All the video game industry has to do is to give its workers better treatment than they would get under union stewardship. Problem solved.
But I expect video games will follow the path of many other industries, and keep beating their mules until the mules revolt.
It's a lesson that has played out publicly hundreds of times over the last few centuries, but new overlords always think they're better, smarter, luckier than those who came before them. They never are.
Not even that. You could give employees half of what they would get under a union and you'd completely kill any motivation to unionize. The video game industry is so exploitative though that'll never happen.
Revolt by creating a monopoly on labor that leverages the violence of government to commandeer the decisions in the company?
Seems a a lot easier for the mules to just quit and work somewhere that fits their needs better.
Humble overlords are required, that doesn't make the entire industry necessary for unionization.
The companies will learn that treating their employees fairly from the outset is cheaper than having a union force it upon them for the next 10 to 50 years.
What is the half-life of a game publisher/studio executive?
You agree that this things are happening and its not OK.
why do you follow that up with:
> but it's not like you don't have options in this industry...
Clearly if people are being taken advantage of its an issue. And its issue for large enough percentage of workforce for us to talk about it.
Also this is global problem and salaries in game dev do not compare to SV. Well nothing compares to SV pay.
unionizing is literally one of the options they have.
It's enshrined in law, has a long history, has been implemented to great benefit to scores of people worldwide -- why shouldn't that option be on the table as well for these workers?
And, frankly speaking, "go find another job" is a terrible rejoinder, if they like their job, but don't like their working conditions, let them come together in a group to change their working conditions. It's their legal right to do so, as well as a human right.
They just think they are smarter/better/more rational.
I disagree. I think you have just eaten up the propaganda pushed by billionaires. There is an entire industry that is dedicated to pushing anti-union propaganda.
Misuse of union funds and a union boss passing over union workers for private workers because they cost less for the job.
Utopian unions don't happen.
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/20...
The fact that this is your go to story on unions vs. the millions of well-protected and empowered workers across the world is just more evidence of how internalized this propaganda is in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Commission_into_Trade_Un...
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2tsg3e/e...
Discrediting single instances of bad union behaviour is an endless game, there's a lot of history to draw from.
There’s more history of unions winning protections, better wages, and improved quality of life for workers across the world than there are evidence of their corruption. It’s why millions upon millions of workers, have created, joined, and maintained them throughout the history of Capitalism. But feel free to try and convince everyone why, for example, the vast majority of trade and industrial workers in developed countries or everyone in the NBA are all just wrong and confused.
Solo game developers will feel no union pressure, nor will small teams.
If there are triple-A studios that are so fragile that they'll go under with their employees getting better working conditions, I will shed no tear for those. I will shed no tear for any employer whose continued business success depends on working staff 80, 120 hours a week, in the game industry or any other.
Psy, gangnam style becoming a billion-view hit doesn't happen in a heavily controlled music industry. YouTube made that happen. Unions are bad news and they are meant to be. The decade of good is over.
Wrong in general and doubly wrong in the games industry where small game studios go bankrupt pretty much every other week. Not everybody is a FAANG or a billion dollar game publisher swimming in cash.
I'm not trying to lump game developers into that class, but it makes me wonder what kind of 'happy accident' that is for influential people.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-median-pay-240000-2...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-companies-revenue-emplo...
2. Median employee salary is wrong, you should look at average salary if you are comparing it to an average (revenue) figure.
3. You should correct for benefits and taxes. I don't know what they are, but salary is only part of the cost of an employee.
I know you are trying to make a quick point, but FB has margins ~40% and all-in employee costs can be 50% higher than salary. Assuming the median comp is close to average, then it's possible FB is making appr. $700K or so per employee in profit and paying out appr. $300K which doesn't sound quite as bad.
Why should they get 40% margins? Form a union, demand more money.
Why should they pay you more? Form the next FB and pay your employees 3x what they currently pay.
Pretty ridiculous response, right?
This is why we need unions.
If you don't like the company find a job that gives you a better deal.
If you have too much money leaving the business through employees (CEO included) you slow growth.
If you don't have high enough margins you also slow growth.
It's a balancing act and free and fair competition usually provides the correct answer.
I'd much rather see greater employee ownership in companies though rather than unions. Union and management negotiations are often a zero sum game. A win for one side is a loss for the other. And in between you can have damaging strikes or a breakdown in relationships. It's an us vs. them mentality, which isn't great for teamwork.
Employee ownership however aligns everyone's interests in the growth and profitability of the company. It puts everyone in the company on the same team and creates and us vs. them mentality with the competition instead which seems like healthy capitalism.
> I'd much rather see greater employee ownership in companies though rather than unions. Union and management negotiations are often a zero sum game. A win for one side is a loss for the other. And in between you can have damaging strikes or a breakdown in relationships. It's an us vs. them mentality, which isn't great for teamwork.
While this is generally true in the US system, it's not inherently true. It's like any other relationship - if there is trust and mutual understanding, then a good union can make a company better than it would have otherwise been. If the union exists as a response to abusive ownership, then it should hardly be surprising that the parties go to war, but it's ownership that drives that divide.
Salaries are based on supply and demand, not value generated. More developers at your skill level = lower salaries for everyone. More successful companies competing for talent = higher salaries for everyone.
If you want compensation based on value to the company, that's stock options or partial ownership.
Tons of companies fail because they pay their employees more than the value they create.
The salary a FAANG or any company offers is designed to be a win/win. The employee gets a fixed income they can plan their life around and the employer gets the potential upside of generating more revenue. As long as the marketplace is competitive and unbiased this works really well.
Please also remember that revenue != profit. If I run a business and I generate $1.6M in revenue off of a $300k employee, it doesn't mean I'm walking home with $1.3M in my pocket.
And running a business isn't exactly easy. If it was so easy to generate $1.6M off of a $300k employee, you'd be flooded with other companies willing to pay higher and higher salaries. It's really, difficult and rare.
This logic is completely flawed. In-fact reality is almost the complete opposite. The difficulty of running a business is inversely proportional to your moat, and the first to market has a much easier path in almost every sector of the tech industry.
Facebook doesn't have competitors offering more compensation because they're in a sector with an enormous barrier to entry. It's got fuck all to do with how good their competitors are, and even less to do with how "difficult" it is for them to run their business.
Except Facebook wasn't the first social network. And Google wasn't the first search engine.
Facebook didn't crush all other social networks by being a 1st mover. They did it by constantly developing their product and making more engaging hooks into their platform and they hired the best like crazy (at the highest industry wages) to do it. They bought Instagram (a competitor -- and not a 1st mover btw) because they feared their competition. It won't be the last to threaten them either and they'll need more billions on hand to buy that company or innovate along side them to keep growing.
I'm speaking as someone who's founded and sold a successful business, helped a bunch of 9 & 10-figure startups grow theirs and been around to see a ton of others fail completely. Unfortunately, it's not easy to make money or run a business as much as it might look that way from the outside.
In a highly competitive hiring environment like tech the day you don't treat your employees well or pay them a competitive wage, they'll leave in a heartbeat. It's not uncommon to see resumes of talented developers with a new company every 9-12 months as they rocket up the payscales.
Why does it matter to you whether you make $300k at a company that makes $500k out of you or at one that makes $1m out of you? You would be doing the same job and either way being compensated at the top range of the market for the skills you have. I don't see the point.
And then, lots of people can choose not to unionize. Personally, I think few FBers will unionize.
And then perhaps you could negotiate percentage of gross revenue if you wanted. But they could choose not to give you that. So long as we have free association, that's fine.
Personally, I don't think "percent of gross" makes sense unless you're a founder and "percent of marginal gross" is near impossible to calculate so probably not that. I far prefer the market for labour and employment.
You know how people say "it's not that you can't find engineers; you can't find engineers at what you're willing to pay". Well, if you can find engineers, then all is well.
Right-to-work laws just take away the right of workers to negotiate on the same terms that businesses do.
When you come here, I will scab you, and picket them if they consider signing exclusivity with you. And that's okay. You can picket them for the opposite and eventually one of us will win.
[1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/employee-...
Yes they should. Repeal all right to work laws.
Be part of the group or don't work here. My justification is that it drastically increases the strength of the union.
While I may be free to quit a union job, it feels quite gangster to say that I have to participate in one to take a job. I don't think the tradeoffs -- benefits from a union versus costs involved, especially when it's exclusively to pursue a career at a specific company -- favor unions.
That said, I do think unions could be stronger, and get a bad rap. To me, this seems like a problem the larger/stronger unions caused (and still cause - see police unions).
Your language - "be part of the group or don't work here" - is also a major disincentive. Artificially created black and white scenarios are reductionist.
If they are going to screw me over, then I am going to screw them over first.
If all I needed to do was make the same capital investments as facebook to get the same returns wouldn't that be wonderful?
Using a revenue number for this makes no sense.
Let’s ignore for now that this revenue also owes a great deal to the commons that is never paid back by most companies.
Does not Facebook also retain the right to hire employees willing to take less?
If the entire staff is unionized and ready to fight, facebook can't just hire outside staff. Too much knowledge.
Also the historical union attitude towards scab labour is another way to prevent this.
You mean violence? This is one of the reasons many people don't like unions.
Employers have also heavily utilized violence. Then they turned to the law and misinformation.
Violence is a last resort.
According to Wikipedia (not definitive I know) anti-union violence ended in the 1950s. Justifying current day violence with cites to events 70 years ago is absurd.
Indirectly, saying that violence can be justifiable depending on circumstance, etc... all legal.
Seems like workers would want to work at a place if they're fairly compensated (in contrast to increasing with company profits), treated well and enjoy their job. Sure you can reward employees for good company performance, and many do in forms of bonuses, equity growth etc, but 1) it's not required and 2) it's not directly correlated to company profits. I mean, if a company won a "lottery", e.g. a huge sale contract, should all employees get a corresponding boost in income?
Is it something that should happen in a conceptual/philosophical/ethical sense? Perhaps as corporations become more productive and profitable while requiring fewer workers, due to technological advances, automation, etc.- perhaps this should be discussed? Why should compensation structures be frozen in amber, while the methods of production improve by leaps and bounds?
There's a catch-22 there, though - the more times you exercise your option (to move to a different job), the harder it is to exercise it the next time. Too many job changes is considered a negative.
A series of quick lateral moves - this obviously excludes freelancers and consultants who specialize in short term contracts - can be a sign of someone who stays just long enough to either show they're not great at the role and took off before they were let go, or otherwise has something else going on with them that you'd want to look into more. It could be perfectly understandable. It can often not be.
If you think the total number is a problem, just start dropping the oldest jobs off your resume, and don't list university graduation years.
That means I'm doing higher demand work.
So at least my most recent skills are extremely valuable.
Indeed, and whether or not one has options was painfully obvious at my last gig where the people in devops, backend systems design, etc. could walk into a new job in a day were pretty relaxed, but the people who lived and breathed Unity3D were crunching hard.
The games industry over the last decade has been experiencing an incredible amount of consolidation so options have been if anything narrowing, as more and more game development jobs rely on working for Big Corp Publishers.
Game development is a unique ecosystem of tech. Sure programmers can pivot to working at Facebook or whatever, but lets be honest that the work and technology used is wildly different, and there's friction to that change.
Also worth noting that there's more to coders in games. What about the artists, producers, qa and other workers?
Thank you for pointing this out. Even within the dev-team side of game production (leaving out legal, marketing, sales, operations etc) the coders are typically 1/3 or less of the team size. Programmers can pivot (with varying amounts of friction) in to other areas of tech. For the designers, testers, producers and artists there are fewer options to use their skills outside of games.
The average tech worker salary isn’t $300k like HN wants to believe. The reality is that this board is mostly made up of the outliers.
For every person getting $150k in stock options and “feels like that’s on the low end because everyone they know gets more” there are 10 others who get nothing.
For the millions of tech workers who don't live in Seattle or Austin or the Bay Area, salaries are under $100k and your city only has a small handful of companies you can choose from. Good luck if they're not hiring at the exact moment you're looking for a new job.
150k in the Midwest won't let you save as much per year (in a combination of savings and home equity) as 300k in Silicon Valley, but it's pretty close
That said, I'd be for a strong code monkeys union even though it'd probably screw me personally. The system we have is great for people who know their own worth and can advocate for themselves, but most people just aren't like that
Strange, I tend to see situations where some people can pick up a new job at the drop of a hat, and others just struggle to stay employed.
The industry goes through cycles, and someone who has a certain kind of engineering talent can easily pick up and move to another job. Everyone else is often stuck taking what they can get.
>> Anyone who works in tech on one of these salaries, and then turns around to complain about their collective rights...
I worked in the gaming industry and left. I’ve mentored several folks who made similar transitions. Consequently, I have perspective based on those experiences.
I think it’s a fundamental mistake to think that transitioning from the gaming industry into general tech is an easy transition. Most people in the gaming industry have a severe form of professional PTSD due to the expectations around death march development. They have strived for a career in gaming where employers see plenty of potential hires and can pay them less as a result. These people end up with limited financial cushions, burnout and depression. They end up believing their only options are to pick up and move to another gaming shop for shit money and the same working conditions. Stay in this “career” long enough, and you are almost guaranteed health complications related to obesity and drug abuse. Yeah, it ain’t glamorous to stay in gaming, but experience means they’ll be an easy hire at the next company and they’ll be able to continue covering the mortgage.
I am mostly anti-union, but I believe unions are actually necessary in the gaming industry. It is pretty shitty and deserves to feel the pain they’ve been inflicting in their developers, PMs, producers and testers.
The gaming industry should not be seen as a career destination if you aren’t in finance/marketing. It should be a stepping stone in a bigger career, but an extremely short one so devs can learn EVERYTHING THAT YOU SHOULD NOT DO IN PROGRAM MANAGEMENT, EMPLOYEE RELATIONS AND SELF-CARE.
You sure about that?
No, a coal vein isn't going to fall on our heads and the factory isn't going to burn down with the doors locked.
We still don't understand inflammation and stress, but it's not looking good right now, and death marches put you into both.
Which of those companies were video game makers?
How many video game designers or programmers do you know? How bustling is that industry, in your opinion? Because I have a slightly different perspective from what I hear.
Also, amount of money made != can't complain about their work or their conditions. Also, FAANG != EA, Activision, etc.
have you ever worked in video games?
The way the game industry drives people is absolutely devastating to your health.
> Anyone who works in tech on one of these salaries, and then turns around to complain about their collective rights... It all just feels incredibly childish to me.
I mean, if we want to start insulting people for having really dumb opinions we can go that route.
Personally I don't think people who want to fight for their standard of living are being "childish".
It certainly won't help with any of the issues you describe.
Also, the concern over all the requisite 'woke' issues incongruously combined with hoarding enough filthy lucre to have FU money by 35 is amusing - a person like this might be described as a 'Champagne socialist' in the UK.
I agree that putting developers on death marches is antithetical to everything that is human, but it's not like you don't have options in this industry... Tech work isn't like coal mining where your health is legitimately at risk on a daily basis, and where the number of alternative options available to the average worker is low to non-existent.
Just yesterday we were all ogling over the salaries offered to engineers by the various top dogs in the valley. Anyone who works in tech on one of these salaries, and then turns around to complain about their collective rights... It all just feels incredibly childish to me.