You're management/executive at this point. It is obviously in your interest to be anti-union.
It is also the case that unions serve the interests of those who are not "rock star developers" more than those who are.
> It is also the case that unions serve the interests of those who are not "rock star developers" more than those who are.
I'm not convinced in the current market that those interests need serving to the detriment of the better devs. Were the employers in a more favorable position I could see a different view. But right now any half-way capable dev (i.e. not "rock star") has plenty of current advantages sans union.
What else can you imagine beyond compensation or job security that could be improved in the lot of a software developer? Maybe even some things could yield productivity benefits that management would like if they could see their way through it? And if some of these things are more likely with collective bargaining, why would you rule it out as a tool?
> if some of these things are more likely with collective bargaining, why would you rule it out as a tool?
Because of all the negative externalities that happen to some employees and employers. If it was all upside there would be no reason. It's not ruled out as a tool, just its use in the current dev (general, maybe not game specific) market.
We shouldn't pretend that what a union wants is arbitrarily disjointed from the individual interests of its members, either.
Every collective has the potential to depart from individual preferences in some way. How much that happens varies in practice.
And it's pretty likely that your employment agreements are not an exception, even if you've arrived at them without any collective work on your side.
> Leaving at-will firings on the table for instance is unlikely to garner popular support.
This assumes the only incentive for joining a union is ultimate job security. That's a popular anti-union conception, but that doesn't make it correct. Any popular benefit that is not commonly conferred could provide a cohesion point for collective bargaining.
> I personally don't want specific severance requirements for those fired, otherwise you end up with defacto unfire-able situations because you've artificially increased the cost to remove a bad employee.
Increasing the cost of something is very different from making it defacto impossible. Though it is one way of providing an incentive against doing something arbitrarily. And it's not clear a negotiated price for firing would be any more "artificial" than any other negotiated price, up to and including your salary.
> I don't want to force them to run their company a certain way by rule, I'll just voice displeasure and leave if necessary.
That's pretty much how unions work. It just turns out to have more leverage if you multiply it by the size of the participating workforce.
> Due to the vast differences in employer packages and the freedom of choice given to the employee in the current demand-heavy market
Again, the freedom of individually negotiated compensation can co-exist with collective bargaining. A sibling comment even points out examples.
How great did those rockstar employees do when google and other massive companies engaged in anti-poaching agreements to drive salaries down? How good do they do when they end up divorced and miserable after putting in yet another 2 months of 100 hour work weeks?
Unionization doesn't stop illegal collusion, prosecution stops illegal collusion. What is with all the appeal to emotion with divorced, miserable, 100 hour work weeks, etc? Most employees did just fine anyways. Every single job would get value out of a union if the justification is simply saying "but tell that to the employee that was divorced, overworked, blah blah emotional language". At a macro level there are practical concerns.
The anti-union propaganda did an amazing job at making most people think that all unions were like the corrupt Teamsters unions of NYC and Chicago, when most of them are nothing at all like that.
Most employees did just fine anyways.
Categorically false. Most employees did fine because unions negotiated the labor rules that led to those "fine" working conditions. Those conditions have worsened as unions have lost their leverage.
You could make that same argument against the concept of defense lawyers. How would you feel if you had to defend yourself against criminal charges without a lawyer? Do you think justice would be served if you had to go it alone against a well-funded, experienced team of prosecutors who want to convict?
Yes, defense lawyers aren't perfect and can't stop all prosecutorial misconduct, but they still help a lot. Ditto with unions.
And unions have labor lawyers. Wouldn't it help the prosecution to add positions whose job would be to identify such issues, and which have visibility across employers?
Today, without a union, how would you as an individual ever know if companies are colluding against you and other workers? What would you do to cause this offense to be prosecuted?
> Every single job would get value out of a union if the justification is simply saying ...
I agree with this sentence, but I draw from it the opposite conclusion. I think most jobs would get value out of a union.
I don't understand your logic here. If something is desirable for everyone, then everyone should do it. We shouldn't assume it's not possible for everyone, and therefore conclude that it must not have been desirable in the first place.
If they unionize, game developers are most likely to copy the union/guild format of Hollywood unions, which provide salary and health protections but otherwise let the members determine employment terms on their own (i.e., contracts for days, weeks, full projects, long-term, or open-ended are all acceptable).
The current unionization efforts provide almost no details on their goals beyond "everything will be better for everyone". On either end of the employee/employer relationship I have a hard time seeing how anyone can support such a generic effort.
A hard stance on working conditions and compensation is a starting point for a real conversation. The majority of employees would have no problem supporting this, and since I already value work/life balance and fair compensation, my motives and interests would align.
The community theatre down the street doesn't require every performer to be an cardholding AEA member, and it wouldn't make financial sense for anyone involved (management, workers, or audiences) for that to change. The mere existence of a union doesn't necessarily change anything unless workers want it to change.
For big game dev companies that have repeatedly shown that they don't believe in treating people fairly, this would bring professional representation to the workers' side. Even if the details are light at this point, I don't see how you can be against that in principle. The employer/employee relationship is inherently asymmetric, and this attempts to correct for that.
If I were a small non-union indie shop and I was lucky enough that some highly talented AAA developer wanted to work with me, I would be unable to hire him if he's union unless I converted my entire shop over to be union. If I didn't, he would be in direct violation of his union contract and could be fined or lose his membership.
I understand that not every union functions the same, but it is not hard to imagine that wherever there is a lot of money at stake the union will do everything in it's power, to well, seize power.
Considering the movie industry is dwarfed by the video game industry from a revenue point of view, I can very easily imagine this scenario repeating itself.
I've never heard of unions working like this, this may be a US-specific thing. Unions are just workers right groups, if the company is big, the group is inside the company, if it's too small, you just apply to the local union. They help to negotiate better laws and benefits for the whole industry & also directly at a company level in big companies.
I don't work in gaming though. I would love to, but the pay for business development is frankly better with a lot less stress. I wouldn't mind seeing a push legislating that any salaried worker in a week must be granted an extra paid day off at 45 hours and each 5 hours above in a single week. That would stop, or at least compensate, the abuse.
Addressing overwork at the legislative level would get my support if there were a way to trade pain now for benefit later (e.g. your extra time off suggestion).
Maybe unions can be useful after all!
Even railroads and textile mills didn’t ask their employees to work 80 hour work weeks.
Where I've worked we valued work/life balance as much as possible. Did we have a bit of crunch close to a release? Yep, but it was short and a few weeks at max. Most of us enjoyed it due to the extra camaraderie.
If there were a unionization effort that focused on 1) a hard 40-50 hour cap on work hours (or with paid overtime) and 2) enforced profit sharing plans, I could support it.
The current main unionization effort basically says "things will be better for everyone" on their FAQ. Total bullshit.
Literally every time I had a 3-4mo 80-100hour crunch it always started out with "we're going to push for a week or two" which just transitioned into "just one more week" for the next 3 months.
Also, shame for celebrating a crunch. You may have enjoyed it but there's a high likelyhood someone else went along just to not "rock the boat". I don't care who you are putting in more hours puts stress on other parts of your life.
I just don't understand how that industry has their head up their ass from top to bottom for such a long time. There's some interesting problems in that space but after my 6 years I'd never go back.
I worked for five years at early and late stage startups before transitioning to games, and I cannot recall there ever being a time when extra work was not needed to get over the finish line.
If a union ends up being the only way chronic overwork can be addressed in the industry at large, so be it. Perhaps the real solution though is a legislative one, as suggested below.
I worked at such company too. It had zero to do with need for overtime and and a lot to do with people wanting to work this way. E.g. unwillingness to prioritize, unwillingness to negotiate, wish to be seen like the one who stays late and thus finding work to stay late when not needed. Overtime is not seen as failure of organization, so the organization does not learn how to do it. People staying late are seen as heros and people managing projects so that overtime is not needed are not rewarded, so latter leave and former create culture.
To large extend, people who stay in such companies don't believe it is possible to make deadline without overtime, so they are not even trying.
Show me any project with dynamic requirements that has some sort of deadline, be it time or money running out, and I guarantee there has been some extra work at some point.
Prioritization, negotiation and saying no. Estimates large enough that they have buffers. You don't need on hour predictability. It is precisely when you have dynamic requirements when you are supposed to use tools like that.
After crunch, there are typically many bugs and convoluted code. It just adds to overall time in long term. Pretty much all studies found crunch to not be effective. It is not about achieving more.
Fuck yeah it's "just work".
I want my employees and coworkers to be happy, healthy and well actualized so that when they're at work they're focused and giving it 100%. Plenty of hard business data there shows that when you make sure someone's time outside of work is well respected they'll perform much better on the job.
Burnout and turnover can have a brutal impact on an company/organization's ability to execute, the list goes on. You're also self-selecting for a workforce that has the flexibility, which means your viewpoint is a lot less diverse.
This is the same crunch bullshit I got fed before in that industry.
What if you were a single dad?
What if you had an elder family member to take care of?
What if you were living paycheck to paycheck and had a second job to be able to make rent?
I've found some of the best teams I was on had a diverse set of people who bring their unique perspectives into the fold. Otherwise you could end up with a racist soap dispenser[1].
> What if you were a single dad? > What if you had an elder family member to take care of?
As I mentioned above, family takes priority. If your team is so immature that they feel resentful when another member can't work those two extra hours a day because their Dad is sick, you've got another set of problems.
> What if you were living paycheck to paycheck and had a second job to be able to make rent?
This is a bit of a stretch. We are limiting the scope of our discussion to workers in the game industry. If you need two jobs to make rent in this scenario, find a way to cut expenses.
I'll hazard that the answer is low, because the industry self-selects for people who are willing to take abuse for 'prestige'. They take pride in it, just the same way you did.
> This is a bit of a stretch. We are limiting the scope of our discussion to workers in the game industry.
Yes, yes we are. My first job in the industry was $35k/hr as a dev and I've seen worse salaries for design or art.
Let me pose a question to you. How would you live in Seattle, on $35k/yr in a way that one accident/major expense wouldn't put you in a situation where you're living paycheck to paycheck? Keep in mind an average 1br apartment is ~$1800/mo[1] so you're going to be well over 50% income : housing ratio.
For that reason you have people who work second jobs or have other commitments to be able to make their rent.
[1] https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/wa/se...
And $35k for a dev job? When was this, and if it was anytime even remotely recent why on earth did you accept? A new QA hire at my last job would've made more than that.
You don't live in Seattle proper if you are making $35k. Live in a suburb on the line. Don't have a car payment if you can avoid it. And to pull that income : housing ratio down get roommates. I have done this.
And frankly this is a pretty silly argument to make in a discussion around why game developers should unionize.
But crunch is normally defined as sustained overtime - articles I seen it require it to be over 6 weeks. So it is quite a lot of time.
If I wanted a predictable job that always has upfront hours, I suppose I could go back to making hourly minimum wage with zero benefits.
>The current main unionization effort basically says "things will be better for everyone" on their FAQ. Total bullshit.
What is your familiarity with how a union works? An industry-wide unionization effort cannot effectively state what the future will hold.
When employees decide to try to organize a union within their company, they decide what the issues are. Their task is to convince their coworkers to join the union, so they will be focusing on the pain points unique to their own employment situation. Maybe in one company, it's crunch time, while in another, it's keeping a more consistent labor force despite project sizes changing wildly over time.
The new union will then negotiate a contract on behalf of its members. Each new union will be focusing on different things.
An industry-wide organizational effort that focuses on work hours and profit sharing would not catch the interest employees at a shop with good hours, good pay, but zero job protections and inadequate health coverage (for example).
What's to stop the same thing repeating itself in a game developers union?
At the same job, another employee, young apprentice, was found napping. He popped awake and was apologetic. Partied too hard the night before. The foreman sent him on a coffee run to get his head together. He wasn't fired, presumably because the foreman never reported him, and (at least for the rest of that job) it never happened again. Almost 20 years later, he still probably gets shit for it.
Bad employees can coast by in any job, especially hourly ones where the upper management is rarely onsite with the workforce. First dude got fired in short order despite the job protections. Second dude didn't, but (to my knowledge) not because of any union regs.
Anyway, I digress. There is, of course, nothing preventing some union horror story from taking place. There is also nothing preventing even worse labor exploitation from taking place (and we're already at 80+ hour weeks in some cases).
The biggest difference, though, is the labor market itself. The laborers in construction unions are temporary hires for a specific job. At the same time, most construction unions are craft unions with apprenticeships, where each new employee represents a risk/investment to training that person for many years. Nepotism abounds, because if you train a new hire for, say, two years, then they wash out of the program or leave to study engineering, they could have spent that time and energy training someone else.
By contrast, I would expect most gaming unions to look more like a public employees' union. It would represent permanent employees of a company, likely salaried. Not much would change in the hiring process outside contact negotiation. You get the job? Congrats, you can join the union.
In my ~6 years in the industry I don't know of a single coworker in the entire Seattle area who didn't run into a project that underwent serious crunch. Sample size of ~400 people or so.
I've also got longtime friends who broke in separately from me(and worked on some high profile stuff) in the SF/Bay area that say the exact same thing.
[0] http://www.striking-women.org/module/workplace-issues-past-a...
[1] https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transforming...
They're also free to bargain collectively. Why should 'freedom' mean capital consolidates and organizes as much as it likes, while labour is reduced to isolated workers making individual choices?
The cold business logic says to consolidate and make partnerships/business unions.
> I don't like doing this, so nobody else is allowed to do this for you either.
Unions very often prevent non-union labor and, as such, enforce their own desires on others. Don't get me wrong, sometimes that's necessary. But there are negatives involved in unions, just like there are positives.
It's also not as simple as "you're free to leave". Most people working in the games industry are young. Many of them do live paycheck to paycheck. In many cases they may have also moved across the country for the job. Quitting a job is in and of itself a substantial risk for many people.
There is a reason we have worker protection laws. That reason is that companies can and will abuse workers without them. This has been proven time and time again.
They knew this industry was like this before they accepted the job. Why do we need to protect people from their own poor decisions? These aren't people who lacked opportunity and got stuck in a bad place in life and need a helping hand, these are highly privileged people who willingly signed up for mistreatment.
Yep. And they are allowing it by not unionizing.
What is the skill gap that a software engineer working in games would have moving elsewhere? The only one I think of would be domain experience in TDD and unit testing. Neither is widely practiced in game development, but they aren't universal for software development more generally either.
Two things wrong with this.
1) Professional unions, such as Hollywood and sports unions, do not establish rigid payscales like non-professional unions. They set a salary floor and some basic guidelines for non-salary pay (e.g. residuals are typically mandated). If game developers unionize, the union will likely be a professional union.
2) Salary negotiation is intensely problematic, and many companies are doing away with it, union or no. For example, Reddit a few years ago eliminated negotiation in favor of delivering their best offer from the start. Salary negotiation has sexist biases and rewards people for skills that A) have nothing to do with the skills that are required for the job and B) not everyone qualified for the job possesses. Salary negotiation is about enabling employers to pay employees lower salaries; it benefits the employer entirely and not the employee. And that goes back to pnathan's comment: the whole point of unions is to act in the interest of the employees against the employer, so the whole "as an employer" section is ultimately irrelevant.
You mean like.... an employer?
> As an employer
Ahh.
> I run a very small indie game studio in Boulder, CO.
No one want's to protect under-performers for whom they'd have to pick up the slack. And no one wants their compensation set arbitrarily. Especially since in software anyone can jump ship and find performance based compensation somewhere else.
They just want to work the hours specified in the employment contract rather than being singled out in isolation from each other and required to work far beyond the amount contractually agreed on under threat of termination.
So you'd just have a group that discuses abusive uncompensated overtime and request changes in a united way. Because a single person complaining or quitting over mistreatment has zero impact.
As an employer I want to be able to fire toxic or under-performing employees at will without jumping through a hundred hoops to make sure I am not breaking any union rules.
As an employee, I want to be free to negotiate my own wages based on my merit.
If there is one thing I would want a union to do it would be to collectively enforce some kind of profit sharing plan. The interests of the employees and the employer align -- make a great game that sells well. Anything else, no thanks.