I would strongly consider supporting a video game union, if only to help formalize the things that the good shops do and bring those practices industry wide.
Personally I haven't done a day of overtime in seven years and I feel reasonably compensated but there are clearly other places out there that are still exploiting their workers.
Improving worker input into production schedules and creating clear guidelines around overtime compensation time would probably reduce companies that rely on "crunch time" too much. Over time is ok if the work needs to be done, but workers should have a reasonable expectation of knowing how much of a break they'll get after. Not that it's some random (small) number in their managers' head.
There are plenty of other workplace issues aside from over time and wages that a union could help address.
Increasing transparency and input from workers into company finances and road maps, improving hiring practices, creating more opportunities for young new grads to break in, increasing diversity.
Standardizing crediting would be one close to my heart.
One time I was laid off from a company along with hundreds others due to various company issues, and eventually the project I was working on made it to market. I made it into the credits, but instead of having a "software engineer" title and naming the significant feature area I worked on, I was reserved in a long list of "Special Thanks".
This sort of thing is totally unacceptable. Would be an area addressable by an industry union.
> creating more opportunities for young new grads to break in
Just going to point out, everywhere, I have ever heard of a union it generally made it harder for new people to come in, not easier, by increasing the commitment an employer is expected to make to an employee, and by making it harder to remove employees that need to be removed but can't because of their seniority with the union.
Just going to point out, everywhere, I have ever heard of a union it generally made it harder for new people to come in, not easier
My observation has been the opposite. I believe because the unions have an interest in increasing their membership, not letting it atrophy and decrease due to time and deaths. A union that doesn't have a growing membership is a union that will disappear.
In fact, some unions I've seen have teams of people (including lawyers) whose sole purpose is taking illegal immigrants working in their industry and getting them properly documented and teaching them English for free so that they will eventually join the union.
Where I have seen this is in carpenters, bartenders, maids, food service, stagehands, and a few others. The industries you've seen may be different.
Worth noting that if they didn't do this, then those same people would be easily exploitable competition in their profession, so it's probably self-interest even for the individual existing union members, as well as the union itself to bring them inside the system.
With the huge decline of unions there's no way the old ways are set in stone. A freshly unionized field should take care to make sure new members don't loose the politics and enthusiasm, leading to decline a generation later.
Unions lost for a couple of reasons: their feet were cut out from under them via outsourcing/globalization. They didn’t/couldn’t picket moving factories overseas and both political parties were complicit in this.
Similarly the economy moved toward services and unions didn’t prepare for that.
Three unions ossified, became political and self-serving (not looking after their workers solely but looking after the org for its own sake and its bosses.)
Yes this is all true to some degree. Check out the first article of https://libcom.org/files/Rad%20America%20V10%20I5.pdf for discussion of the changes to union structure at their peak which may helped along the 3rd.
My original point is the old unions have no leverage not to acknowledge this and accommodate the concerns of a newly union members in a freshly industry.
The only union I know much about is IBEW. My dad's family is huge, and everyone in it is an electrician basically.
The way it seems to work is that a contractor wants N number of electricians for a contract, so the first N electricians in the queue are laid off get dequeued and sent to work.
This is a really interesting system, and I think if there were subgroups of software engineers it would pretty much work fine. I think at the end of the day, SWEs tend to be picky about where they work, and employers tend to want SWEs with backgrounds that perfectly match their needs.
I dunno, I think if someone could figure out how to make a queueing system work, it could work for a lot of people and businesses.
It seems close to the agency model already. Only problem is, I don't see how you're going to get top engineers to join. Most of them are already making bananas money, and I don't see how highly compensated engineers would fit into this model at all.
> Only problem is, I don't see how you're going to get top engineers to join.
You appeal to their boredom. FAANG pays people to not compete more than anything. Rotation is a chance to break the monotony and actually be able to steer the ship for a change.
>I believe because the unions have an interest in increasing their membership, not letting it atrophy and decrease due to time and deaths.
It really depends. The smaller the organizing unit, the more short-sighted they're going to be because they have less leverage and they benefit less from long-term big picture thinking. For example, if I'm a union that organizes machinists specializing in a specific type of tool then my focus is going to be on keeping this tool in place and these machinists employed, even if it's at the expense of new entrants or generational changes in technology. If the union is organized for an entire industrial sector, though, then their focus is on organizing and developing labor rights and practices for the sector as a whole rather than any specific shop.
The big difference with these industries is that they are global. When the Austin office becomes uneconomical, it gets wound down and the Montreal office ramped up, or Warsaw, or Manila, or Brisbane, or... so many to choose from in many cases. The only power workers have over their employers is to stop work. Picket lines exist to increase the cost of bringing in new workers. But you are powerless if the employer is in a position to move the work elsewhere on the planet, especially if it is a net cost saving that will earn the executives a fat bonus.
The screen writers guild has some systems in place to ensure that a certain amount of scripts from 'new writers' have to be taken in. Not sure how effective that is, but that's a thing.
I was basically thinking about my present company that has done a great job of bringing in coops from local universities for work terms. We've had a great experience with this. However, this is one of the only games companies I've worked at that does it.
How does that square with what David Simon has to say in, “But I’m not a lawyer. I’m an Agent”?[1]. It seems pretty fanning about what happens to novices in the industry.
There's definitely a tension. When employers can treat employees as disposable, there is more firing and thus (sometimes) more hiring.
However, unions increase the value of jobs. Union workers enjoy a better QOL and career stability, and they can actually build a life for themselves without worrying about being fired on a whimsy.
Luckily for something like game development, it is a growing industry with a low barrier to entry. Finding a job or starting a new company is very realistic-- until the next economic downturn, which will hurt union and non-union workers alike
Game dev is not a low barrier to entry industry. It is WAY easier to get a SDE job at a FAANG straight out of college than it is to get a job as a programmer at a big name studio, even with experience.
Maybe at a place like Valve, but that's a special case. a private company swimming in cash and having basically zero urgency to innovate or produce even derivative content.
Any of the Rockstar Games studios, Naughty Dog, SCE Santa Monica, Bungie, Epic Games, any of the main Activision-Blizzard (Ininity Ward, Treyarcht) or EA studios (Respawn), etc... basically any major studio rarely hire straight out of college.
> everywhere, I have ever heard of a union it generally made it harder for new people to come in
I'd imagine unions are most prevalent in industries with a surplus of workers.
If you have a rapid growth industry with competitive hiring practices, you're probably getting treated great and courted to switch jobs for higher pay pretty frequently.
If your industry is stagnant and management is constantly trying to replace you with less expensive workers that can be quickly trained to do the same job I can see why there would be a strong desire to unionize.
In that sense, I can see how the union would be protecting it's workforce by stemming the inflow of new employees. The fewer the supply of workers, the higher demand for the one's you have.
One key difference for unions is whether a job is project based or more of a permanent placement. The problems you mentioned are often a problem in the latter like with teacher or police unions. Project based workplaces are different in that they have a natural turnover and people need to be continually rehired so seniority or difficult to remove employees are less of a problem. The various unions in the entertainment industry are a good example of this. Video games are closer to the project based end of the spectrum.
> Standardizing crediting would be one close to my heart.
Oh hell yeah.
I did 3+ years on a title, nearly killing myself to ship it. When I realized that doing that much OT was doing to my personal relationships, health and sanity I left with a generous transition ~8mo before ship(including tossing 2.5mo of PTO because they didn't have to pay it out and I could never take it).
Listed under "special thanks" as well, it would have cost them nothing to do proper crediting but instead a giant middle finger for "betraying" the company.
There's so many aspects of that industry that are messed up, I heard similar stories across the board form co-workers at the places they had worked at. Since everyone had gone through the hazing process it was a self-perpetuating cycle that didn't stop.
> it would have cost them nothing to do proper crediting
How much does this matter? (Really asking, I know nothing of this industry, nor film.)
What I mean is, beyond enjoying seeing your name, does it make a big difference in landing subsequent jobs to have your name publicly listed at this size / under this heading / etc. on past work? Do companies hiring you go and check what you say against the credits, or how does this work?
With less and less titles shipping as boxed-product and very few of those having anything approaching an instruction booklet crediting is almost dead already.
Some in-game credit screen buried in the options menu or after completing a 50+ hour campaign is about as un-readable as the end credits on a Netflix TV show.
The argument against you getting a full credit is that it would list your contribution to the game as the same as a colleague who worked through the ship process. I'm not sure how it works in the production side of the film industry but I imagine it is not dissimilar.
You definitely did the right thing by getting out and looking after yourself and those around you. The industry has and is responding to the loss of good people due to burn-out, not at every developer but some of the most notorious have realized the level of churn hurts their ability to hire and retain the best. The more push-back there is against the onerous work practices the more quickly they will stop.
> The argument against you getting a full credit is that it would list your contribution to the game as the same as a colleague who worked through the ship process.
There should be universally-agreed rules around how crediting works: how about a case where a noob who joined a month before shipping gets credit, but someone who slogged for 2 years but quit gets relegated to "Special Thanks" despite putting more effort. Does that seem fair to you?
To me no, it is not fair at all (although generally there is little to no hiring in the last few months before shipping).
From the game company perspective making the new employee feel good is better than making a former employee feel good.
What is interesting with games that are live for multiple years is how often should in-game credits be updated and how do you credit over time as people join and leave the product with differing amounts of tenure and influence.
But yes, universally agreed crediting rules would be wonderful. I don't see how the collective industry gets there outside of a union pushing for it.
This argument is unsympathetic to the millions of creative professionals who deserve credit for their work. It's about a lot more than just a list of names.
Authors get credit for their books. Everyone who works on a film gets credit for their contribution. This goes into your CV, resume, IMDB, whatever. It's important.
I understand but I don't see the industry going back to boxes 30 page with instruction books.
Having an industry approved crediting scheme would be wonderful but for the most part the only people viewing it is going to be people on the credits. No games industry recruiter looks at a resume and verify names against the in-game credits (or even IMDB) - they will check against references and people they know that you may have worked with. Same as every other job application.
Film may be the last industry where everyone involved still gets credited. TV credits are basically unreadable, streaming music credits only cover the artist, books only list the author.
I'm not arguing against credits, just that they are not important outside of being a cool 'thank you'.
It's not just about having a name listed in an instruction book or in an end roll, and never has been. You know where most TV/film credits are actually seen? On IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and other sites. I can go look up my cousin who works in the film industry and see every film he's ever worked on: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4253724/ That's the primary way that film credits are consumed, and it would be great if we had something similar in our industry (the closest we get is a list of open source contributions e.g. on your GitHub profile). But, for example, I've contributed code to Google Cloud Platform, Android, and the Google Search app, but you'd never know it unless you worked at Google and looked through the monorepo very closely. The closest I can get would be to write my own credits page, but how would anyone verify that?
So it's fine if you don't care, but plenty of other people do care about getting credit for their work, and to them it is quite important. This describes most people in many industries. So yeah, it is important.
This is very specific to gaming though. The vast majority of people are never credited for anything. If that's the best justification for a union then it's not gonna happen.
> I'm not sure how it works in the production side of the film industry but I imagine it is not dissimilar.
I don't know about films, but credits on TV shows apparently work more like lifetime achievement awards than like a list of who worked on what. Everyone touches a lot of different things, your total contributions are tracked informally, and when they exceed a certain amount you get an episode credit. You need to have touched the episode, but you might have done much less work on that particular episode than a dozen uncredited people.
Source: Mark Rosewater's writing about his time on Roseanne.
Yeah except I knew many people in the industry who would cross reference mobygames when a resume came in and not all of our hires were with direct references.
Also this was a boxed retail title with no dlc so the credit list was pretty fixed.
I'm out of the industry now with no plans to ever return but the whole process just seemed pretty and spiteful. We worked just as hard during those 3 years as I did shipping other titles before that so I don't really buy that leaving early changes the title on which you worked as.
> Since everyone had gone through the hazing process it was a self-perpetuating cycle that didn't stop.
I find it’s more than people only get one shot to organize their project, and it’s scarier to try something you haven’t vs something that was extremely painful but delivered. There’s a large contingent that believes without massive overtime and crunch a game will never be released.
I don't really understand this obsession with credits in the game dev industry. There's no credit list in GMail for example, and yet everyone is fine with it?
Maybe there should be? If we had a union to fight for it there could be. I think it'd be cool if my name was on the credits list of every software I've ever written. Hell, there should be.
This is something open source gets right that companies don't -- in open source, there is a credits list. Both in the contributors listing and in the actual publicly accessible history of commits itself (which in turn auto-generates contributor lists e.g. on GitHub).
In some ways it's more akin to having a FAANG on your resume. Games are traditionally much more project-based than a service such as GMail and employers, colleagues will use it as a benchmark for hiring and networking.
I'm an example myself, as I started in the industry working on a strategy-genre game, and talking shop about the genre makes me more appealing to studios that serve that.
Game studios believe that the relevant experience is much better indication of a prospect's value than the ability to solve programming puzzles for a few hours. Credits are the proof of this experience.
Google, on the other hand, appears to be exactly opposite [1]. So, it appears that, for somebody who worked on Gmail and pursuing the similar line of work in a company similar to Google, proofs of experience would be of little value.
The most cursory thing an employer can do is Google an prospective employee, and that will bring up title credits on games you've worked on. If you were to Google my name, for instance, as I don't have any social media presence other than LinkedIn, you only get game titles I'm in the credits of.
But it's a silly system. As a corporate worker I have no social media presence, so you won't find anything I've ever worked on.
Instead I have a resume and references which can be checked to determine if what I'm saying is true.
Now being able to do that automatically is great, which means we should just take the whole process on our own hands as software developers and create something that represents us?
Oh, I list my greatest hits on my resume, of course. It's a matter of trust. I don't know how much prospective employers trust interviewees, to be honest. I can only assume they do a Google search at the time of the interview (or just before) to do a bit of investigative work and then a background check before beginning the job.
When the game ships, you are likely looking for a new job. And what job you can get depends on how many games you have shipped, and credits are the evidence.
That's saying that being in a union is cost-free. I suspect it's not. There's usually dues of some kind, and if you're in a union shop the rules may be less flexible - not just for the company, but for you. And the rules being less flexible for the company may have consequences for you.
That said, insurance costs, too, but most of us have it...
I read all of this as "Major union seeks to extract rent from an additional sector".
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.
I read all of this as "Major union seeks to extract rent from an additional sector".
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.
> All the video game industry has to do is to give its workers better treatment than they would get under union stewardship. Problem solved.
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.
Apparently if you just pay people a bit more and give them free lunch that's enough to placate people to the point they regard the very notion of collective bargaining as 'childish'.
The same lesson that unions have learned about killing machine shops by locking down production and employee ownership to the point where no growth can happen. Unions tried to stop the progress of new technologies and save jobs and failed. Thousands of years worth.
Humble overlords are required, that doesn't make the entire industry necessary for unionization.
Sadly they might actually be. It's game theoretically an efficient strategy because they can extract so much before the workers unionize that it'll still be cheaper than compensating them fairly all along.
Only if institutional myopia keeps them focused solely on the next quarter or two.
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.
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.
Unpopular opinion: Large segments of the american population don't even real realize they have foolishly internalized decades of anti-union propaganda.
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.
Yup, and every person on welfare eats caviar and drives a Cadillac.
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.
This is just a logic error masquerading as an argument. Discrediting single instances of x’s behavior is an endless game, therefore all instances of x are bad. You haven’t provided anything inherent to unions to discredit them that wouldn’t be true of any other form of social organization, from governments to corporations.
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.
I don't mind unionizing factory work on institutionalized sports, even though that can go poorly in some cases. There are some industries that have finite requirements and no amount of union bending can change the nature of the industry. There's only a few games that employ enough people to become an institution that requires worker protection. Star Citizen, Blizzard, Riot Games are institutions in their own right. Thousands of indie games are not and can make good wages or average wages by working solo or in small teams. Forcing these people to work to union rules (which will happen with union capture) breaks the model of independence for the sake of salaried employees. The large companies will merge and the industry will die. I can't agree with that.
The game industry will do just fine with a union presence. It won't die.
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.
Indie films still get made, big actors work at scale, or certain content shifts to new platforms (e.g. streaming). The decline of independence in Hollywood has little to do with unions and more to do with unregulated, entertainment industry monopolies.
Who do you think enforces those monopolies? Working outside SAG can have deleterious effects on your access to future roles. Disobeying Disney as a movie theater can sink your access to their future releases. Both the institution and the union work together to make the monopoly. They are two sides of the same coin.
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.
Again, this is a failure of imagination, believing that unions are inevitably shaped like the unions of the past. As tech is founded on disruption and innovation, it is defeatism to assume that worker relationships have to be a certain way- especially when there are models of unions and management having a less antagonistic relationship, as in Germany.
I think op is saying that the video game developers are choosing to subject themselves to it and therefore they don't need protections. Even though conditions are said to be bad studios somehow seem to have an endless supply of developers.
They do subject themselves to it. However, what that analysis lack is an understanding that the worker/employer power relationship is completely asymmetrical. Workers have everything to lose, Employers have nothing to lose. That leads to 'illogical' decisions such as workers who could find work elsewhere opting not to: Shit, their rent, their medicine, their family is on the line here. Maybe the new job will be worse, or have worse benefits, or not let you skip out early on Friday to go to soccer practice?
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.
Let's use Facebook as an example. The median employee salary is $240,000 [1], but Facebook makes an average of $1,620,000 in revenue per employee [2]. Why is it okay for a company to extract a so much more money from an employee than they pay them, but not okay for employees to band together to get paid what they're worth?
1. Using revenue comparison is incorrect. Profit is more complicated because you have to add back in compensation (and if necessary be able to know when r&d comp is capitalized and be able to break out r&d versus sg&a if you only talking about comp for particular groups of employees) but it is the correct per-employee stat to compare.
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.
I think you radically underestimate how over staffed these firms are. The only sorry of strike that could harm Facebook is if the SREs actually shut down all the servers. But you can get DevOps people anywhere and management there is technical do could easily run the firm themselves for a while. All the strikers would do is get themselves fired
For a market to be both free and fair workers must have symmetric power and information with ownership and the customer. Otherwise the system is inherently unfair (in an economic sense) toward workers.
Every power dynamic is inherently unbalanced and unfair to at least some degree, but I agree you want it to be as fair as possible as often as possible.
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 guess I agree in theory, but if ownership doesn't want to deal with a union, what makes you believe that your idea would be an easier sell? Unions are basically the compromise.
> 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.
Good points. I suppose employee ownership is better institutional policy from the outset. I'm not sure it would be an easy transition later in the life of the business.
I have actually seen that a few times, but it's mostly small local businesses. Modern Times Brewery recently implemented that kind of program. At the end of the day, the owners have all the power to make that decision.
> Why is it okay for a company to extract a so much more money from an employee than they pay them, but not okay for employees to band together to get paid what they're worth?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Facebook is competing with other FAANG [et al] companies for talent, and not all of them are in the same sector. Their market position is only relevant in that it allows them to compete for the kind of talent that $300k a year can buy, and they deem it necessary for maintaining that position, they are not going to pay more than necessary nor are you entitled to more just because they can.
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.
I don't think anyone is arguing that you shouldn't freely associate. Facebook employees who want to collectively bargain should be allowed to. That's just free association. They just shouldn't be allowed to prevent other employees from not unionizing and working without the union.
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.
If a union can't form an exclusivity agreement with a company, then all exclusivity agreements between any type of organization should be banned. That would be true freedom of association.
Right-to-work laws just take away the right of workers to negotiate on the same terms that businesses do.
Oh no, I think they should have the right to negotiate an exclusivity agreement. And if the business takes it, so be it. I don't think they should be allowed to impose that agreement on the business through law.
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.
I am unaware of any way for a union to compel a business to become exclusive without an agreement as described here[1]. Can you provide a citation for this?
Stronger unions also have their issues. I strongly disagree that union-only shops should be allowed.
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.
Those people don't generate $1,620,000 with their labor once they leave Facebook. That number comes from being plugged into the Facebook machine, part of its system. Which is why Facebook gets the revenue and the employee gets a salary.
But that system is made of employees. It's not the office building or the computers. It's not the copy machine or the coffee maker. It's other workers.
If all I needed to do was make the same capital investments as facebook to get the same returns wouldn't that be wonderful?
It’s more than just employees. It’s also existing capital, both physical and in form of intellectual property (e.g. the codebases and their real world deployments), and the organization of labor inside the company. If you take 10 000 random software engineers and put them in one huge office without any business structure imposed on them, you aren’t going to see billions of dollars in revenue any time soon.
This is the wrong number. The average revenue per employee isn't what determines a wage, even when the employees are fully interchangeable: it's the marginal revenue brought in by each extra employee.
One of the persistent sources of economic misunderstanding is the difficulty of marginal thinking. It's frequently counterintuitive and leads to a false sense of injustice, e.g., "If teachers are so important, why are they paid so little?"
They aren't extracting money from the employees. Edit: and you're comparing revenue. FFS. Shouldn't the power company's employees also get a share of Facebook's profits, because they wouldn't be able to run their website without electricity?
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.
Sure, and you can tie the two together more with higher equity component. But the argument here is that Facebook should pay engineers more because they make a lot of money. My point is, then should a company that doesn’t make as much money (which is most) pay their employees less? Or in the cases of companies that don’t make money, not pay their employees at all?
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 financially beneficial to a company? Maybe not, unless as a means to incentivize employee retention and attract high performers.
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?
Not frozen in amber, but perhaps linked to something else like performance, expertise, experience etc. If we're talking about this as a means of wealth distribution then that seems like it should be something at the government policy level.
While they are indeed very high compared to other professions and the national average, they are still on relatively low growth compared to others. There's also the argument that it's not software engineers that are overpaid, but that everyone else is underpaid [1].
It's Ok because employees are carrying short term debt, not equity. They don't participate in that upside you're referring to. And, conversely, they are not exposed to the downside either. There are numerous options available for those employees to have equity in that or many other companies if they're willing to risk their capital.
Revenue isn’t income. Much of that $1.6 million goes towards paying suppliers and contractors and landlords and isn’t available for employee compensation.
No they are worth whatever the going rate is for their position. The market decides the salary. If programming was a unskilled job you would get supermarket salaries.
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.
In other industries, perhaps, but it's standard in tech work to move jobs frequently. Every time I hire a new dev I slog through 200 - 300 resumes, the overwhelming majority of which have never held a job longer than 18 months.
There's an easy rule of thumb ... is there an upward trajectory in the responsibility or stature of the roles, or are the moves mostly lateral?
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.
It's not the total number but the frequency. If your average tenure is around two years then you should be totally fine. Anything between 1-2 years might be fine or might raise some questions. Below one year, then yeah, it might start looking bad.
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.
"not like you don't have options in this industry"
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.
> but it's not like you don't have options in this industry...
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?
> 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.
The reality is this board heavily trends towards SV and other tech hubs where salaries are outrageous and everyone is flush with choices for employers. Not everyone working in tech can walk into their local coffee shop and walk out with a job.
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.
Click the "Who's Hiring?" threads on this site. There are tons of 100% remote jobs with great benefits that pay 150k a year or more
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
Collective rights extend beyond salary to the ability to have say over the basic terms and content of one’s labor. Some people can certainly be bought out of these concerns with high enough pay, but salaries at Google weren’t high enough to prevent people from organizing around sexual violence in the workplace nor work on Chinese surveillance. And I don’t think their organizing around these issues was “childish” in any fashion, no matter what they were being paid.
Your comment is really rubbing me the wrong way. How is it "childish" to band together and fight for better working conditions? Because you aren't literally dying in mines you have no right to demand improvements? Your bar is that low?
> Tech work isn't like coal mining where ... the number of alternative options available to the average worker is low to non-existent.
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.
>> 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
>> 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.
Unions are not just there to protect people close to poverty wages or who work in potentially deadly conditions. Sure, as a software engineer you are pretty well off to begin with, but there is also the question of fairness - how much of the company's success are workers actually reaping? Are they really getting a fair share of the fruits of their labor? The union should help with that, if nothing else.
>and where the number of alternative options available to the average worker is low to non-existent.
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.
> Tech work isn't like coal mining where your health is legitimately at risk on a daily basis
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".
I don't feel like I have any options. I've felt burned out for about four years now. Our tech stack is very old and my my interest in programming is near zero at this point. I feel like I'm just waiting out the inevitable. I don't live in SV or an area with more than a handful of companies who would provide a desirable job.
Most do not get multi-million-dollar pay, hell a lot of people there barely make a living. The reason there is an union there is because a lot of those same people would work for free to get a chance at making it in the industry (interns don't get paid), that is highly exploitable.
> 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.
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.
There are plenty of examples where unions can be a constructive force in securing good working conditions while promoting good business practices. Given the poor reputation of video game development work this could be a really positive development.
That being said, the last time I had a unionized job I was pretty disappointed with the results. They consistently failed to secure cost of living adjustments, and the one time I got a pay bump was to ensure that I would be ineligible for an increase in the federal overtime threshold.
AAA video game development has many similarities with the production of big budget Hollywood movies. Hollywood was unionized in response to the incredible abuses of "the studio system". I wonder the degree to which the Hollywood union system can be brought to AAA video game studios. One issue is that AAA video game development is more internationalized than Hollywood. Overall I think we are likely to see AAA video game studios unionized since the workers are both treated very poorly, skilled, powerful and are hard to replace.
A common factor between video games, Hollywood, and many other successful unions is that the supply of potential workers outpaces the amount of jobs available. This is the reason why general tech workers are treated better than people doing the exact same thing in the video game industry, because video games are just "cooler" and people are willing to sacrifice to work on them. This shifts the balance of power into the employers favor and allows them to enact policies and standards that are difficult to endure. Unions are a great way to shift that power balance back to neutral or even in favor of the workforce.
USA has a pretty bad track record when it comes to unions. In theory they are great, but in practice they get implemented really poorly.
I think we need to examine how other countries do unions because I agree, the one union I was in for a short time (teachers' union in California - I was basically forced to join even though the job was only temporary) felt like a ball and chain around my ankle taking a cut of my pay more than I felt like it was empowering me.
Public sector unions are a completely different ball game than private sector unions.
I whole heartedly believe in worker organization and believe that tech workers should unionize, but it is also true that in a lot of different pieces of this country public sector unionization has been an unmitigated disaster.
In any niche of our society that is not legible to the average person, public sector unions + the morass that is local politics in the US creates a downward spiral between public sector union workers and the politicians they bring into power.
The subway in NYC for example is broken for a number of reasons, but high on that list are the efforts of the transit worker union to block improvements in operational performance and their lobbying for Andrew Cuomo who might be one of the most transit hating governors in the last 100 years of New York politics.
Employer and union incentives need to align to some extent. The issue with a lot of public sector unions I see is there is no incentive for the union to be effective. Not like the employer will go bankrupt.
As the article notes, in effect they have to be, since no one in the games industry has any experience with labour organizing. Outside help from an existing union is the way to jump start the process.
I think the existing framework is largely broken for skilled workers in the US.
These unions have not evolved in decades, they're not going to. Many of these unions actively protect long time workers who are just running out the clock, refuse to advance their skills, and put up barriers to deal with them... to the detriment of new union members, and they do it by design.
Keep in mind once you pick a union ... that's it, there's no need for that union to change, there is no competition.
> we need to examine how other countries do unions
The biggest difference is that in other countries, the employee can pick any union they want, while in the US each employer is locked to a single union.
The US had a fine track record until they started pushing anti-union propaganda, started having union corruption and corresponding aggressive police crackdowns, and the government abandoned the working class. Now Michigan is a right to work state and free trade has killed thousands of domestic manufacturing jobs.
Employers tend to be a lot more hostile to unions in the US. This manifests with deliberately spread FUD about unions (e.g. the ridiculous Walmart video), covert attempts to sabotage, depiction of schoolteachers as terrorists (by the Kentucky governor) and, in one rather extreme case, aerial bombardment of striking workers.
Beyond that, you can’t really compare US unions to European ones because of the virulent anti-communism of US politics. In Europe, following the war, left wing coalitions of socialists, communists, and left liberals secured major parliamentary victories for workers. In the US, by contrast, sector-wide bargaining was banned, strikes were limited, and anyone with vaguely Marxist sympathies was purged from politics, the labor movement, and many industries through state intimidation and violence. Any comparison of unions across countries, and the shortcomings of American ones, has to be understood through this historical lens.
Yeah, it's a great feedback loop: pass piles of laws making unions ineffective, then watch as workers complain about how their unions are ineffective. Add propaganda videos (a la walmart) to the mix, and stir.
The video game industry seems like a prime candidate for a union.
But otherwise I agree. Based on my experience a union is just another layer of bureaucracy that ends up defining your job, career path, and etc without you getting to decide. They're just as full of mixed motivations as any employer.
I think something like SAG-AFTRA would be the perfect model. We already function as actors... We audition for coding roles... The recruiters are like managers... Most roles are for 1.5 years...
If the major FAANG companies had an association called the Software Development Industry... Programmers would join a Software Developers Guild... Annually the guild would negotiate with the Software Development Industry and create daily minimum rates, safe working conditions, and worker protections for software developers.
(what kind of protections... I think assuring workers can operate and compete freely... No anti competitive behaviors such as refraining from soliciting one another’s employees in order to avert a salary war)
If FAANG doesn't do it, I would not be surprised other firms push for it as a way to compete for talent.
Imagine, instead of figuring out cap tables and trying to prevent getting screwed by dilution... imagine if that task was delegated to the Guild and they could hire people to negotiate for that and monitor that on an ongoing basis.
Imagine if those options could be captured in a defined benefit plan or packaged in some other way where professionals could be hired to manage the risks inherent with taking options from a startup.
I think too many people think about dockworkers and construction workers when unions are discussed.
Please review the SAG agreements here:
If you are a great programmer you might charge 8x the daily minimum. No one is forcing you to accept the minimum, but you should not have to accept anything below the minimum.
If you could delegate tasks to the guild to monitor the financial health of your employer, manage your stock option negotiation, and negotiate a daily minimum each year... you could offload a lot complicated issues and at least focus on your work...
At a certain point a manager could assist with these tasks as well, especially if you are 8x the daily minimum.
The daily minimum is to make sure no one takes advantage of people (ie, young employees at startups)...
People think that their specific workplace issues will be fixed by a union, but unions are run by people and you can get a weak union rep just like you'd get a bad boss, except that your paying directly for the rep. Or there might be rules on the book but no one enforces them or the rest of your union doesn't think your ideas are important enough to be included.
Sounds like you just had a bad union or said union was handicapped. A lot of unions now are not even "allowed" to strike, which is THE tool to secure better working conditions.
and what were your total union dues during this period ? Because if the union failed to get you a COLA increase then the dues would have put you in the red.
I worked in the video game industry for several years.
Being "in the red" over dues wouldn't be on by top-100 list of things to care about.
The regularly use worker hostile behavior - Two famous examples are eternal crunch times and laying off entire teams after shipping a game, even after luring them from other companies with promises they wouldn't.
Eventually, I left that industry entirely, which was unfortunate.
I loved what I was making, but I hated what they could get away with doing to the workers.
It reminded me of Hollywood - So many young actors wanted the job, they knew they could mistreat them, and regularly did.
A union would be excellent here.
Don't get caught up on the money part.
I am not making the argument against unions, perhaps the example provided above. Not all unions are created equal. Unions can be a good thing to enact change and are proven to work in creative fields as Hollywood could attest. That being said, Hollywood seems to take dump on many post production services and VFX which traditionally don't have unions. The nature of the work also allows for the work to be farmed out to companies all over the world.
How Americans can be so anti-union by default is really beyond me when looking at the facts at the ground:
* A culture of overwork (especially in the game industry).
* No vacation.
* No parental leave.
* No sick leave.
* At-will-employment (which inherently causes massive under-reporting of things like sexual harassment in the workplace due to the fear of losing ones livelihood, and please spare me the "actually it's already illegal!", very few people are willing/capable of mounting a messy legal case on their own).
You are making seriously sweeping allegations, could you not? It's hard to have a serious discussion when someone goes generalizing 300 million people and all of their jobs.
>* No vacation.
>* No parental leave.
>* No sick leave.
All three of these are provided, I don't have a union.
>At-will-employment (which inherently causes massive under-reporting of things like sexual harassment in the workplace due to the fear of losing ones livelihood, and please spare me the "actually it's already illegal!", very few people are willing/capable of mounting a messy legal case on their own).
It's 2020, any allegation of sexual harassment is treated incredibly seriously across the board. Yea, I have no doubt it's a major headache. But an accusation of sexual harassment is a serious thing, it shouldn't be something we ever allow to be filled out anonymously, thrown in a complaint box, and assumed as true. It could lead to a firing and possibly criminal charges, lets not try and pretend that's not serious.
Part of why your comment bothers me so is that you are generalizing all Americans. The game industry may make sense to have a union, but you simply call out all Americans as being anti-union, as if it's something unfathomable. Different professions have different circumstances, not all of them need a union.
> All three of these are provided, I don't have a union.
You said it right, they are provided. In Europe they are not provided: they are your right and it cannot be taken away by your employer. Also an anecdote doesn't invalidate something that is true for a vast majority of the american workforce. But even if it was just a single person, it would still be a tragedy and a problem to solve.
>Also an anecdote doesn't invalidate something that is true for a vast majority of the american workforce.
You just love your wide sweeping claims don't you? No it is not true for the vast majority of the american workforce.
>You said it right, they are provided. In Europe they are not provided: they are your right and it cannot be taken away by your employer.
Can we please not move the goal posts, I thought this was a union discussion? If everyone in the U.S should have 4 weeks vacation, 4 months maternity leave, however much sick leave is deemed appropriate, that can be done at the legal level. You do not need unions to exist to do that!
> that can be done at the legal level. You do not need unions to exist to do that!
Unions allow workers to wield political power collectively as well. Union endorsements are valuable, union money, union member donations. Instead of having billionaires like Bezos or the Koch brothers buying up media and giving millions to candidates to push their agenda, ordinary people can be heard.
Why do you think so many old school union people were outright socialists?
Unions were always the way to gain those rights: weekends, 8hours a day, abolition of child labour, they were all fights won by unions. Now USA have weak business unions and no more rights are gained. Same is happening is happening in Europe where neoliberal governments are disgregating the rights won by unions in the last 2 centuries.
It's not moving the goal post: unions are about improving the conditions for workers and when they are powerful enough, they can demand the State to crystallize their rights in law so that the battles don't have to be done over and over in each factory and office. That's the endgame, the rest is just preparatory.
Honestly, OP's comments didn't come across as anti-union at all to me. They came across as not blindly pro-union (ie, they're always the right answer), but they also said that a union might be right for the game develop industry.
The US has federally mandated (job-protected, but not necessarily paid) parental leave, and a number of states have mandated paid parental and sick leave.
Of course, these are largely a product of lobbying by unions, which don't just do collective bargaining.
"Under the FMLA, most new parents can take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave without the threat of job loss. That’s most parents, not all parents. Employees qualify for leave under the FMLA when they’ve worked 1,240 hours over 12 months at a company that employs more than 50 people. With part-time workers and small business employees left in the lurch, only about 60 percent of American workers are entitled to leave under the FMLA.
The FMLA does not require your employer to pay you while you’re home with your kid. So even if you’re legally entitled to take leave, you might not be able to afford it."
Not to mention that with at-will employment this is essentially a moot point. If you qualify for FMLA and take paternal leave, they can still just fire you "just because we felt like it".
That's not really true with the civil standard of proof, which is preponderance of the evidence. If you can provide any evidence which tends to suggest that you were fired for an improper reason, the employer must overcome that with greater evidence that the firing was actually made for a reason that is not prohibited.
It's not like criminal law where violations have to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, so merely presenting a plausible alternative consistent with (even if not the most likely conclusion from) the evidence is adequate to avoid liability.
I would point directly to the rampant and historical abuse that has plagued union leadership in the US, in a litany of business sectors as the primary reason. One of the largest in the country, the UAW, is currently going through quite a turnover as multiple layers of leadership are being indicted for everything from fraud to racketeering.
Information about historical scandals is very searchable on the Googles.
Americans are very used to switching jobs to take better options and do not suffer bad bosses for long. I would say it is pretty rare to actually have a job with no vacation or leave.
Unions in the US can feel stifling, as they only rewarding if you can stick with the same job and position for a long time. It's not a very American mindset to stay with a job and make demands when you can just bounce to a slightly better one. And few people idealize working in the same job for 30 years.
Video game workers are probably an exception in that they are willing to agree to terrible terms in order to chase what they perceive is their dream job.
It's not a very American mindset because the unions have been stomped on and it's hard to find a decent job now.
Used to be that a (white cis male) person could go get a union job out of high school and they were set until a comfortable retirement with pension. Good luck finding that sort of security now.
I have a relative who is a Teamster and pays $16k in Union dues a year. He said the math on his benefits only works out for him if he works for more than 15 years in the same position. Obviously different for different unions, but the vast majority of benefits in most unions go to those with seniority.
What!? That is over 60× the membership cost of UNITE (the largest British union).
Apparently, comparisons between the US and Europe don't work here either.
Maybe this is because "union shops" are allowed in the USA. Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights forbids them (the right to free association is taken to provide the right not to associate).
> Maybe this is because "union shops" are allowed in the USA.
Not only are they allowed, but they're almost universal. Unions in the US (for various historical reasons) refuse to represent a bargaining unit unless they can claim the majority of the bargaining unit, which means that, in a unionized shop, every single employee must be covered by the same union.
Unlike in Europe, there is no competition between unions for workers in the US.
The facts on the ground is most people don't deal with that in their job. We don't have a culture of overwork, we get vacation, parental leave and sick leave. There are exceptions, but those are entry level no skill required jobs.
Sexual harassment is treated firmly in every company I've been in - even entry level jobs. There is no fear of retaliation for reporting it. (generally it is impossible to prove so the reporting doesn't go anywhere)
health care. It's a big problem. This is why many unions are pro-M4A. You start taking away the big things the company can hold over your head in a negotiation.
In tech we have those things you mention, mostly. We also have a labour market with massive demand. If that demand falls/supply increases then companies will start cutting costs.
When a lot of the people on HN actually experience some uncertainty, their attitudes will probably change.
In some parts of the US, the answer is "Our industry". There are areas where a reasonable argument can be made that overweening unions played a key role in setting up the local economy for cataclysmic failure. Detroit is an example.
That said, video games production doesn't look like that right now. It's just perhaps worth considering that people's fears might not be wholly meritless, baseless, and without foundation.
But again. This doesn't hold up to a straight forward comparison to many European countries. If labour costs would be so detrimental to employment we'd still be queuing to the transatlantic ocean liners.
We could always compare unemployment rates in the US to those in France for a straight forward comparison to a European country. Then we could compare full-time employment rates for another straight forward comparison to a European country.
The American experience is that labor can and occasionally has set itself up for massive failure in the past. The idea that there's literally nothing to lose fails a basic sanity check against not-so-distant American history.
It may be worth considering the possibility that some people might might legitimately, earnestly, and honestly perceive there to be real risks. A pitch to such people of "You have nothing to lose!" runs the risk of coming across as, optimistically, ignorant. Perhaps such things could be worth considering for a person as informed and thoughtful as yourself?
> We could always compare unemployment rates in the US to those in France for a straight forward comparison to a European country. Then we could compare full-time employment rates for another straight forward comparison to a European country.
Sure, go a head. Historically as well. Furthermore, what kinds of jobs are those actually? What is the quality of the jobs? Do they enable a dignified existence and so on?
> The American experience is that labor can and occasionally has set itself up for massive failure in the past. The idea that there's literally nothing to lose fails a basic sanity check against not-so-distant American history.
Do you have an example where it was obviously due to unions?
I wrote a more detailed response, but I have deleted it, as it was a distraction. Getting into the details of Detroit's economic history or a deep comparison between the US and French economies struck me as perhaps not as helpful as it could be while providing an endless profusion of points for differences of opinion to distract. I hope you'll forgive this editorial decision.
Please accept my sincere apologies if I have been in any way less than clear. All I ask if that you consider if it may be worth considering the possibility that some people might might legitimately, earnestly, and honestly perceive there to be real risks. People may have what seem to them to be good reasons to fear that they may actually have something to lose. Some of these reasons might be rooted in history in living memory.
Please, don't hesitate to ask if there's something you would like me to clarify about this core point.
No worries. I can of course understand that some might think so. I'm just cynical enough to assume that a corporation will move to a lower-cost country independent of the added 15% or whatever the amount in added labour costs that various benefits may add. If there's a profit increase waiting, they'll grab it.
If there's something wrong with the statistics given in the source, point it out. If you've got statistics that you think are more accurate, give sources, and say why you think they're more accurate.
But this drive-by snide comment is pretty worthless. You can be better than that.
Given the flow of the argument in this subthread, it seemed at least somewhat relevant. You seem to be trying to dismiss the point, not by argument, not by evidence, but merely by being dismissive. That's not a very convincing approach.
because brining up youth unemployment and nothing else is an honest argument about the merits of unions?
It's low effort. It's not useful. It provides no evidence for the argument being put forth. Really it's not even making any sort of argument. It's just a fact presented in the hopes that people will buy a tenuous at best relationship without further insight.
So jahaja raised the question, "What do you have to lose?" (by unionizing). And in response, Kalium said, "Our industry". That is, unionization often raises costs for companies (better pay, fewer hours and more benefits cost), and those costs could result in fewer jobs.
jahaja replied that "this doesn't hold up to a straight forward comparison to many European countries. If labour costs would be so detrimental to employment we'd still be queuing to the transatlantic ocean liners." Which seems to be saying that unions in Europe aren't costing jobs, so why should they in the US?
In reply to that, AndrewGaspar compared unemployment rates between the US and Europe. They are relevant to the question of whether greater unionization will cost jobs.
So: It is very much making an argument - that greater unionization costs jobs. And Europe was introduced by jahaja, a union proponent, not by the anti-union types.
But you, why do you keep trying to dismiss the topic without actually answering the point? The question is whether greater unionization hurts employment, your side raised the comparison of Europe, and the European unemployment statistics are grimmer than the US ones. Are you actually going to contribute something to the conversation, or are you going to keep trying to distract from the question at hand?
(Many of us would take your approach to mean that you know you that unions can cost jobs, you know the European data supports the point, and you just want to hide behind smokescreens because you know you don't have an answer. That's the impression you're giving. So, last chance: Do you want to concede the point? Or do you want to try to refute it?)
I did however say "many countries" not Europe as a whole. Since there's vast differences both in unionization and recent economic developments. There's clear and obvious reasons why for example Greece is where they are.
I mean, if unionization (and in the end high labour costs) really significantly hurt the economy and employment numbers it would be trivial to see through comparisons and we would already empirically know it.
Hmm. Say, the US, Canada, and western Europe, on a scatterplot that shows unemployment rate vs union membership rate. Anybody got that data somewhere?
Best I could find: Union rates: France 8.8%, Germany 16.5%, UK 23.4%, US 10.1%. Unemployment: France 8.9%, Germany 3.3%, UK 3.8%, US 3.5%. I must admit, that doesn't look much like correlation.
> But again. This doesn't hold up to a straight forward comparison to many European countries. If labour costs would be so detrimental to employment we'd still be queuing to the transatlantic ocean liners.
You can't use a "straightforward comparison" to Europe because labor law is so different in the US. European unions are legally required to compete with each other for workers, whereas American unions almost exclusively represent members where they assert exclusive right to representation.
That's a massive difference in incentives, and it makes for very different dynamics.
I don't think all Americans are inherently anti-union, just not inherently pro-union. Some of the issues you cited are real, and I think some of it can be addressed by unions. However 2 issues I see:
1) Unions aren't appropriate for all places.
2) The currently implementation and behavior of unions in the US are not all that great. For example I'm turned off of unions based on personal experience.
So for me, given the choice to vote I'd vote against an union at my current work place.
* I have over a month of vacation and sick time, not including holidays
* 1 month 100% paid family leave, with 13 weeks at 80% pay and an additional 13 at 50% pay, not including New York City paid family leave.
* Sick leave is rolled into paid time off or disability.
* At-will employment works both ways. If I get a better offer, I can leave.
Vacation, sick, and parental leave policies are not up to European standards yes, but it's a hell of a lot better than most people's 2 weeks of vacation.
Do you have any sources to back that up? The film industry is one of the most heavily unionized industries in America (if not the most!) and indie films are as popular as ever. The only way I can think of a union hindering independent content is that more people actually enjoy the company they work at and attempt to "strike it out on their own" less often.
I am saying that running your own show or a show with other people you value working with does not need to be under the thumb of union rules or overarching corporate pressure.
There is no scenario in entertainment where unions "keep to themselves". A union started will soak up the entire industry and now my show with people I respect, admire and fair equity shares now has time limits and controls none of us decided or agreed to because a union(s) can excommunicate us from the entire working industry.
The industry should self-regulate under threat. Implementing a union will benefit few but the union leaders. The film industry is a prime example of what happens and films like Star Wars barely exist in the face of union pressure. George Lucas hired Irvine Kershner to direct because he knew all about Hollywood, but was 'not Hollywood'. Gary Oldman turned down a SW role due to union rules. The public has no idea how cliquey and regulated the film industry is, thanks in part to the studio model and union rules.
I'd sooner call for a tech union and see a whole bunch of engineers get a proper cut of the $100 million+ companies that get sold without them seeing a dime.
Game industry artists are very skilled and can get work elsewhere for much easier conditions. They choose to stay and work hard and can choose to negotiate better salaries. I can't comment on mega-corps that there are limits to negotiations, in the independent part there is a lot more leeway. The conditions will always be difficult, timing is the difficulty that we can't control.
> I am saying that running your own show or a show with other people
If you're running your own thing then you aren't a worker. You aren't part of the union. Your input on union activities is not valuable, because you are the opposition.
The world is a good place with good people in it. The perception of bad actors and bad intent is your worldview, not mine. You have too much to gain from painting the world as a bad place, it's not trustworthy. The innocent everyday man aiming to be king of the union has all the personal motive in the world to manufacture a utopian vision of worker's rights. The real world has good people bearing a cross of suffering to generate something of meaningful value in this world.
They also have the incentive make those things happen.
The boss doesn't. The boss has incentive cut costs and increase profits. Even if the current boss is good person, the next one might not be. Situation might change the boss might go after workers to save profits.
We aren't on the same side of the table.
Look at Google. Good job, stable, good pay, solid benefits. Sounds great.
They were also engaged in massive wage fixing and are now firing union activists.
Some of the biggest companies in the American tech space value things other than money as the highest priority. Steve Jobs famously was product focused and warned against excessive greed.
Elon Musk poured his own money into his projects to the point of becoming bankrupt and was helped out by others who believed in the product.
Cutting costs is the antithesis of what these guys are doing, making outrageous profit is the marketeers and advertisers that came to slash and burn Apple. These guys making reasonable profits and achieving good things are doing so at the expense of greed. The world is a good place.
Google's "don't be evil" has left me uncomfortable when combined their actions.
Cadbury pushed a whole bunch of innovative workplace conditions and purchased a collection of houses to supply the workforce, without the pressure or installation of unions.
There will always be a fundamental conflict between what the worker can get from a company and what the company can get for it's goals. Unions can't change that and nor can bosses. We can see the good in the world for what it is.
Remarkably ignorant. Mining billionaires have said they could pay more tax. Bill gates is one of the biggest proponents of a robot tax and patent reform. Elon is a billionaire in Tesla stocks, not liquid cash. Tesla pays payroll tax and a bunch of other taxes.
What would you do with more taxes to save the world?
> Do you think union leaders get a cut of every member's pay or something?
Isn't this exactly what happens? You pay the union a percentage of your salary, which is then used to among other things pay union leaders salaries. And just to note, union leaders typically earn a lot more than union members, making this transaction regressive in nature.
Wow, this is a very cynical interpretation of union leaders salaries. The previous posts implies that they are enriching themselves through members dues in a caricature manner.
Can you explain to me why a union leader should earn many times more than the median union worker? Enforcing that they don't earn more than median workers would increase solidarity and be more fair, but as far as I know no unions have such a policy. Why do you think they don't do it?
I don't think they should. I think it should be quite frugal. Some pay too much, some don't. It's in any case vastly different than the multiplier that the execs get.
As much as I don't like the idea of unionizing tech workers in general, game development does seem like it's suffering from the kind of industry-wide coordination failure unions are built to address. Every source I've ever seen is unhappy with months-long crunch time - are there any serious arguments that it's a good development model?
If that kind of development model was that much of a liability, you'd think at least one studio or company would have figured that out and would now be killing it as a result. I suspect it's just one of many factors, and probably not that important by itself.
The bottom line is that the supply of game developers has historically outpaced the demand. There are simply a lot of people who really want to make games, and are willing to put up with those work conditions.
I mean (for developers at least), it's not as though most of them couldn't find work doing some other kind of SW dev that doesn't typically involve death marches. Game dev programming skills have plenty of applicability in other kinds of software. I know this from first hand experience. So there are definitely a lot of people who are doing this voluntarily, and not because they have few or no other options.
Given that, it's hard to see a way of solving these problems via unions that doesn't effectively increase the barrier to entry for game developers. I guess that's one way to deal with it..
> The bottom line is that the supply of game developers has historically outpaced the demand. There are simply a lot of people who really want to make games, and are willing to put up with those work conditions.
If game developers don't feel exploited by their conditions, then they probably won't join/create the union. If they do feel exploited, then the union will be a good thing.
> Given that, it's hard to see a way of solving these problems via unions that doesn't effectively increase the barrier to entry for game developers.
What barriers to entry do you foresee coming out of a union?
The employees at large companies like EA and Acti-Blizz and other big corps will join a union that will gain them more benefits at their day job. The feeder schools and universities will start getting all their students into union positions.
The independent 20% will be muscled out of relevance as the union can simply ex-communicate members that break the rules and the employees will follow union rules. Independents will have to toe union rules to get anything done and not really be independent anymore, just a cache of jobs that the union is too big or risk averse to do.
An artist run game industry will die (like United Artists used to be in film) and you will see the game industry become a studio model and institutionalized like Disney.
As we've never seen any examples of tech sub-industry unionize before, this whole scenario is of dubious provenance. Especially since 21st history labor relations will unlikely to mirror what happened a century ago.
> What barriers to entry do you foresee coming out of a union?
You can just look at what unions have done to other industries to see.
As it relates to tech workers, there could be senority rules, qualification requirements (such as degrees, ect), and retaliation against people who are precieved as not having "paid their dues" yet (iE, they might try to stop the bootcampers from entering the industry).
> "What barriers to entry do you foresee coming out of a union?"
Making game development more expensive, obviously, since ending the current abusive practices is going to cost the publishers and development studios more money plus the overhead imposed by the union itself. Unions may have their benefits but it's undeniable that there's a cost there.
You have a point, but I think what actually happens isn't so sure, because there are still market forces putting downward pressure on barriers to entry. So either:
(1) The profit from abuse/exploitation gave a pure surplus, and the barriers to entry will remain the same but the surplus on the back will go down
(2) There is no real surplus, the profit from abuse/exploitation was the only thing keeping barriers to entry as low as they currently are, and they'll increase.
The majority of development studios are relatively small and, if you follow industry news, bankruptcy is a routine occurrence; even some well known small and indie names are only one or two flops away from bankruptcy. Unions might be able to make headway against EA, Valve, or Activision but for the smaller studios, well, there is no surplus. You can't get blood from a stone no matter how hard you squeeze.
I think the question is "Is there a better deal that's possible without bankrupting the studio?" When it comes to it, a lot of game companies are essentially running like startups, but without the massive gluts of VC funding to give them runway. It's questionable how much small-to-mid-sized studios can increase costs without making it all the more risky that a single underperformance kills the studio.
Obviously, this is less the case at somewhere like EA/Activision/2K/Epic, and you could make the case that if they can't treat the employees better, then the project doesn't deserve to exist.
I think there are a lot of poor analogies and comparisons being made to Hollywood. AAA linear game development accompanied by massive sustained growth in production budgets has made some segments of games look like Hollywood.
Some segments of game development may continue to look like that. However, the mix of procedural content generation, user generated content, a strong skilled global talent market, and the US being of piece of a much larger global sales pie, makes it look nothing like Hollywood.
Hollywood has traditional been very much an American cultural product dependent on American talent both on and off screen to produce. Games are neither.
The boom-bust cycle of studios is of course another matter. Games-as-a-service may appear to be more suitable for unionization but the end result may just improve the economics of user generated content marketplaces.
No game developer is living on starvation wages, it is just a question of how much they get. If a game company can provide for its people and offer enough incentives that its workers aren't fleeing to better jobs it deserves to exist.
So why aren't the people leaving then? Maybe they love the game they are working on and prefer bad conditions over working on something else? Maybe they have non-standard backgrounds and would be forced to wash plates if not for this company? It isn't clear to me that a union would make the life of these people better.
> "If it can't afford to provide for its employees, why should a small company exist?"
If I rephrase that as "If a startup can't afford to provide for its employees, why should a startup exist?", it should be clear to HN readers why that is problematic. Without a way for new players to enter the market cheaply, you wind up with a stagnant industry fully of deeply entrenched players who are afraid to take creative risks. (Not unlike Hollywood, come to think of it.)
> If they do feel exploited, then the union will be a good thing.
For them, perhaps. But not so much for future would-be game developers, who will likely have a harder time finding a game dev job.
> What barriers to entry do you foresee coming out of a union?
Even if union membership does not become a requirement for a job, merely reducing the number of hours worked will increase the cost of making games, even if pay doesn't increase under a union. If games become more expensive on average, consumers will buy fewer games, all else being equal. Fewer games made = fewer opportunities for new developers = studios can be more selective in hiring.
Do unions decrease employment? I wasn't aware of that.
As I said in a different comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21982787), I don't think it's 100% sure that games would become more expensive. But if they do, I think it's a tradeoff we have to make in a humane society.
I didn't say that unions decrease employment. I did describe the mechanisms by which employment might be reduced due to increasing costs (regardless of the cause of the cost increases).
In the referenced comment, you speak of "profit from abuse/exploitation", which presupposes that abuse or exploitation is occurring. Most game developers (programmers at least) have skills that are valuable in other kinds of SW development. If they wanted to, they could usually find work that didn't require so much overtime and in many cases would pay better as well. So if they choose to continue working on games, it's just that: a choice, not something that is being forced upon them. Given that, the implication that they are somehow being 'abused' sounds at best paternalistic.
If our only consideration for every decision is whether or not if it will increase cost for employers, then we would still have child labor and slavery. I don't believe this is a hyperbolic statement. The specter of increased costs is used to justify opposing everything from higher minimum wages to the 40-hour workweek.
The point is that the large majority of these developers are choosing this line of work, not being forced into it. Including the long hours and frequently lower than average pay. Any comparisons to slavery or child labor are an insult to all those who actually suffer(ed) under those conditions.
You’re missing the point, which is that failing to act for fear of “increased costs” is a poor justification for being satisfied with a status quo.
And just because people currently are satisfied with mistreatment doesn’t mean it’s not worthy of change. Whether if that change comes from unions, or from the companies themselves.
I misspoke; I should have said, "you're missing my point". I think we may be talking past each other a bit.
> ..failing to act for fear of “increased costs” is a poor justification for being satisfied with a status quo.
Saying this is about "increased costs" is a gross oversimplification of my position. Personally I don't care much about what the costs are for these companies; I'm more interested in what things will be affected by changing those costs. If SW dev talent is made more expensive for game companies (for whatever reason), then fewer SW devs will be employed there than would otherwise have been. Now this may or may not be a good thing, but it does seem like a very likely and unintended effect.
> And just because people currently are satisfied with mistreatment doesn’t mean it’s not worthy of change.
If they don't like it, the particular people in question are literally free to stop putting up with it at pretty much any time! We're talking about people with very marketable skills working in a relatively thriving industry. Here I'm speaking of all software, not just games, since most skills of SW devs working on games are useful in other kinds of SW as well. If more of them chose to not put up with such mistreatment, then game companies would be forced to increase compensation and/or improve the work environment in order to find people to work for them.
That's a point I keep trying to make. It's easy to see that the status quo sucks; understanding why requires more consideration. There is a reason why these adverse conditions are more common in the games industry than in other areas of SW dev, and that reason is that there are a lot of people who want to work on games compared to other kinds of SW dev work. Having worked in games myself, I can think of a few reasons for this:
* Games are fun to play (well, ideally).
* There is a great variety of different kinds of technical problems that need to be solved in a typical game: graphics, sound, collision detection, network communication, performance, all manner of different kinds of custom development tools, to name just a few. Personally I always liked this aspect.
* There is definitely a certain cachet to being able to tell people that you work on games, and even more so if it's a game they know of. I know it may sound a bit far fetched, but don't underestimate this one.
If unionization were to achieve the goals of better working conditions and/or higher pay, then one would expect demand for gamedev jobs to increase further, but certainly not to decrease.
Now perhaps you would argue that regardless of all the above, game developers shouldn't have to put up with those adverse conditions, that they should get to work in their field of choice without having to work long hours for relatively lower pay. I totally agree that that is a very fine goal. I simply ask you to consider that 1) unionization does not address the underlying cause, namely the surplus demand for gamedev jobs and 2) trying to force these changes via unionization will have unintended consequences, namely fewer jobs. The benefits (better working conditions) are obvious but the costs are much more diffuse and much less obvious.
In short, the best way to refute my concerns about the unintended consequence of lower SW dev employment in a post-unionization game industry would be to show that either a) it won't happen or b) the benefits for those who have a job outweigh the loss of jobs that would have existed but don't. Personally I think a is very unlikely to be true, so I think it's really down to b: is it better or worse (and for whom) to have fewer, better jobs?
IMO this just feels wrong. If you're knowingly going into an industry with a bad rap where developers say they feel exploited then don't go into it. The studio has already given them a job, going into it and then complaining and demanding change seems a bit selfish, no?
I could understand if things were at one point great, and then some series of events lead to a worse situation with no options leaving. But I can't understand having options and choosing the bad one and then complaining about it being bad.
Does someone have a different viewpoint that could help?
It's not wrong because all jobs are by mutual agreement. You aren't in it by the grace of the owner. You have come to an agreement with them to trade labour for pay. Therefore if you do know the working conditions in general there is nothing wrong with trying to renegotiate using your leverage to get better conditions. This is most obvious in trying to negotiate promotions and pay rises in peoples day to day lives. The biggest issue for most workers is that the company that employs you has a lot more leverage than you do as an individual.
Collective bargaining at its most basic is a means by which employees can band together to increase their leverage and negotiate better deals for themselves.
Employees agitating for change is the basic building block for improving conditions.
Take the bad option knowing the downsides and work to make it less bad.
I see your point. But I think what you're taking for granted (tell me if I'm wrong) is that exploitation is somehow a necessary condition of making the game development industry work, and trying to improve it would destroy it.
If game design as a field can survive a decrease in exploitation, then why wouldn't someone want to follow their passion to game design, but not be exploited? Why wouldn't someone want to change the status quo?
CD Projekt Red has figured it out, but their company is funded by the Polish government...so I'd say they're in a unique position to be able to take their time.
Many well known game developers disagree with this notion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIvHkaV6Ri8 that this is a huge problem. All the sources you see seem unhappy because those stories get the most attention, but it doesn't mean that those things are occurring often or everywhere.
John Carmack is not a "game developer", John Carmack is an independently wealthy man who sometimes develops game engines (or VR tech, as the case may be).
Picking your random, above-99th-percentile literally-owns-multiple-Ferraris outlier and using him to discredit people who might be pulling $50K-$60K a year as line employees is downright disingenous.
John Carmack got to where he is by being a game developer. If you discount all wildly successful people in a field that is known to be a winner takes all environment then you won't have that many successful people to listen to.
John Carmack got to where he is by owning a game development company. That does not imply he didn't work at it and it doesn't imply that he didn't work hard but the difference between capital and labor is obvious and that is precisely what a union seeks to address.
(He's also a genius. And good for him for that. Most people aren't.)
He talks about this in the video. In his own experience in his studios he never noticed someone being unfairly pressured to work more than they wanted, and he had colleagues who worked 9 to 5 and who did just fine. He also claims that from people in the industry he spoke to, most people under these situations choose to work overtime because they value their work a lot, and that he doesn't buy into social engineering arguments that people are pressured into doing it because otherwise they'd get fired.
"Never noticed" is doing a lot of work for you there. Making line employees work more to achieve goals that cannot otherwise be reached except by pushing those employees to crunch is what managers are for. Why would an executive or a founder "notice" this? The work's getting done, what else do they care about?
It's possible that iD was well-run when he was there. (And, from what I've anecdotally heard, that's probably true--Todd Hollenshead gets a lot of respect from folks I know!) That doesn't mean other studios are run so well and it doesn't mean that Carmack's anecdotes cancel out, or even meaningfully put into question, those of people not in his rarefied circles. There are a lot of game developers out there and most don't have nearly the funding or the schedule luxuries that iD always did pre-Bethesda, when Carmack was most involved.
well, if he's right then people might just reject the union. if his experience is biased and/or anecdotal, we'll find out the truth. either way, no point in trying to undermine or discredit grassroots unionization efforts.
The article isn’t describing a grassroots unionization effort. The CWA, a large external organization which expects to benefit from the creation of game developer unions, is pumping in an unknown amount of resources and funding.
We should be quick to encourage genius outliers, but thats not most people, and those people shouldn’t be forced into death marches to ship games. The two concerns aren’t antithetical. Major industries like sports and entertainment, both of which are a heavy mixture of average and high-performers, are already unionized without any real drag on the exceptionally talented nor their compensation.
But it’s still an important example, because a union would not have allowed John Carmack to exist, and we would have none of his fruits. If you read Masters of Doom, it will be obvious why.
Yeah, a union definitely would have meant that half a dozen friends couldn't quit their employer and go work for themselves. That's definitely how it works. Because unions are slavery.
Why are you bad-faithing your way around this entire discussion?
OK, fine, then, I'll bite. If that's not the "claim" you want people to extract from your drive-bys, then please substantiate: how--exactly--would that evil specter of a union prevented Carmack and his friends from founding iD to make Keen, Doom, and Quake? Be specific.
There is already a book that details the origin story, but like most things, happenstance and early opportunities play a big role.
Carmack would have never met Romero or the others, who first worked for SoftDisk, and were later allowed to cherry pick “cool” kids willing to work crazy overtime and spin out their own business unit called Gamers Edge, much to the dismay of the senior developers. That’s where they made Keen originally. According to the story, the rest of the developers actually did “organize” and threatened to quit en masse because they were jealous of the special treatment that Carmack and Romero were getting. The owner had to tell them, like it or not, Gamers Edge was what was paying their salaries and he had no choice.
iD would not have existed without Gamers Edge, and Gamers Edge would not have existed without SoftDisk.
Wolf3d and Doom would not have existed without both of them. And the world would be very different without those.
Carmack is smart and might have done something else cool, perhaps in a different industry with a different group, but it wouldn’t have been Wolfenstein or Doom. He would have been unemployable because he could not stand college, and he would likely not have started his own company, because business and management was what he detested and relied on his partners for.
John Carmack was hired as a starry eyed novice without degree. A union would probably prohibit such things by enacting a high minimum wage and so on.
Edit: Since you probably missed it, the question where how unions would prevent John Carmack from existing as he does now. John Carmack entered the gaming industry as a low skilled cheap abused worker, if he couldn't have done that at a young age chances are he would never have started his company and so on. Being able to work for 3 years instead of finishing your degree is an option unions likely would close.
"Unionization, Steady Careers, and Generations of Games Culture" by Super Bunnyhop
03:15 Game Workers Unite: Who, what, why?
14:11 Anonymous on the disposability of QA staffers
18:11 Testimonies on crunch
24:01 History of unionization in Hollywood
33:39 The potential downsides of unionization
37:39 Ageism vs. future generations
Thanks for filling me in. My question wasn’t rhetorical, and if Carmack is right that some games literally couldn’t be made without crunch time, that does seem like a good argument that it’s not a failure even if some people find it intolerable.
He's not. They could be made. They'd just cost more.
The race-to-the-bottom pricing effect is not one caused by line developers and it's not caused by customers buying the games. It's caused by management and executives eating the seed corn. It's going to have to stop.
Timing matters more in entertainment than other industries. There is an infinite amount of content you could pack into a game and it has to be delivered on time to be relevant to your customers and out do the competition.
There are countless games and films at every level of investment that come out too late to be relevant, Jodi Foster suffered from that fate not too long ago.
Crunch might make sense for something that doesn't have arbitrary deadlines, like a daily newspaper. How often do games have releases delayed? Crunch is only as necessary as the employer makes it.
His argument seems to be that much of what people call “crunch” is actually a labor of love, and that a norm discouraging overtime would discourage the level of personal investment that’s necessary to make great games.
Early in my career I was interested in game development because I had dabbled in graphics programming personally and it seemed like more fun than other types of development.
A cursory look into opportunities showed that the schedules were grueling and driven by the market, which expects new flashy titles quite often but the demand for the new titles tails off relatively quickly. Worse, it's not like a spreadsheet where you can just fix some bugs, add some new features, then charge people for upgrades. You're constantly rewriting everything.
So I made the decision to not go into that market.
Software development skills are fairly fungible. I'd advise people to not go into game development unless they have a real passion for it and don't mind the demands upon them that are derived from the market forces.
Game development has probably changed since you looked.
I don't know of anyone who is rewriting everything between releases and even new games at new companies are built on top of existing tech 99% of the time.
The market has also changed, the big money games are almost all games-as-a-service with multi-year lifespans. For better or worse there is a lot of 'fix bugs, add some features, charge people for upgrades'.
The schedules are definitely getting better as the (remaining) industry talent matures and games are less driven by putting something in a box and moving on to the next title. I'm not saying it is perfect (by any means, and some things are worse) but it is not the same industry as it was 10 years ago.
Have you considered what your career will be like at age 48? 55? 62?
It's true that software developers are well compensated and in high demand, that demand tapers off rapidly after 40, when ageism comes up.
If you want to go into management, then it's climb the corporate ladder, and get promoted until you can't do your job.
What if you want to stay an IC? Become the lone developer who can support a legacy react application, while 99% of the team is working on whatever the latest CS languages?
A labor union for software developers would be an insurance policy for our futures.
I won’t comment on anything but the ageism. Most of the developers I work with are in there late 20s and early 30s. We’ve hired people in their 40s, 50s and 60s to join our team.
According to those I’ve spoken with there really isn’t a challenge to find work - regardless of age. The caveat being everyone I spoke with was current on the latest languages, research, etc.
If you stay current with the times you can find a job in most white collar fields without a problem. Basically your resume should reflect your time to obtain experience.
Final note - people typically hire others similar to them. As engineers age they are more likely willing to hire older engineers. I basically view this as a solution today because we have such a plethora of engineers being hired.
Not OP, but I can tell you how it was working out on my previous team within a big 4 tech co. For the context, the whole team consisted of a mix of a few people in their 20s (1 being almost 30, 2 being straight out of college in their early 20s), 2 in their 30s, manager in their 40s, 1 more person in their 40s, and 1 person in their 50s. Almost like a paper perfect age diversity bingo card.
What i found was that age had absolutely nothing to do with anything when it came to my workplace. There were more differences between some teammates in their 20s than between them and the teammates over 40. Older teammates were not slower or learning less things or anything like that.
The only major workplace difference i have noticed between younger and older people was that they were better at estimating their schedules/delivery timelines, as well as them being able to spot certain things that younger ones havent spotted yet, i guess due to their experience with certain problems and being able to see those repeating patterns. A bit more patience and being a bit better at explaining things in bajillion different ways until one of them clicks for you; i would say social skills and ability to navigate the workplace in general were a bit higher. But that was definitely not universal for every older person, just simply talking about averages within the groups of older people i got a chance to work with.
However, i bet it had a lot to do with the kind of people we hired, and if you look at the industry averages of older people vs younger people (when it comes to being up to date on the tech stack, research, learning new things, etc), the picture painted would be vastly different.
Can’t speak for the original commenter, but the 50 year old on our team ramped up to become our most trusted source of design feedback within a month or two.
My experience with older programmers is they are generally a bit slower. However they typically bring to the table something much more valuable. Everything that's new, has been done before... and they've seen it done before. They know the pitfalls, they also know the shortcuts. Many of them are hesitant of adopting new technology, but when they do, it's usually bringing something significant to the table.
In my opinion, if you can get one of these old guys on your team, your team is going to be better off. That said, the crotchetiness is almost always on the higher end.
Of course, it's not a rule. I also once worked with an older guy who was one of the nicest guys I've worked with... but I wouldn't let him come within 10 feet of my repo.
I think the difference may be approach. I found those older were often better at estimating and had a breadth of knowledge they could draw from.
Honestly, I think generally everyone comes to the table with experience. Those who are older typically can tie theirs together better than we can vocalizing between members, so they have an edge.
Everyone I’ve worked with has always been willing to learn (it’s what I personally and companies screen for in interviews) so that’s never been a problem.
Generally though, age doesn’t play a role in anything meaningful I’ve seen. Years of experience In a field can help, willingness to learn, and attitude / temperament, that’s about it - irrespective of age
This seems like an argument against unions. I certainly don’t want to live in a world where somebody is guaranteed a wage or a job due to age or seniority. This just seems really entitled.
It’s up to you to create value, regardless of age.
That's a straw man argument oft used by anti-labor unions.
Think of it this way, you want to create value. But you have NO say in the definition of value, the calculation of that value, and little influence as to what percentage of that value you get to claim as your own.
Your livelihood is directly controlled by something you have very little influence over. You have to TRUST the company is going to act in your best interest and value your contributions.
A labor union would give you the bargaining ability to have that say.
Unions aren't above abuse, but neither are non-union jobs either.
I'm offering a perspective as someone with ~20 years experience in industry lucky enough to have been relevant for so long.
A labor union gives union leaders bargaining ability. Even if we assume that leaders are properly aligned with the employees as a whole, which is not something I think can be taken for granted, I’m not sure I want a handful of representatives with no personal relationship to me deciding how valuable my work is.
> I’m not sure I want a handful of representatives with no personal relationship to me deciding how valuable my work is
This is precisely the situation that most non-unionized workers already have, except that no one is even nominally trying to advocate for their interests.
The theory that corporations should be beholden exclusively to shareholders and not to all stakeholders took over completely, and has failed workers spectacularly (it's been great for capital, unsurprisingly). Having union representatives with bargaining ability is just a means for the most important stakeholders, workers, to exert any influence in a situation where they currently have none.
The sentiment here is that for the game industry Unions would be a benefit to put an end to unfair working conditions. Game companies have a lot of leverage because the demand for jobs in gaming for out weighs the supply.
Your bargaining power comes from leverage, and your only real leverage is that you can go work for some other company.
A labor union's bargaining power comes from numbers of it's members.
Certainly that can and has lead to abuse, but that is no different than what can happen with business.
It isn't a strawman - it is in fact one outcome from the requirements for a union to work: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2016/07/16/public-transit... Workers who feel like they are not better than each other are much more willing to organize, and they are also more likely to support seniority pay systems.
Note that this isn't a hard requirement. Some unions do not have it, but it is a strike against the whole concept. Maybe the union and work anyway, some do. It does however make it much harder for the union to get started and remain started.
Mm. I sure do love to create value. That's certainly why I live. Not to, like, experience the world, or to do things I care about. Nope! I live to create value.
Work to live, not live to work. Well-run unions help workers do that, both young and old.
What you do or don’t love is not relevant. You’re free to provide me with no value at all if you choose. But I’m obviously not going to give you any of my money in that case.
If you want someone to give you money so that you can do things like experience the world, or eat, you have to provide something in return.
I've seen what my career was like at 48, and at 55. Still guessing at what it will be at 62, but I'm not very worried.
> that demand tapers off rapidly after 40, when ageism comes up.
I haven't seen ageism come up. I've seen that I'm a pretty expensive guy, because 35 years of experience has value. But not every employer needs that, and those that don't hire someone less expensive. That's not ageism.
That is lower demand for people over 40, though. On the other hand, the supply is lower, too.
Game developers are like actors in Hollywood. Massive supply of candidates so the pay is not that great. It's a cool and challenging work but everyone would prefer it than "boring" programming jobs which actually pay much better and don't require crunching.
Yeah I don't get why people bring up Hollywood in union discussions. Virtually every position in the film industry is unionized, even the semi-obscure ones like storyboard artists.
The film unions are the perfect thing to bring up because they are the most like video games. Thus both the good and bad from those unions are likely to apply. Apply the rules for a coal miners to video game workers and the union will die quickly as workers realize the rules coal miners need are not helpful for their situation. Apply the rules for the actors union to video game workers and you have a chance of success.
I meant in reference to the argument that “so many people want to do the job, ergo companies have little incentive to treat employees well.” The point being: the film industry has a huge potential workforce yet still manages to have functional unions.
For some definition of functional. In hollywood actors commonly should really be called waiters with an acting hobby. The union is not able to get their members a living wage.
I have witnessed more and more people from the gaming industry switching back to the boring programming jobs. Why? Because they get to have a life and play video games too.
I work as a programmer in the AAA games industry, and I think there are a lot of underexplored options for what collective bargaining could look like. Something such as a trade guild could benefit developers a lot without necessarily requiring things that would irk a more neoliberal-inclined HN reader.
One thing that comes to mind is guarantees about crediting. A worker in the industry is more or less at the whim of the developer/publisher if they're included in the credits. There's a good chance you've played a game or two where the person implementation a core feature wasn't credited because they were not there for the entirety of development (eg: changed jobs, health leave, laid off, etc.).
Can’t say for video game industry. But software engineers are both in hot demand and well compensated, as such, I personally and the people I know are mostly content and not likely to join an union.
I wouldn't rule it out. Professional athletes have great unions. Hollywood screenwriters, actors, and directors have great unions (or guilds). Couldn't software engineers benefit from a similar organization?
Professional sports leagues have unions because they are necessary. There is exactly 1 league, and you’re required to sign exclusivity contracts with your team. You are owned by your team. You play for them, or you don’t play at all. You move your family to whatever shitty city bought your rights. Only rarely does a player get any say, unless they’re a superstar with a special contract. They’re also very prone to injuries that can take them out during their narrow prime earning window, and that risk needs to be hedged. As does the risk of permanent damage, including brain damage, by being required to play when it is not safe. And NBA players actually got paid very poorly before the union. Far worse than software engineers. They had no leverage.
There are many reasons for players to have unions, and none of them apply to software developers.
The Hollywood situation was similar. New actors were locked up in bad contracts. But generally, all of Hollywood is a mess of negotiations, unconventional and confusing compensation structures, scheming lawyers, and conflicts of interest all over the place. These also don’t really apply to software developers.
We don’t have agents, royalties, multi-year exclusivity, or a huge population willing to fight for scraps and slave for free in hopes of getting a big break (game development - which has much more in common with Hollywood - being an exception).
Unions are not free. The layer of bureaucracy that they introduce is a huge cost, and one that many companies cannot bear. Startups definitely can’t. Then you have to account for the widespread abuse by employees in unions. Your salary has to subsidize everybody who decides they’re going to be lazy and take a free ride by exploiting union rules. Those people are everywhere in unions. And it’s completely rational. Most people will do the minimum required for the maximum take, especially when there is no risk to doing so.
Sometimes, this cost is worth it. But, if we ranked industries in need of a union, I can’t really think of anything that would have less need for a union than software development.
> There are many reasons for players to have unions, and none of them apply to software developers.
There are analogs to some of the things you listed.
For example, exclusivity contracts sounds a lot like non-compete agreements.
You play for them, or you don't play at all sound like employment agreements where the employer demands rights to everything you create during your time of employment.
You move your family to whatever shitty city bought your rights sounds a lot like being transferred to some place you don't want to go.
They're analogs in only the most surface way though. There's no "Computer Science Draft" where companies get to pick you and lock you into a contract that you must accept no matter which company it is.
Sure, things like non-competes and inventions clauses are restrictive, but not even within the ballpark of the restrictions on most sports contracts. Most leagues make it literally impossible for you to "change jobs" to a different team AT ALL for years at a time, while at the same time reserving the right for them to transfer you to any other job they want.
Sure, Google or whoever might try to transfer you to a different office, but you have the option to quit and try to find another job in the same city. Most athletes, if they're being traded from LA to Boston can either A. Move as commanded or B. Retire completely forever unless they move to another country. Being forced to quit and find a new job in the same industry sucks, but it's better than forced retirement...
Not really- non-compete agreements are very hard to enforce in many jurisdictions, and even where enforceable are limited in scope- you might be able to go from working on a check clearing system at one company to another company working on a check clearing system, but going from working on a check clearing system to working on software for medical equipment is going to be OK. Also, unions may not necessarily be interested in ending non-compete- they have a vested interest on keeping union employees within union employers.
Your other two examples are completely different- while your statements are true for a single given employer, there are plenty of other employers out there willing to pay a roughly comparable wage. If you want to a side gig and your current employer won't allow it, you can start submitting resumes. If you don't want to transfer, you can start applying to other companies in your current location, or go for remote work. There is no equivalent in sport- US Professional sport leagues have a monopoly exemption approved by congress.
Those unions evolved in pretty different- Professional athletes are typically in a monopsony (single buyer) situation, whereas the Hollywood situation evolved during the studio system era that was much more cartelish than tech today.
It's possible that workers joining unions will make life even better than today, but the previous high-paying occupation unions evolved in different circumstances that might matter.
It may be true that programmers at the top 5-10 tech companies are well compensated but the vast majority of tech workers (programmers and operations) work for enterprises and small shops where there are some really egregious practices and not particularly great compensation. Being in hot demand means little when these practices are universal in the industry. This is the perfect scenario for workers to get together to demand better treatment and ending of these sorts of practices:
Uncompensated overtime,
On-call (if the work is important pay someone to be available to do it),
Expectations of 24/7 uncompensated availability,
H1-B use/abuse,
Lack of training on systems workers are responsible for,
Age discrimination,
Lack of decent work environment (open plan offices),
Lack of vacation options (sometimes masquerading as unlimited time off)
Compensation is only one axis here. There's many of other things unions can do to improve the life of video game workers independent of seeking higher wages. Eg. compensation time, influence over production schedules, transparency, credits...
Software engineers aren't the only one that work in that industry. On the dev-side there's a couple routes out, however on the design and art side adjacent industries are even worse meat-grinders or not an option.
But there in lies the problem. Most of the discussion opposed to union come from the actual software engineering aspect, but the unionization proposals are attempting to cover the multitude of sub-professions that compromise game development. It is often glossed over that actual engineers have vastly different options, priorities, and working conditions than these other workers.
Carmack’s options should be seen as addressing engineering conditions, I would assume. The negative articles seem to address animators, level layout designers and, most particularly, QA employees. These roles have a wildly different work trajectory than an exiting software engineer.
I’m all for these workers finding some leverage, but I think engineers linking there prospective and fate to people in such a disparate place.
I can understand the general philosophic argument for ‘worker’ solidarity, but in practice that is not how unions work. Union represent professions and then those unions often pool resource under a larger labor umbrella. It is why the the Screen Actors Guild is separate from Cinamatographer Guild, Screenwriters Guild, production laborers union, etc in the motion picture industry. Further it’s why plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc have separate unions in the construction field. If software engineers feel they need the leverage of organized labor that is a decision these developers can make and then act on, but that is very different than suborning the needs a very particular profession to the needs and desires of complete separate groups.
As a note, the solidarity in these situations tend to come as reciprocal strike agreements, i.e. the SAG not working during the Screenwriters Guild strike in the last decade (I think it was post 2010 anyway)
How broad the accepted membership is entirely depends on the union. There is no objective reason to always segment by profession. In my opinion having worked in the games industry for over fifteen years software engineers are treated very similarly to other disciplines although paid better and it would make a lot more sense to work together with other disciplines than trying to each form a union separately.
As you say unions often have reciprocal agreements or are even part of larger umbrella organizations for example the TUC in the UK.
Compensation is an important role for unions, but it isn't the only thing a union can address.
For example (with the caveat that I'm not certain about its actual legality and how effectively unions could push back on these contract provisions), but I find employers asserting ownership over open-source projects/code people write in their free time particularly dystopic.
I find this untrue. historically, unions represent jobs that are most at risk from replacement - e.g. by strikebreakers. Which is opposite end of the spectrum from 'hot demand and well compensated'. In fact, unionization are spurred by the opposite of these things.
You've missed their point a bit here. It wasn't that the most common time to start a union is when you have leverage, it was that that is the best time.
Software workers could achieve huge results if they collectively bargained, and the relative scarcity of labor means that if they unionize it will be comparatively difficult to skirt those unions.
Also, there's not knowing what you've got until it's gone. Software workers have the power to organize now, but there is good reason to believe that, for one reason or another, that power will decrease at some point in the future. That has happened to practically every industry in history. Software workers would be wise to organize when they can, instead of waiting until they are forced to.
True however as soon as market conditions change and software engineers aren't in demand, which will at some point happen (hopefully not soon though), then businesses will adjust.
The best time to unionize is WHILE software engineers have power and leverage.
And for examples of kinds of unions people don't usually think about, I believe there is an NBA players union. The screenwriters guild of america functions as a union, I think. Lots of unions in Hollywood.
I wanted to give some examples of high-status or high-compensation professions where professionals have chosen to unionize.
> True however as soon as market conditions change and software engineers aren't in demand
I find this unlikely, while boom and bust cycles are normal. If software engineers aren't in demand, other people will have it worse. Demand for software engineer will then pick up faster.
I don't see any major employment segment that has higher future prospect or long term security than software engineering.
Unions can and have brought worker benefits, but I don’t want them in my (Software dev) job. Or at least I don’t want to have to be part of an union.
My experience is obviously a small sample size but both times I worked at a place with an Union the experience has been terrible. Seniority based promotions, the general lack of ownership and accountability and massive bureaucracy killed any motivation for me.
I enjoy my job, I think I’m fairly treated and am well compensated. And this has been true every non union job I’ve been at. I just don’t see the value of an union for me.
I can't really see tech workers joining a union, game industry makes more sense as it's notoriously terrible and there's nothing but horror stories about the working conditions.
Yes, but they are really part of the Entertainment industry, more specifically. Unionization is very much part of that industry, so maybe game developers should recognize that and try to join/expand those unions.
Software has eaten the world. There are tech workers in every sector. It's getting to the point that the phrase "tech company" isn't really meaningful.
I don't understand how a union would function in the video game industry. I don't work at a video game company myself, but I have some friends that do. The typical life-cycle of a video game is:
- A small group of developers work on the core physics engine, graphics engine, and high-level game design.
- When the core game engine is sufficiently developed, the number of artists and game designs greatly increases to generate the art, sound, and level designs for the game.
- As the game reaches an alpha stage, the number of QA testers is dramatically increased.
- After the game is released, almost all of the QA and art people are let go, with a small number retained to work on DLC. A core group of software developers will be kept to be begin work on the next game, and the cycle repeats.
How does a union function when much of the workforce is only going to work for the company for less than 2 years? Many QA testers work for less than year.
As a tech worker (game industry or not), what should I expect when/if I join a union? A 3-minute googling only gave me very vague answers like higher salary and better workplace safety.
Is there a potential pro and con somewhere?
e.g. If I get better compensation, would the union take a percentage cut from it? Or it's a fixed union deduction?
If unions seek to serve industries of the future, are they prepared to demonstrate how they have radically overhauled themselves compared to how they have operated from the last 100 years?
Disruption is leaving no industry or group operating according to the economies of the past safe.
It would be interesting to see what a new union, designed from the ground up would look and operate like for the knowledge worker age, instead of an industrial worker age.
Unions aren't perfect and neither are corporations. But it's never fair to have the industry be single sided where corporations are organized and workers are not. For fair negotiations both workers and corporations need organized planning.
I thought unions were for low skilled workers that are easily replaceable. If you do this with higher level skill jobs, I think there is a strong risk of stagnating the growth of the industry by forcing companies to hire a certain way. Higher skill jobs are already in a position of good compensation and companies understand those employees are valuable. This includes programmers and such, but perhaps not artists (unfortunately). I can see a union for game artists and non-programming roles, as those would basically be lower skill level that can be easily replaced.
Unions are for high skill jobs where there is worker solidarity. If you are low skill your attempt to unionize will be met by strikebreakers happy to take your job. If you don't have worker solidarity you cannot unionize because those who feel they are better won't want the inability of the lesser to pull them down.
Let's say the unions get huge wins, make huge gains, and unionize essentially all programmers. They decide to call a strike. What happens to Linux development? What happens to tons of other OSS development? If a strike only affects closed-source software, that's an incentive for users to go Open Source, but it's also an incentive for unions to try and destroy it.
This isn't like the auto industry union vs shadetree mechanics, which was never a conflict because shadetree mechanics are fundamentally not a threat to the auto industry and its unions because the shadetree mechanics of the world can't make their own credible car as a hobbyist project.
The "shadetree mechanics" of the OSS world have made large chunks of a software ecosystem as a bunch of interconnected hobbyist projects, which is a distinct threat to the software industry's UAW-equivalent's ability to exert pressure on companies that make and sell software.
No thank you. I don't want a union "representing" me or seizing part of my paycheck. Furthermore, if you examine history, all this will do is send jobs and opportunities elsewhere.
Also, I have dreams of developing video games in my garage some day. I don't want to deal with the video games equivalent of a screen-actors guild telling me I can't give away my games for free or that I need to adhere to some outdated regulations regarding what friends I can ask to compose music for my game and how much I can pay them for it.
Working for MSP's a large companies demanding 24/7 on-call with computers waking you, even after managers explicitily stating they expect 70 hour weeks.
The average video game developer makes a lot less than the average tech worker. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone lower than a Director hitting $300k from what I figure.
Glassdoor indicates a "Senior Software Engineer" at Blizzard (considered one of the better companies, afaik) makes between 63k-126k. A "Game designer" makes 33k-72k. Video game industry also works long hours with a lot of crunchtime. And this doesn't even get into EA, or the other megalithic companies that push out dozens of titles every quarter.
The video game industry gets away with working their engineers harder and for less money, because people generally like building video games.
For the most part, I have never felt threatened by offshore workers. I am more productive, and my code is typically better quality. However the general quality has been improving. I can see a day where a unionized programmer is just too expensive, and difficult to work with compared to un-unionized offshore workers.
Niko has to cut costs to make low budget films and the union mandates someone watch the camera feed for the director, completely unnecessarily in the modern era. The film industry is notorious for the boundaries around union and non-union work. Gary Oldman's decline of a role in Star Wars used union rules as an answer:
>Oldman's spokesman is reported to have told the newspaper: "Gary was excited and looking forward to working on the film. The snag is that the movie is being made without members of the Screen Actors Guild. It means Gary would have been working illegally overseas. Out of respect and solidarity with the other members, he could not and would not consider violating the rules of his union."
Unions bring many complications and seeing them as a universal good is a problematic perspective.
Which he obtained from his talent, something he advertised as something he can do and others can't. Unionizing credit for his performances is as the same claiming credit for another man's work that nationalists do.
The union doesn't get credit for his performance, he just places value in the union. The point is he's had a tremendously successful career while supporting the union. It hasn't hurt him. He missed out on star wars by choice.
I asked you what benefit he gets and you listed his 'respected career' and 'eventually an oscar'. You directly answered the question about what union benefits you get from unions with his career. You are changing your reply.
Had he chosen to do nothing that career would never have succeeded. The union did not benefit him his career, his actions did. He had the opportunity to choose SW and did not because the cost of losing union membership was too high. So again, what did the union benefit him? If he was simply choosing to value the union for his own reasons, then you haven't answered the question, you've just shifted the answer to Gary Oldman who is not here to answer for you.
I generally agree. What we do need is better worker protections and consumer protections. Get rid of no-competes. Get rid of right to work statutes. Add mandatory retirement contributions. Add mandatory and standard severance packages.
That will just drive more employers towards part time employees and outsourcing.
The latter, I agree with the former reforms.
You also aren't getting this sort of top down reform without obtaining more political power than the upper class. That's not going to happen without better organizing (Union, political movements, whatever).
Finding sources to support my arguments is good practice. I do not have the resources to do multi-variate analysis of the problem within the scope of a hackernews thread.
The generalization about utopias is something I've lived through.
Meaning that you're fine with me being required to join a union in order to work? No. I'd rather have the freedom to choose for myself, even if it means I have to give the same freedom to others.
No, I meant that when you take a job you are given a contract with clear rules about your job and for fixed durations. I was suggesting this instead of unions but this does require legislation.
The best outcome is the industry self-regulating these amendments into their business practices under the threat of unionizing, rather than actually turning the industry into an institution itself and losing it's creative spark.
Who is waiting? Most people I know that didn't like the conditions got better jobs in other industries. Finance pays well and is cushy in comparison. Architecture visualizations, media jobs, programming roles are easier to find after obtaining the ability to outperform the norms for other industries.
For most of gaming's history it has been a niche product without mainstream appeal. Do you unionize every fledgling industry? No. It hasn't been four decades in the making. The majority of bad sentiment has come in the past five years, exacerbated by a goldrush mentality and kickstarter burns. The goldrush is over, the big projects are paying out massively to employees. Star Citizen has spent hundred of millions on staff and capital and needs to raise more. Epic is pouring cash back into the industry rewarding workers.
There are more people employed in the industry than ever and some see the collective as a route to personal power. I can't agree with that.
> For most of gaming's history it has been a niche product without mainstream appeal
Really? So the Atari boom was niche? 500,000 arcade machines sold in 1982 was niche? 30 million Nintendo Entertainment systems in American homes was niche?
It hasn't been a fledgling industry by any reasonable measure for at least 25 years if not much longer.
How many artists, testers and game designers do you know that moved into finance, media jobs, or architectural visualization (very much a niche industry). At least 75% of people working in the video game industry doing skilled and professional work can't easily transfer to a different field in the same way as an electrician cant move in to plumbing.
I know one in finance and one in arch viz. There are interviews of Bethesda artists looking for work on the side and quoting generous and lazy deadlines for the work. The customer is amazed they can do in two weeks what takes other people a month or more.
Games is not in a position of minimizing all risk. What industry is? If you want a safe job get into defense contracting. Go back to university and retrain like everybody else does.
It's baffling to see this attitude on Hackernews, famous for tech entrepreneurs who have more pivots in their career than a pirouetting ice skater.
Are comic books mainstream? They sold millions of copies, they are still a niche interest. Not until the Wii did games open up to a 'casual' market. With phones it's truly everywhere now.
Hacker News is not immune to the vicissitudes of society at large, and there is similar discontent against tech employers in non-game industry as well. There has been both sentiment in support of unionization at large tech megacorps like Google [0], and (non-union-related) sentiment against predatory startups that give misleading promises while forcing employees to assume both greater risk and lesser reward. [1] Not to mention there seems to be less hero worship of founders than there was in the past. [2]
There is a generalized dissatisfaction that the wealth generated by tech is not adequately being reached by its workers. Union advocacy is only a component of it. Tech might pay better than other industries, but its workers are just as affected by costs in housing and healthcare, just as everyone else.
The key engineers who left Ferrari in '61 became the key engineers that lifted Lamborghini into existence. They didn't start a union and stepped away from deaths of Ferrari drivers and verbal abuse to start something new with Lamborghini. Both companies survived and no unions were started.
Disgruntled employees are the birth of something new, not a call to clamp down.
Who is calling for tech & gaming unionization because of the first 3rd party gaming company? It's not the majority of bad sentiment. It's not even news.
"Right to work" is one of those legal principles that follows a dystopian naming scheme. It was lobbied for by the owner class because it allows freeloaders to benefit from collective bargaining without paying membership dues in the union representing them. This weakens the union, with the eventual goal of eliminating the union (and the benefits it negotiated for workers) altogether.
Your alternative puts workers in a straitjacket of having to belong to a union to work certain places. You say it's for their good. But all I see is the straitjacket.
And yet the alternative is not being allowed to work unless you donate money to extraordinarily political organizations who lobby for policies you may actively oppose.
Sorry, but I’m going to call the compelled speech option far more dystopian than right to work.
We live at the absolute _extreme_ of capital power over labor power. Unions can certainly do harm, and you are right that they shouldn't be seen as a pure and irreproachable force for good, but small anecdotes about individual bad decisions made by unions are not useful in discussions about this.
In fact, they play to the already ridiculously anti-union sentiment that the vast majority of Americans (this article is about America, apologies if you are foreign) hold.
Unions can go way too far, and they can do harm, but the overwhelming majority of Americans live so far away from that point that it's not even a fruitful discussion to be having.
This is a weird claim to make in the games industry. The vast amounts of cash Fortnite made for Epic is being poured back into buying up indie games and supplying a better store for game sales and creating a better game engine that anyone can pick up and use for 5% of sales. It is empowering the little guy way more than could be imagined in the past. Is that 100% of their revenue? No, but it is well above what anyone could hope for 10 years ago. You used to require hundreds of thousands of dollars in licenses to even see the tools used. People are getting good jobs training off these tools as we speak and releasing new innovative products.
I understand working conditions in the US sucks and I hold no bones about fixing them. The union is an infinite tool that will not stop at fixing engineering conditions. It has the ability to own the industry. That is not an outcome I want to see, I'd prefer to give 50% of my salary to whoever wants it than have a union tell me how to run what I do.
>The vast amounts of cash Fortnite made for Epic is being poured back into buying up indie games and supplying a better store for game sales and creating a better game engine that anyone can pick up and use for 5% of sales.
For the sole reason of trying to replace Steam as the dominant store platform on PC. Epic isn't just doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. This will not continue once Epic achieves their goal of buying their way into being the middleman between developers and gamers.
They don't need to replace Steam, they have 80 million active users from Fortnite alone. Steam has 90 million active users.
Were they to compete with Steam properly they would crush Steam's store feature set. The Epic store is still under-developed compared to Steam by a lot. Regardless of their perceived intent the entire point is that the little guy is being rewarded and the system works even if it appears 'evil'.
The definition of slavery changed over time. Be sure that salaried worker in a few centuries will be considered a mild form of slavery similar to indentured servitude, debt bondage or coloni's restriction of freedom under the Roman Empire.
"Were they forced to work?
Yes and no.
What happened if they decided not to work?
Weeeeell... if they were rich, nothing. If they were poor, they would have died."
> Were they forced to work? Yes and no. What happened if they decided not to work? Weeeeell... if they were rich, nothing. If they were poor, they would have died
Hasn't that always been true of society, across all government models (or lack thereof)? At best, you don't have the rich that don't need to work... but what are the situations where the vast majority don't need to work (as far back as hunting/gathering).
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? We're trying for a bit higher quality level than internet median. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking that spirit more to heart, we'd really appreciate it.
Please explain the problem with my comment on slavery. The first part is factually accurate, the second is a valid opinion to express.
I was downvoted, why?
You know what whatever. I know better than to ask HN moderation for any sort of transparency or any dedication to actually fostering discussion vs just reinforcing the particularly awful groupthink that dominates this place.
Factual accuracy isn't enough to make a comment substantive, and the point about "wage slavery not being much better" is an empty cliché. We're looking for thoughtful discussion here, not throwaway lines.
I've posted thousands of comments explaining HN moderation—probably tens of thousands, in fact—so I'll have to differ with you on it lacking "any sort of transparency". What would you like to know?
What are the actual rules? You are the most arbitrary and least transparent mod I've ever dealt with. You wield the word "unsubstantive" as a cudgel. You seemingly only hold the goal of stifling discussion that might be against the accepted HN positions. The result is board that yes, does mostly lack flame wars. It's also bland and processed and almost impossible to contribute to, and I lay the blame on that squarely on you. The very poor downvote system does not help. Restricting downvotes to high karma users just lets a handful of people dominate discussion.
> "wage slavery not being much better" is an empty cliché
7 million+ working poor. Millions more one unexpected expense away from financial ruin. "empty cliche".
Also could explain to me why this
> > We live at the absolute _extreme_ of capital power over labor power.
is fine. This response
> No we don't, that is called slavery.
is fine.
But my post reaches the bar of unsubstantive flamebait.
I asked what you wanted to know, but reading this response, it doesn't seem like you want to know things so much as to fulminate against HN and how it is moderated. I'm sorry you don't like it, and if I saw a path from here to maybe getting you to like it better, I'd be happy to try. But I'm not seeing that yet. It takes a ton of time and energy to answer posts like this, and that investment only makes sense when there's a visible modicum of good faith to begin with—otherwise it just results in twice as much fulmination, which helps nothing, and takes resources away from helping other users.
I can take a crack at replying to your question about those specific comments though. A comment that said only "We live at the absolute _extreme_ of capital power over labor power" would be lame and unsubstantive, but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21983921 went on to say other things that made for a thoughtful comment, though the generic ideological topic (unions-good-or-bad) is a bad one for HN. I don't see why we would moderate a comment like that.
The reply "No we don't, that is called slavery." is lame and pedantic, but I wouldn't call it flamebait. That is the contrarian dynamic which can't resist pointing out a logical flaw in something somebody said. HN has this all over the place, as does everywhere else ("someone is wrong on the internet"...) They are low-quality comments but they don't typically start flamewars unless there is some other baity element in there.
You, on the other hand, have been posting obviously flamebaity and ideological battle comments as well as fuming about "groupthink" and "wrongthink" and downvoting and how awful everything here is. You might find HN less "impossible to contribute to" if you took its intended spirit to heart. You could start with trying for thoughtful conversation and assuming good faith, as well as the rest of what https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ask.
>
I asked what you wanted to know, but reading this response, it doesn't seem like you want to know things so much as to fulminate against HN and how it is moderated.
and instead of reflecting on that for a minute you will continue on in exactly the same manner.
I was able to contribute to this site for years without issue before you came along. I find the moderation here now arbitrary, heavy handed, and pretty extremely biased.
> You, on the other hand, have been posting obviously flamebaity and ideological battle comments as well as fuming about "groupthink" and "wrongthink" and downvoting and how awful everything here is
Having and expressing any sort of ideology is against the rules. Great thanks.
Higher karma users have the ability to downvote. They use that to enforce their ideology. Anything that goes against the grain too much immediately gets downvoted and flagged. You personally described the my comment on wage slavery being bad as an "empty cliche". That's not condescending low effort flamebait?
You are so entrenched in your own ideology you can't even tell how deep you've gone. Just completely impossible to reason with.
> I was able to contribute to this site for years without issue before you came along.
When people go on about how badly they were treated on HN, but omit any verifiable details, I call such comments linkless martyrs [1]. Without links, readers have no way to make up their minds for themselves [2]. The past pattern has been that such claims are greatly exaggerated, leave out critical details, or are made up. Sob stories and tales of injustice are easy to produce, but looking at what actually happened reveals otherwise.
Perhaps your case is the exception? If so, you can easily prove it with links that show how you were posting like this "for years without issue before you came along". pg was 10x quicker to ban accounts than we are, so my bet is that what you're saying is false.
You take pride in coining cute little phrases like that?
> If so, you can easily prove it with links that show how you were posting like this "for years without issue before you came along".
I really have no interest in playing your games at this point. I explained myself, you dismissed everything I said and seem to have zero interest in an honest conversation. Instead you'd rather pick a line and jerk yourself off about what a way with words you have.
> "wage slavery not being much better" is an empty cliché
Still haven't explained how that isn't unsubstantive flamebait. Smug jerk.
I realize we're probably past bridgeable distance here, but if there's a way to explain it, I'd be curious to hear what would have counted as a more helpful response.
It works with group by group elections. So for example if 50% of Activision software engineers in Irvine vote to unionize, then Activision will have to bargin with the union for contracts for all the software engineers they have in Irvine.
That's quite a low bar to start. All it take is one site with abusive management and they may make enough of their employees willing to get the ball rolling. If the union improves their conditions, other people may start to see it as a more viable option and it can spread.
There's high supply of "technology people" in the space because a lot of people want to make games, but you have to remember that not everybody who works at a game developer is a programmer. An artist being asked to crunch for $45K a year and who doesn't have too many other options deserves some representation, too.
When there's tens of thousands new college graduates applying for 10 positions (and willing to work for $20,000 a year because OMGVIDEOGAMES), any single individual's negotiation power is pretty close to zero, even should they have capital-T Talent.
This is good. I probably won't bother engaging with people who disagree.
Also going to say to the "i can organize a better deal myself" types. Google and other companies with a combined market cap of trillions spent years illegally conspiring to keep you wages lower.
You can't compete with that.
The current situation is an artifact of extreme demand. We already have worse protections than the average worker. When things start to turn they will get bad.
I want proper overtime laws and proper pay for oncall. If you work overtime or oncall for a salary, factor that in and then recalculate your hourly rate. Not as great.
The games industry is a good example of the future of tech. They have a surplus of workers and they routinely treat them like garbage. This is after years of negative publicity and pushback. That's what it took to even get things improved to the point where spouses aren't writing open letters to EA about how awful their conditions are.
Personally I haven't done a day of overtime in seven years and I feel reasonably compensated but there are clearly other places out there that are still exploiting their workers.
Improving worker input into production schedules and creating clear guidelines around overtime compensation time would probably reduce companies that rely on "crunch time" too much. Over time is ok if the work needs to be done, but workers should have a reasonable expectation of knowing how much of a break they'll get after. Not that it's some random (small) number in their managers' head.
There are plenty of other workplace issues aside from over time and wages that a union could help address.
Increasing transparency and input from workers into company finances and road maps, improving hiring practices, creating more opportunities for young new grads to break in, increasing diversity.
Standardizing crediting would be one close to my heart.
One time I was laid off from a company along with hundreds others due to various company issues, and eventually the project I was working on made it to market. I made it into the credits, but instead of having a "software engineer" title and naming the significant feature area I worked on, I was reserved in a long list of "Special Thanks".
This sort of thing is totally unacceptable. Would be an area addressable by an industry union.