YES! You're absolutely right!
> They don’t need to unionize.
Err... Why on earth not? That would literally be the definition of growing a spine and saying no to ridiculous work conditions but also having it be effective.
So yes, unions are one way to try to solve that problem. But if you choose to advocate for that, just be aware that attempting to solve these problems via a union would result in trading one set of problems for another: you'd probably end up with better working conditions, at a cost of new, artificial barriers to entry for all those people who want to work in that industry. Maybe it would be worth it, I don't know, but given the root causes, it definitely seems like this tradeoff would exist.
This actually does hit on the major difficulty in unionizing, which is that people want to make games. It seems fun. It feels rewarding to point to something bringing joy to your friends and family and go "I helped make that!" Because this feeling is so common, it's extremely easy to find someone to to do the job for less. If you're a cost minded manager (instead of a results minded manager) you might be willing to take on 3 dirt cheap juniors to do the work of one really expensive senior dev.
Yes. Often (though not always) by increasing barriers to entry. Either directly, for example by requiring union membership, or indirectly, by increasing the cost of labor, which could mean that companies in the industry will higher fewer people in aggregate.
I see a lot of anti-union talk on HN, I don't think a lot of the criticism of unions I see here is fair.
That's because most people on HN are from the U.S. where a century of propaganda has convinced most people not only that poor people are lazy, but by extension that unions are evil, corrupt and lazy organizations infiltrated by organized crime. While this propaganda has a minority basis in reality in some cases, as all propaganda will have because propaganda can't be 100% fantasy and make-believe, it's an ignorant basis to take when discussing broad and general questions like unions as a concept.
If you ask someone from Spain or Germany about unions and attempt to explain why they're "evil" from the US perspective, I can guarantee you will be met with complete disbelief. Most people in Europe may not actively be a part of a union, but they normally recognize them as beneficial entities in the labor market, and as something that will help balance the scales against employers of normally vastly larger influence, both politically and economically.
That's because, in the US, it's all true, historically. Auto unions were a big reason why Detroit's automakers were so uncompetitive against the Japanese automakers in the 80s; autoworkers got ridiculous pay for menial work, which is why Detroit moved a lot of their production to Mexico and Canada, and other automakers moved to Southern states where unions didn't exist.
The simple fact is that unions in the US in the latter half of the 20th century and beyond were nothing like unions in Germany, where by almost all accounts they seem to work out extremely well.
>Most people in Europe may not actively be a part of a union, but they normally recognize them as beneficial entities in the labor market
Yes, in Europe that's true. In America, it just hasn't been the case. It's just like public transit: in Germany, trains and subways are fantastic: they're inexpensive, clean, and efficient; whereas in America, they're an utter disaster: dirty, expensive, constant maintenance problems, and just a miserable experience. Try riding the subway in Munich, and then riding the subway in NYC or DC; there's just no comparison. The problem isn't that subways are bad, it's that subways in America are bad. Same goes for unions.
It's fair enough to say that American auto unions (and very importantly, auto company management and ownership) would do well to model themselves after Germany's system. It's not a universal truth that all our unions are ineffective.
You could say that about many different things: if we just did it like the Germans, everything would be better, right? But how exactly do you actually do that? We're not Germany. You could go to Zimbabwe or El Salvador and tell them the same thing ("just be like the Germans or Japanese and you won't have all these social problems!"), but that isn't realistic; if it was that easy, every country would be copying the Germans and Japanese.
As for a universal truth, I haven't seen any evidence yet that unions in America actually work well. In Germany, yes, but this isn't Germany.
I could compare all companies to the worst examples too (e.g. all startups are Theranos) but that would never be taken seriously nor would it be fair yet somehow with unions that level of analysis is taken seriously.
Well, I'm pretty sure those auto jobs in Canada were also high paying and unionized.
Source: I worked for one through University.
That just supports my argument even more. It's not unions that are the problem, it's unions in America.
How can you possibly guarantee (no less!) what someone, regardless of where they come from, will say about any subject? You cannot complain about generalizations and broad statements, as in here:
>...a century of propaganda has convinced most people not only that poor people are lazy, but by extension that unions are evil, corrupt and lazy organizations infiltrated by organized crime.
And then try to fit reality into your own narrative at the same time without being a hypocrite.
I will tell you this, though: CCOO and UGT (the two major trade unions in Spain) are publicly funded, which I find absolutely wrong. Moreover, they tend to be incredibly incompetent and useless in most cases. Of course, I'm drawing from my own personal experience and others' accounts of their own.
Leave the more general, "politics" side of unions (calling for general strikes, and so on) to CCOO and UGT, and make use of another union to protect you when your company tries to abuse you. Also, if you're not satisfied with what the unions do, you can always the works council. A workmate of mine is in our company's works council and she isn't even part of any union.
Also, in my experience CCOO and UGT are not nearly as bad as the media paints them (again, I'm talking about what's going on at companies I've worked at). This may sound like a cliché, but really, there is an awful lot of propaganda against them because there are plenty of rich people interested in having an exploitable work force. The only real complain I have against CCOO and UGT is that they sometimes don't fight as hard as they should. But in many other cases they do. I've seen cases where these unions have successfully sued companies upon wrongful termination of workers, for example.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newsweek.com/why-are-people...
The main point of my comment, which I made very clear, was that specific examples of "bad unions" is not a helpful or constructive basis upon which to have an argument about the theoretical place of labour unions in a market, no more than you would base an argument about where to go for dinner in the nutritional value of a carrot.
Either working for the MTA or LIRR is one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, or this is quite literally "organized crime"
And who could forget this story? Is this "25 years of propaganda"? https://nypost.com/2013/12/20/ex-lirr-union-boss-in-gravy-tr... https://nypost.com/2014/08/06/nearly-all-lirr-workers-have-d...
Anyways, not saying there aren't good, hard working people in unions out there, and they don't provide some functional value, but like anything in life they have become corrupted.
Unions can certainly succeed if the the employee side also has a vested interest in the success of the company just as much as the company has, and that balance is maintained. Then, you truly have a collective.
This statement is completely and utterly nonsensical to anyone that has even a shallow understanding of the history of labour struggles and unionizing.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rubber-rooms-in-new-york-city... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rubber_Room
When I was young I believed they were good as it was what I was taught and fell in the socialist-leaning mentality of much of the country.
Having started to learn about economics, entering the industry, and seeing the arguments many people make for unionization have definitely led to me to swing much harder to the "unions are evil" side of the argument.
That said I do believe they are a double edged sword of sorts. When the only employer for a certain profession is the government for example (i.e. not driven by profits and losses, or not a part of a competitive market) unions can actually help make things fair and get a point across that otherwise would not be visible. But in general they are much less efficient than profits and losses in a competitive market and in those situations will lead to a decline in growth that you would otherwise not get.
> seeks to extract as much value as is possible/reasonable from the host organization, but not so much that they destroy it
I'm lucky at my current job that my employer does care for the employees. We are paid well, have amazing benefits, they are open about earnings and such. I much prefer this scenario rather than a union, but I can totally get why some companies need a union -- companies that treat their employees terribly. I just feel bad that it has to be a thing at all :(
Which means IT also benefits from the work hours agreements that affect everyone, just to give a basic example.
So far on HN, I've noticed that people from the US seems to not like the idea at all about unionization while people from EU (me included!) see unionization as something good that protect workers. I do know that efforts around unionization are very strong in Europe, and helpful for the workers. Maybe there was a previously unsuccessful attempt in the US and peoples impression comes from that?
First, culturally, US Americans are much more individualist than most Europeans. (Obviously I am painting with broad strokes here, but it’s true in a general sense, on average). US Americans are somewhat less likely to feel solidarity or a sense of common cause with coworkers, and more likely to value the freedom to negotiate their contract on their own.
They are also much more likely to distrust large organizations and bureaucracy, sometimes to an extreme extent that would be puzzling to Western and Northern Europeans. Rather than being on their side, many would perceive the union as just one more large bureaucracy trying to screw them.
Third, there are many current examples of unions in the US that have made industries meaningfully less efficient. And highly-paid US Americans are less likely to see themselves as oppressed by their employers and more likely to see themselves as making common cause: after all, they have a common goal of making a lot of money. If my company, say, found it harder to fire low performers (an almost certain consequence of a union), it would be less efficient, make less profit, and be less able to pay me my current high salary.
I hope I’ve genuinely answered your question and given you some insight into the mindset without implying either side is right or wrong. Just different viewpoints...
> US Americans are somewhat less likely to feel solidarity or a sense of common cause with coworkers, and more likely to value the freedom to negotiate their contract on their own.
No one is negotiating their contracts on their own. A negotiation requires at least two parties, and when it comes to negotiating employment terms, one party typically had no problem incorporating and using that to their advantage.
> They are also much more likely to distrust large organizations and bureaucracy, sometimes to an extreme extent that would be puzzling to Western and Northern Europeans.
Yet some of the largest and most powerful organizations in the world are US based. For a place where so many buy their food at large restaurant and store chains, buy their internet and phone plans from large national service providers, trust large organizations like Google or Facebook with information about their browsing and communication habits and depend on large credit organizations and banks, this just doesn't strike me as true. Large, bureaucratic organizations thrive in the US and people love them. Maybe not meaningfully more than in European countries and probably even less, but to call it an extreme distrust is a mischaracterization IMO.
> Third, there are many current examples of unions in the US that have made industries meaningfully less efficient.
IMO this is an important point, but in a country with the GDP per capita of the US I think that there is some margin to improve conditions in a lot of industries, of course at the expense of some very rich people. The problem is that consumers cover that margin instead of shareholders.
For example, they don't work very well for freelancers/gig economy type jobs; and their traditional focus on job safety in factories/assembly lines doesn't really apply in the same way to programmers sitting at desks.
[1] I'm not affiliated with them, but have met the team, and they seem like smart people.
I commend you for saying this. Usually people just keep digging in and stick to their previous statement.
Not to say that the mods don't work hard at this as well nor that there aren't others who contribute positively here. This is just such a perfect example that I'd like to draw attention to it.
Back on topic, I think unions are like anything else; if they are not well managed/maintained, they can become top heavy and easily corrupted. The key (much like any other organization) is consistent involvement from membership to keep the top honest... and move leaders along that don't have the organization's best interest at the forefront.
While unionization is the formalized structure of collective bargaining, there is nothing keeping these individuals away from collective bargaining without forming an official union to do so.
I think this is the main reason why I just "don't get" unions. Why do we have to put a name to it? Trying to understand unions, I guess it provides some sort of legitimacy to the organization. Or perhaps unions are more efficient at bargaining multiple issues simultaneously. I guess I am just really hung up on paying a union money.
To set up a communications and decision-making structure.
> hung up on paying a union money.
Agreed.
Am open to unions, but their worst tendencies such as significant monetary collection and (everyday) work obstruction should be against the rules. Just as anti-employee corporate policy should as well.
I know someone who's in a union as a mechanic. Her union dues are $50 and she gets fantastic benefits, that more than pay for the union dues.
Plus many countries have laws surrounding how unions can operate and protections for employees organising them. In a less enlightened society employers will just lay off anyone attempting to organise.
So in general Unions are typically formed explicitly because people have lots of existing evidence of the benefits.
I'm not against unions, but his suggestion is about the individual.
I refused to work over 45 hours a week. I worked one 13 hour Sunday and said no to the 2nd one and was fired. Another dev/ops person left two weeks later.
The others: almost all of the team is still there, working over a year later, with the same crazy hours (80+ for 6~8 weeks at a time) and same constant crunch. I really really really wish I had at least used the word "union" in a meeting or e-mail while there, so I could claim I was fired based on trying to organize. I've even considered taking a day or two off, standing in front of the building and handing out unionization pamphlets, just to see if I could help make a change for the people left there.
Everyone else let themselves and continue to let themselves be exploited. I honestly don't understand why many of them haven't gotten new jobs yet. Do they not realize that type of work isn't normal? I've worked at a lot of places and maybe I can just see bad management when others can't?
As you can tell from the fact that they have chosen to stay there and keep doing it, they apparently don't mind it that much. Certainly not enough to leave anyway.
In my experience, that attitude is common and not limited to game developers or even programmers in general. American working culture tends to respect those who go above and beyond, or at least maintain the appearance of doing so.
Leadership would say, are you sure? Engineers would basically flip them the bird and say yes. Then inevitably be late.
I get it, estimating is inexact. But there's a clear difference between "I broke this down into little tasks, and I think we're looking at x" and "implement multiplayer? Four days."
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-sch...
I once asked, how long to add analytics to your code? (I wrote a one line utility that could bundle up objects and fire them off for you.) The response was "three weeks per event". Guess which part of the code didn't have analytics.
Now, at some level this is leadership's fault. They own the culture, but many of the engineers I worked with in games were the least interested in being a part of a team I've ever seen.
To elaborate on your point, say a programmer and a designer brainstorm an amazing new jetpack feature for the game. They spend a day (when they should be working on less interesting but planned features) on a quick first pass and show it to their PM.
The PM asks how long it will take to complete, they say 3 weeks (2 days of UI/UX time to add the fuel bar, a week to tweak the feel and mechanic, 2 days of FX artist time, 2 days of artist time to make the rocket pack model). The PM says that the feature is unplanned and that is too long, so they say they can cut some corners because they really want the feature in and its more interesting than working on their planned tasks. The PM agrees because he wants the team to be creative and take control and pride over how great their game is.
In the end the feature stays in and takes 2 months of development time since it requires modifications to world collision geometry, each selectable player needs a differently modeled jetpack to fit their geometry, a jetpack upgrade system is added, loot box unlockable color customization gets introduced, bots need to be able to fly too and so pathing and behaviors need extensive modification, a tutorial needs adding, sound effects need designing and adding, QA has to do a pass of finding everywhere in the world that the jetpack can be used to get out-of-bounds and to avoid gameplay trigger volumes, and someone has to triage and fix all those issues. And I realized I probably vastly underestimated... do we slip, missing being part of this quarters revenue and cancelling our ad-campaign or have we just pushed into development hell?
Now they certainly do have unique pathologies related to their "cheap" talent pool churn - the lack of experienced people leads to some shockingly bad mistakes reoccurring, and lack of attention to detail from passion often shows.
Later Civilizations (V and later) for instance often came out with some shoddy AI doing things like pathing algorithms clearly designed before they added the one military unitn one civilian unit per hex limit, spamming absurdly bad trade deals, or deciding the proper thing to do against a technologically advanced power who thanks to game mechanics gives research points for every technology they lack is embargo them over conquest of one militant city-state, making it even harder to catch up.
Whereas the older ones did it with smaller teams and more constrained resources where seeking efficiency had some weird side effects - granted there were also plenty of 'shovelware' examples from the past.
This comment shows lack of historical perspective.
All of these complaints have been hot topics since before the term "AAA game" was invented.
AAA games "suck" (if they do, which the customer base's wallets seem to to think so) because they have gotten too good at making money even against their customers' stated preferences, not because they are bad at anything.
It’s easy to put in long hours when everyone else does and you genuinely enjoy their company.
It’s easy to forgo pay, when you have equity.
You’re just never going to get the opportunity to work creatively with a talented team at Wells Fargo. It’s a totally different experience.
If you’re concerned about a work/life balance or compensation, it’s not for you. I’d hate if game development turned into a typical corporate 9-5, and was inclusive of all skill levels.
Pay is decent, if you’re established and are at the top of your game.
Why? If the quality of the games stays the same, what benefit is there for the employees to work 20 hour days during crunch? How is that inherently "good"?
How would you make it better than "terrible by any measure"?
Lower profit and higher expenses is the only way, but given the risks of any ambitious title, small studios are nearly always flirting with bankruptcy as it is.
There’s no easy answer, but time to market and risk will suffer.
The competition to be a low-paid drone in game development is huge; significantly more than in non game dev. The games industry is powered by huge numbers of low-experience software engineers. They get paid in glamour and the thrill of being able to tell their friends they work in games. They could leave and go somewhere else for more money, but they don't want more money as much as they want that glamour. I've seen it myself; people take low-paid QA jobs at games companies for the love of spending 12 hours a day following mind-numbing instructions, repetitively playtesting a greyscale wireframe without sound or graphics assets. For the glamour of it.
These people have skill sets that are unusual amongst the general population, but not in the realms of software engineering job candidates and even less so in games, where strongly talented people take Godawful jobs for the glamour of it.
Yes, there are highly skilled, experienced software engineers in the industry too, but they're not the ones being fucked over in huge numbers on a daily basis.
You know who is cool? the 2-3 people who designed and built Pac-Mac, or Legend of Zelda, or Braid, or Papers Please. Not the people making guns for Call of War 7 that's a clone of a dozen other AAA games.
That's precisely why unionization is the best course of action. Game development companies aren't threatened if individual developers demand better treatment because they can be replaced by the next starry-eyed young dev seeking prestige and glamour. But if enough of them unionize and collectively bargain for better conditions, the industry has to listen.
But it's all QA. So I'm like "Cool, so you make minimum wage running tests".
I mean, you may never see my name in lights, but I ain't hurting to pay the bills if you know what I mean.
As a society we do want to protect people from exploitation, but a game developer is significantly different from the other 2 examples you used: amazon (I assume you meant warehouse) worker and uber driver. Those are low skill jobs so employers have all the leverage, I don't think many of them want to be an uber driver or warehouse worker.
Contrast that with a game dev, which is a very high skill job. They can take those skills into many other fields and make money, but they don't want to. Is that exploitation? I don't know, but it doesn't feel like it is to me.
But I feel much, much more proud of the games I released than anything I've done outside of the games industry, even applications/services I've worked on that have been used by millions of people.
In corporate dev it just feels too much like I could have been replaced by just about anyone and those applications would have been basically the same, or only mattered for a few years before the company decided to throw everything out and rewrite everything, letting my old code disappear whereas with games my own ideas and creativity and how I determined the mechanics should feel and I have something at least partially unique to show for it after that people can go back and play decades later.
Games have their own problem, in that there's so many games out there that unless you've made a superhit, your game will fade to the point where probably no one is playing your game anymore anyway, in place of one of the hundreds of other games coming out all the time, but at least there are people out there that try to preserve as many games as they can, and there's a chance someone will run into your game, dust off the cobwebs, and share it in a video with the world, and a few more people will discover it and enjoy it.
Like for example I'm currently collecting and searching for obscure, fun puzzle games on the original Game Boy and Game Boy Color. All sorts of cool games there that probably only a handful of people in the world are playing right now.
A really cool surprise I can only find a couple of videos for online is Klustar for Game Boy Color. It's Tetris blocks coming in from all sides and you move a central mass around and rotate it, and try to make those blocks connect somewhere on that mass, which alters its shape, and make large squares to clear them and shrink your cluster, meanwhile some blocks slip past and land on the opposite edge of the board and stay there for the rest of the game, blocking you and other pieces, until eventually your cluster is too big and ungainly and oddly shaped that you can't place the blocks in good places anymore and all the pieces attach in bad spots and you fill up the board and the game ends. Really addicting. I don't know of another game like it out there right now. And probably no one is playing it. But at least I found it and I'm enjoying it.
If that's not an acceptable tradeoff, you can always make your dream indie game on weekends.
The success of a studio does not seem to correlate with how poorly or well they treat their staff.
In CA overtime is always paid for more junior staff (QA, junior artists/designers) as there were a number of high profile lawsuits against games companies back in the early 2000s. For senior staff and most programmers the salaries are (in my experience) competitive with general development work outside of the Bay Area and FAANG space.
It's people's own responsibility to make themselves valuable. It's nice if some people offer pathways to becoming valuable (education, traineeships, whatever), but I don't see how anybody would be entitled to it. That would imply somebody would be responsible for delivering it, and who should that be? Why would anybody be responsible for it?
That said my views on unions have become less negative: as someone pointed out - at least around here the construction companies with highest percentage of unionized workers are generally the most profitable ones year after year.
Why? I can only guess but I guess people work better when they know they are safe and also get a fair pay based on their work.
Unions are a tool for workers to come together and collectively negotiate working conditions and compensation with their company. That's it. Allowing Unions to collect fees such that they can donate to political blurs the original intent of the Union in the first place. I would support a bill banning Unions from donating to political causes so that we can all get back to remembering that Unions are a useful, narrow, and focused tool that does one thing super well.
Seriously?
You honestly think your employer, who you support with your daily toil, does not contribute to any political causes you might find objectionable?
It's factored in when I accept my job.
I've worked for next to nothing to support causes I find worthy so I am allowed to hold opinions on this.
But with my money, I choose.
Movie crews are constantly rolling on and off projects and are unionized. This is hardly a foreign concept.
They have a valuable skill set, but making big games takes large groups of testers, tool programmers, texture artists, etc. Who are talented but not unique.
Like movie productions, games depend on a lot of skilled labor. And like movie productions, they tend not to be steady employers. So like film production in the US, it makes a lot of sense to have guilds or unions to protect work situations. Maybe also to create a framework for long term benefits, though I guess that is more debatable.
Equally, finally leaving the games industry was one of the better things I did.
I look at the experience required on the 'Who is Hiring' threads and sigh -- how am I supposed to get two years' professional experience using a technology that has nothing to do with games, or, how do I pick which tech to invest my time in, given that everything seems to be changing so quickly?
If you can code in C++, then becoming competent in JS/PHP/Python/Ruby is a matter of learning their syntax quirks and basics of the standard library. You don't have to worry about the framework-of-the-month churn. These things get popular because they're easy to pick up and well-documented.
Companies recognize that general programming knowledge is the hard part, and happily hire for it. Just avoid recruiters, as they're usually clueless keyword-matchers.
It's prisoner's dilemma.
I somewhat lack sympathy when the industry is clear as water about abuse like this yet people still go into it without precaution.
If done right you can beat the dog for a very long time and if the dog actually bites back you get rid of it and get another one.
Without unionizing, even if all of current employed and poorly paid game developers realized this, there would be no shortage of people coming in to undercut them.
Edit: grammar