Game Developers Break Silence Around Salaries (axios.com) 89
Developers are sharing their salaries on Twitter under the hashtag #GameDevPaidMe to encourage pay transparency in their industry. Axios reports: The hashtag started circulating last year, but has returned periodically as developers fight for better working conditions. Salary sharing is a way to equalize the field. By removing the secrecy, as well as the stigma, around discussing pay, workers have more power to advocate for themselves when negotiating salaries and raises. In 2020, Blizzard employees shared their salaries anonymously via a spreadsheet to compare compensation. The pay gap between people at the top, and workers on the ground is measurable in hundreds of thousands of dollars -- even when those CEOs take pay cuts.
What they're saying:
A lead designer on "Hearthstone" working for Blizzard Entertainment: "I started getting paid fairly once I started asking questions. I only started asking questions once I better understood what I was worth. Understanding what your worth can be a difficult question, but this helps."
A lead designer at Blackbird Interactive: "Every single person who plays games should take a good look at #GameDevPaidMe and get a sense for what the people who make your art actually make."
A senior game designer at Reflector Entertainment: "Don't wait for your employer to give you the raise you deserve, be open to talking to other companies even if you feel you are at a 'great' spot."
What they're saying:
A lead designer on "Hearthstone" working for Blizzard Entertainment: "I started getting paid fairly once I started asking questions. I only started asking questions once I better understood what I was worth. Understanding what your worth can be a difficult question, but this helps."
A lead designer at Blackbird Interactive: "Every single person who plays games should take a good look at #GameDevPaidMe and get a sense for what the people who make your art actually make."
A senior game designer at Reflector Entertainment: "Don't wait for your employer to give you the raise you deserve, be open to talking to other companies even if you feel you are at a 'great' spot."
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Not faulting your reasoning here, but you're responding to the opposite of what OP said.
In many jurisdictions, even discouraging disclosing your wage to coworkers is illegal.
There are many places that feel that the knowledge of comparative wages is essential to eliminating or suppressing things such as gender pay disparities. I don't know which countries, if any, have made it criminal to discourage the open discussion of payments, but it is certainly actionable in many places.
If you live in an Orwellian "Right to Work" state (Score:5, Informative)
they can fire you on the spot, you have no recourse, and probably won't get unemployment either. There are 20. [ncsl.org]
Re:If you live in an Orwellian "Right to Work" sta (Score:5, Informative)
That's "at will". It also allows you to tell them "I quit" for pretty much any reason at any time, and they can't do much unless you signed a contract agreeing to extra terms (and some of those won't hold up in court).
"Right to work" means you can't be forced to join a union in order to work at a job. Which was a whole different ball of abusive labor practice wax.
Re:If you live in an Orwellian "Right to Work" sta (Score:4)
And all 50 states, plus DC, are at-will. Most states [worldpopul...review.com] have some limits on that doctrine, and it's generally illegal in all of them to fire people for certain reasons like their race or religion. Of course, it can be hard to prove in court that someone was fired for an illegal reason.
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And all 50 states, plus DC, are at-will
49. Montana is not an at-will employment state,
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Sort of...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:If you live in an Orwellian "Right to Work" sta (Score:4, Insightful)
Whether the "must work for a union" requirement is good or bad depends entirely on the work environment. Forcing all workers to join the union prevents scab workers. Where that requirement exists, it is always, in my experience, because at some point (maybe now, maybe in the past), the company was especially abusive of workers. Generally, the more exotic the union requirements, the worse the company was at some point. For example, shops with the "dumb" rules that "no engineer can touch the equipment, only the technicians" generally arise after a few engineers break stuff and then blame the technicians for the failures. Techs get fired unfairly, and later the union puts those rules in. After that, lots of people complain about how inefficient it is that engineers must call someone just to plug in a cable and how upsetting it is that that good engineers cannot help out their technician co-workers. But it's because of past history.
In any domain, when you see a stupid rule, look to history... it's almost always got a really terrible person in history who caused the rule's creation.
Re:If you live in an Orwellian "Right to Work" sta (Score:4, Informative)
'Right to work' doesn't relate to being fired without cause, nor unemployment insurance. Just whether workers can be "compelled" to join unions. I'm pro-union, more in the ideals and less in the way they've been managed. But in no way do I think someone should be compelled to join anything.
The link above reads as follows.
"Under right-to-work laws, states have the authority to determine whether workers can be required to join a labor union to get or keep a job.
Currently, 27 states and Guam have given workers a choice when it comes to union membership. Labor unions still operate in those states, but workers cannot be compelled to become members as a requirement of their job. Kentucky became the 27th right-to-work state when it enacted HB 1 on Jan. 9, 2017. "
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Consider whether you are combining "Right to Work" with "at will employment". See here [mcrazlaw.com].
There are pandemic relief issues influencing quitting/refusing to work [cnbc.com], but those may be evaporating in the coming months.
And if your employer fires you, you may still be able to collect unemployment [dol.gov]. And if they invent a bogus "fault" to fire you with, 1) that's a PR disaster waiting to happen, 2) if you can prove it was bogus, it's also a legal disaster waiting to happen, and 3) it's a company you shouldn't be workin
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Consider whether you are combining "Right to Work" with "at will employment".
Consider whether you're conflating "combining" with "conflating".
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Indeed. Had I done one last pass of real editing (instead of just looking at it), I would have take the course you suggest.
My bad.
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Re:There's a reason talking about wages is protect (Score:5, Informative)
That's false. In the US, that's just a scare tactic from exploitative employers. In the EU/UK it's certainly illegal to prohibit workers from discussing their salaries. Not sure about the rest of the world.
"The contractor will not discharge or in any other manner discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because such employee or applicant has inquired about, discussed, or disclosed the compensation of the employee or applicant or another employee or applicant. This provision shall not apply to instances in which an employee who has access to the compensation information of other employees or applicants as a part of such employee's essential job functions discloses the compensation of such other employees or applicants to individuals who do not otherwise have access to such information, unless such disclosure is in response to a formal complaint or charge, in furtherance of an investigation, proceeding, hearing, or action, including an investigation conducted by the employer, or is consistent with the contractor's legal duty to furnish information."
Source: Executive Order - Non-Retaliation for Disclosure of Compensation Information [archives.gov]
Congress enacted the National Labor Relations Act ("NLRA") in 1935 to protect the rights of employees and employers, to encourage collective bargaining, and to curtail certain private sector labor and management practices, which can harm the general welfare of workers, businesses and the U.S. economy.
Source: https://www.nlrb.gov/guidance/... [nlrb.gov]
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Yes, the shorter the better! That was great, thanks.
So kindly fuck off now and stop spamming.
Not just for game devs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not just for game devs (Score:4, Interesting)
(As an employer) you try to make things fair. That is a huge (and time consuming) struggle. You have some people that started at a very low salary for one reason or another (like not realy speaking English as an engineer). You have other people that negotiated a starting salary well beyond what they are worth. You don’t want to give people 50% raises every year to get them up to the right level (morale drops when they get there and the raises are much more normal). When people that are overpaid deserve to be rewarded you struggle to find ways to do it that will not make the situation worse.
Personally, I have always been a fan of over-paying someone if they make my job easier. That is easy to do when times are good, but when things slow down it becomes a struggle.
Anyway, long story short, looking at your co-worker’s pay at a single point in time is unlikely to tell the whole story.
Re:Salary Surveys FTW (Score:5, Insightful)
> If you don't like how much you're getting paid, apply to another company.
Why? I may not like I am getting paid, but I may like the co-workers, the job and even the company in general. It would be just silly for me to huff-quit without trying to optimize the outcome.
There's no virtue signalling here - just information sharing. Generalized salary surveys are vague - specialized occupations, roles, geographies, and even the profitability of the company - all these play a part. Sharing pay info is good as long as it's consensual.
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I make $210k with about $60k in bonus and another $50k in restricted stock every year. As a Staff Engineer, my TC is $320k. I compare my salary to folks at Apple, Facebook, and startups like Robinhood on a regular basis. I know I am underpaid. My company allows me to work from whereever, whenever. I never have to go to an office. As long as work is getting done and I am responsive, I can spend my entire day playing video games for all they care. And that's why I look at Apple, Facebook and Robinhood b
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You're still making in the mid-six-figure range.
When your salary is in the seven-figure-plus range, you'll quickly understand that a higher salary isn't always better. It's often not worth the stress. It's also not worth having to constantly be available and constantly juggle major projects that are subject to the mercurial whims of those who listen to whomever spoke to them last. Months of progress can be undone by one executive meeting gone awry. I don't care what industry you're in, that latter heada
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Re:Salary Surveys FTW (Score:4, Insightful)
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> ....he wanted to give me a raise but there wasn't any budget.
I've just had that. Oddly, there was plenty enough budget for a director in a newly created position...
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Find another job first, then quit. Unless you like the uncertainty of living off rapidly dwindling savings.
GlassDoor ? (Score:3)
Isn't this essentially what web sites like GlassDoor are trying to accomplish for people, without anyone needing to risk the wrath of an employer who dislikes them talking about pay in the workplace?
I was just talking to a younger person (Gen Y) about this whole concept of keeping one's pay secret, vs opening discussing it. As a Gen-Xer myself, I always felt like pay was something people didn't discuss, primarily because of the sense doing so would have an overall negative effect on the possibility of earning "above average" for doing hard work. (If your employer wants to reward you for going "above and beyond", he or she might traditionally give you a raise that let you earn considerably more than your peers who were just doing the "average/expected" work. But when everyone knows you're earning more, they all start demanding similar pay and try to argue whey THEY deserve it as much as you do. Employers don't want that kind of headache, so they're going to solve that by only paying a known or published pay rate with annual raises of a fixed percentage to cover "cost of living adjustments".)
That said, I completely get the problem some seem to have with getting underpaid if they don't openly share what's going on with the salaries. That's why I think these web sites that let you anonymously share the data make the most sense. (I can't remember which site it was, but I stumbled onto one that let you create randomized usernames and they made you do a 2-factor type verification by sending a code back to them for logins that came from your corporate email address. That way, they could confirm people worked for who they claimed, and enabled secret/private discussions among all the people who worked for the same employer.) I guess a savvy employer could block all email from that site - but it was so obscure, I doubt almost any are aware of its existence? And the content you sent/received through it was so little, they couldn't prove anything about what you actually did or said on the site from it.
Re:GlassDoor ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Glassdoor is ridiculously inaccurate for SW devs and seems to use really outdated info. Levels.fyi is a much better and more accurate resource.
Example: Google Senior SW (L5)
Glassdoor = $210k
Levels.fyi = $350k
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Aa good number of those individuals will have Ph.D.s and a decent chunk of experience.
It also depends on what projects you work. Your specialization matters too. A recent AI/ML Ph.D. graduate who has top-tier conference and journal papers is going to be offered just shy of that. Offers can be even higher depending on who your doctoral advisor was or your dissertation topic. After around five to ten years, that salary will likely be doubled, unless that person is either bad at negotiating, does only aver
Just "Ask" Equifax (Score:2)
The truth about art in games (Score:1)
At the same skill level, a fan-artist making lewd fan-art makes more than four to five times the salary of the artist creating the OC.
Collective Bargaining (Score:3, Insightful)
Without it, management pit workers (i.e., the people who actually make the product the company sells) against each other. It's a classic divide-and-conquer strategy. With it, management has to bargain with the whole of their workforce.
That's what a union does. It's not a Grand Commie Socialist Satanist Paedophilic PIzzaParlour conspiracy. You've been propagandised to hate unions exactly for this reason and this reason only.
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I don't want to bargain WITH you. I want to bargain FOR MYSELF. Why would I want to be grouped in with you? Maybe you are a terrible worker who doesn't deserve a good salary. Maybe you are mediocre. Why would I want to be lumped in with you? You aren't strengthening my bargaining power, you are weakening it. I guess that is what you guys don't understand: workers are not interchangeable. Not everyone deserves the same compensation. THAT is why we don't like Unions. Unions are just another method for some mi
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I don't want to bargain WITH you. I want to bargain FOR MYSELF.
By yourself, you have zero bargaining power against a large corporation. To think otherwise is fucking delusional.
Why would I want to be grouped in with you?
Because we're both in the same position - we have to work for a living.
Maybe you are a terrible worker who doesn't deserve a good salary. Maybe you are mediocre. Why would I want to be lumped in with you? You aren't strengthening my bargaining power, you are weakening it.
The employer has a remedy for that - not hiring or termination.
I guess that is what you guys don't understand: workers are not interchangeable.
Your employer doesn't see it that way. Your employer would gladly replace you with someone making 1/4 of what you do because some asshat C*O who's never written a line of code in his life will get a bigger bonus.
Unions are just another method for some middle man to come in and take a bit of your salary for himself.
Delusions like yours have allowed employers to tak
Re: Collective Bargaining (Score:2)
Maybe. But last time I negotiated, I was told salaries were locked due to COVID. I was the ops engineer at a small startup before we were acquired.
When we were acquired, I got put in charge of migrating everything to their colo from AWS. Half way through the project I hear our salaries are locked. I tried to negotiate a higher salary, but they said no. So I told them I wouldn't work on the project anymore.
Over a year later, after they've added half a dozen people to the team, they still aren't finished with
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By yourself, you have zero bargaining power against a large corporation. To think otherwise is fucking delusional.
The moment I get paid more than minimum wage it's because I have bargaining power.
To think otherwise is fucking delusional.
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That's grossly over-simplifying. Being paid more than in legally required by law doesn't mean you have bargaining power. That's the bargaining power inherent in supply and demand for your particular position. It quite possibly has absolutely NOTHING to do with you, personally.
And at the low level, that power you're claiming is so wildly disproportionate as to not have any meaning what-so-ever.
Re:Collective Bargaining (Score:4, Insightful)
The bargaining power inherent in supply and demand for my position is mine to exert. I choose whether I want to take a job, or stay in one, and negotiate the terms on which I make that decision.
Far from not having any meaning, it means absolutely fucking everything. Why on earth would I abrogate that power and put it in the hands of a corrupt organisation prioritising neither my own or my employer's best interests?
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If by "corrupt organization" you mean a union, then my answer is that after decades in the workplace, my experience is the majority of EMPLOYERS are just as corrupt.
Because you get the benefits of the union negotiated contracts regardless of your membership. That's MY main gripe with the law. The results of collective bargaining apply to ALL workers, union and non-union alike. "Right to Work" laws are fundamentally dishonest, because all they allow you to do is be a free loader in a union shop. They do NOT
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The results of collective bargaining apply to ALL workers, union and non-union alike
That's not the case. For instance, as a non-union worker I don't have to fund politicians whose policies I hate, I don't have to pay for union leaders to get rich and build their own political careers, and I get to negotiate a contract with my employer that lets me benefit in ways a union would prevent.
Don't blame me if other people don't want those advantages.
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Mandatory dues are separate from voluntary donations. It is illegal for mandatory dues [twlglawfirm.com] to be used to fund political activities. Unions may *call* them something else, but there is always a division between mandatory dues and everything else. Same answer for paying for union leaders, etc. Stick with mandatory dues.
As far as negotiating a contract that benefits you in ways a union would prevent, not in a union shop. Unless you're an "exempt" employee, aka "manager", then you're a member of the bargaining unit
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My extreme example wasn't remotely extreme.
A friend of mine is a part-time chef. He has very explicitly had the conversation with his boss about whether he should continue to work for them or take a job elsewhere at 30p/hour more.
When 30p/hour is material you know it's close to minimum wage. It's still a negotiation. He still had bargaining power. He still works there, so you can also guess how that negotiation went.
Unions are for the lazy, the ignorant and the stupid.
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That your use case works for one instance doesn't mean it works for all instances. You're over-generalising.
Unions are for the lazy, the ignorant and the stupid.
Based on this comment, I get the impression you're at least flirting with the No True Scotsman fallacy here.
The more skilled, specialised, and/or difficult-to-replace a worker is perceived to be, the more bargaining power they have, generally. But not always.
Unions do have some benefits in many scenarios. Clearly those benefits don't weigh heavily in your value evaluation, but your overbearing tone of
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elitist
Wanting people less able to afford to fund lavish union boss lifestyles to not have to is hardly fucking elitist.
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By yourself, you have zero bargaining power against a large corporation. To think otherwise is fucking delusional.
You must have a really shitty skill set because I bargain with large corporations for use of my skill set all the time. I negotiated an extra week of vacation and a higher salary before I was even an employee.
And, I don't want to pay you to allow me to work and don't want you telling me what work and jobs I can and can't do.
Re: Collective Bargaining (Score:2, Flamebait)
In fairness, anyone working on a factory line with a greater than 85 IQ is interchangeable. In that case a union makes sense so long as the people running the union aren't self serving assholes. However, the longer a union has been running and the larger it is, the more likely it no longer becomes about protecting the workers and the more it becomes about serving the whims of the union leaders.
Re: Collective Bargaining (Score:2)
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If you are the rockstar developer you probably don't need a union, for the rest of us, a union can be beneficial - as long as they're not the type that have been in place for years and only care about themselves.
Trouble is that everybody thinks they are the rockstar developer when in fact the vast majority of people are more like the World's Okayest Developer. And that's fine because the World's Okayest Developer is perfectly capable of delivering workmanlike product. And as long as employers wants to pay the world's okayest salaries, then they can be satisfied with workmanlike product from the World's Okayest Developers.
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Corporate America has done their job quite well I see. They even convinced the smart people, or at least the ones that don't know the first thing about bargaining power. You don't happen to work for the UK government do you?
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Junior people get laid off first at any given plant
Junior people work at the front of the assembly line
Senior people can't do the work of junior people
This meant that if a short layoff is needed to clear out inventory at a plant, the junior people are laid off and all the lines at the plant go idle and the senior people still get paid full time to produce nothing cost the company more money than simply idlin
About time (Score:4, Insightful)
How is was in 1990s (Score:4, Informative)
I had a friend that worked for a local game developer. This person was a lead programmer and made royalties on the games he worked on. This guy never needed to work again. He made that much on royalties. I applied and got an offer for a Junior Programmer for $24K (if I remember correctly.) that was when competing offers were about double that. It was understood that if you start as a Junior Programmer and worked your way up to Lead and then you make the big bucks. I turned it down. I needed more money than that. Plus the position required much more than 40 hours per week. I think I made the right choice. The company was sold about a year later and all the rules changed, layoffs were abundant, and it wasn't fun anymore...maybe it was never fun.
game developers are well paid (Score:2)
Let's see, Tynan Sylvester earned more than I ever will from just one game. Andrew Spinks is a multi-millionaire. Markus Persson makes both of them look poor.
If an individual developer doesn't feel they're earning enough they can always just get another job. Plenty of programming jobs out there, or just go solo. If you're good enough there's good money to be made.
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> Tynan Sylvester, ... Andrew Spinks ... Markus Persson
BioShock, Terraria and Minecraft are the exception; NOT the norm.
For ever successful game developer there are literally thousands of developers (insert starving artist meme) whose games are not successful (for many reasons.) Indie Game: The Movie [wikipedia.org] shows the realistic struggles of independent game developers.
One of the reasons Minecraft was successful is because it ripped off [wired.com] Infiminer. Hell, lots of things in the vanilla game started off as mods [reddit.com].
Only half the deal. (Score:1)
What good is great pay, if you're still expected to work 200% and abused psychologically all the way through it.
What good is it, if you're still only developing AAA crap that maximized the target group by minimizing emotional impact (aka art, education, entertainment, sports), and generally usefulness, and maximizing time-wasting literal addictiveness?
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What good is great pay, if you're still expected to work 200% and abused psychologically all the way through it.
I ask myself this a lot.
As I get older, the equation is definitely slanting toward the "not worth it" stage.
However, I made enough money in my mid 30s to have the luxury of thinking that way.
I know that the entire struggle up to a "rockstar" salary, I needed every penny I made just to get by. At those times, the abuse and 200% was worth it.
You need to make pretty good money in the US to be financially comfortable.
I remember the first time I didn't need to check my bank account 8 times a month to make
This is the key part (Score:2)
I only started asking questions once I better understood what I was worth.
Unless you know what you are worth, you won't know what to ask for when it comes to salary. One doesn't need to ask one's coworkers what they are paid to know what one is worth. One simply has to entertain offers from other companies, including contracting companies. See what they think you are worth. If it is significantly higher than what you are making now, you have sold yourself short.