CDPR sounds like a relatively progressively run game company tbh. A lot of game dev companies deny you overtime during the run up to a major release and massively layoff staff after releases.

Up here in British Columbia all technical workers[1] are overtime exempt because EA ran roughshod over our labour laws a number of years ago and people are too afraid to change them for fear of driving off businesses.

1. Vaguely defined - in practice includes anyone who uses a keyboard or has anything to do with the film industry.

Something similar happened in NZ too under the "Hobbit Law" bought and paid for by Warner Brothers. Now everyone in the film and game industry is considered an independent contractor by default and aren't subject to the usual rights and legal protections afforded to company employees.

> bought and paid for by Warner Brothers

Hang on I remember mass protests by the artists themselves in favour of that law?

Could you find some details on this?

Also, "even a shitty job is better than no job" might lead to people campaigning for that law if that means they get to work on LotR in their home country. Of course this is not really a viable strategy long term.

For example http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/4279251/Jackson-I-feel-enorm....

I think the union leaders trying to block the law were getting death threats from the workers they were supposed to be representing. There's some documentaries about it online as well. I think the union were completely at odds with their own members. Bizarre situation and an example of why people should be cautious about unions.

Peter Jackson played a blinder on that one.

Some of the people who showed up were colleagues. I wouldn't go as far as to call it a rent-a-mob but there was a lot of misinformation being spread on internal mailing lists leading up to the day.

Indeed, when I worked at EA in BC we were promised comp time for working 'coverage' (overtime) and I even got into trouble for refusing to work on Labour Day! The comp time fizzled into nothing because they fired the Development Manager of our group on the DAY of shipping the game. He just disappeared along with all of his promises. I alone got paid for the overtime because I refused to work TFT (temporary full time - which they pressured me to do) and instead was a true contractor.

I dunno, my impression is that for a game company, CDPR is fairly employee friendly. Of course that's relative to the rest of the gaming industry, which is a well-known employee welfare shithole.

I'm not familiar with Polish labour law, but it could be that in Poland like in many other European countries concepts such as "denying overtime" are inherently illegal.

In Poland most of developers run own companies to pay linear income tax (19% flat) plus €350 a month for state pension instead of paying 18% tax for first €20k earned plus 32% for overages plus mostly hidden to employees installment for pension scheme. So when your cost to the employer is €100k a year: - under labour law you take home €5.7k per month - running a company you take home €7k per month

For a country with a minimal wage of €610 this is a significant difference.

Most of the companies will offer paid time off to contractors, end even companies offering high-paying jobs like pilots do in do the same: https://www.ft.com/content/b8f77f16-d865-11e8-ab8e-6be0dcf18...

> under labour law you take home €5.7k per month - running a company you take home €7k per month

I dunno about Poland, but where I live this type of employment has some caveats:

- You need save for your time off (holidays) yourself. - You save on social security taxes, but it means your salary is not compensated by it when you are ill (or your kids are ill and you need to take care of them), thus you need to save for this yourself. - I would like to say that you would need to save up more yourself for your retirement fund (as you pay less for state pension), but at these level of incomes, usually at both scenarios (self-employed vs being employed) you would like to do that, so it cancels out.

Also it may be illegal, i.e. if you are employed like a full time employee - you cannot work as an independent consultant/contractor. Though AFAIK this definition of "like a full time employee" is not very strict.

IMO problem is that income taxation should be treated (mostly) the same, no matter how you earn the money. Because now (where I live), the wealthier you are, the more elaborate schemes you can run to avoid paying taxes on your income.

> Also it may be illegal, i.e. if you are employed like a full time employee - you cannot work as an independent consultant/contractor. Though AFAIK this definition of "like a full time employee" is not very strict.

Polish here. It is like you described but a) not many people know about this (sometimes I surprise some guys telling them their employment form - independent contractor for one company where you are actually working full time - is illegal) and b) I've never heard of someone being caught practicing this.

I'm also Polish, I know quite a few people in IT who used to do exactly that, but this year they all had to stop or figure out some workarounds, because the Polish tax office has started asking for proof that their company is actually working with more than one client. If they only have a single client in a year then they have to convert to full time employment. So yes, people are absolutely getting caught by this.

most of the countries now have something like that but for sole proprietship. if you have an llc, you can do basically whatever you want because it is taxed different, and somebody has to be employed there, so the country gets the taxes. its just that you can pay yourself some salary and the rest you can pay out at the end of the year as profit that is taxes different.

> b) I've never heard of someone being caught practicing this

Yup. Me too.

It's not as bad with design/IT agencies anymore, but I know that lawyer agencies are still notorious for this. Big-ish lawyer agencies with dozens of lawyers have no employees, everyone is a "partner" (or whatever the term is).

I think that is kinda normal for lawyers though. In the Czech Republic (I've been here 16 years and work with a lot of lawyers) it's normal for lawyers to be "contractors", very few are salaried.

In fact it's a funny rite of passage for most lawyers: after graduation they have to work for 3 years for a law firm before they are allowed to take the bar exam and become "real" lawyers. During this time they earn a salary. When they finally become "real" lawyers by passing the bar, they get fired. :) And immediately taken back on as contractors.

The difference is a law "partner" is called that because they become a partner in the LLP. In other words they are given a very real ownership stake in the firm. They are paid a portion of the firms profits in addition to any salary.

Associate lawyers (what you are before partner) are paid a regular salary as employees.

Law firms aren't healthy workplaces, but I wouldn't worry about the legal rights of the lawyers working for them.

No, it is not illegal - I've been practicing this for the last 10 years, never had any trouble with tax office.

It all depends on how your contract is written - if you have clauses that put some of the business risk on you (e.g. you give 3 month warranty on the code you write, or have some bogus penalties for contract breach, or other things, which I've never seen enforced) then it cannot be treated as full time employment, even if you have just one client for which you issue invoices.

The only thing that is an actual red flag for tax office is when you start as a full time employee, and then switch to running sole proprietorship and your previous employer remains your only client - then it is too obvious that this is just employment in disguise.

EDIT: Also, those "independent contractor" contracts come in different shapes. I, for example have just an hourly rate set, and then I get paid for the hours worked. Some people prefer to have flat monthly rate, and even some paid vacations included in their "B2B contracts", which makes it more suspicious.

Other thing worth mentioning is that for full time employee penalty for malpractice is up to 3 monthly salaries.

Contractors are liable with all assets/wealth.

Sure but contractors just get an indemnity insurance for this exact reason, which you can't get as an employee.

This depend on the kind of legal relationship one has with the company. If you’re working as independent contractor with a B2B arrangement, the notion of overtime does not really exist. If however you are employed through the “employment contract” (“umowa o prace”), the limits on overtime are really strict, and you must be paid for it, in fact 50% extra, and double pay for overtime worked during nights, sundays and holidays.

I don’t know what’s the typical arrangement in game industry, but in software engineering industry at large, B2B contracts are very common, due to rather preferable tax treatment. B2B gives 10-30% increase in net pay, and its downsides are lack of mandatory severance, mandatory time off days, overtime pay etc. In most scenarios these are not an issue, because if one can negotiate high pay justifying B2B, one can also negotiate time off and lack of overtime. Don’t know about game industry though.

> If you’re working as independent contractor with a B2B arrangement, the notion of overtime does not really exist. That's correct. But if you're paid for an hour of work ("time & material") you will get paid for your "overtime".

> I'm not familiar with Polish labour law, but it could be that in Poland like in many other European countries concepts such as "denying overtime" are inherently illegal.

Which explains why so many Ubisoft games are made in Canada...

No, the reason why so many Ubisoft games are made in Canada(and other studios as well, take a walk around central montreal, there's tonnes of games studios there) is that the Canadian government is giving out massive subsidies to the game industry to grow it there(last I've heard it's literally half of every salary - an absolutely ridiculous amount of money). If you compare the cost of having an employee in Canada to most other places, Canada works out pretty cheap, and it's an attractive place to move to and live in, without the ridiculousness of the American immigration.

I’ve always thought it was interesting that video games are the only kind of software that’s often made outside big tech hubs - not to mention the only kind an ordinary person enjoys using enough to emulate!

Does Canada not subsidize other tech work? I’ve heard the pay at Blackberry was terrible for instance. The only good thing is that Canadians will be impressed if you call yourself a software engineer because they think you have an iron ring.

Ubisoft, specifically, versus some of the other companies has the interesting added factor that with their upper-management being primarily based in France it is useful to them to utilize countries/provinces that can also speak French.

Yea Ubisoft is a rather special case. And their montreal studios have actually long be lauded as a pretty good place to work if you're in the game industry.

Never understood why they tried so hard to be the destination for offshoring instead of fostering home grown studios.

That and pitching Vancouver as an ideal HQ2 location since tech workers are worth ~50K less than in America[0]. Is this something that Canadians approve?

[0] https://www.vancouvereconomic.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02...

As a Canadian, Vancouver resident, and software developer, I certainly don’t approve of the discount all software companies get here, including ones based here. Not only do companies pay out 60 cents on the dollar, they can also qualify for large refundable tax credit subsidies from provincial and federal governments.

In other words, there are plenty of your “home-grown studios” here, who benefit from the manipulated market created by the multinationals that came before them.

Salaries won’t rise to meet parity until labour gets organized, but as a previous commenter pointed out about labour laws and overtime pay, it’s a massive uphill battle.

Nope, and most software developers in Vancouver aren't participating with foreign companies at those rates. The laws remain how they are mostly to disenfranchise QA testers which remain a very hard labour segment to mobilize. There are thousands of "I can make money playing games?!?" folks out there that drown out the really good QA folks and insure that EA can maintain its churn.

For regular dev jobs, I think the market is less imbalanced than it appears on the surface. Cost of living isn't cheap in BC but free medical care is a big bonus and the city is quite pleasant. Senior devs will end up pulling senior dev money - it's mostly the entry level wages that are depressed.

Actually, senior dev money is half as much in Vancouver as it is in the US. The higher up the tree you go, the more the gap widens.

I wonder why. There must be a skill gap, else the senior engineers would simply drive three hours and double their earnings.

... No, The answer is immigration.

1. If you have a problematic history (which includes things entirely outside of your control, like being born in the wrong part of the world[1]), it can be nearly impossible.

2. If you don't have a problematic history, it's incredibly stressful. If you're on a TN visa, you can be turned away at the border at any time, for any reason whatsoever, including no reason whatsoever. If you're on an H1B visa, you can also be turned away from the border at any time, for any reason whatsoever, including no reason whatsoever. If you lose your job, you need to immediately start dealing with immigration issues, while looking for a new one, or you have to leave the country.

3. If you're married, your spouse can't work for a long time.

4. If you aren't married, your girlfriend/boyfriend/whomever can't even try immigrate with you, even if they wanted to.

5. Being three hours and a border away is not remotely the same thing as being three hours away from your friends and family.

6. There is a long, long, long list of cultural reasons for why a comfortably-living Canadian may prefer to avoid living in the US, even for double the paycheck.

[1] I had a friend whose family fled from Saddam's Iraq, due to their political activities, when he was a child. As an adult, he was consistently singled out for harassment, intimidation, and delays during his crossings at the US-Canadian border. [2] According to him, getting a work visa in the US was not remotely a possibility.

[2] Isn't it wonderful how passports list your country of birth?

That still doesn't explain the gap when they are working for the same company.

When you're working for the same company, the gap exists bcause the company can get away with it. What are you going to do? Go across the street to a competitor who pays just as little?

I worked for an above-market-rate firm in BC. When I got a job offer in SV, my boss could only counter-offer the financial gains if I relocated to their SV office.

Any decent software employer in the US will have good insurance that basically guarantees your max out of pocket health expenses won’t exceed a few thousand dollars. That doesn’t really account for the difference.

>>your max out of pocket health expenses won’t exceed a few thousand dollars.

Wait, that's meant to be good? What kind of insanity is this. Why do you have to pay anything out of your pocket at all??

It depends on what type of health plan you have. For instance, a high deductible health plan allows you and your employer to put money into a savings account pre-tax (thus lowering your tax burden) to be used to pay out of pocket costs. As the money accumulates you can begin to diversify it in part with various investments. In years where you have few or no health issues the account begins to grow much like a retirement account. You keep the money after leaving the company and it can be used for healthcare any time in your life.

So yes it’s very good, or can be. Putting pre-tax money away and also lowering your tax burden while saving over time for healthcare matters is nice. Because you have a “maximum out of pocket” cost each year you stay ahead of it.

There are many different healthcare schemes in the USA that work best in different ways for people that have different circumstances.

Note that HSAs are not pre-tax in California, you still have to pay state income tax on them. Theoretically. In practice HSA providers don’t report your accounts, nor is there even a way to get the info you’d need from an HSA investment to pay the taxes.

In the US, there is no ceiling to your potential health expenses if you are without insurance. A few thousand dollars looks like a pretty good ceiling compared to infinity.

Don’t Canadians also have to pay for prescriptions and dental work? Some of that is included in the US benefit cap.

Yes. But I've never worked for a company that didn't provide coverage for that as well. My current plan provides $1500/yr for routine dental coverage, $15k for dental emergencies and accidents. $30k/yr prescription coverage. Massage, chiro, accupuncture up to $1k/yr. Counseling for up to 6 sessions free, then 50% coverage. This is not an unusual benefits package as far as I can tell. My last company even provided a $400 wellness spending account on top of all that. Anything I could justify as 'wellness' was covered to that amount. Running shoes, ski passes, recreational classes. This isn't some special package for high value employees. This is standard for any FT employee.

My out of pocket expenses this year for all health related stuff is around $100. That is made up mostly of prescription dispensing fees ($10 for a 3 month supply), and massage fees that were over the per visit limit (they only cover the first $100/hour. My massage therapist is $115/hr)

Benefits in Canada blew my mind when I moved up here.

The downside is that I make $80k ($62kUSD) as a mid level web dev, and that is not really considered low for the position.

In Canada it varies. Dentists are terrible and always covered by private insurance. In BC pharmacare is capped out-of-pocket by the province but it's a high cap so you will generally have employer insurance just like you have in the US - while as Ontario has full prescription coverage.

Oh the same thing goes for vision insurance, alternative medicine (RMTs and acupuncture) and some medical devices - i.e. a CPAP for Sleep Apnea.

Hundreds out of pocket is better than thousands out of pocket though.

(I'm not Canadian, but here in Europe, without insurance, I've never paid more than a few hundred for dental work or tens for prescriptions. Even if its more in Canada, I imagine its still less than "thousands")

There is typically some out of pocket component to prevent moral hazard. A good plan will still be covering something like 90% of your costs until you hit the max out of pocket, then it becomes 100%. It’s so you are at least a little conscientious in choosing doctors and pharmacies and such.

I'm sorry, but $7000/year is not about "preventing moral hazard". NHS charging a flat £9/per prescription is preventing moral hazard so you don't request medicine nilly willy. The out of pocket expenses that people quote in this thread are insane - having to suddenly pay few thousand dollars for treatment would cripple my finances, and I'm a software engineer.

You’re very unlikely to spend that much. If you have multiple serious medical emergencies in the span of one year, $7000 is nothing for having your life saved and getting treatment. Also, the cap is usually much lower than $7000. Also, remember, they’re still covering ~90% of every individual expense. By the time you’ve spent $7000, the insurance company has put down many times that.

Our medical providers are competing private businesses. There are really good doctors, really bad doctors, and everything in between. Everyone wants to go to the better doctor, but there’s just not enough of them. Price differentiation is important.

There are $0 deductible and $0 copay plans and $0 coinsurance plans. They are also exorbitantly expensive because of the absurd moral hazard they create.

It’s a strange mindset to think that something should just be free. We pay for our cars, our housing, our food. Medicine is not free to provide. The America system is broken in many ways, but not because people have to pay for medical care. The problem is that it’s too expensive because of artificial constraints on the supply of doctors and other medical resources.

>>It’s a strange mindset to think that something should just be free.

When it comes to healthcare? Yes, it should absolutely be free to the recepient.

I don't know why it's such a strange concept to you - afer all, Americans are also used to receiving certain services for free - you don't have to pay the police for coming to help you, or the fire brigade for that matter. To me it's the same thing - if your house on fire, the fire brigade will come and help, free of charge - that's what taxes are for. So if I'm ill, I will be given any and all help needed - also free of charge, after all, that's what taxes are for.

>>They are also exorbitantly expensive because of the absurd moral hazard they create.

Like, sometimes I think Americans live literally on a different planet. Do you think that in countries where healthcare is free to use people have medical procedures without any reason and simply because they don't have to pay for it?

In general, it's simple - if a country wants to have healthy, productive citizens, it should pay for their healthcare, I don't understand why it's such a divisive concept. The crown example of how crazy the US system is, is the fact that you have to pay to give birth. Like.....so US cares so little for its citizens that literally the very act of giving birth to new ones is not covered by the government? That's....beyond mind boggling.

You have to pay for food. That doesn’t mean that eating isn’t important or that a society wants people to go hungry. By your logic, the private market would just be the domain of luxuries and useless trinkets. The government here provides health insurance for the very poor and subsidizes private insurance for the somewhat poor.

Police and fire are public services because they would not work as market systems. Fires spread from house to house, for example, regardless of who pays or doesn’t, so private fire brigades would have to protect non-payers in order to also protect payers. That’s a classic market failure that can be solved by public services. (Potentially, that problem could have been solved by requiring fire coverage, but then there's the further problem of a row of houses, each with different fire services, some better than others, with the better ones still needing to protect the houses insured by the worse ones to protect their own customers. Not to mention that a single house fire can lead to a whole city burning down. It's just not a service that the market can effectively provide in most places.)

And no, of course people don’t completely waste care in other systems either. That’s because it’s rationed by the government. Elective procedures have long wait lists, access to specialists is specially guarded, etc. Limited resources always have to be rationed by some mechanism.

Our system in the US is far from perfect: we let the doctor’s guild limit the supply of doctors, we are too uncomfortable with ending care for the very old and terminally ill, and the whole hospital and medical device industries could use an antitrust shakeup.

> if your house on fire, the fire brigade will come and help, free of charge

Unless you're in a "no pay, no spray" area and haven't paid your fire subscription fee. Wish I wasn't being serious.

And the labor of others is paid for by the taxes you pay.

Yeah, no, hard disagree. Every citizen should have the right to free healthcare, and it should be provided for everyone, regardless of any other factors.

Roads require labour of others to build and maintain, yet every American would object if they suddenly had to pay to use them to get anywhere - how is that any different. You're just moving the line elsewhere, but the exact same principles exist in America too.

Toll roads exist.

And in countries with public healthcare private hospitals exist too.

The existence of toll roads in a country where 99.9% of roads are free to use has no impact on your ability to get anywhere, just like the existence of private hospitals doesn't change the fact that every citizen can receive free care from public hospitals in countries with public healthcare.

I have another reply to you that engages with all of your points. Feel free to respond to that. As of now, you haven't given any principled reason for which services should be provided free by the government and which should not.

Two points:

1. Free travel is a right. At it's most basic, walking requires nothing from anyone else.

2. Everyone benefits from the economy being able to function. Only one person benefits from a person receiving a free million dollar medical procedure.

1) free healthcare is a basic right

2) everyone benefits from the economy having healthy citizens who aren't worried about medical bankruptcy. It's not true that only one person benefits from receiving a million dollar medical procedure . Also outside of US medical operations don't cost a million dollars.

Like, we're just not going to agree here.

>> At it's most basic, walking requires nothing from anyone else.

Also, to add to this point - no, walking anywhere requires permission from whoever owns the land you are walking upon. Americans also are incredibly restrictive here, despite being the land of freedom. In UK you have the right to roam[0], where you are allowed to walk through someone's private lands(as long as you don't damage anything). In the US try walking through someone's land - you will be shot in the worst case.

[0] https://www.gov.uk/right-of-way-open-access-land/use-your-ri...

A fair trial requires the labor of others, and I have a right to that. No guns to head involved.

A fair trial is those people trying to take your freedom. Not you getting a service from them.

Canadian living in USA. My brain is regularly fried by healthcare here, it ends up being a simple high level equation.

My out of pocket max per year is around $6000 USD, and my salary is double what I was (under)paid in Toronto, and taxes are a bit lower here (CA).

So the take home pay is mid-5-figures more, and worst-case scenario healthcare is mid-4-figures, so it balances out very favourably for my situation (anyone in tech with a full-time job, basically).

(Of course, those who aren't well-paid in tech have a much worse situation and I can't imagine how difficult that must be.)

Out of pocket maxes in the 10-20K range aren't that uncommon in the US. Even when I've seen places with plans where it's <5K, that's only for single workers, and it doubles with a partner or family.

I’ve never seen out of pocket maxes that high but I’m limited to my own experiences. I’d imagine the premiums would be super low for such a high deductible.

Even the high deductible plans I’ve seen are no more than $3500/single or $7k family per year out of pocket max. And those allow you and your employer to put money into a high deductible savings account pre-tax like a retirement account. And it can be used for any qualified health payment for the rest of your life and is passed down upon death. It’s really like a 401k for health payments.

And I’d rather have extra 100k and pay the 10k for health.

My plan for a family of 5 has an out of pocket max of 4K with no deductible.

The theory goes that the big foreign corp (ie. EA) hires a bunch of locals, and over time those locals get good and leave to form their own company.

There's a fair amount of evidence that this works. It's not like Vancouver is solely populated by foreign studios. Local game companies like Kabam, Black Bird Interactive, Relic, United Front, etc would have all either had their roots in EA workers or would have hired ex-EA workers.

Offshoring companies bring investment into the community, while funding startups costs the local community. Also if your startup needs skill and services not available locally that have to be sourced outside that’s more cost, whereas a company coming in will have to provide those services at its own expense.

If local salaries are depressed like that, this implies the outside investment is sorely needed. If there was enough investment available locally and local companies had the resources to hire more workers and were successful enough to pay them well, those salaries would be higher, but the resources to make that happen have to come from somewhere.

> while funding startups costs the local community

I'm not sure I completely understand.

> If local salaries are depressed like that, this implies the outside investment is sorely needed.

It's interesting because a lot of capital is flowing into Vancouver right now in the form of real estate speculation.

You'd be shocked at what Canadians put up with. Look closely at any industry here and corruption/abuse run rampant.

That document is not saying they are "worth" less than in America but that they are undervalued which I imagine a lot of them would agree with.

Well, according to the market they are worth less.

I am honestly not sure why Canadian developers are paid so much lower than our American counterparts.

Vancouver is a large market for tech as is Toronto, and now the rest of the cities in Canada are picking up. Anecdotally I have never seen this much recruiter activity in Alberta as we're seeing right now.

Not true of EA, at least in the United States. EA hires junior employees as non-exempt for their first couple of years. They are also in my experience among the most progressive big publishers when it comes to overtime and work/life balance. Not perfect, but certainly trying in a real way across most of its studios.

Source: Worked for, but not currently employed at, several EA studios over the last decade, including as a junior engineer paid overtime.

I worked at EA for five years (2015-2019) in Sweden and during that time I heard a lot of talk about minimising overtime and new measures to prevent it. Every game new alternatives and policies would be introduced. Then, when it became clear that we couldn't deliver on what everyone always said was over scoped, all of that was thrown out the window and we went back to ordinary crunch.

We did sometimes get compensated, but always in comp days, never money, and it was usually very uncertain ahead of time if and how it would work.

I work at Ubisoft(in the UK[0]) and overtime and crunch are heavily discouraged, to a point where as a matter of policy, we are asked to report to higher management if anyne is asked to do overtime - it just shouldn't be happening at all. I've worked on two big AAA releases in the last 6 years and my total overtime was statistically zero, I did some extra hours in the last 2 weeks leading to release, but that was mostly to watch over the server infrastructure to make sure the launch went smoothly.

We've had people join from Rockstar, EA, CDPR, and one thing everyone is always surprised by is how good the work/life balance is. I'm personally in around 8am and always done by 4pm(7.5 hours a day).

[0] - now, all Ubisoft studios set their own policies. Please don't extrapolate my experience in the UK to experiences in other Ubisoft studios in other countries.

Yeah the games company I used to work for has gradually improved over the years - I have one good friend who stayed the whole time, and it's gone from "mandatory unpaid weekends" to "a bit of paid overtime here and there".

The key part I think is just making overtime paid, then the incentives all align much better.

It's sad if that counts as "progressive" business practices in the games industry.

It really, really doesn’t IME. This is basically what the industry was like when I joined 15 years ago.

> deny you overtime during the run up to a major release

This made me stop. Do you mean deny you paid overtime, because actively preventing extra work in the run up to a milestone is absolutely not normal for the games industry. The opposite is far more common.

EA Vancouver might be more carefully watched, but one way of avoiding regulations like this is to make sure employees are only logging normal workday hours - if at all - regardless of how long they actually work.

I took it to mean you have to work, but they don’t pay extra for overtime, in the context of others not even being allowed overtime. In the US, that would be standard. I’m not aware of developers in the US getting paid overtime rate for overtime work in development, period, but overtime work is definitely expected a little too often, and if you work for a company where it isn’t, it’s either a large company with other ways of dealing with such things or they just haven’t had it happen yet or recently. However, the US isn’t a bad place to work; whenever overtime is expected, often times there are financial incentives. Just try not to burn out.

I believe those rules only apply to companies that are primarily tech companies (like EA of course). Tech workers at non-tech companies can get overtime.

Programmers in the non-gaming parts of the industry are treated better not because of any labour laws, but because of supply and demand.

CDPR is paying their staff the full bonus for Cyberpunk 2077 due to the circumstances of the release.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-11/cd-projek...

Making it less terrible after-the-fact, after tons of bad press and outside pressure, and when you desperately need the devs to stay on and fix the problems left after the launch they no doubt told you was not going to work… not sure that deserves much praise.

Don't get me wrong, it's better than not doing it, but it doesn't fix the underlying issue with the system there.

I'm not praising them, just stating facts.

Probably need them to stay and fix the bugs instead of rage quitting when their bonuses are withheld likely because decisions made outside their control.

I felt like management withheld the bonuses to get them to stay on to finish the game. Major patches have already been promised for Jan and Feb because it's basically early access quality, and I bet more than a few devs are ready to walk away.

I know if tensions were high after a long crunch and I just got a big payout before a major family holiday, I'd need some convincing to go back in.

I heard the bonuses were paid out prior to the last release bump, so they got much less than they could have.

Lots of companies have a bonus which is a combination of 'corporate wide' bonus, 'performance' bonus and 'personal contribution'.

This just seems to formalize some of the parts which are often just arbitrarily decided by some governance committee.

No reason to not give the bonuses when accomplishments are recognized then, instead of tying it to the team's success at a singular date (delivery). It forces everyone to work in overdrive. It's plainly not a personal contribution/performance bonus at all. If CDPR makes a bad hire that causes a delay (even outside of development, like marketing?), then everyone suffers for that from a lack of a bonus.

This is particularly shitty when combined with the stress and demands and low pay of the game industry as it is.

Also, super curious if the tokens can be forged. Can I just show up at the end of release with 50 tokens and cash in? Surely they were tracking it elsewhere, making the tokens useless.

Plenty of companies recognise contributions by handing out tokens that can't be cashed in immediately, that have a value that depends on the fortunes of the company, and that might fall in value precipitously. Just usually they name the tokens "stock options" or "pre-IPO shares"

I agree there are plenty of shitty practices in the games industry, of course.

In the US, those are regulated. I'm not aware of the details, but I doubt these "certificates" in Poland have the same level of regulation as US securities.

This merely makes these certificates worth less than the same but named stock options and regulated.

The employee will "just" need to discount the value of these certificates accordingly.

It would also be weird if managers were to capriciously hand out options to employees as short term performance bonuses.

Weird, normal-and-accepted, guess it depends what part of the industry you work in.

You've piqued my curiosity - where is this normal and accepted?

Normally at tech companies there’s a review and bonus twice a year. At ours we only participate in one of them, the other is done by management, and for most of my career ours would just pretend he decided to give us a bonus for our hard work one day. You had to ask around and notice it was always the same week to figure out how it worked.

It’s pretty usual for a company financial target to need to be hit before the bonus payout starts - in fact it’s unusual for a bonus payout to happen regardless of financial performance (companies want to give employees certainty about what the rules are to trigger a bonus, but don’t want to have to give out bonuses if they are going under).

I’ll assume the bonus is probably actually tied to the companies financial performance rather than the release, but that the release was required for the revenue target to be hit.

Good practices in management are still developing in Poland, unfortunately.

Many companies around here do experiments like this one hoping to see improvements. Most of such attempts fail miserably.

I've seen my share of weird, counterproductive ideas from grades like in school to work logged down to the second.

My last company, even though it was over 500 people strong, was basically winging it.

I think the hardest part about running such "experiments" is ever knowing whether they were success or failures. Even here, we (and I doubt CDPR) don't know enough to really judge whether the tokens things helped or hurt. Or if it helped, whether it helped as much as a more traditional system. Except for small experiments that can be run many times (or in many similar departments in parallel), circumstances just change too much to ever compare apples to apples. (Here, devs may have loved this game's concept so much that they worked hard in spite of the tokens. Or didn't love the game concept but loved the tokens.)

Frankly it's why it doesn't make too much sense to veer very far from practices proven to work. But what's shown to work in a HBR studies may not apply in a different cultural landscape than the US.

All that being said, I'm sure there are many possible practices that are better than traditional approaches. It's just risky trying to find them.

Doesn't sound much different than getting paid in equity at a startup.

There's centuries worth of legislation about equity. You can still get screwed, but "I'm giving you the right to own shares in this company" means something in the eyes of the law. Getting paid in participation tokens doesn't.

This is absolutely technically correct. Practically speaking, maybe not so much.

http://stockoptioncounsel.com/blog/standards-ownership-canth...

Most areas of the world use at-will employment but I'm specifically familiar with the US and Canada. In either of those you can kill options dead due to expiration clauses[1] - actual equity issuance tends to be rarer due to the tax liabilities around it and, either way, dilution can destroy your value and it's completely legal. Additionally, if you crunch for work, you can be denied promised bonuses[2], be fired before they arrive[3], or just be suddenly downsized and end up needing to eat that bonus while you find another job.

Do not work overtime without compensation, no company is your baby and companies have no legal obligation to remember your service. Labour laws are terribly slanted against employees so be very conservative about your expectations from work and never sacrifice your health (mental or physical) due to some B.S. team oriented camaraderie.

I work hard at my shop, I really love all the things we've managed to accomplish and I appreciate all the folks I've built them with. But when it comes to money it is good to be incredibly self-interested because no one else will do it for you.

1. You can be put in a position where you're able to exercise your options but you'll be doing so blindly - trading personally held cash for stock and hoping the company doesn't end up tanking.

2. Bonuses are almost never legally promised in practice, so they remain at the grace of the employer.

3. At-will employment laws means that all future implied payments can be retracted if employment is terminated excepting those that are contractually owed.

You can be employee #2 of a startup, receive a lot of stock early on and then see it dillute to fractions of a cent. Perfectly legal.

This happened to me back in the 90's.

Company 1: The company went bankrupt, founder renamed the company, started a new company with the same name as the original, transferred some assets for pennies on the dollar. It later went public, but collapsed in the dot-com crash.

Company 2: Company raised $50 million during the dot-com boom. After 5 or so years, it still did not have much revenue to speak of. After several down rounds, it was eventually was sold to a major corporation for pennies on the dollar. All common stock was worthless.

Company 3: Still working on it. There have been several down rounds. All employees got their options re-issued at the lower price after a key employee threatened to walk...

> Company 1: The company went bankrupt, founder renamed the company, started a new company with the same name as the original, transferred some assets for pennies on the dollar. It later went public, but collapsed in the dot-com crash.

Is that legal? It looks like the CEO of the company willingly harmed the company's interest to enrich himself, which is basically fraud.

My understanding is that it was done in a legal manner. The majority of the investors were "friends" and had to give sign off. They got a smaller stake in the new venture and promise of larger returns, etc.

Unsure why you are being downvoted.

Perhaps some founders and investors don't want this to be known...

I guess no one paid attention during The Social Network because they spelled it out clearly in that movie.

Happened to me three times... upvoted to bring light to this as startup finances is tricky for most mortals. Dilution, premium vs standard, cliff, etc.

When I was negotiating my current job, I had a competing offer for around $100k more plus equity but it was essentially Engineer #1 after the technical co-founder.

In my negotiations I inquired about said equity and the other founder was vague as hell around all of those important questions that early employees need to ask.

The extra $100k wasn't worth it and I'm making the difference in real, liquid equity (and then some) from my current employer.

They know full well what they are doing or they are naive. It’s so important to know the terms before you commit. However, another ace is living in at at-will-to-work state so I can just quit once I realize I was bamboozled. I’ve done this. I’m not proud of it, but my time is mine. I have goals. Help me achieve my goals and I’m all yours to help you achieve yours. Sad to say but there are founders/CEO’s that know engineers are itching for an early-in to a “rocket ship” and will manipulate to get momentum. Don’t buy it. Do your due diligence. Research. Ask about the terms, the equity, the stock, current value? Dilution? Who’s invested? Who has what stake? Who’s on the board? Prove to me it’s a rocket ship... sales? When do you recognize revenue? How? Opportunity pipelines healthy? All of these things are proxy to an engineer yet all of these things effect the engineer joining the company as employee <50.

So can any equity holder in a company.

Maybe, but if you have RSUs in a FAANG those are your property and pretty safe. They can (must) also be sold when paying tax so pretty liquid asset.

Once you accept a RSU grant they are your property once vested. Regardless of where you work.

Yeah, but for smaller companies there is usually options and preferred ones etc. The upside is a lot larger as well of course.

That's what happened to Eduardo Saverin.

Leading to a lawsuit that was settled with undisclosed terms, but he's reportedly worth $15B now [1], so he must have received quite a lot.

1: https://www.forbes.com/profile/eduardo-saverin/?sh=1b75ae527...

It happens to a lot of other folks that aren't currently worth 15B. He made out well but the majority of folks are left with nothing.

So is Zuckerberg an actual villain?

Well they state it right in the movie that he deceptively tried to screw Saverin over and his own lawyer in a nutshell said "Settle. Because what do you think a jury will say?"

Took you way longer than enough

I thought that was PascalCase and this is camelCase? Have I been wrong all these years?

This is something that I miss about forums of yore and sort of hate about HN, Reddit, and their ilk: the deprioritization of a post author's identity. It took me way too long to figure out you were talking about the username of the person you were replying to. I miss being able to scan through a forum's post listing and readily pick out names of posters I recognized after being involved in the site for a while. It was an additional signal of post quality (or lack thereof, depending on the user). Here, the username is hidden in a sentence of status text, on the same visual level of the number of minutes ago the post was made, all of which is rendered in a light grey font. It's clearly intentional, and I can't for the life of me figure out why the forum owners don't want users to be able to build a consistent identity.

I made a quick little userscript that allows you to attach tags to users on HN. There's pretty much no documentation, I didn't really expect to release it, but it puts a little [t] next to usernames on HN and you can click it to add tags that persist in localstorage and show up next to that user wherever they post on HN. Feel free to use it and adapt it however you like. Only tested on Firefox and I'm sure it's full of bugs and unintended side effects!

https://gist.github.com/errantspark/7000c8a5192eb0b8ee64ba21...

Cool! It works in ViolentMonkey on MS Edge Chromium.

I didn't realize how easy this was to setup and do. Here's a first crack at making user names more prominent.

That's weird, I could have sworn I shared the link

https://gist.github.com/capnmidnight/b61dcecf587949d6adf1dc4...

Wow. You make excellent points, I never realized it was intentional how the usernames blend in on the page on HN and Reddit. This is fascinating! Is it that usernames distract from the content?

wikipedia, the world's highest authority on matters of nitpicking, says camel case can be either; capitalization of the first letter is unspecified.

in practice, I've certainly heard people use camel case to refer to either convention. I hear pascal case a lot when people specifically mean a capitalized first character. wikipedia lists dromedary case as the complement of pascal case, but I've never actually seen this term used IRL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel_case

I've always seen it like camel case when it's not important if you capitalize the first letter or not and lower camel case or upper camel case if it's important.

Yes. CamelCase is such, you're referring to mixedCase. (The first letter is the camel's head.)

I would say the same.

If I got paid in tokens at a startup, I would riot. That’s some “company town” bullshit.

It's just a bonus, not regular compensation, right?

Did you not know about the tokens when you were hired?

Why is your first reaction to "riot" instead of just "quit"? Unless it's in your contract, you don't deserve a bonus.

I can't imagine HR going into it any more than "there is possible bonus compensation" when hiring.

My company's HR people and recruiter both spelled out the bonus plans in great detail (cash vs equity, what you're rated on, typical amounts for my incoming level, etc etc). Don't just accept wishy-washy answers, this stuff matters.

That would still have been a description of the company's nice intentions, and not a contract/legal promise.

Why, when someone tries to take advantage of you, is your first reaction to retreat?

If I knew about the tokens before I was hired, no advantage is taken.

Honestly not even sure I agree that you're being taken advantage of if the policy is enacted after your hiring.

A bonus is a bonus. It is given out at the companies discretion, unless stipulated in your employment contract.

> If I got paid in tokens at a startup, I would riot.

>> Why is your first reaction to "riot" instead of just "quit"?

>>> Why, when someone tries to take advantage of you, is your first reaction to retreat?

Because, "rioting" when you don't get your way is... unprofessional?

Because I want to. It’s my job, and I’d like to keep it. I take great pride in my position. I do graphics programming myself, and those jobs aren’t exactly numerous.

Quitting is for cowards.

> Quitting is for cowards

No, quiting is for people who want something they don't have. Loss-aversion is a very powerful force, especially in the hands of senior leadership.

I hope you'll reconsider your position because it greatly benefits your employer.

You don't have to be your job. I wish you well.

Awful? This is miles ahead of nearly ever other game studio out there. How do I know?

One of the people I served with aboard the USS Honolulu is a game designer for Darkpaw Games. They have nothing like this. Not even close.

Another person is a high-level executive at Activision-Blizzard. He has compensation that is generous, but it took him 17 years to get there.

Yet another personal friend is a junior developer at Obsidian Entertainment. They don't have anything like this, at his level.

Maybe their system isn't perfect, but its a hell of a better than nothing.

Changing the terms post-hoc is pretty scummy. Logically you would assume having something is better than nothing, as I assume most would - simple math. The reality is anticipating more than you actually receive can be more detrimental. You make sacrifices you normally wouldn't if you are lead to believe there is a reward. Perhaps you turned down another job offer since you had been factoring those extra projektbucks and then they suddenly devalue at the end of the race. Maybe you treated yourself or your loved ones to a gift as a small token of appreciation for the effort spent on this rather than them. That $2000 in fairy-bucks turns out to be $500 and those extra hours amount to less-than-legal-minimum-wage.

Regardless of whether it's better than nothing - there is a tangible risk to having something accounted for that turns out to be short.

The game development industry has been a cesspool for worker exploitation for the longest time and this adds to a long list.

Obsidian is downright abusive towards any of their staff that isn't part of the old guard, and doesn't compensate any more to make up for it.

source: three people I know who worked there

sounds like a sure fire way of baking in "low hanging fruits" in release, and heroically picking them to get the bonus :)

don't game the game devs man...

On some level it makes sense:

-if we succeed massively, you should get an outsized portion of those winnings because of your immediately obvious hard work in the now that paid off later.

If not, then it literally doesn’t matter.

If getting anything at all for overtime and crunch is your definition of shittiest, you've not seen shit :)

I worked for a game studio that did this. Tokens could be used for a raffle. It was kind of a silly thing though and wouldn't be considered compensation, there were normal bonuses and stock grants. It also (usually) wasn't tied to crunch. The tokens were handed out by peers

That seems far more like being paid for the windfall of hard work than most (eg) executive bonus schemes, where you're disproportionately rewarded for the work of others.

But no, they should absolutely also pay overtime.

Why is this sort of practice so common with video game studios but not elsewhere in the technology industry?

This is well-trod ground, but it's common with any job where the supply/demand ratio is severely in the employers favor.

Not a ton of those jobs in tech, but the dynamic is frankly pretty similar to professional cheerleaders. Lots of people want the job, relatively few of them, and the skill floor isn't all that high.

It's common in tech two.

Of the places I've worked that promise some form of bonus, I have only been paid a single one - $172.

In my experience, bonuses are almost solely a carrot to hang over people's head. They rarely actually get paid out even if the company is doing well.

Stock and options have there downfalls, but at least their terms are in writing.

Because they have a line of people wanting to work for them despite everything.