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Comment by turtledove | Hacker News Reader

You aren't paid to play videogames. You are paid to test videogames.

It's asinine to think they are just playing the games - QA has complex skills necessary to succeed, from technical writing to careful test planning to cross organizational planning. QA is some of the least rewarding and most difficult work in a games studio.

It's like asking why camera operators in film sets "get paid to watch movies". We've decided we like games, so we better pay people for the labor in making them.

Fuck off with this "it's an honor" bullshit. It's work. It deserves good working conditions.

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Least rewarding? Sure. Most difficult? I'm not so sure about that one.

What's more difficult than a job that's absolutely soul draining and long hours for next to no pay?

It's difficult to become a software engineer, but the job is relatively easy. It's not hard to become QA, or a fruit picker, or meat packer, but those jobs are fucking hard.

I think it's time to take a step back and realize that even living in a first world country and working a tech job is, honestly, not a bad deal.

> What's more difficult than a job that's absolutely soul draining and long hours for next to no pay?

An equally soul draining job that requires you to service customers. And equally draining job that puts in physical danger. And equally draining job that takes out on long distance travel, like crewing a vessel.

I really doubt that a company is going to struggle to find people to load up a build of the game and try to clip through walls all day.

>It's asinine to think they are just playing the game

There are bad parts of every job. The fun part of SWE is coding, but that doesn't mean I don't have to write design docs, coordinat between different teams, etc.

>It deserves good working conditions.

I agree, but that doesn't mean you should make a union to do that.

one should not have to rely on the hugely imbalanced power structure between employer and employee to get better working conditions.

these people have stopped licking the boots of capitalism and started to demand change. there’s nothing wrong with that, and there’s no inherent moral value that people should adhere to in their work relationship that precludes them from forming a union.

I sit upon a silk cushion, my servants fanning me as I pluck a grape from the bowl. “The plebs don’t understand how hard I work too”, I complain to no one in particular. “Don’t they realize a union will only hurt them? If they’d just brought me their concerns, I’m sure I would have changed those policies.” My guards chuckle as they spear a nearby peasant and toss him from the ramparts.

This made my morning, thank you.

Personally I cannot wait for these “engineers” to be treated like normal technicians.

The odd sense of superiority that people like OP seem to have is nauseating.

FWIW, I am an engineer and I agree with you.

So am I. I have interviewed a lot of “software engineers” lately and I think that our industry needs to do a better job of protecting that title.

Is this seriously supposed to be anything but hyperbole? It's not a question of how hard a given job is, but how much demand there is for a given job. If someone wants this job and wants it so much that they're willing to do it for less, I'm not saying no. Not unless there's some special skill that these existing QA people have that the rest of the labor pool lacks.

If someone else is capable of doing my job for half the pay, then hats off to them, and they deserve it.

That's certainly one theory on how to price labor, but it's not the only one (and not even the only one in our capitalist economy.) Worker coops, for instance, have a totally different theory of labor value.

So no, it's not hyperbole to suggest the poster is undervaluing their peers.

Not just "undervaluing their peers" but comparing them to peasants murdered and put on pikes?

Honestly the tone of the post and the satirical post matched each other so precisely I think it serves as a useful counterpoint to what was posted. The continuity in tone with a completely different context sheds a new light on how problematic the content of the original post was. This is essentially what satire is for.

Writing design docs isn't a bad part of the SWE job.

> that doesn't mean you should make a union to do that.

Usually folks don't unionize until their work consistently fails to deliver good working conditions, so, yeah, in this case you do need to unionize to get that.

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