crunched like hell and every place that my coworkers came from crunched like hell. There are companies that limit crunch but they are few and far between.

My experience was that those who survived crunch perpetuated a culture of needing to "pay your dues" and you weren't a "team player" if you didn't put in the extra hours on salary.

I also worked in the industry and would agree with your assessment. Many of the senior folks I talked to even agreed that crunch was a 'mandatory, necessary' part of game development.

You can even perceive it from the vernacular of how you refer to "crunch" - it has a feeling of something often talked about, a term used in the industry.

You could be right, my game industry career could be an outlier. I never worked at a big AAA studio like EA or Ubisoft. I worked on MMOs.

anecdotes are just that. They vary wildly.

Me: I worked 3 years, had a total of 6 weeks of crunch @50-55 hours/week, compensated 1.5x and with "free" dinner (AKA they actually complied to state law due to staying after 6PM). This was after literally cutting the content of the game in half due to client deadlines (A certain Big Tech company was not going to delay their product just because they set unreasonable deadlines to the studio). Attitude wise, no one liked it. Manager didn't pretend to be pleased with the discussions.

No extra vacation, but overall it wasn't one of those death grinds people talk on the internet about. I think both tales are valid, but of course one of them gets a lot more attention.

I've worked in games, I've worked out of games. The workers in games are absolutely being exploited because they think the work environment is unique.

And yes, there's something cool to see people at PAX or elsewhere praising a project you worked on. But saying people are making a tradeoff, or giving up salary to work on games is a defeatist attitude -- big game devs should be paying what big tech companies pay.

You should not have to give up pay to work in games, and it absolutely kills me every time I see an engineer claim that it's somehow noble to do so.

In the indie space, sure, pay is going to be weaker. But there are thousands working for Blizzard, Activision, EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar, CDPR, etc. etc. etc. who are all being grossly underpaid for the value they bring to their company.

> Crunch time is like 1 or 2 times a year, for maybe 1-2 months each time.

So, at worst, one-third of the time is crunch time. That's... a lot. Even a full month of crunch time per year isn't nothing.

Yeah - plenty of SW jobs that pay as much and more, with 0 crunch time per year.

A month is a lot for subpar pay.

It's also possible to work on games or game like software at FAANG, not crunch (although FAANG companies have plenty of other toxic qualities that can make them worse than a game job in subtle ways) and get paid a FAANG salary.

What are the toxic qualities that are unique to FAANG?

Hope you aren't talking about Amazon Games Studios, because that place is incredibly toxic from what I understand.

> Just to have a bit of a counter argument from me

You didn't supply any kind of argument. Your comment can be reduced to "If you want a good salary, you are not one of us."

As a person who loved gaming and wanted to work in that industry, you are the reason I didn't go for it.

You should take some personal responsibility and stop blaming your life choices on other people. There's also a world of difference between saying that a FAANG salary isn't the most important part of a job for some people, and saying people in game dev shouldn't have a good salary.

> You should take some personal responsibility and stop blaming your life choices on other people.

You should stop jumping to conclusions. Nothing I said indicated I don't take responsibility for that decision. I can choose not to take a job because of crappy pay, but I can still point out why the job has crappy pay (and the reason is not me).

> There's also a world of difference between saying that a FAANG salary isn't the most important part of a job for some people, and saying people in game dev shouldn't have a good salary.

I don't get paid anywhere near FAANG salary, but I bet I get paid more per hour than most game devs.

> I don't get paid anywhere near FAANG salary, but I bet I get paid more per hour than most game devs.

If you don't get paid anywhere near FAANG salary then you're probably making the same as what you could make as a game developer...

>I don't get paid anywhere near FAANG salary, but I bet I get paid more per hour than most game devs.

if you include the small studios, sure.

if you are focused on the big AAA studios like most of this topic is, I would doubt it. Blizzard may not be paying Google money, but the engineers there aren't making peanuts either.

60 hour work weeks as the norm is still crazy to me, though I am in my mid thirties as well and might have been able to pull that off in my 20's as you said. Maybe that's why start-ups usually end up burning me out because I've never really cared that much about the product like I imagine game devs care about theirs, and 50-60+ hours a week is kind of normal for a small start up.

>Also the argument that it's "grueling 80+ hour weeks day in and day out is" is bullshit!

This is just your experience. There are plenty good studios but plenty of grueling ones!

If you're working on a AAA title, crunch can be all year long.

Since you are a game developer with kids, I have to ask... what about the addiction? Have you seen your kids getting addicted to games? Does that bother you? Have you pondered your own contribution to that problem?

Just saying, I'd rather have kids be addicted to games than drugs. At least there's a high possibility you can recover game addiction without major effects to your health. And you learn very abstract things in games you can use IRL too.

This is on point and similar to my experiences in game companies.

That said, I'm in music/audio, and from my side of the fence there seemed to be a sort of higher respect from management for programmers (and to a certain extent, art) in that they really tried to slowly ramp up their crunch and not keep it sustained for too long. In my experience, the truly crazy crunch tends to be borne by audio and QA.

Audio is hardcore, Naughty Dog being the most hardcore (but they wear this as a badge of honor and everyone who works there knows it before going in).

This instantly raises a question for me: what companies did you work for that did not leave you feeling like you were being abused? Do they still exist, do you have any impression of how their work environment has changed since then? I know my friend who worked at Popcap sure did like it a lot less once EA bought them, for instance.

60h + 1-4mo of crunch sure sounds like more than I'd wanna do for anything. Maybe if I got a piece of the IP/profits - as someone with 'socialist' in your username I'd assume you'd be interested in companies that let the workers own more of what they produce; were any of your workplaces unusual in that regard?

> Crunch time is like 1 or 2 times a year, for maybe 1-2 months each time.

If it is 2 times per year and extends for a period of 2 months, that is almost half of the entire year.

That sounds crazy to me, I would never ever work 60 hours a week without getting paid for it. Many game companies make ridicolous amounts of money, there is no reason why they shouldn't pay a reasonable salary for it.

60 hour work weeks are insane and you should never accept that.

>You don't work in gaming because you want to make the top salary. You work in gaming because you love games

That's just rationalization. Gaming companies earn ridiculous amounts of money, especially the ones that do it through microtransaction model. These companies would have no problem paying FAANG-like salaries if they had to do so, but they pay less because they can get away with it.

Maybe that was true 20, 30 years ago. Right now outside of a handful of studios that release quality games the rest aren't that good or innovative. I find it hard to believe people are happy to work on games with heavy elements of microtransactions or reheated elements (e.g. Ubisoft games are basically the same)

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