The author had the universe of salaries to choose from and chose ... lawyers. And not nationwide, but lawyers in literally the highest (or very close) paid market in the world. A comparison to Hollywood union rates would have been much more logical and probably still supported the writer's thesis.

So, yes, I think it fair to call it a lazy comparison and criticize the author for that point. Even if it doesn't really undermine any of the other well known issues with the field.

The other reason the comparison is so flawed is the education requirements for lawyers in that market and the enormous debt usually incurred in getting there. (These characteristics are not unique to lawyers, but are not totally shared with game devs.) Large NYC firms will only hire from a dozen or so law schools and those schools accept students from relatively small pool of mostly pricey undergrads. Without scholarships or aid, you're looking at $2-350,000 in student loans over the 7 years of school. Then you generally don't work for 6 months after graduation in order to study for the bar exam because you didn't expect $300k to teach you that stuff did you?

Does the reputation match reality? The brutal hours in law firms are mostly for junior associates on partner track. Lawyers working in government, corporate, or non-profit jobs tend to work about the same hours as developers in those organizations.

> It's purely biased.

You read "NYTimes" on the front-page, decided that you were gonna hate this article, and then found something that did it for you. Congratulations. You are justified in your hatred of "biased reporting".

I honestly don't see how something so insignificant can be considered biased. You are being ludicrous. Law and banking are excellent examples because they are the fields that most Americans associate with brutal work hours. Law and banking also are skilled positions that require (at least) an undegraduate education.

But ok - I can't convince you because the article is biased. Biased to what? Biased in favor of the right of game developers to get a fair wage? Biased towards allowing them a 40 hour work week? Oh no, what a shame that would be! Bias cannot be inherently bad because bias is inherent to any writing or any argument. If you're going to claim that Mr. Schreier is biased towards the perspective of game developers, explain why that could possibly be a bad thing in this scenario.

> That's clearly the best source for reliable developer-related information right?

Yes, actually. They broke several major stories this year that depended on internal leaks at various companies. This article (also by Jason Schreier) is a good example.

https://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-t...

For those who may be unaware, Kotaku is hated by a certain subset of the alt-right. It appears that's why all the cockroaches have come out of the woodwork for this story. Do people really not see what's going on here? There's a large segment of people who will convince themselves of anything in order to "prove" that this article is "biased".

> You read "NYTimes" on the front-page, decided that you were gonna hate this article, and then found something that did it for you. Congratulations. You are justified in your hatred of "biased reporting".

You know, if you are so confident that the author is right, please find (or ask him) to provide relevant wage data from other related, non-lawyer, non-banking fields, and you know, not based in New York.

We'll see how strong that argument actually is once we have proper comparison points across industries. When I see cherry-picked data like that, my bullshit detector self-activates.

And no, this has nothing to do with hating the NYT. I routinely enjoy some very well written articles in the NYT, but this is one of of the worst ones they have ever published.

> For those who may be unaware, Kotaku is hated by a certain subset of the alt-right.

For those who may be unaware, Kotaku is part of the Gawker Group (yes, _that_ Gawker Group, of Hulk Hogan infamy). They're held in low esteem by pretty much everybody for their lengthy history of slanted and click-baity reporting.

Not that Mr. Schreier is wrong about deplorable conditions in the games industry but your accusations about the motivations behind people's dislike of Kotaku are, ahem, difficult to take seriously. They worked hard to earn their disrespect.

Game developers aren’t flipping burgers. They’re working hard and deploying tremendous skill. The comparison to lawyers, another hard-working highly-skilled trade, is appropriate.

Yeah, I have been a bit surprised. There is much more skill and knowledge involved here than in churning out ReactJS interfaces. There's a lot of looking down at game developers, I think by "programmers" that tend to try to follow these crazes like "machine learning everywhere" but wouldn't even know basic linear algebra.

Agreed: they are deploying tremendous skill, but not necessarily with the same level of academic achievement and formal traineeship. I say this as someone who has qualified and worked as a lawyer and subsequently cross-trained into and now works as a software developer. I suggest that you can be an accomplished hacker by the time you're 16 without any kind of formal qualification, but you can't be a lawyer (in the UK at least) until you've done yourself the unimaginable harm of forcing yourself to read legal dicta from hundreds of years ago. Part of you dies during legal training.

I don't know much about NY first-year associates, but imagine they fall into the "rockstar" graduate category; perhaps a better salary comparison would be with rockstar (first-year) developers at a Silicon Valley giant?

> They’re working hard and deploying tremendous skill.

The same can be said to folks making furniture. Yet they don't get paid like lawyers, even though their job is highly technical and skilled as well.

Can we stop using only 2 variables to compare how much people should be paid? It's not like the reality is not a little more complex.

> The same can be said to folks making furniture

Certainly not if “skill” is defined within the context of supply and demand, i.e. scarcity. (If it isn’t, it’s identical to “hard work.”)

Among developers, media, and people who pay attention to the state of the games industry, Kotaku's reporting is as highly regarded as anyone in the field. Schreier in particular is one of the best-sourced reporters in the industry. And let's be real for a sec: those circles that don't like Kotaku also correlate with reflexive reactionary politics cloaked in "pro-consumer" rhetoric waaaay better than anything else, like "interest in or respect for truth or reality".

He has a point though. The author chose lawyers as a comparison point. Why? Manual laborers work long hours. People with two or three part time retail jobs work long hours.

Lawyers have a different set of qualifications and requirements than game developers do.

I think that this is sort of missing part of the comparison in that it's meant to compare similar highly demanding jobs which require a specialized education. While labor is incredibly important and I respect the hard work, it's a different skillset entirely that doesn't have the same prequisetes. I would suggest the comparison is between professions with the same demanding hours and same demanding prequisetes, not just the hours. It's not to diminish other jobs with long hours, it's just they're not the focus of the comparison.

(To further elaborate, my very first job was picking flat stone at a quarry, since it was popular for home gardens at the time and machines couldn't get the stones easily without breaking them. Long hours of hard work in the dirt and mud plus many split knuckles and crushed fingers. Still, I was able to do it as a 15 year old unsupervised and with no training. It was useful and hard work, but not really the same as the IT I do now, the majority of which is watching progress bars.)

I think your point is a little hard to discern. Who do you think educationally game programmers are more similar to: Manual laborers or Lawyers? Other than the regulation of the latter, I think it is clear they are more similar to lawyers. Serious game programming requires fairly extensive knowledge in multiple disciplines of computing particular graphics and rendering, AI, at least some basic algorithmic knowledge and competency with programming that is much more technical than "make yet another web app in a hipster JS framework," to just be honest it. There are many people in the game development industry with MS degrees and even some PhDs. This I think is more similar professional "status" than brick laying, I think.

Wait really? I assume you're talking about gamer gate obliquely: I'm not a gamergater (to be honest, I still barely even know what it means) and I had a vague sense of Kotaku that more or less aligned with "gaming tabloid". That's just based on having read a couple pretty dumb things from them, and the fact that every other Gawker property is pretty much a tabloid.

Your experience with them may be negative, but the general social memes about Kotaku are one hundred and ten percent fostered by the regressive parts of the gaming community that don't like that they give people who have the temerity to not be white, cis, and straight a platform. (And 'ekianjo's body of work on Hacker News makes me disinclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.) I will go to bat for Schreier specifically, but there's a reason why they had Patrick Klepek and his Scoops around, too (until Vice came knocking, anyway).

They are legit. Maybe now Waypoint edges them out as they seem really dedicated to doing good investigative stuff (Klepek and others), I dunno, but it's pretty much those two and Eurogamer doing the heavy lifting in the "widely read" spaces.

In reality, one of the things that actually got Kotaku a bad reputation back in the day was the endless, gratuitous stream of scantily clad chicks on the front page, many not even vaguely gaming related. It turns out that doing that whilst lecturing your audience on how they're all evil misogynists who're objectifying women wins few friends, especially if you then try and smear the people who don't take your publication seriously because of it as evil bigots who just can't handle your social justice awesomeness.

(Also, since this obviously pissed off people on the feminist side of things too, something really weird happened: people started arguing that obviously the gamer complaints about Kotaku not being about gaming anymore were really just misogynists trying to undermine feminism, because if they really cared about it being gaming-focused there was far more unrelated cheesecake than feminism and social justice posts. Except the unrelated cheesecake posts were a huge part of what created that idea about Kotaku in the first place; they'd been had!)

Yea I mean, I don't know anything about what Gamergate thinks, and I don't have as low an opinion of Kotaku as you're saying that GG does. Ive just never had any exposure to as _high_ an opinion as you have of them and was curious about it. Not really a domain I know much about, to be honest.

I have a high opinion of some of the people who work for them more than I do the outlet itself. I don't read it on a daily basis. But when news breaks that actually holds up, it basically comes from Kotaku, Eurogamer, or (lately) Vice/Waypoint, while the sites started by or pushed by folks who get thirsty about those three--the Reaxxions, ha ha ha, of the world--are mostly just angry whineboxes.

> people who pay attention to the state of the games industry, Kotaku's reporting is as highly regarded as anyone in the field

Checking today's Kotaku headlines:

> That Time We Got To See Mario's Dick

https://kotaku.com/that-time-we-got-to-see-marios-dick-18198...

Yeah, my claim about it being a Tabloid is completely unsubstantiated, sorry.

Huh! It's like there's a difference between filler stories, which are part of the modern views-based economy for news sites, and reporting. Can't for the life of me figure out why you'd elide that.

(There's a reason why, in terms of general news, Buzzfeed, of all places, is well regarded for investigative reporting. And it's because other stuff pays the bills.)

Yeah, but this is a bit dramatic right? I mean, you can find many trivial stories on NYT or probably even more in the Washington Times; it doesn't mean these are garbage sources like the Inquirer.

> In many circles, Kotaku is largely regarded as a tabloid in video games.

In GamerGate circles, you mean?