As someone who's been in the game industry a while, I can see where this is coming from. This is not about software devs, it's a special challenge specific to game devs where the lower pay and higher overtime expectations really affect people's lives. This is then made worse as studios keep closing down, because people will put up with more bs than usual for job stability.
No idea if unions are the solution, but this is definitely an issue specific to the game industry right now.
The biggest reason why gamedev jobs tend to have lower pay and more overtime compared to many other swdev jobs is really simple: there are lots of sw devs who are willing to put up with those conditions because they want to work on games.
Also, it's easy to claim that one "wants" to unionize on a survey. But that's quite a bit different from actually doing it. So I would take this survey with a large grain of salt. It's not like most game developers couldn't get other sw dev jobs if they wanted to, after all.
If you want to know what people really value, ignore what they say and focus on what they actually do.
> there are lots of sw devs who are willing to put up with those conditions because they want to work on games.
This is exactly the reason why I don't want to pursue a career in game development. I find games exciting but that doesn't make it feel worth to me to make compromises in pay and working conditions. Instead it can just be a hobby.
I used to be in the game industry. It's now just a hobby for me. If you're willing to work on small games in your spare time, you don't have to kill yourself to work on those things, and can still make things. There are times where I'm tempted to get a full time job in the industry again, but then I read articles like these and I remember why I'm still out. I have nowhere near as much passion about any other industries though, and it can be really hard to keep going to work every day at "corporate job X".
Iβm trying to talk my kid into doing FX instead of games, so I get to see him in his twenties. Itβs not working so far but he has figured out that EA and Activision are both bad actors.
While this is true its not the biggest reason. The game dev cycle is just different than the tech cycle and it opens a window to exploitation.
Games releases are seasonal so a common practice is to hire for an xmas release and gut the teams after that.
Shady bonus practices are common. You often have very little recourse into how yearly profit is calculated and paid out.
The separation of studio managing employees and publishers holding on to IP means that studios can close up shop without the rights holders being liable for any back pay or bonus.
This is the correct answer. Management promises a unicorn, works you like a dog, and then pulls the rug out from under you, just before you deliver.
Alternatively, if you dig in, and refuse to deal with that bullshit, quitting, or being dismissed for not being a team player, half-way through crunch on a shitty project is a great way to burn bridges in that industry.
> Alternatively, if you dig in, and refuse to deal with that bullshit, quitting, or being dismissed for not being a team player, half-way through crunch on a shitty project is a great way to burn bridges in that industry.
I don't doubt it, and your comment supports my original point: that there is a surplus of devs willing to tolerate such conditions. If that were not so, quitting would not be near as much of a problem for one's future employment prospects, because employers would not have as many candidates to choose from in the first place.
I won't even play games anymore because I find those conditions to be deeply disturbing on many levels. I can't in good conscience support these workers grinding themselves to the bone just so I can receive slightly more motor cortex stimulation than I would spending the night on HN.
The film industry figured out long ago that they need to treat their employees with respect by giving them predictable hours, fair compensation for overtime, and guarantees that they won't lose health/retirement benefits across projects and studio closures. I do believe the game industry will get there eventually, but it seems it will take a lot of kicking and screaming.
You can't support these workers grinding themselves to the bone? What are you talking about?
There's no slavery here. I've been there. Unlike the people making your shoes in Bangladesh, everyone making your games is there because they love it. These are talented individuals who could easily go work in other industries.
People in the industry want better conditions, and more power to them. But this is not slave labor and no one is stuck in the game industry.
What you're saying is tantamount to not buying a painter's painting because he worked too hard on it. Trust me... the people you think you care about want you to buy the games.
> everyone making your games is there because they love it
That's simply not true. I'm sure most of them entered the industry for the love of it, but that doesn't mean they love their current job or being expected to work long hours.
> These are talented individuals who could easily go work in other industries.
There's a lot of shovelware in the games industry and I doubt many people love working on it. Do you really think the people working at studios churning out hanah montana games love their jobs? At best their hoping to work on something better in future, at worst the probably can't move elsewhere.
It can be a lot harder to break out than you think, the type of skills a game developer would have aren't in high demand in a lot of places and they could be missing some important skills used in the the more general industry, like SQL. This is an industry that loves to type cast, even something like getting a c# job as a java developer can be tough.
And then you've got the non-developer jobs. Graphic artists, writers and music composers don't have nearly as many options available.
Based on first hand experience, no it's not that hard to get out of games industry, not for a sw dev anyway. It's true that (for example) intimate knowledge of real-time 3d rendering is a rather niche skill, but OTOH knowing how to write fast code has much wider applicability, and most game developers will tend to be much better at that then your average sw dev.
If anything, it's harder to get into the games industry than to get out because there is relatively more competition for gamedev jobs than for other sw dev jobs. So I would argue that if you can get in, you can get out, and when getting out you have the added advantage of being more experienced than when you got in.
Late to the party but wanted to point out that in other industries like application development you are probably more likely to accept slower code if it means more readable and maintainable code whereas in games you often (opinion) need to really crank out the performance at any cost.
But I mean.. You know those interview questions people complain about? The ones with the binary trees and inverting? There is a certain group of people I'm thinking of who would have no problem with those questions... Besides High Schoolers! 'Cause let's be honest here, graph and tree traversal is High School level comp sci...
The reason there is so much shovel-ware is because there are so many people interested in making games. So many individuals involved in shovel-ware are talented. Perhaps not the best artists, or game designers, but certainly have enough technical chops to do other work.
That's a capitalistic outlook though. I don't particularly subscribe to "choice" or "free will" in general though to be honest..
Maybe people are working themselves super-hard to make indie games, but it's self-directed and totally by individual choice. Tons of great indie games out there.
So are people working for regular employers making video games. There's just more people who want to make games than work on insurance calculation (etc) software. That's why wages are lower.
As the film industry has demonstrated it is perfectly okay for independent productions to be non-union. There is little need or use for organized negotiations in that situation.
I agree, but I'm not sure any potential union would.
E.g. want to hire a union programmer for your 3-person team? Whole studio has to now follow union rules and bring all other developers into the union as well. Forever.
'Work like a slave on something you enjoy or get another job' is a scammy proposition. Games are highly profitable, no reason developers shouldn't negotiate for what their services are worth. Individual negotiation is difficult, collective negotiation is easier.
SOME games are highly profitable, and many are borderline and probably wouldn't be profitable without exploiting the devs. I don't like it either, but that's how it is.
Those for whom a union would not be a benefit are so exceedingly few, but this is the standard anti-union message that has been given out for the last 40 years.
Game devs are hardest hit by bad conditions, but every worker in every company would benefit from collective negotiation -- use your imagination, you could have a much higher salary, more flexibility in your workplace, more autonomy, you name it. That's what unions do, they let you bargain for the things you can't as an individual.
Lamentably, there's still a lot of folks in the software field who see themselves as the rock star, rather than the rank and file.
Also lamentably, there's still a lot of perception that a union means: you can't fire dead weight (you can, you just have to follow a process), pay is based on seniority (doesn't have to be, but what's wrong with that anyway? we don't have a good way to measure productivity or value, so what other metric should we use?), that they're corrupt (they're democratic institutions, so they're as corrupt as the members make them), etc.
All of it anti-union propaganda that's been working pretty well for the last 40 years.
Yep. It's just frustrating seeing anti-union propaganda repeated, uncritically, unthinkingly, year after year, especially on a forum where people pride themselves on being thoughtful people.
Of course unions can be corrupt, but the only thing more corrupt than a union is management.
> totally balanced lives, with a fair employer, earning good wages
In that case you could view union membership as insurance, in case you ever lose that great job. Keep in mind that your local pipefitters union is not the only model out there - SAG-AFTRA seems to work for actors/actresses across a broad range of income, experience, and talent levels.
No there isn't. It's very easy to qualify for membership in SAG as virtually every feature-length movie is SAG compliant. The only filter they use is checking there's a legit paystub so you didn't just shoot a short in your bedroom and try to pass it off as a screen credit.
I didn't go into game development, even though that's why I started to learn programming, precisely for this reason.
While I hope that the issues you mention above plus the cycle of game launching after a massive deadline crunch leading to development teams searching for new jobs (ie less stability), I don't know that it will happen. Why? People buying games.
Personally, I tend to buy the top tier of a game if for no other reason than they typically include the game/season pass (or whatever branding they go with) so that I don't have to manage it after the fact, of the games or expansions I bought recently, they've been the highest tier available: Assassin's Creed Odyssey, State of Decay 2, World of Warcraft Battle for Azeroth, Tekken 7, Destiny 2 Forsaken (which I really haven't played. Still in the Osiris area. Eh, oh well), Ghost Recon Wildlands, The Division. To me, the fidelity of the graphics and scope of the games (in that most everyone is chasing epic stories now and if it isn't 30+ hours, it is too short) means the price should bump up beyond $60 so while the tiers of games seems like a dirty move, it seems to me that it is so they can sell you $60 worth* of a $100 game instead of you looking at a $100 game and scoffing entirely.
So basically, until people purchasing games are willing to accept that a AAA game in 2019 takes more resources to create than a AAA game in 2009, I don't see this ever getting better.
* the $60 version is a full game and not 60% of one though so in reality at that price point you're getting way more value.
This is simply a marketing line, not reality. EA, Activision, and Rockstar are making record profits, not struggling to meet budgets. The base price of a game as you point out, gets you less than a whole game, for which you need to buy a season pass (sometimes as many as three of them) they have product tie-ins (Pizza rolls, Dew), they have DLC om-disc and off, and a world of microtransactions abusing gambling mechanics, and the disgusting βLive Servicesβ model.
>The base price of a game as you point out, gets you less than a whole game...
This has become a meme at this point [1], but has anyone actually studied this in any type of academic or scientific manner? There are plenty of the games that have DLC, after release support, or any number of other revenue streams that would 100% be considered "complete games" by any reasonable standard. I know it is anecdotal, but compare Zelda: Breath of the Wild to Zelda: Ocarina of Time or FIFA 19 to FIFA 08. The release versions of the two newer games were probably more complete than the older versions even though they have DLC and micro-transactions respectively while the older were "done on release". In those two cases the extra revenue streams are helping to justify and pay for the continued support of the newer games.
Those are outliers. Game industry have very small margins on average, it however tend to be hit or nothing. If you follow the news, studios are closing right and left.
But, the crunch does not happen because it would be effective. It is not effective way to create something. It happen because of mismanagement and culture that glorifies it - both among managers and workers. Crunch is more related to desorganization and lack of trust then something that would be smart to do.
beyond adding more story or visual add ins, what is a game that can't be completed without DLC? Never played Battlefront 2 (or 1 for that matter) and those tend to be tossed out there so I can't confirm or deny that one.
Diablo 3 base game - if you beat that, have you not beat the game? The DLC adds a new act to it, but for all intents and purposes it is an add on to a game.
What sometimes happens is that developers will create a game and then, very close to the end, some portions will be hacksawed out and turned into dlc. If done poorly, this can be very obvious and can ruin the game - the last Deus Ex game seemed to suffer from this.
This not standard practice. DLC plans will be specified at a high level early in production but will only solidify as the game gets closer to ship. There is a gap, which differs for different disciplines, between finishing work for the shipping build and its actual release. DLC is a great opportunity for the team to continue working at peak production on new content.
I've never seen content held back or cut out of a main release explicitly for the purpose of including in DLC. What sometimes happens is that features or half-finished content that the team decided to cut from the game is revisited for DLC. From my perspective as a game developer, modern games are never finished but at some point you have to start shipping things. DLC is an opportunity to explore ideas that would have otherwise been left on the cutting room floor, and provide some stability for large teams as they ramp down from full production.
I purchase most of my games on sale on steam for under 30 bucks. That's what they are worth to me, and clearly that's what they are worth to the publisher as I'm purchasing them legitimately.
Games made in 2019 have a larger audience than games made in 2009. I don't pay 600 dollars for a ticket to see a movie with a 300 million dollar budget. I pay the same as a movie with a 10 million dollar budget. Memento had a 9m dollar budget; I have not been 30x more entertained with a movie than Memento.
This has been a big issue in accounting, specifically public accounting. You are basically paid a salary and then you basically become a slave to the firm. You put up with lots of BS because you don't want to get fired or passed up for a promotion. The reason it is like that is because the partners of the firm get a cut of everything you produce...so the more you produce...the more they get. They quickly realize they need to figure out ways to keep you working more and more.
I suppose this could happen to software engineering jobs outside of the gaming industry too once we end up with an equal number of over supplied software engineers.
I've been in the game industry going on a decade now and I have zero interest in unionizing. I do not want my future in any way controlled by yet another external entity that I have little control over and promises nebulous results.
As an employer I want to be able to fire toxic or under-performing employees at will without jumping through a hundred hoops to make sure I am not breaking any union rules.
As an employee, I want to be free to negotiate my own wages based on my merit.
If there is one thing I would want a union to do it would be to collectively enforce some kind of profit sharing plan. The interests of the employees and the employer align -- make a great game that sells well. Anything else, no thanks.
As someone on the employee side (not games), I too want my company to be able to fire bad employees at will. Having been at companies that do and don't, I very much prefer the ones that do lest the workplace become bloated with low quality.
> It is also the case that unions serve the interests of those who are not "rock star developers" more than those who are.
I'm not convinced in the current market that those interests need serving to the detriment of the better devs. Were the employers in a more favorable position I could see a different view. But right now any half-way capable dev (i.e. not "rock star") has plenty of current advantages sans union.
A union is ultimately just labor doing collective bargaining, which is certainly something capital+management does. What is bargained for isn't set in stone; while lots of people are interested in making sure firing isn't arbitrary, labor doesn't have to bargain over making people unfire-able, or even on specific compensation. A well-run union bargains for what its membership wants. If a union of software developers wants competent productive co-workers, then it can leave at-will firings on the table and instead push for limits on hours worked per week, or bonuses based on revenue (with access to the books to double check), or employment agreements that vigorously protect individual IP rights to anything made on their own time, or sane office layouts instead of open plan, or a generous severance package with at-will firing, or provisions for no confidence votes for some management positions, or, well, any number of things.
What else can you imagine beyond compensation or job security that could be improved in the lot of a software developer? Maybe even some things could yield productivity benefits that management would like if they could see their way through it? And if some of these things are more likely with collective bargaining, why would you rule it out as a tool?
In the current market, I'd rather bargain for myself. We shouldn't pretend what a union wants is what every one of its members wants. Leaving at-will firings on the table for instance is unlikely to garner popular support. I personally don't want specific severance requirements for those fired, otherwise you end up with defacto unfire-able situations because you've artificially increased the cost to remove a bad employee. I don't want to force them to run their company a certain way by rule, I'll just voice displeasure and leave if necessary. Due to the vast differences in employer packages and the freedom of choice given to the employee in the current demand-heavy market, I find individual bargaining to currently be more beneficial than collective bargaining.
> if some of these things are more likely with collective bargaining, why would you rule it out as a tool?
Because of all the negative externalities that happen to some employees and employers. If it was all upside there would be no reason. It's not ruled out as a tool, just its use in the current dev (general, maybe not game specific) market.
> We shouldn't pretend what a union wants is what every one of its members wants.
We shouldn't pretend that what a union wants is arbitrarily disjointed from the individual interests of its members, either.
Every collective has the potential to depart from individual preferences in some way. How much that happens varies in practice.
And it's pretty likely that your employment agreements are not an exception, even if you've arrived at them without any collective work on your side.
> Leaving at-will firings on the table for instance is unlikely to garner popular support.
This assumes the only incentive for joining a union is ultimate job security. That's a popular anti-union conception, but that doesn't make it correct. Any popular benefit that is not commonly conferred could provide a cohesion point for collective bargaining.
> I personally don't want specific severance requirements for those fired, otherwise you end up with defacto unfire-able situations because you've artificially increased the cost to remove a bad employee.
Increasing the cost of something is very different from making it defacto impossible. Though it is one way of providing an incentive against doing something arbitrarily. And it's not clear a negotiated price for firing would be any more "artificial" than any other negotiated price, up to and including your salary.
> I don't want to force them to run their company a certain way by rule, I'll just voice displeasure and leave if necessary.
That's pretty much how unions work. It just turns out to have more leverage if you multiply it by the size of the participating workforce.
> Due to the vast differences in employer packages and the freedom of choice given to the employee in the current demand-heavy market
Again, the freedom of individually negotiated compensation can co-exist with collective bargaining. A sibling comment even points out examples.
Doesn't make much sense. Collective bargaining is just that. If you trust the company to do what is best you should have no problem because the company will bargain for what it finds important. Also you seemingly care a lot about what would happen with a union, but essentially nothing about how you are treated by the company. That isn't really a very strong position to make an argument from. If your whole idea is that you don't mind taking other opportunities, presumably it would be worth it for you to move to a company that isn't unionized in the same way you would if you didn't agree with what he company was doing.
"A well-run union bargains for what its membership wants."
how? if it's via democracy then no thanks, as that comes with so many issues it's not even funny.
I think making these arguments at this point shows just how effective the decades long campaign of anti-union propaganda has been.
How great did those rockstar employees do when google and other massive companies engaged in anti-poaching agreements to drive salaries down? How good do they do when they end up divorced and miserable after putting in yet another 2 months of 100 hour work weeks?
I think not recognizing the arguments as built instead of propaganda-fed shows how effective the anti-corporate narrative has become.
Unionization doesn't stop illegal collusion, prosecution stops illegal collusion. What is with all the appeal to emotion with divorced, miserable, 100 hour work weeks, etc? Most employees did just fine anyways. Every single job would get value out of a union if the justification is simply saying "but tell that to the employee that was divorced, overworked, blah blah emotional language". At a macro level there are practical concerns.
There are many different types of unions, ranging from the destructive (i.e., Teamsters) to the cooperative (Hollywood guild-unions).
The anti-union propaganda did an amazing job at making most people think that all unions were like the corrupt Teamsters unions of NYC and Chicago, when most of them are nothing at all like that.
Most employees did just fine anyways.
Categorically false. Most employees did fine because unions negotiated the labor rules that led to those "fine" working conditions. Those conditions have worsened as unions have lost their leverage.
You could make that same argument against the concept of defense lawyers. How would you feel if you had to defend yourself against criminal charges without a lawyer? Do you think justice would be served if you had to go it alone against a well-funded, experienced team of prosecutors who want to convict?
Yes, defense lawyers aren't perfect and can't stop all prosecutorial misconduct, but they still help a lot. Ditto with unions.
And unions have labor lawyers. Wouldn't it help the prosecution to add positions whose job would be to identify such issues, and which have visibility across employers?
Today, without a union, how would you as an individual ever know if companies are colluding against you and other workers? What would you do to cause this offense to be prosecuted?
> Every single job would get value out of a union if the justification is simply saying ...
I agree with this sentence, but I draw from it the opposite conclusion. I think most jobs would get value out of a union.
I don't understand your logic here. If something is desirable for everyone, then everyone should do it. We shouldn't assume it's not possible for everyone, and therefore conclude that it must not have been desirable in the first place.
If they unionize, game developers are most likely to copy the union/guild format of Hollywood unions, which provide salary and health protections but otherwise let the members determine employment terms on their own (i.e., contracts for days, weeks, full projects, long-term, or open-ended are all acceptable).
Protecting bad employees is not really what game industry unionization is all about. Its more about standardizing job titles and accreditation, like film industry unions.
Admittedly I assumed this thread had devolved to general development unionization. If game industry employees are valuable, not easily replaceable, limited to only a few companies, and can't easily repurpose themselves then unionization has value.
Unions in Hollywood place a useful role of insuring proper credit and arbitrating when there is a dispute. Some game publishers have tried to avoid credits, partly to make it more difficult to know which employees to poach. But I have seen credits sorely abused in some instances.
That's the beauty of the current over-abundance of demand for devs. You fire bad bosses by quitting. Simply put, if you want to pick your best company, you have to be willing to find it. Similarly, if an employer wants to pick their best devs, they have to be willing to do things like not have bad bosses. In markets where demand is constrained, mobility may not apply, but neither do the benefits of cross-company unions.
I've been an employee for 80% of my career and from a moral standpoint I believe in treating people fairly.
The current unionization efforts provide almost no details on their goals beyond "everything will be better for everyone". On either end of the employee/employer relationship I have a hard time seeing how anyone can support such a generic effort.
A hard stance on working conditions and compensation is a starting point for a real conversation. The majority of employees would have no problem supporting this, and since I already value work/life balance and fair compensation, my motives and interests would align.
Then this doesn't affect you. Even in industries that have unions, the smaller shops are frequently non-union, and if you treat employees well, they won't have any incentive to organize.
The community theatre down the street doesn't require every performer to be an cardholding AEA member, and it wouldn't make financial sense for anyone involved (management, workers, or audiences) for that to change. The mere existence of a union doesn't necessarily change anything unless workers want it to change.
For big game dev companies that have repeatedly shown that they don't believe in treating people fairly, this would bring professional representation to the workers' side. Even if the details are light at this point, I don't see how you can be against that in principle. The employer/employee relationship is inherently asymmetric, and this attempts to correct for that.
Let's use SAG as a blueprint for a game industry union.
If I were a small non-union indie shop and I was lucky enough that some highly talented AAA developer wanted to work with me, I would be unable to hire him if he's union unless I converted my entire shop over to be union. If I didn't, he would be in direct violation of his union contract and could be fined or lose his membership.
I understand that not every union functions the same, but it is not hard to imagine that wherever there is a lot of money at stake the union will do everything in it's power, to well, seize power.
Considering the movie industry is dwarfed by the video game industry from a revenue point of view, I can very easily imagine this scenario repeating itself.
> If I were a small non-union indie shop and I was lucky enough that some highly talented AAA developer wanted to work with me, I would be unable to hire him if he's union unless I converted my entire shop over to be union. If I didn't, he would be in direct violation of his union contract and could be fined or lose his membership.
I've never heard of unions working like this, this may be a US-specific thing. Unions are just workers right groups, if the company is big, the group is inside the company, if it's too small, you just apply to the local union. They help to negotiate better laws and benefits for the whole industry & also directly at a company level in big companies.
I'm not a fan of unions either. That said, I won't work more than 40 hours in a week more than a handful of weeks out of the year. I'm 44yo now, and when I took my current job, I stated I only have about 1 crunch week a quarter in me. If I have to do more than one 40-50+ hour week a quarter, then it's not me that is the problem.
I don't work in gaming though. I would love to, but the pay for business development is frankly better with a lot less stress. I wouldn't mind seeing a push legislating that any salaried worker in a week must be granted an extra paid day off at 45 hours and each 5 hours above in a single week. That would stop, or at least compensate, the abuse.
I'm with you on the crunch limit, few weeks a year at most and even then anything beyond 50 hours is pointless from a productivity point of view.
Addressing overwork at the legislative level would get my support if there were a way to trade pain now for benefit later (e.g. your extra time off suggestion).
Are you suggesting that a significant portion of legislation is because of unions? Maybe a part of it, and probably so at the state level. As it stands, I shouldn't have to be in support of a union in order to support legislation.
Then don't let them into the union? Or, alternatively, fire them from the union. A modern union is not restricted to follow the same practices as ones for different times and industries.
Then the rules for firing toxic and under performing employees can be written into the union contract and how the union conducts its business... This isn't an unreasonable ask, no one is going to want to be saddled with a toxic person they can't get rid of.
These are all very old problems brought up when workers want protection from abusive employers by forming a union and is not unique to the video games industry at all.
Even railroads and textile mills didnβt ask their employees to work 80 hour work weeks.
There are some serious bad actors in the game industry, Rock Star being one of the worst.
Where I've worked we valued work/life balance as much as possible. Did we have a bit of crunch close to a release? Yep, but it was short and a few weeks at max. Most of us enjoyed it due to the extra camaraderie.
If there were a unionization effort that focused on 1) a hard 40-50 hour cap on work hours (or with paid overtime) and 2) enforced profit sharing plans, I could support it.
The current main unionization effort basically says "things will be better for everyone" on their FAQ. Total bullshit.
Saying that 'most of us enjoyed crunch time' seems like a bit of projection, especially for people that might have families or other social obligations outside of work that crunch time eats into.
Just so you know, this is the knife edge that leads you down to crunch.
Literally every time I had a 3-4mo 80-100hour crunch it always started out with "we're going to push for a week or two" which just transitioned into "just one more week" for the next 3 months.
Also, shame for celebrating a crunch. You may have enjoyed it but there's a high likelyhood someone else went along just to not "rock the boat". I don't care who you are putting in more hours puts stress on other parts of your life.
I just don't understand how that industry has their head up their ass from top to bottom for such a long time. There's some interesting problems in that space but after my 6 years I'd never go back.
Shame for celebrating a crunch? I'm talking 50 hours a week instead of 40 for a period of a few weeks. It is possible for a company and project to need that extra work and not turn into a sweatshop afterwards. I am 100% against the crunch that is par for the course in so many studios, but I am also disappointed by an attitude that work is always just work and god forbid it ever intrude on life outside.
I worked for five years at early and late stage startups before transitioning to games, and I cannot recall there ever being a time when extra work was not needed to get over the finish line.
If a union ends up being the only way chronic overwork can be addressed in the industry at large, so be it. Perhaps the real solution though is a legislative one, as suggested below.
> I worked for five years at early and late stage startups before transitioning to games, and I cannot recall there ever being a time when extra work was not needed to get over the finish line.
I worked at such company too. It had zero to do with need for overtime and and a lot to do with people wanting to work this way. E.g. unwillingness to prioritize, unwillingness to negotiate, wish to be seen like the one who stays late and thus finding work to stay late when not needed. Overtime is not seen as failure of organization, so the organization does not learn how to do it. People staying late are seen as heros and people managing projects so that overtime is not needed are not rewarded, so latter leave and former create culture.
To large extend, people who stay in such companies don't believe it is possible to make deadline without overtime, so they are not even trying.
It's trivial to never have overtime if you either 1) have no deadlines or 2) have a project so unoriginal you can plan its schedule to the hour.
Show me any project with dynamic requirements that has some sort of deadline, be it time or money running out, and I guarantee there has been some extra work at some point.
I am not saying it is trivial. I am saying it is not rewarded. It takes skill and willingness and some companies are not motivated to do it. Nevertheless, it is quite possible to not cruck when you decide you don't do that, period.
Prioritization, negotiation and saying no. Estimates large enough that they have buffers. You don't need on hour predictability. It is precisely when you have dynamic requirements when you are supposed to use tools like that.
After crunch, there are typically many bugs and convoluted code. It just adds to overall time in long term. Pretty much all studies found crunch to not be effective. It is not about achieving more.
> but I am also disappointed by an attitude that work is always just work and god forbid it ever intrude on life outside.
Fuck yeah it's "just work".
I want my employees and coworkers to be happy, healthy and well actualized so that when they're at work they're focused and giving it 100%. Plenty of hard business data there shows that when you make sure someone's time outside of work is well respected they'll perform much better on the job.
Burnout and turnover can have a brutal impact on an company/organization's ability to execute, the list goes on. You're also self-selecting for a workforce that has the flexibility, which means your viewpoint is a lot less diverse.
This is the same crunch bullshit I got fed before in that industry.
Yup, but that's a place of privilege that lets you do that.
What if you were a single dad?
What if you had an elder family member to take care of?
What if you were living paycheck to paycheck and had a second job to be able to make rent?
I've found some of the best teams I was on had a diverse set of people who bring their unique perspectives into the fold. Otherwise you could end up with a racist soap dispenser[1].
You can imagine me to be as privileged as you wish if it helps your argument.
> What if you were a single dad?
> What if you had an elder family member to take care of?
As I mentioned above, family takes priority. If your team is so immature that they feel resentful when another member can't work those two extra hours a day because their Dad is sick, you've got another set of problems.
> What if you were living paycheck to paycheck and had a second job to be able to make rent?
This is a bit of a stretch. We are limiting the scope of our discussion to workers in the game industry. If you need two jobs to make rent in this scenario, find a way to cut expenses.
Yeah, but how many people do you work with that have those types of commitments? How many people didn't participate in that crunch at all?
I'll hazard that the answer is low, because the industry self-selects for people who are willing to take abuse for 'prestige'. They take pride in it, just the same way you did.
> This is a bit of a stretch. We are limiting the scope of our discussion to workers in the game industry.
Yes, yes we are. My first job in the industry was $35k/hr as a dev and I've seen worse salaries for design or art.
Let me pose a question to you. How would you live in Seattle, on $35k/yr in a way that one accident/major expense wouldn't put you in a situation where you're living paycheck to paycheck? Keep in mind an average 1br apartment is ~$1800/mo[1] so you're going to be well over 50% income : housing ratio.
For that reason you have people who work second jobs or have other commitments to be able to make their rent.
Let me reiterate, I am not advocating crunch. I am saying that it is a reasonable expectation for a high performing salaried position that a few weeks of extra hours over the course of a year is completely reasonable.
And $35k for a dev job? When was this, and if it was anytime even remotely recent why on earth did you accept? A new QA hire at my last job would've made more than that.
You don't live in Seattle proper if you are making $35k. Live in a suburb on the line. Don't have a car payment if you can avoid it. And to pull that income : housing ratio down get roommates. I have done this.
And frankly this is a pretty silly argument to make in a discussion around why game developers should unionize.
Family obligations are quite clearly not taking priority when you are crunching. By necessity, the partner is doing all household and kids related work at that time. Obviously missed deadlines happen outside game development too and the partner is likely to have period where she/he has more work to do too and the other one takes it.
But crunch is normally defined as sustained overtime - articles I seen it require it to be over 6 weeks. So it is quite a lot of time.
Yea exactly. The difference between crunch and extra work to hit a deadline is entirely one of frequency and duration. My wife couldn't work in a more different industry than I do, but she is also subject to the occasional bout of extra work. We support each other and it's no issue.
If I wanted a predictable job that always has upfront hours, I suppose I could go back to making hourly minimum wage with zero benefits.
>If there were a unionization effort that focused on 1) a hard 40-50 hour cap on work hours (or with paid overtime) and 2) enforced profit sharing plans, I could support it.
>The current main unionization effort basically says "things will be better for everyone" on their FAQ. Total bullshit.
What is your familiarity with how a union works? An industry-wide unionization effort cannot effectively state what the future will hold.
When employees decide to try to organize a union within their company, they decide what the issues are. Their task is to convince their coworkers to join the union, so they will be focusing on the pain points unique to their own employment situation. Maybe in one company, it's crunch time, while in another, it's keeping a more consistent labor force despite project sizes changing wildly over time.
The new union will then negotiate a contract on behalf of its members. Each new union will be focusing on different things.
An industry-wide organizational effort that focuses on work hours and profit sharing would not catch the interest employees at a shop with good hours, good pay, but zero job protections and inadequate health coverage (for example).
Well my brother worked construction in the northeast where it is unionized, and it was an absolute nightmare for a variety of reasons. He was unable to work without a union card, getting that union card was very difficult without knowing someone because union jobs are highly coveted and thus kept artificially scarce, and once a member of the union he was forced to work with many lazy workers hiding behind the job protections afforded by the union.
What's to stop the same thing repeating itself in a game developers union?
I also worked for a construction union in the northeast, and our employer sent the worst employee's pay check to the job site via same-day courier to ensure that, once duly compensated, he could be immediately dismissed. The rest of the crew was thrilled to see him go. Construction is dangerous work, and none of us wanted him around.
At the same job, another employee, young apprentice, was found napping. He popped awake and was apologetic. Partied too hard the night before. The foreman sent him on a coffee run to get his head together. He wasn't fired, presumably because the foreman never reported him, and (at least for the rest of that job) it never happened again. Almost 20 years later, he still probably gets shit for it.
Bad employees can coast by in any job, especially hourly ones where the upper management is rarely onsite with the workforce. First dude got fired in short order despite the job protections. Second dude didn't, but (to my knowledge) not because of any union regs.
Anyway, I digress. There is, of course, nothing preventing some union horror story from taking place. There is also nothing preventing even worse labor exploitation from taking place (and we're already at 80+ hour weeks in some cases).
The biggest difference, though, is the labor market itself. The laborers in construction unions are temporary hires for a specific job. At the same time, most construction unions are craft unions with apprenticeships, where each new employee represents a risk/investment to training that person for many years. Nepotism abounds, because if you train a new hire for, say, two years, then they wash out of the program or leave to study engineering, they could have spent that time and energy training someone else.
By contrast, I would expect most gaming unions to look more like a public employees' union. It would represent permanent employees of a company, likely salaried. Not much would change in the hiring process outside contact negotiation. You get the job? Congrats, you can join the union.
The same thing that stops it from happening in Hollywood. Even the best actors and directors choose to join SAG and the DGA even though they don't need to.
In my ~6 years in the industry I don't know of a single coworker in the entire Seattle area who didn't run into a project that underwent serious crunch. Sample size of ~400 people or so.
I've also got longtime friends who broke in separately from me(and worked on some high profile stuff) in the SF/Bay area that say the exact same thing.
Pedantic note: In the 19th century textile mills and factories in general asked for 14-16 hours a day, 6 days a week [0]. In the UK, in 1831, for minors under the age of 18, daily hours were LIMITED to 12 hours a day[1].
> If employees don't like it, they're free to leave.
They're also free to bargain collectively. Why should 'freedom' mean capital consolidates and organizes as much as it likes, while labour is reduced to isolated workers making individual choices?
Its 80 years of propaganda that makes people think like this. It is to be expected, since many of these beliefs are from emotion, and not from cold business logic.
The cold business logic says to consolidate and make partnerships/business unions.
> I don't like doing this, so nobody else is allowed to do this for you either.
Unions very often prevent non-union labor and, as such, enforce their own desires on others. Don't get me wrong, sometimes that's necessary. But there are negatives involved in unions, just like there are positives.
Positives and negatives. 2 sides to the coin. The tone of your post makes it sound like you disagree with me. The argument of your post agrees with me.
Programmers are not the only ones being mistreated by gaming companies. QA testers, graphic designers, etc... cannot simply "change jobs".
It's also not as simple as "you're free to leave". Most people working in the games industry are young. Many of them do live paycheck to paycheck. In many cases they may have also moved across the country for the job. Quitting a job is in and of itself a substantial risk for many people.
There is a reason we have worker protection laws. That reason is that companies can and will abuse workers without them. This has been proven time and time again.
>Most people working in the games industry are young. Many of them do live paycheck to paycheck. In many cases they may have also moved across the country for the job. Quitting a job is in and of itself a substantial risk for many people.
They knew this industry was like this before they accepted the job. Why do we need to protect people from their own poor decisions? These aren't people who lacked opportunity and got stuck in a bad place in life and need a helping hand, these are highly privileged people who willingly signed up for mistreatment.
Excuse me? Video games are software by any definition I'm aware of and highly complex software at that. More than most, software engineers on AAA video games need to have an understanding of the full stack including the underlying hardware to be effective contributors.
What is the skill gap that a software engineer working in games would have moving elsewhere? The only one I think of would be domain experience in TDD and unit testing. Neither is widely practiced in game development, but they aren't universal for software development more generally either.
This is missing the fact that the vast majority of game developers are not "software engineers" While what you say is true for a large amount of software engineers in games. The vast majority of game developers are in Art, Design, Audio, QA, etc, where this does not apply.
I can't speak for all game development degrees, but at least for the one my university offers they don't have much focus on strong CS fundamentals, and offer more of a high level overview of programming, writing, animation, etc, especially focusing on combining these in existing game engines. People who graduate with these kinds of degrees would be employable as game developers, but wouldn't be strong software engineers. They could transition I'm sure, but it would take time to learn what they missed in university, and given the work hours expected of them in game development it seems free time for learning would be at a premium.
> As an employee, I want to be free to negotiate my own wages based on my merit.
Two things wrong with this.
1) Professional unions, such as Hollywood and sports unions, do not establish rigid payscales like non-professional unions. They set a salary floor and some basic guidelines for non-salary pay (e.g. residuals are typically mandated). If game developers unionize, the union will likely be a professional union.
2) Salary negotiation is intensely problematic, and many companies are doing away with it, union or no. For example, Reddit a few years ago eliminated negotiation in favor of delivering their best offer from the start. Salary negotiation has sexist biases and rewards people for skills that A) have nothing to do with the skills that are required for the job and B) not everyone qualified for the job possesses. Salary negotiation is about enabling employers to pay employees lower salaries; it benefits the employer entirely and not the employee. And that goes back to pnathan's comment: the whole point of unions is to act in the interest of the employees against the employer, so the whole "as an employer" section is ultimately irrelevant.
Hmm, if being in management makes him conflicted from making anti-union statements, does being an employee also conflict someone from making pro-uniom statements?
High-performing, in-demand, highly capable workers have always felt like this. Unions don't benefit you, the way mandatory healthcare doesn't benefit young healthy people.
Why would any of those things happen when none of the potential union members want them either? A union is democratic after all and does not automatically have legal agreements with the company or requirements from other employees.
No one want's to protect under-performers for whom they'd have to pick up the slack. And no one wants their compensation set arbitrarily. Especially since in software anyone can jump ship and find performance based compensation somewhere else.
They just want to work the hours specified in the employment contract rather than being singled out in isolation from each other and required to work far beyond the amount contractually agreed on under threat of termination.
So you'd just have a group that discuses abusive uncompensated overtime and request changes in a united way. Because a single person complaining or quitting over mistreatment has zero impact.
Predominantly engineer, but I've been a first employee at a hugely successful game startup and now run my own very small indie game company. I'm intimately familiar with the pros and cons of being on both ends of the equation.
Not to be pedantic, but this headline is not accurate. Thereβs nothing that makes me confident that respondents to the game dev conference survey are representative enough to say βnearly half of game developers.β
This is a really important point as trying to represent a bunch of peopleβs opinion based on a single, limited survey is not productive.
I would think that conference attendees would be fairly representative of commercial game developers.
I don't know enough about statistics to say how big the error bars would be here, but I'm constantly astonished by how well statistical methods can work with even seemingly small samples.
Take a sample of 5000 random people (an enormous sample size) attending the Republican National Convention and ask them which party they will vote for.
But considering how many developers donβt live where the conference takes place and/or canβt get there I have to agree with the top here and say this survey is severely limited.
Statistically speaking 4000 is a good enough number. I mean, election polls in the US usually use less than that for a population of 300 million and they're usually close to the real number.
Except in 2016. And that 4000 is a biased population of only game devs that attended a certain conference. Maybe if it was a totally random sample of 4000 of all game devs it would be statistically significant.
In 2016 the national polls were very close to the final result--within a couple points. Remember that Clinton won the popular vote.
State polls were less accurate, but the general consensus is they were wrong due to undecided voters breaking more for Trump than is normal in the final few days--after the final state polls were conducted.
That being said, your point stands. Sample method is generally more important than sample size, and 4,000 game devs who self selected to attend a conference is very unlikely to be a representative sample.
When they do these election polls, do they stand in the street randomly choosing people coming out of the conference centre where one of the major parties is having their AGM?
>> Statistically speaking 4000 is a good enough number.
It seems to me the GP comment meant that because it was a survey among people who attended GDC it's not representative. If that is why they questioned it, I'd say it's an even more relevant survey, as those are the people who care more about the industry and have more influence. No mater how you slice it, I'd say it's an indicator not to be ignored.
Game prices have already increased via less consumer friendly practices. Predatory monetization schemes like lootboxes (i.e. gambling), DLC (mixed bag), cosmetics, always online DRM, company specific storefronts, digital sales, "early access" and releasing unfinished games have all reduced costs and increased profits while sticker prices remain static. Sticker prices have even gotten better sometimes since many games go on deep discounts quickly.
Looking at the bigger picture, as a whole, adjusted for inflation, looks like games have actually gotten a bit cheaper. An NES game was $30-$40 in 1988[1], that's $65-$85 in 2018 dollars.
You also have a whole category of "basic" games (like phone games or indy games) that are nominally (unadjusted) cheaper than a retail NES game for the full version. I'm not an expert on this category by any means but I bought a few games from the Switch store that are very comparable to an NES game for $5-20. That's only a max of $9 in 1988 dollars!!
I'd agree that "consumer [un]friendly practices" are still a problem though. (could be a case of a few "whales" making large purchases on stuff like loot boxes subsidizing everyone else)
Perhaps you're replying to the wrong comment? I certainly didn't say, nor imply, they weren't. Nor am I "buy[ing] the industry bullshit" (whatever that means), I'm speaking as an end consumer.
When someone says "X has gotten cheaper" they mean when you walk into a store and buy X you pay less than you did in the past, either in real (adjusted for inflation) or nominal (unadjusted for inflation) dollars.
Most games have $80-$120 editions that include all of the actual content. $60 is usually the bare bones experience. That is on top of monetization in game.
But prices don't exist in a vacuum either. The gaming market has exploded and is vastly larger than it was back in 2006.
Steam found games were typically much more profitable when heavily discounted than when full price in general.
This is not typical of "most" games. Some games, usually AAA titles from major publishers do this, but the content is usually unimportant to the game as a whole.
The discussion is about unionization. I'd assume that means we are primarily talking about AAA here. But I could of been more explicit.
How much of content offered is sort of irrelevant. A better metric would be how many gamers buy these things. I'd guess quite a few since they keep going all in on the model (it's getting worse).
This is wrong because you assume that content from the season pass is already ready when the game releases. Season pass is a different term for expansions that you used to pay in the past.
I've seen that on Reddit as well, you think companies have a year worth of content and holding onto it ... The content is just not ready / created.
What? No where did I suggest that content was ready to go - I'm simply stating that a finished game now has less quality content for the same price than it used to.
I really can't agree with that. A small minority of games are like this yes, Battlefront 2 being the shining example of bad monetary practices. But something like RDR2 or just about any RPG is packed with content.
I can't think of games in 2006 that offered additional, free content. They sold them individually as map packs or weird, one-off add-ons (Horse Armor).
Horse Armor was basically the start of the bullshit, I'm not referring to additional free content, - but to match older games in terms of quality play time you often need that season pass.
Play time is a terrible measure for cost of creating a game. Yes, maybe the average playtime of old NES games was shorter, but the amount of artists involved was minimal and they didn't do it by having more content, they did it by stealing coin-sucking GAME OVERs from arcades.
I care about quality play time over just about any other metric. How long is a game actually enjoyable - maximizing that seems like it should be the clear goal, no?
I can't think of a game that is shorter than its predecessors and requires a season pass purchase, or really any 'essential' DLC for a single player game at all. With regard to multiplayer games, they don't have a cap on playtime and traditionally sold expansions (for example Battlefield 1942 Road to Rome).
Multiplayer games are often particularly brutal about this though - if you want to be able to play with the largest population you need to buy the latest content expansion - this didn't used to be the case, compare Call of Duty 4 with the newer Black Ops series for example.
Battlefield games and call of duty games come to mind. You can buy the DLC a la carte when itβs released or spend on a season pass to get all DLC when itβs released.
Fallout 4 on release had a $60 season pass - last one I ever paid for. But many games are still doing it, I see black ops 4 has one of similar price, as does Civ 6.
Maybe it was after release but I seem to remember the prices matched of the title and the season pass, I'm not in the states though so perhaps an international pricing difference, you get the point though, $50 is still nuts. I've edited the parent appropriately. I suppose the ~$100 range is more correct than the $120 range for a full game these days.
These union-skeptical comments like the GP rely upon the assumption that unions a hypothetical tech union would look identical to failed unions of the past, and are incapable of doing anything different.
Example of a modern non-American union where workers exert control to better the company over management decisions:
> Game prices have already increased via less consumer friendly practices. Predatory monetization schemes like lootboxes
I suspect loot boxes decrease the price of a game to the median player. I suspect that in many cases, they've reduced the modal and often even median price to $0.
The probably also increase the mean price, though.
Labor cost does not determine a product's sale price. That is a disastrous myth. Demand changes selling price. If a company cannot price to sell to their demand because of capital or labor costs, the free market has stated that the business is not viable.
For any particular company or even country to some extent (since the games industry is quite globalized), this is true. However, if there were widespread unionization among many of the biggest studios then that could conceivably lead to a market-wide price hike, which would be largely absorbed by consumers due to a lack of suitable substitutes. Yes, the supply/demand equilibrium point would shift and demand would likely drop somewhat, but I think it's quite likely that the market demand for top-tier games isn't perfectly elastic.
The optimal selling price for a game does to change becase developers add a fixed cost.
Suppose you have 1 Billion in fixed costs and 1$ in per unit cost and are given two options. The equation is just (number sold) * (unit price - unit costs) and that 1 Billion dollar fixed cost is irrelevant when maximizing profit (or minimizing loss).
What it would do is reduce the number of games created, as the industry becomes slightly less profitable. Which would then spread consumer spending over fewer titles and thus recuperate the burden of a union.
This is the current problem with the game market. There was a race to the bottom in game prices over the course of the last 8 years that's caused many titles to barely break even. Throw in an over-saturation of developers who are willing to price their products for less and you have an industry that is sustained through people chasing their dreams while eating ramen for dinner.
Labor / Employee costs is a lot of the times the most significant costs to a company. It's not the sole determination but it's definitely one of the top 3 factors Labor (forever and growing) > Infrastructure (large but incremental) and R&D (medium and ongoing)
Right, and if the costs of running your business are greater than the revenue you can generate from market demand, then you are not running a viable business.
Depends on industry film has a high labour cost because you pay actors a lot - I suspect the % of film labour costs due to Bectu/ ISATSU members is not that big.
It really doesn't matter what the market bears because software is so malleable that companies spend dozens of hours creating loot box systems, marketplace systems, data driven pricing models etc. to squeeze every last dollar out of the customer, regardless of whether the demand is high for these things or not. It doesn't matter if their product is half broken or is barely a product at all, as long as they can create 50,000 skins.
Then again, I'm not sure what demand for these systems are, but considering how universally detested they are, I would assume not much.
> Labor cost does not determine a product's sale price. That is a disastrous myth
It's not a myth. It just depends on whether the pricing is demand driven or supply driven. Commodity products absolutely have their prices set by costs (labor among them).
Maybe. Itβs also possible that being less able to offload the costs of bad project management onto your workers will just make them pursue more realistic project plans.
I see lots of AAA games loaded down with unnecessary cruft that adds little value to the overall experience and it makes me sad to think a bunch of poor devs probably had to grind through crunch to add it.
If you look at most AAA games from a structural perspective, they are generally composed of many systems and modes of play. Compare to indie games, which typically have a much smaller number of different systems and modes.
Think of a first-person shooter. You can add the ability to upgrade weapons and armor (a system) and add a fishing minigame to provide resources for upgrades (a new mode of play).
Specifically, look at Just Cause 4. Your basic systems core to the gameplay are shooting things, the grappling hook, the parachute, the wingsuit, and vehicles. The unnecessary cruft is stuff like your ability to upgrade the grappling hook, the deployment of squads to capture territory, and supply drops.
My impression is that AAA studios aren't stupid... they know that these extra systems and modes don't contribute much to the game. But they do contribute to customer's evaluation of whether the game is worth spending $60, and this contribute's to the bottom line. This is the same reason why manufacturers pack needless features into a product and skimp on core functionality. People are more likely to shop on the basis of feature lists than on the quality of core functionality.
This is why I'm skeptical... the unnecessary cruft is there because it drives purchasing decisions, so it's not going away unless you change the way people purchase games.
Others have mentioned RDR2 and the upgrade systems in Just Cause. They're both right and symptomatic of the larger problems.
I think Ubisoft games are the worst at this. Tons of experimental or different game elements that don't contribute to the core game. You can play chess or other board games in the middle of Assassin's Creed III. It does nothing. They had this whole city-building subgame that added nothing. They had an inchoate pirate game in there that was actually engaging enough that they made an entire sequel centered on it, but it added nothing to the actual ACIII game itself.
I can see evidence of all sort of "wouldn't it be cool if. . ." features that really don't need to be there and I can't help but think that if PMs actually had to think through what they're trying to do with their game they wouldn't do this as much. Bioware actually admitted to this after Mass Effect 3, claiming that they had never managed with so many resources at hand before and they couldn't really resist the impulse to bite off more than they can chew. This led to them adding in a bunch of extraneous side-quests and stuff that they didn't really get a chance to put enough time in to do it justice or make it worth anyone's while.
Well, RDR2 for sure. So much in that game is there to make the game world realistic and beautiful (and it succeeds greatly!), but not a lot of attention to lasting gameplay.
I'll happily pay the lowest price they'll sell the game to me for, and routinely wait for years after a game's initial release to get that low price. Nothing stops you from buying multiple copies of a game you like and want to support. Or going to https://www.mobygames.com/ and looking up the Credits for a game you like to find the devs to contribute to directly.
How do you contribute to a dev directly? Also, how do you decide who to contribute to?
When it comes to AAA games (which is who is really exploiting their employees rather than indies) it sounds like you're picking someone at random, (e.g. "Today's your lucky day Shading Engineer #4, please accept this venmo.")
We pay so little for games these days. Even the big titles still sell at $60. They inflate the price through DLC and other add-ons, but it does seem like something like a RDR2 should cost at least $80-100 these days.
The unfortunate side-effect is that smaller studios often charge much less for their titles than what they should in an effort to please customers who are conditioned to pay very little, and then can't make up for price in volume.
It's true. A lot of people complain about $60, but that's significantly cheaper than what NES games cost back in their heyday (adjusted for inflation).
And just look at not just team size and effort (probably 50-100x comparing modern AAA games to NES titles), but amount of content: most NES games used difficulty to pad out their length greatly; a gamer who's reasonably skilled at, say, Contra, can beat it in like 30-60 minutes. In comparison, a game these days with a 6 hour campaign is thought of as pretty short, and usually they have other content other than campaign: challenge modes, multiplayer, minigames, etc.
Its a weird industry. If you're there for appeasing people who enjoy art, story and gameplay, there's now a market for that. And those people don't mind either paying a little more for the title nor a 2-3 hour long game, as long as the experience is great.
But if you're there to chase teenagers for their parent's money, or even just the lowest common denominator of gamer, you'll probably have a bad time. Those customers want very long campaigns, AAA graphics and as low of a price point as possible.
This is pure speculation, but I'd imagine they would increase game quality too. Many AAA games are heavily marketed but lacking in depth and features; it would make sense that if game designers had more power in the organizations they work for, they might be able to push back against unrealistic publisher-driven deadlines which lessen game quality.
Last year, EA made over a billion dollars in profits. If they aren't using that money to improve the working conditions of developers, what makes you think the solution is to give them more money?
When you look at the prices of the games themselves, they're fairly cheap today. For the last couple console generations, the cost of a new AAA game has been consistently around $60. A NES game 30 years ago could cost $50, but when you take into account inflation that's about $100 in today's money. Companies like EA seem to make up for that by selling more copies of games, having deluxe editions, and jamming in microtransactions.
Only the most bare-bones version of a AAA quality title will cost you $60; the absolute minimum of content which could still be called a game. To get access to all of the content (frequently including story content), you're looking at a $100 starting point ($70-$90 for the "deluxe" edition, $30 for a "season pass"), going ever-upwards with the more in-game content and physical ephemera you want.
And that doesn't include any in-game transactions.
>Only the most bare-bones version of a AAA quality title will cost you $60; the absolute minimum of content which could still be called a game
That's fairly disingenuous - the last game I bought at full price was Spiderman. A quick Google says the the average user on the default difficulty clears the story in about 20 hours.
Sper metroid came out in 1994 (25 years ago), and the same quick search says that most people will clear it in 8 hours or so.
Single player games today are also regularly putting out free balance patches (nioh), large free content updates(Gran Turismo) and smaller chunks of paid content that rival the size of other games for very reasonable amounts (Witcher 3).
The production value behind those "bare bones" titles is still magnitudes larger than what you had back then, while the "play time" is at least comparable.
Statistics show that most people never finish the games anyway (I certainly don't) so it's only fair that those people who must really play everything pay extra.
Developers will probably just move development to Asia or Eastern Europe. At the end of the day, unionized devs will be at a substantial competitive disadvantage against ones that are willing to put in more work.
We all say we'll happily pay more for the same product. But those words often aren't backed up by actions.
"Unionized" is not the same as "not willing to put in more work". It's more about "not willing to put up with more bullshit".
Developers who actually sleep and spend weekends with their families produce a better product than those who just accept dead marches. If managers are aware that they can not get away with those shenanigans it's possible that we'll actually get better games.
> "Unionized" is not the same as "not willing to put in more work". It's more about "not willing to put up with more bullshit".
The point is, though, many people are willing to put up with that "bullshit" (which, judging by what you say later, mostly revolves around working hours contrary to what you write in this first paragraph). As much as we try to convince ourselves that crunch time and long hours don't work, plenty of studios demonstrate that is does. RDR2 is probably one of the best games of 2018 and it relied on crunch time. At the end of the day, a studio that can't demand crunch time is going to be at a disadvantage compared to those that can.
In an ideal world we'd all have well paying jobs in fields we love that offer good work life balance. But we don't live in the ideal world, we live in the real one. And many game developers are willing to make the sacrifice of long working hours.
It's not work if you are just looking at your monitor like a zombie. That's just heating the chair with your butt. So yes, bullshit. If a manager doesn't realize that, he should be fired.
You didn't address the more important point: Managers can get away with it by moving production to cheaper places. It's already happening anyway.
What a lot of people don't realize is that unions can also cause wage suppression when they decide that more members working is better than fewer members working at higher pay.
Managers can also get fired when they plan unrealistic goals or keep changing signposts instead of forcing the devs to solve their problems. Unions can make that happen.
Game developers already heavily use outsourcers and freelancers, many of whom based in South America, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia. The biggest games will have hundreds of contributors from internal support studios in places like Romania in addition to external partners.
I expect this trend to continue along the lines sketched out by the film industry: smaller core teams with specialized support studios/groups brought onto projects as needed and heavy use of contractors to scale staffing at different points of the project. This works in Hollywood in large part due to the union protections afforded to that temporary workforce, from actors to camera operators to screen writers.
As it stands now, video game development looks a lot like the (film) VFX industry and I think both are in an untenable place for long term sustainability. Something needs to change and I think organizations like SAG are a model for that.
General software development gets moved overseas and comes back all the time.
Software development is hard. Pushing it to a cheaper third party usually increases costs a lot in the long term due to the increase is development complexity and generally a decrease in worker skill.
A strong union can also prevent companies from moving some jobs overseas.
The Witcher 3 was a pretty good game (Polish developers) - many would call that an understatement. The Uncharted series since 2 or 3 relied heavily on outsourced development (especially for art assets). Arma 3 was developed by Czech devs. These countries probably produce lower budget games on average, and don't have lots of existing infrastructure to leverage. But that makes what they have accomplished all the more impressive given what they were working with.
What makes you so confident in the class that developers in countries with lower costs of living are worse than ones in wealthy countries? Do you think that Polish or Bulgarian developers are on average worse than American ones, and it so do you have something to back up that claim?
There's also, I dunno, all of the Japanese games that people love. Chinese companies are also starting to increase and market overseas, and some of those games are high quality. South Korea too. Asia is a powerhouse for entertainment software, even if we might argue they have a long way to go for business/enterprise/SaaS software.
Moving development doesn't necessarily entail outsourcing. Publishers can contract foreign developers for the whole game. Blizzard is already doing this with Diablo Immoral, handing development off to NetEase
> General software development gets moved overseas and comes back all the time.
General software development also isn't unionized. As soon is it is, moving overseas becomes vastly more attractive.
> Software development is hard. Pushing it to a cheaper third party usually increases costs a lot in the long term due to the increase is development complexity and generally a decrease in worker skill.
What's actually harder about outsourcing is management and quality control. The developers in cheaper countries aren't somehow inherently worse.
Many publishers have studios around the world, working on entire games by themselves. Why keep funding an expensive studio in the US that's getting unionized? That better be high caliber, which most studios aren't.
> A strong union can also prevent companies from moving some jobs overseas.
Maybe in a big monolithic company, but that's not how game publishers operate.
My union has done nothing perceptible during the course of my employment, outside of protecting employees who are under performing.
My union dues cost 1% of my salary, and my perception is that they're taking that money and spending it on protecting bad employees.
I have friends who are higher up in unions at other workplaces, as well as friends who are involved with labor law. The impression all around is that my union and its representatives are "not good".
Unions don't automatically make working conditions better. They need to have good people working in the union to achieve that.
The fact that "shitty unions are shitty" implies that unions represent both cost and risk that must be weighed against current and potential future states-of-affair. Those who have experienced the downsides of those costs and risks are informed by those experiences and unsurprisingly more likely to be cautious about unions in the future.
I don't necessarily disagree with what you are saying, I do think your perspective is somehwat wrong however. The ultimate goal of a union is of course to improve the state of affairs. But the larger reason reason to have a union is because it is a right to be able to affect your own future.
There are shitty unions, but there are also shitty companies and you only have the right to affect one. If people say shitty things, should you abandon free speech or should you engage in the free speech you believe in? Most people would say the latter because they think free speech is an important right. I guess a similar conclusion would be that worker participation is too important to be left to shitty unions.
I would expect a new union to design around some of the pitfalls that have affected unions past.
Your general attitude sounds defeatist and strange on a community that is all about improving from past mistakes and learning to build better systems by breaking existing ones.
The poster responded to someone saying βwhy would anyone not want to unionizeβ by saying βsome unions are shittyβ, is that not reasonable? They arenβt even saying itβs a good reason, but a lot of people seem to have this idealistic view of unions and I do think it is healthy to keep in mind that this isnβt the case, just wanting to unionize and handing the reigns over to people who are lazy or greedy can leave you with labor problems AND a bite from your paycheck.
Indeed we should try to solve the problem. Tech is already helping (things are much better than just a decade ago), and there are plenty more opportunities to help.
But I'll stick with my point. Creating an union right now is not completely safe, so there are reasons to be wary of people proposing them, and to debate the details. There is even reason to not create one if the details are not right.
If your coworkers are unionizing, maybe it would be polite to at least attempt to understand their reasons and goals before dismissing it outright as something you don't want or need.
Organized labor has introduced customs that you benefit from and take for granted.
All you have to do is look at the difference in quality of life that came before and after the changes we obtained from organized labor in the 1800s/early 1900s.
Most people don't appreciate the extreme asymmetry between those who control capital and those who create the wealth of nations (26 individuals have the same worth as 3.5 Billion individuals)
In fact, just look at the quality of life of a worker in a place with strong labor (say most of the EU) vs say, the US.
>In fact, just look at the quality of life of a worker in a place with strong labor (say most of the EU) vs say, the US.
My wife is from the UK, I've looked into things there. I make 4 times what I would make in the UK, and that's before the additional taxes I'd pay (and before you ask the additional taxes for the NHS exceeds my spend for health insurance + copays). Sure they get about two weeks more vacation but I wouldn't trade that for 3/4ths of my salary why should I be forced to do so?
You're already prefacing that you don't need unions, it's impossible to argue against that. If you don't need or want a union membership, don't get one, nobody is saying anything else. The argument is that you will know whether or not the tool is useful if you do some research.
I posit that if the market of the labor you're offering isn't very advantageous to you anymore, and if you're being mistreated by an employer when you're in a position where you can't use your financial means or time to fight back for whatever reasons, you will feel the need of someone else to fight for you because you can't just find an employer that will shower you with money two blocks away. And when I say "mistreated" I mean that everything you are entitled to in your contract is not something you can count on, so no severance, and when I say you're not in a financial position to fight back I mean that you don't have the means or the time to sue, even if you're 100% in the clear legally.
If you believe that will never happen, you're likely correct. I don't think my apartment will be on fire without me noticing too, it's a very low risk of that ever happening in my life, but I still want a smoke detector. I just can't take the risk. Same thing with union membership for me, I can't take the risk of being treated the same way my ex-wife was treated when she was simultaneously struggling with depression (and wouldn't have gotten anything she was entitled to from her employer during her medical leave if someone else hadn't fought for her).
> If you don't need or want a union membership, don't get one, nobody is saying anything else.
That is incorrect, in the US if my workplace decides to unionize I'm forced to pay union dues. I am fully in my right to criticize unions as they can be foisted upon me without my consent.
Wow, what a weird and counterproductive way to implement unions. In Sweden, that's not even remotely how unions work, they're voluntary. That's a pretty messed up system you have, would you be more interested if they're fully voluntary?
Not OP, but I'm against unions in the US for many of the same reasons. Yes, my quarrels would be fully resolved if the unions were completely voluntary.
However, unions here in the US have done untold amounts of lobbying to government and employers to make them mandatory. The argument is usually that, "if membership is voluntary, some people will forgo membership but still reap the benefits of our negotiations, therefore you must force them to join us." Considering that many politicians (particularly in rust belt states) win office by getting big union endorsements, this tactic works very well.
I would be likely to join a union that was voluntary, because if the leadership started doing things I disagreed with, I could quit the union, or join a competing union that was more in line with my beliefs.
Federal law requires unions to represent all workers in a bargaining unit. States can decide whether unions can recover those costs from all workers they represent or just members. Mandatory membership is illegal.
Both entrenched unions and corporate interests support the status quo. It strengthens strong unions but makes organizing new unions harder.
> Federal law requires unions to represent all workers in a bargaining unit.
As I've explained above, this is true but misleading. They are required to represent all workers in a bargaining unit, but they can define the bargaining unit however they wish, including defining the bargaining unit to encompass only workers who have decided to sign up for the union and pay their dues. The only thing they cannot do is create contracts which apply to non-members and refuse to represent those non-members.
> Mandatory membership is illegal.
This is a common misconception. Closed shops are illegal, but it is legal for an employer to require (pursuant to a union contract) that employees join the union within 30 days or risk being fired (excluding railway, airline, and government employees).
Unions can also expel members from their union, and if they have an exclusive contract with the employer, this may result in the employer being forced to fire the employee in question, depending on the reason for which they are expelled.
We can quibble about how to describe it, but members-only unions in the US do not have the same standing as majority unions in the US or members-only unions elsewhere. Employers are free to ignore them. They can't negotiate exclusive benefits. Members can't commit to collective bargaining. The prevailing legal opinion seems to be that the NLRA does not allow a union to represent more than 50% but less than 100% of a potential bargaining unit.
Well, obviously. They can make whatever negotiations that they want for their own benefits.
What they cannot do is negotiate for other people who have chosen to not join the union, which is what the word "exclusive" implies.
So yes, they can negotiate. For themselves. Not for other people. Which makes sense, why the heck should they have the right to negotiate a contract for people that they don't represent?
The can absolutely negotiate for themselves, though. Just like you and I can negotiate a contract for ourselves.
It's the other way around. Employers are generally prohibited from bargaining with minority unions.[1] They can change policies that apply to everyone.
> Then what if the next wave of unions are designed to be voluntary instead of compulsory?
This would require that the AFL-CIO, UAW, Teamsters, SEIU, etc. all reverse decades of their own established policy not to pursue members-only unions.
It would also require legislation that makes it possible for a worker to dissociate from a union that they don't want to represent them. There is immense opposition by labor organizers against anything remotely resembling this shape of law, so it is unlikely to happen.
I'd have no problem with you joining a union provided I'm not required to also do so or pay any dues. I just don't see any benefit at the current time so I'd have little interest. It seems like another layer of bureaucratic game playing to navigate and additional costs from my perspective.
Federal law forces unions to represent all workers in a bargaining unit. You can choose not to pay anything in most states. In the rest, you are forced to pay an "agency fee" for the services the union is forced to provide you.
> Federal law forces unions to represent all workers in a bargaining unit.
This is true but misleading. Unions can define their bargaining unit as they choose. It is perfectly legal for a union to decide that its bargaining unit consists only of members (ie, people who have signed up for the union and have paid dues to it). That is exactly how unions work in almost every other OECD country, and which is why employees in countries like Germany, the UK, or France often have the choice of which union they want to represent them at their current job (or the choice not to be represented by a third party at all).
In the US, the main labor union syndicates (AFL-CIO, UAW, Teamsters, etc.) have all decided not to pursue this, instead only forming unions when they can get enough support to unionize all employees in a given class.
> You can choose not to pay anything in most states.
Technically true (27 of 50 states), but the main hubs for tech workers are basically all in states where this is not true (California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Massachusetts, Colorado, Illinois, etc).
> That is incorrect, in the US if my workplace decides to unionize I'm forced to pay union dues. I am fully in my right to criticize unions as they can be foisted upon me without my consent.
Why all the hostility? If there are changes at your employer that you don't agree with, like unionization, just quit and take a different job. There's approximately zero unionization in the software development field right now, so you'll have tons of choices. No one's going to force you to stay in a union job if you don't want to.
You're recommending everyone unionize, even though some unions are shitty and may end up being a net negative for people. But, aren't some businesses or sectors not shitty? Why unionize in nonshitty sectors or businesses?
Unionizing in a non-shitty sector will give the workers a way to help ensure that the sector continues to not be shitty, both by maintaining a baseline for what a union shop looks like, and by contributing money to politicians who will work to pass laws that help keep the sector free of shittiness.
But the sector is already doing a good job of being non-shitty without a union. And what about the case where you're in a non-shitty sector, but end up with a shitty union, resulting in a net negative for the employees? Do you just say "Oh well, it was for the greater good. Someone else somewhere has a union which is non-shitty, just in case some day the sector becomes antagonistic with employees"?
> You can always unionize later. Ununionizing might be a much bigger challenge.
Deauthorization of a union is much more difficult than forming a union in the first place. It is very difficult to obtain sufficient support for deauthorization without the union leadership hearing about it, at which point they can usually find sufficient reason to expel the member from the union. If there is an exclusive contract with the employer (which is usually the case in the US), this may result in the employee's termination.
Even if there is enough support for deauthorization to require an election, the NLRB has the authority to overturn the results of the election, and it has historically wielded this power quite generously in favor of the union.
It seems prudent to unionize and protect yourself while the business/sector is employee-friendly rather than have to unionize if the employer is taken over etc.
Have you ever considered that you one day could be that "under performing" employee grasping on to their livelihood during a period of poor health, family problems etc?
Under performing was an understatement.
I could have as easily said "employees that are asleep at their desks" and it would have been true for some cases.
Management doesn't pursue these people because of the effort involved with dealing with the union.
I'm in favor of allowing people to live without needing to work. I understand that there needn't be a job for every person in the world. I'm aware that nobody should have to work 40 hours a week anymore.
I'm open to a system that allows all of these things to happen.
However - applying that system on a micro scale (one workplace at a time, through unions) introduces way too much friction between employers and their employees, employees and their peers, and employers and unions.
It also causes an internal conflict for the employee - where they have to mask their lack of contribution by busywork, ultimately feeling unfulfilled in their life.
Unionizing all workplaces is a sub-optimal means to distribute wealth.
How would you go about achieving these things through this conflict averse approach? I find it naive at best, and it's firmly in the best interests of business. I mean, this is why corporations in the US (and elsewhere) have fought tooth and nail against unions and labour movements for its entire history and continue to do so. Comparing the welfare systems and labour laws & benfits to western Europe shows the result of this.
I've worked with people who would have produced more for the company collecting their paycheck and just not showing up to work. Don't let the freeloaders distract you, and maybe let the ball drop occasionally so they HAVE to catch it, or prove they can't anymore. Let them hang themselves, no need to punish!
Well, Pyrrhic implies that I think it's too great a cost because you'll take down the people with social issues (and more) along with the much fewer obvious freeloaders.
>Unions don't automatically make working conditions better. They need to have good people working in the union to achieve that.
True. Unfortunately, many unions are incredibly milquetoast. However, even in such cases the union can still function as sort of an insurance policy against future severe abuses. Folks can also engage with their union: they will listen to workers.
> Folks can also engage with their union: they will listen to workers.
Uh, the same group dynamics that cause cliques to form and higher powers within bureaucracies also can happen in unions. This happens regularly, and I've been a part of one, where regular workers were not listened to but the upper "management" of the union (can't use that word though) controlled the fates of everyone below.
You needed regular workers to rebel against the union to even get representation against management. All the while they collect dues.
Plenty of unions are good. But acting like all of them are, or why you can't understand why everyone wouldn't want to unionize, is really naive.
"The Union," as an entity, has power over the workers in many of the same ways that corporations do (especially the power of coordination). You'd need a union-union so that workers could bargain collectively with the union leadership. For N people employed by a corporation, you could have N groups: One containing all N (the corporation), one containing N-1 (the union, whose membership consists of all but the CEO), one containing N-2 (the union union, whose membership consists of all but the CEO and the top union leader), and so on all the way down to the N-(N-1)th subunion which consists only of the intern.
Now, there may be more than one equal among the top corporate leadership, and there might be more than one equal in the top union leadership. So, instead of having to have N unions, you could have N/m where m is the number of voting equals at the top of each level of the hierarchy.
This is not entirely facetious, many democratic countries essentially work like this. For example, Americans have a county legislature, a state legislature, and a federal legislature, and to some extent (a greater extent early in the country's history), they perform this sort of nested bargaining.
The historic links between unions and political machines and unions and organized crime suggests that the concept of workers fixing a bad union is great in theory but nearly impossible in practice.
The historic links between the capital owning class, political machines, and organized paramilitary forces suggests that the concept of individual workers fixing a bad company is great in theory but nearly impossible in practice.
I'm not sure that undercuts my argument. At best, most unions provide an ineffectual outlet for worker frustration at the company negotiating with the union with the union leaders colluding with management and eating steak and caviar on management's tab. At worst, union leaders are completely ignored by management and line their pockets on the misery of their members, occasionally stepping in to right a wrong but mostly acting the treacle in the gears of actually getting things done.
Almost every modern union is the textbook definition of controlled opposition.
The only escape is likely violent revolution of the anarcho-capitalist or anarcho-communist variety, these systems still share the problem of rich and powerful people with guns.
> No, they couldn't, because unless you bargain collectively, you have a lot more to lose in these negotiations, then your boss does. You derive 100% of your income from your employer. Your employer derives ~0.01%-1% of their income from you.
You derive 100% of your income from your union membership, which is a mandatory term of your employment. Your union derives ~0.01%-1% of their income from you.
(It actually derives even less than that, because it operates as a syndicate representing workers across multiple employers).
> What prevents EA from moving their studios to Poland or China?
Culture, for one thing. Especially game series like Fallout or GTA live from the absurd amount of US-centric cultural references in even the tiniest details.
I think at least part of the argument is that if the union spends time and money improving general working conditions, you're benefiting regardless of whether or not you're part of the union.
At least if the laws were less hypocritical and applied to all things that improve our living conditions (such as open source software development) then I could understand it, but right now as it is I find it unacceptable.
In the US mandatory union fees for the public sector were struck down by the supreme court, I'm not sure if this also applies to private sector jobs though. This was due to the Janus v AFSC ruling see. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-1466_2b3j.pdf
Varies from state to state. Some states have union requirements for certain sectors, or as businesses are either unionized or not. Right to work states make it so that there can be no requirement to join a union.
Of course Arizona itself has a weird kind of reverse union of hospitals that covers nursing that afaik hasn't been challenged yet, which seems like it would be either a right to work or trust violation. Can't speak to a broader sense.
> Varies from state to state. Some states have union requirements for certain sectors, or as businesses are either unionized or not. Right to work states make it so that there can be no requirement to join a union.
Even under right-to-work laws, the employees can still be required to be covered under the union contract. Right-to-work laws just mean that the union can't forcibly withhold or charge dues from people who aren't union members.
The problem is, this is exactly what you would expect from a union that's working.
If the union is successfully scaring the management from pulling any shenanigans on the good workers, then, they have a lot more free time for the borderline cases.
As for moral character: let me introduce you to the average person in management at a large corporation!
Unions may not always do the right thing. And there are lots of cases out there where unions have too much power or abuse that power. And sometimes you have an annoying co-worker who is so zealous about taking cases to the union that they seem to be in an extractive relationship with the company.
But that just means that unions are another human institution. Apparently the nearly-infinite number of cases where management abuses their power doesn't count? Where management is in an extractive relationship with the company?
If you want negotiating power over certain issues, for many kinds of workers or concerns, unions are the only game in town.
I work for myself now, but I was in a TA/RA union in grad school. The answer is an unequivocal yes. Among other things, they prevented the school from charging us hundreds of dollars extra a quarter in fees. They also commonly protected grad students against illegally long hours as TAs.
Have you ever considered that maybe it's due to past union efforts that they currently don't have massive transgressions they must currently fight against?
Sure, we've all heard the anecdotes of a union protecting some guy who probably wasn't competent or cut out for the job. But how do you like your weekends? Benefits? Work/life balance? It's not perfect, but those things would gradually erode away without unions to fight for and defend them. Don't think companies will preserve that forever just out of the goodness of their hearts. Don't think it's just a permanent, inviolate fixture of our culture now. It's a hard-earned way of life that our ancestors carved out for us.
Actually, those things are gradually eroding away this very moment, because unions are now terribly weak and most Americans have internalized this contrived hatred of organized labor. It's not going to go well for workers in the future if we're so complacent. Make no mistake, you and I both enjoy the fruits of bitter and intense union battles from previous generations. They may seem unnecessary relics of the past now, but without them we'd be back in tenement housing working 16 hour days and making barely enough money to afford rent and food from the company store very quickly. Lots of industries are already pushing us back to that state. Be grateful your career has a union. It's definitely well worth one percent of your salary.
I can negotiate my own salary, hours, and working conditions. I don't need someone to do it for me, and I certainly do not want to be forced into such an arrangement. Just because it's something you personally find advantageous doesn't mean others feel the same way, and no one should ever be forced into it.
>I can negotiate my own salary, hours, and working conditions.
You can, and the company can choose to not hire you. There is a huge power imbalance between employers and employees. Right now, this is muted because the job market is so tight. This will not be true forever.
> Just because it's something you personally find advantageous doesn't mean others feel the same way, and no one should ever be forced into it.
As a society, we make decisions against the will of individuals for a greater good all the time.
I noticed you've emphasized this twice. You have to admit that this pro-active idea of "join a union before you _really_ need the union" is not that compelling of a sales pitch to a lot of developers who already have good paying jobs. It's human nature.
>I never understand employees who don't want to unionize.
Do you really want to understand? I think the reasons are obvious: most programmers don't see any economic benefits to paying ~$500 (or whatever amount) annual union dues for very little gain.
If you can prove to developers that paying $X would return tangible benefits in excess of those fees, there would be an unstoppable movement. The proof isn't there yet.
As many programmers have testified, they already get excellent pay, benefits, work hours, etc without union representation. Yes, of course some programmers are suffering in terrible jobs but not enough of them (yet) outnumber the people who don't want to pay for a union.
I can easily understand why some programmers want a union. But it's a mystery why union supporters also can't see why some don't want it.
Virtually every other high paying profession has unions by another name, namely professional organizations who often are responsible for things like licensing, ethics enforcement, ect.
Should Software Engineers want to remain a part of the professional class over the long term, it would be ignorant to not push for these things and introduce further supply restrictions around who can and cannot be a software engineer just as how accountants, lawyers, actuaries, ect have all done before them.
The NCEES does offer a software engineering PE exam. But, that's meaningless when anyone can be a dev because there are no limits to who can be hired for what purpose in software, really.
I'm someone is and has had very senior roles in software development without any formal education past high school, for the past 24 years. I'd rather not have a program that requires such in this area of work. There are already enough businesses that won't hire me for a give role because of their internal requirements for certain positions, I'd rather not.
I sympathize with that, and I was in no way advocating the PE exam for software development (although I could see it being of use in certain areas - it could be useful for roles involving risk similar to the risks that usually lead to other engineering disciplines having that requirement). But with how many CRUD apps are in existence, it's wholly unreasonable to expect all developers to get a 4 year degree and pass the PE exam.
When unions were first starting, people were literally putting their lives on the line to protest and strike. State troops (in various states) were called, protesters were killed. Frankly, today isn't that bad for most people. Personally, I don't have a problem with unions existing as a protected option. But insisting they exist is akin to Communism imho.
>But insisting they exist is akin to Communism imho.
This is funny for me to read, because you probably intended to imply that's a bad thing. I'd also question whether the forms of domination which the founders of the unions of old has decreased or just changed form - and even given that it has decreased, what is an acceptable level of exploitation? I would say none, and many union members would agree with that supposition.
Today not being that bad means that today is still bad.
It should stop where the liberty eroded for anyone is greater than the good provided to someone else. Also, where is the exploitation? Are people locked into contracts and cannot leave their job? Most of these jobs are in states where non-competes are not enforceable.
It's a trade, one person trades their time, knowledge effort and skill, the other trades money and other compensation. As I said, I'm not even anti union. I would rather see a guild around software development over a union though, based on reputation over protecting the bad performers. It could be considered A union, but wouldn't act like a typical union in practice.
If you are more senior, and submit that a junior is ready to move into a journeyman role, your reputation is also at least partially on the line if they cannot do the work, or put in the effort to get there.
No person's wants should ever infringe on another's rights.
Some theorists define exploitation in capitalist society as unequal exchange of labour, see John Roemer for instance; other more traditional critiques see it similarly but it may apply individually (such as Marx's theory), and yet others see it as a class issue. Of these, they can be grouped into PECP (Profit-Exploitation Correspondence Principle) and CECP (Class-exploitation Correspondence Principle). There's a lot of talk and debate as to whether which of these, if any, is a viable or possible way to characterize modern relations of production.
>It's a trade, one person trades their time, knowledge effort and skill, the other trades money and other compensation.
In the employment relationship, this trade is assymetrical, hence the need for either strong labour laws, a rich union culture or both.
>No person's wants should ever infringe on another's rights.
The critique of capitalism begins with a critique of rights-based thinking. In short, some people don't believe that rights are a useful tool to characterise how society ought to look, since it is clear that despite universal rights, some are clearly more able to take advantage of them than others. The propertyless have right to property. So what? Where does that get them most of the time?
I believe that the existence of unions is necessary. Without any unions worker rights would degrade pretty significantly. I also strongly believe that unions aren't the right answer in most situations.
One example - teachers. In the public sector, teachers are unionized yet underpaid, and in general terms, have unfavorable work conditions.
In the private sector, teachers get paid much better and have the freedom to actually run their classroom in the way they see fit.
The union isn't the cause of this disparity, but it clearly doesn't overcome it.
>In the private sector, teachers get paid much better and have the freedom to actually run their classroom in the way they see fit.
While this might be true wherever you are from, it is definitely not universal. Every US state I have lived in has been the opposite.
At a private school, the advantages to teachers are the student base is self-selected and can be expelled, and the school can teach things a public school cannot (often religious).
At a public school, pay, benefits, and job protections are much better.
Being able to "run your classroom the way they see fit" is a school-by-school work culture thing, but a teacher with more job protections would always have more leeway in how they ran their classroom. A teacher working at-will could never truly run their classroom the way they saw fit, because "do X or you're fired" is always a possible ultimatum.
Honestly I think unions are redundant when you have properly functioning governments.
Ideally the government should have worker protections in place that do exactly what a union does.
Of course in reality you need groups to represent the workers to put pressure on the government to do that. But I'd rather give money to groups like the EFF who specifically push policy and lawsuits over a group like a union.
This is an assumption, and a logical fallacy. The whole problem of doing something "for the greater good" is that no one on Earth can definitively define what is good and what is not. Trying to do so is the bottomless rabbit hole we call ethics. OP is correctly pointing out that your view of unionizing being advantageous is subjective.
>You are contradicting yourself. If a union could be a good or a bad thing, then one cannot use the argument that we do things for the greater good without presupposing that a union is a good thing. You are indeed assuming your own premise as true, which is indeed a logical fallacy.
No I'm not. In these comments I am arguing against the premise that a closed shop union is automatically invalid because the coercion would be wrong. The advantages that a union can have is not subjective under pretty much any reasonable ethical framework. If your ethical system can not produce judgments about public policy based on evidence, then it is useless.
Subjectivity is a different thing from uncertainty. The goal of ethical systems is to provide a way to make ethical decisions based on evidence. If we can agree on some ethical concepts, then objective decisions can be made given those concepts. The selection of an ethical system is subjective, but it's pretty obvious that it must allow for coercion.
Your comment seems dismissive of the notion of ethical behavior. We can argue the finer points, but we can agree for example killing letβs say innocent people is bad. Feeding hungry people is good. The point of collective power is not to agree on everything, but to find enough in common agreement to organize around it. As a collective you can better negotiate for your common interests.
> We can argue the finer points, but we can agree for example killing letβs say innocent people is bad. Feeding hungry people is good.
This is simply moral relativism. That argument holds up only under specific, ad-hoc circumstances. A group of people can very easily come to a conclusion that an action should be taken because they agree on it, and find out later that the consequences of that action were detrimental.
Yes, decisions must be made under uncertainty, because we don't ever know the exact outcome. Sometimes, even when acting rationally using available evidence, a decision winds up having negative consequences. Them's the breaks in our uncertain reality.
If a group of people collectively make a decision that is not consistent with evidence and their ethical system, then they are not making decisions correctly. I don't think anyone here is debating that decisions can be incorrect.
No it's not. The poster was seemingly espousing a belief that because he didn't want a union, it is morally wrong to force one on him. That is inconsistent with a belief in the benefits that government coercion can sometimes be a good idea. A union could conceivably be a bad thing or a good thing, but to dismiss it with a rights-based argument simply doesn't make sense.
> The whole problem of doing something "for the greater good" is that no one on Earth can definitively define what is good and what is not.
All endeavors may fail. We make decisions based on probability of outcomes. This is the same for both individual and collective decisions. If we cannot make collective decisions under uncertainty, then there is no point to any government whatsoever. Also, if we cannot come up with a baseline of ethics to evaluate possible outcomes, then we can't make any collective decision either.
> A union could conceivably be a bad thing or a good thing
> As a society, we make decisions against the will of individuals for a greater good all the time.
You are contradicting yourself. If a union could be a good or a bad thing, then one cannot use the argument that we do things for the greater good without presupposing that a union is a good thing. You are indeed assuming your own premise as true, which is indeed a logical fallacy.
>> As a society, we make decisions against the will of individuals for a greater good all the time.
> Is it hard to see why an individual might be against that?
It's not hard to see, but individuals who prioritize their own desires over the greater good of their community are often (rightly) regarded as selfish. It is hard to have much empathy for someone who has their selfishness thwarted.
Fair point, but applied to the original comment, is "not wanting to join a union" so selfish that one can't even understand how someone would have that position? I'd consider anyone who thinks so to be thoroughly ideologically possessed.
The poster I was responding to was actually asserting that unions are bad because he would be forced to pay the dues, which you also seem to be asserting here. An argument that unions are bad because closed shops violate an individual's autonomy is completely incoherent if one also holds a belief that sometimes coercion is justified. This particular logical fallacy is commonly used by libertarians to dismiss policy proposals out of hand, in my experience.
To see why this belief is fallacious, abstract the proposition "Unions violate individual autonomy, therefore unions are bad" to "P violates individual autonomy, therefore P is bad." Replace P with criminal penalties, taxation, etc, and it is immediately obvious that this belief is logically incoherent if one also holds the belief that civilization is preferable to the state of nature.
Logical consistency matters. You can't make rational decisions without it. Either you believe that sometimes coercion is morally justified to achieve other ends, or you cannot have a consistent belief that any societal organization is morally correct. We can debate the pros and cons of unions, and yes, there are cons. But it makes no sense to dismiss it out of hand due to an incoherent moral belief.
You can coherently believe that coercion in and of itself is a bad thing, and I agree. That must be weighed against the benefits of said coercion when making such decisions. For example, most people don't like to go to prison, so I think there should be a really good reason to violate someone's autonomy in such a massive way. Thus, I only support prison for serious crimes that I really don't want people to do.
Taxation is also coercion. I don't like paying my taxes, but I support coercive measures to make sure everyone does because I like having a government.
> I can negotiate my own salary, hours, and working conditions
I'm represented by a union at my job and I also negotiate these things myself (well, the union has a bargain for minimum working conditions, so I can't say "if you pay me $1000 I'll move my desk to the HVAC room"). The union comes into play more for things like health insurance and retirement benefits. I can't imagine an individual having much luck getting their insurance copays reduced, but the union seems to have a decent amount of success.
I agree that no one should be forced. However without organized labor most people may be negotiating from a weaker position, and therefore free to negotiate their own (low) salary. Collectives do have real power.
I think a lot of people would be better off with a union, though really I more advocate cooperatives.
Actually, personally hiring an agent seems like a GREAT idea, and these things exist in all jobs, even if it's not common. Your incentives are quite closely aligned.
Having a collective agent is almost the polar opposite.
Can you explain how is it almost the polar opposite?
Things like retirement and health benefits are not negotiated at the individual level. having a personal representative likely wouldnβt help much in that area, but a union would.
Sure, maybe "polar opposite" was a bit much, but there's a big difference between negotiating for a collective set of shared benefits vs specifically negotiating for your interests. Of course, your personal agent has other clients, but is not only negotiating for precisely what you ask for (of course you will not get everything you want!), but is also likely not even negotiating on behalf of anyone else against the same organization!
In the event that your personal agent is negotiating for you personally, but also for several teammates, of course there is then a conflict and your interests may be traded for the interests of another one of his clients, which is an issue.
This is still better than having your interests pooled together, but not as good as having ONLY your interests advocated for.
It's far from certain that your interests get traded for someone else's; just as likely the opposite. Further, on some things you are in a much weaker position individually than you are collectively.
It's not objectively better to negotiate by yourself, stop pretending like it is.
I negotiate for myself too. But my negotiation starts from 5w paid vacation and Iβm negotiating for a sixth. And thatβs only because if unions. Only.
I never understand employees who do want to unionize.
Ok that's not entirely true, I get that unions can help guide a one-shot prisoner's dilemma to cooperate-cooperate. But those are increasingly rare in a broad economy. My main objection is that I don't want to be part of a group that claims to "represent me", if I want a representative I'll appoint one myself. My secondary objection is that I don't want to be entangled in a legal structure where people far away can determine that because of such-and-such the union is going on strike and I'm not allowed to perform my job even if I want to. My third objection is for software related fields specifically, that a union will raise the barrier to entry, which so far has been kept incredibly low for the betterment of many people who came up from lower-middle class or lower and has allowed the field to expand to meet supply and across a pretty distributed set of locations.
The later is done in virtually every other high paying blue and white collar field, from construction work to all sorts of professional services. It benefits no one but the employers to not have such constraints.
The only people I know who are in a union hate the union.
It effectively only seems to keep people in jobs that are terrible employees and would otherwise be fired. I know the intention of a union is much more noble, but effectively this is the only outcome they have seen a union enable.
Everyone hates their government, but that's no reason to want to disband the government. It's a means of representation. Everyone will gripe that it doesn't represent them perfectly, which is true, but it's still better than not having representation at all.
Every person I know in a union talks trash about their union like they talk trash about their family. The union will annoy them on a daily basis -- and then they'll remind you that it's all between friends, and everything is far better than back before they had representation.
> Everyone hates their government, but that's no reason to want to disband the government.
It's not a reason to add another bureaucracy on top of the existing one we all hate either.
I've been represented by a union and their representation was wholly disadvantageous to me to a significant monetary amount as a result of their 'screw the new guy' policies and priorities. To wit, things would have been far better for me without them.
> I never understand employees who don't want to unionize. It just shows what a sorry state the labor movement is in.
You need to be a part of a terrible union to understand why people would think that way. It's pretty simple once you've been in one that siphons off dues and does very little to combat management, of which there are many groups that will do this.
Or have been exposed to union related violence and intimidation. When someone says "Join a union" I hear "Sign up to get sucker punched in the bathroom" if somebody suspects you aren't going to fall in line. I know that's probably uncommon, but formative experiences are formative.
Currently in programming/software jobs in the tech industry, salaries and perks are good and there is relative freedom in how you spend your time on the job doing the job (atleast in all the jobs I've been in -- all in the US). Unionizing will impact all of those -- ultimately whatever the benefits, unions will be seen as creating an us-vs-them environment where the default view is management fighting the employees (it doesn't have to be that way, but I feel that will be the end result at some point). The end result of that will be that employees will be more constrained in their freedom/salaries to whatever is negotiated by the union.
Just a personal view-point. I don't have direct union experience other that what I read about. Teachers union/nurses union/workers union typically going on strike every few years to get a cost-of-living increase in wages. Unions of tradespeople seem to be better though, but it still seems like salaries are constrained in those areas.
Management is already fighting employees. The difference is, management bargains collectively, and employees do not.
For anyone who thinks that they have a strong bargaining position, or enjoy great perks: Try asking for an escape from the open-office-floor-plan-hell, by getting your own office. You'll quickly see exactly how valued your special snowflake concerns are to the company.
That, I see as a bad example of needing a union for depending on what the company is preferring the open-office floor-plan for. I think it makes sense for a company to optimize on real-estate costs to run a viable business. After-all they aren't forcing you to work there.
I see unions as a way to protect employees from being unfairly taken advantage of (long hours without commensurate benefits and choice on your part, dangerous working conditions, bad salaries/wages). A bad office design is a bad office design and you need to convince your company that it's not in their best interests by other means or work elsewhere. Using a union to deal with all this will only end up in causing bad-blood all around. For certain things legislation is better -- you can blame the "government" boogeyman instead of being pissed with each other.
A question for you -- are unions mandatory or it's just a normal way of life there. Also do small startups have unions? What's the tipping point for having a union at a tech company.
There is a minimal amount of employees, I think around 30, where there is legal support for the workers to organize and request the presence of the union in the company.
Usually it requires a voting process for everyone to decide if they are willing to adopt one or not.
Another tricky question -- does having the union prevent (or atleast make it difficult) for a company to pay way higher than normal for someone (who will be a union represented employee) they deem necessary for the company?
Maybe what I am asking is -- does having unions constrain pay-hikes in any way?
There is very little incentive for someone in the tech industry to unionize. Well paid, safe environment, adjustable hours, often free food and unlimited vacation(s).
Why should I go through the extra effort, financial loss, etc. Typically to help support engineers less productive than I to keep their jobs? No thanks.
I'm an engineer and in general if I want to work in the game industry I will end up taking a salary that is significantly less than I would if I joined any non-game tech company.
Case in point, I've worked with someone at a game company that compared to the rest of the industry treats its employees very well. He was making at most $110k a year as a lead senior engineer (not including bonuses). He left the game industry and joined a well known soon-to-IPO startup as a senior engineer. He is now making $175k base with additional bonuses and stock options.
I'm not complaining, but trust me, the game industry is a different beast. It's much worse if you aren't an engineer -- artists, designers and QA are often treated as disposable.
"Adjustable hours" is not true everywhere, and being expected to work large amounts of unpaid overtime is extraordinarily common in this industry. There's many with companies with forced arbitration clauses for disputes and other unfair practices. Unions provide a great deal of protection against these abuses for pretty insignificant union dues.
Workers have more power now due to the red-hot tech job market. This will not be true forever.
I like to think of unions a little bit like getting a vaccination. You may not need it now, or ever, and when it actually works for you, you may not be aware of it. It's a low cost way of protecting yourself from injury and loss. And, there's a bunch of people out there that are really really convinced they are terrible for you.
I'm completely okay with underperforming software engineers getting fired. I don't want some system that I'm paying for with my union dues helping them maintain a job that they don't deserve.
On the other hand, I've never seen a deserving and talented software engineer out of a job for very long. And if you're talented you will get paid much much more than average.
The only software engineers that want or need a union are the ones that need artificial barriers to keep them employed.
But I'll note that even engineers who are less productive than you deserve stability and some level of control over their work lives.
So maybe consider it part of your moral imperative as a "winner" in the current economic environment to make sure other people can taste the benefits you enjoy -- even if you have deemed them "less productive."
I disagree. I don't believe that engineers who are not productive deserve stability. They should leave the industry and move into another one where they can be more productive.
The ones who are not productive are usually the ones that interfere with my ability to be productive.
> At whose cost? Do developers even less productive than that next tier deserve stability? Does the worst employee deserve stability?
Yes.
They don't deserve the best jobs at the fanciest companies, of course, but every single human being alive deserves stability. That's the baseline. If we as a civilization cannot provide that, then we need to keep working at it.
Fine, cook up a basic income scheme that won't fall apart then, but keep them out of the engineering disciplines if they can't perform above a minimum level. We can agree that we should strive for universal stability, but not universal stability in any arbitrary field of "work".
I've heard a number of horror stories about the game dev industry that would be unheard of in the larger tech community. I've always thought this was because there was a less restricted labor supply among game developers. I knew a LOT of guys in University who got into CS because they "wanted to make games." That increases competition for the available positions, which creates unfavorable conditions for the labor pool and an easily exploitable market for employers who know there's always another eager kid lining up to "make games."
And this is almost certainly coming to the rest of the industry- there is currently another front page article about the difficulty of getting into classes/programs because they are so full.
It definitely hasn't hit the industry yet. I've been trying to recruit mid-level to senior devs throughout the last year - in NYC of all places - and I've had very little luck. We have an amazing in-house recruiter and nearly everyone is thoroughly unqualified.
Although, we just took on an intern who absolutely kicks ass, and runs circles around people who've been doing it for 10 years. That kid makes me nervous lol.
Yep. Weird that it doesn't restrict the labor pool though. I would love to work in games. But I'm not putting in 80 hour weeks for 75K a year. No thank you.
It's at least partially because it's so many programmers' "dream job." So many people get into programming because of their interest in games, then take jobs in the industry. They then are willing to tolerate/justify worse working conditions because they are doing something they are passionate about and the company culture has evolved to exploit that.
I'm generally anti-union, but the game developers are treated so poorly that I completely understand.
Theory: Because people like developing games, the industry has gotten used to overworking workers and replacing them with fresh meat once they burn out. There's more than enough replacements eager to work on games.
I can see how someone working on tech might think that. But game dev is kind of a big exception inside tech. I recommend you do some googling about working conditions, salaries, stability etc.
RSUs / stock options align incentives with the company. If half your compensation is from stock (and you have tons of it unvested), sure you want good pay, good work conditions, etc., but you also want the company to grow its profits and not be dragged down by unproductive employees.
Because it'd be better to legislate that full time employees (even management) be granted a paid full day off for each 5 hours over 40 worked in a single week. That can either be paid out at the end of the pay period or accrued for later use. If a company has "unlimited" vacation, those days of overtime must be paid out by the end of the next pay period.
As much as I prefer not to have government involved in much of anything, it's far simpler and far easier to legislate than to attempt to unionize. Unions tend to under-serve their average and above average members and is often not worth it. In the end, most would be happy to be compensated for personal expense and mandated overtime.
The idea that the American government will step up and legislate these protections is a hopeful one, but not even remotely realistic. It's a much better use of the time of game developers to unionize now, demand better working conditions now, and strike now.
Convincing even a majority of the gaming developers alone to do so to a point where those companies will agree to accept a union is unlikely. Especially across international and even interstate boundaries. There are some states (I live in one), where you cannot be required to join a union as a term of employment.
The biggest issue is generally a side effect of compensation. If the level of compensation after 40 hours exceeds the benefit to the company (reduced time to completion) they will pay or not. When it's effectively free, they will push. When less than half are willing, you won't get movement to/from a union.
There are also already lots of laws regarding payment to non-management, blue collar mostly hourly emloyees. Programmers are an exception, more so if salaried. There could probably be enough support to reduce the exceptions so programmers and IT in general are covered.
Which has asymmetrical effects. Ask why all of those miserable people working in the video gaming industry don't just quit? The "just go find another job" refrain is a tired one.
A canard repeated often is a refrain. A statement can be both.
I have dismissed it as a canard because this argument of "well if they don't like working there they can leave" has been done to death on HN, usually on threads about bad working conditions, at places like Amazon warehouses or on video game QA teams. And I point you to those places for my arguments against yours, because they've been repeated again and again. People often can't leave their job because of personal circumstances. They need the money. They need the health insurance. They have lack the resources to find another job quickly. They have families to feed. And sure, you'll rebut with "well they just have to suck it up and deal with it, and they must be sucking up and dealing with it if they haven't left." Which is correct to a point but is this an optimal result? Do we want a society where people are forced to stay at jobs they hate, that actively harm their mental if not physical selves, because of a resource distribution? When we produce enough to ensure that everyone can have a better standard of living? Which is the second, you could say, prescriptive, part of the argument. But the point is that the first argument has been debated before and I choose to dismiss it because we would be rebashing a very dead horse.
I had a job in another industry that was unionized. All it was was a way to skim some money from a large group of people and have a handful of people profit magnificently. It did nothing to help me.
Since becoming a software developer, my life has been great and I have never needed a union's help. My TC is well over $400,000/year and after everything I've seen in my previous industry, I never would have reached that with a union.
I'm not sure where to begin with this, since your perspective is contrary to all economic evidence.
Have you been aware that real wages have not been rising with productivity since the 70's? Inequality has also risen massively. You may be in a comfortable position in your job, but a very large proportion employed people in the US are not financially secure.
Folks forget now, but the existence of a large middle class in the US is due to reforms pushed by the labor movement in the first half of the 20th century.
Honestly not trying to make an argument for/against unions (my own stance is I'd be totally fine with fully voluntary unions), but in isolation this comment doesn't seem to contradict the above comment's point about unions having outlived their usefulness.
On one hand, it's great the labor movement pushed for reforms in the first half of the 20th century. But we're in the first half of the 21st century now and as you point out, real wages haven't kept up with productivity and lots of people are financially insecure. So has the labor movement been slacking for the past ~50 years?
Of course, there's a whole lot more to financial insecurity than labor compensation, but you seem to be arguing for unions being one part of the answer to that. But we have unions, so where's the disconnect?
Contrary to all economic evidence? Unions don't represent me. What "evidence" is there besides that? As a fiscal conservative republican/libertarian - unions do not represent anything about me. At all.
People being "not financially secure" doesn't mean that a Union represents their needs. Those are two separate - if related - issues.
"folks forget now" you seem to be ignoring one of my main points: Many Unions out live their usefulness.
There are points where Unions are great - and some of those points do exist today. I think Unions are important with regards to government agencies, for example - because the "employer" is massively disconnected from the lower level employees and in many aspects not accountable.
But the vast majority of Unions get created... maybe full-fill a purpose... then continues to exist as a detriment. A bureaucracy that exists unto itself and stops representing the worker and instead becomes another detached entity that's, for all intents and purposes, a net negative and a drain on a company.
IE: The auto industry.
You show me a union that factors in their base and covers the entire spectrum - and not 100% one party or political ideology... and we can begin talking about how a Union could or would represent all it's members...
> Folks forget now, but the existence of a large middle class in the US is due to reforms pushed by the labor movement in the first half of the 20th century.
Exactly the opposite. Unions started forming after WW2 which is when the middle class began its decline.
Something along these lines wandered through my nonce t'other night. There appears to be a fairly direct inverse correlation between labo(u)r union rates and economic equality. Has anywhere democratic ever experimented with mandatory unionization? The socialist in me thinks that would be a neat idea β the anti-authoritarian in me not so much.
In relation to tech jobs, as I understand it union sign-up rates are quite low and that may be a function of the pretty decent wages the median tech worker makes. On the other hand I was listening to the news today and in my country they are experimenting with the idea of turning certain tech roles into trades and they say that the large tech companies might go for it. Not everyone is suited to 3rd-level ed. at the age of 18 and some learners are way more practical than theoretical oriented. If you could learn on the job and earn small wages while you're at it rather than racking up massive student loan debt that'd be super. Even better if you joined a tech union right out of the gate.
Since it's game programmers, why not apply some game theory?
Aside from not wanting to be part of a union, people are reluctant to join a union if others do not do the same. Many people might actually join one if there was a big one, but a big one can't grow because nobody wants to be the first guy to raise his hand.
So someone needs to make a website that manages this. Everyone pays a deposit, say $100 bucks, and signs onto some secure site that will keep details private. If you get more than some minimum, the money is sent to the new union. Otherwise send it back.
Do you suspect this would fall under trademark confusion? It's definitely towing a line but I don't think it's necessarily that clear-cut. It's not like they own the term 'kick starter,' they just used it in their trademarked brand.
I don't know what's driving people to work in the gaming industry. If you worked on simulation software, for example, you could still do graphics programming, have a phenomenally better working environment, reasonable hours, and more pay.
Games are more than "graphics programming". In fact, the fraction of programmers on a game is small, and the number of graphics programmers is a tiny fraction of that. In my most recent project we didn't even have a dedicated graphics programmer because we used Unreal Engine. Yes, sometimes things had to be tuned and UE had to be kicked in the butt, but mostly it just worked.
I haven't worked in regular software in ages and have no intention of every going back to that. A single game will have multiple areas in which you have fun, interesting and challenging problems to solve. You don't typically get that in a vanilla software job.
Of course, if you work for a large game company, they tend to have specialists for various areas and I would guess the job gets old in one of those places pretty quickly.
In my experience, the ones who really get exploited in the game industry are non-programmers. There are plenty of young people who want to work on games but not be programmers. They are frequently tracked into QA, game design or producer (known as program manager elsewhere) careers. There's an oversupply of these kids and along with artists they are the most egregiously underpaid. The best among them do go on eventually to be game designers (or upper management if they so desire) and do well.
It's because it's a dream for people, comparable to working on movies. That's like saying why should a AV technician not work on movies when they can make more money doing recordings for corporate events.
So why should anyone outside this "dream" industry give two shits about the people inside the industry being mistreated? If they don't like it, they should go to work in some other "boring" industry that uses those same skills. There's no shortage of jobs out there for skilled people these days, the problem is too many prima donnas like these game devs who want to live their dream and then also be treated well. When everyone and their brother is clamoring to work in a particular niche industry, producing a huge oversupply, this is what you get. Go work in an industry where there's a shortage of qualified people instead.
Sorry, I don't believe that. I believe people who don't have a good choice should be treated well, but if people are happily signing up to be treated poorly, and they KNOW they are going to be treated poorly there, (and they have plenty of far better alternatives, and they're only signing up for this because it's "cool") then I don't have any sympathy for them whatsoever.
If you want to be treated well, then stop flocking to people and places that treat you like crap.
A lot of people love the industry and the idea of making games. They hate the working conditions however which leave much to be desired... especially considering the working conditions are bad at many companies that make a significant profit on many of their projects.
A pretty large number of people do end up making that decision. I'm an academic researcher who does some stuff related to AI & Games, and one of my personal problems is that my game-industry AI contacts keep leaving the game industry for jobs elsewhere, which makes it hard to build any kind of longer-term collaboration.
Whats lost in all this is how idiotic the extra hours are to begin with. Games aren't different than other tech. Burning out your employees is demonstrably counterproductive. There's some usefulness in short term crunch but some large studios crunch for a full year. But games are run like entertainment companies and a lot of the decisions are not fact based.
Even if the only thing a union did was stop the exempt status for developers with regard to wage law we'd see a huge quality of life increase without much of a real impact on worker output.
Game testers should unionize. I've met some game testers who are as dense as a box of hammers. I've also met some game testers who are valuable, awesome people who know things and who I'd be glad to work with. Unfortunately, the game industry seems programmed to treat them all like trash. I think this is another form of bigotry obscuring real human value. If one could find the really good testers, pay them well, and retain them, it might just pay off in increased quality and productivity.
I hope that the folks at the forefront of trying to unionize the game industry are talking to existing entertainment unions. I suspect there's a lot of similarities, especially when you get into absurdly huge projects like a sprawling open-world game or an animated feature.
(And by 'animated' I include pretty much every effects-laden action film. IIRC there is not currently an effects worker union in Hollywood, while there is an animators union - guess which craft sucks less to be in?)
I never understood the desire to work on games. Is it because many people get their introduction to software via games (legitimate question)? I remember many of my classmates in my college days were really about entering the gaming industry, and I just never understood why.
IMHO, itβs also some of the least interesting dev work you can do. A few people might get lucky and work on physics engines, but for everyone else it is basically a gigantic UI project with a ton of control flow and throwaway code.
Been that way for more than a decade(at least since I was looking to get into the industry around '00 or so).
Problem is there's a thousand young devs out there trying to bang down the doors to get in. In that situation I don't see how you have effective leverage.
With things as it stands today there's a good ~50-60% churn in the industry and things seem to keep rolling on(although I wonder what improvements we'd see with better working hours and improved pay WRT other dev domains).
> Problem is there's a thousand young devs out there trying to bang down the doors to get in.
The same could be said of acting and professional athletics, and actors and pro athletes have strong, effective unions. So this hurdle is not insurmountable.
Absolutely false. MLBPA is a joke and NFLPA stands idle while its employees are killed and subjected to brain damage while ineffectively signing agreements that discharge liability by management.
> How about promoting software companies being run as co-ops, where all workers have more ownership and are self-managed?
That's a fantastic idea. In all honesty, unions are merely a mitigation for some of the worker-hostile aspects of the division between owners and workers. That split is also seems like it's the root cause of a lot of pathological union practices. I don't think you'd have those problems if businesses were worker-owned or if a worker union had a significant ownership stake.
Unions work well if everyone can agree on the same wage, or the same wage increases over time, etc, or can agree on barriers to entry.
Teachers unions, pilots unions, etc, generally agree on wage (usually some % increase per year of experience), and doctors which are harder to agree on wage because there is much more variation instead unionize with barriers to entry (stricter AMA requirements).
I wonder which would be better for game developers. Barriers to entry or agreed wages.
Don't do it. The enemy of your enemy is not your friend. Unions are not a bucket of roses.
You're exchanging one set of overlords for another. Literally sit down with anyone in their first 8-15 years of experience in a union and ask them what kind of influence they have on their industry, what sort of choices of work they get to work, who gets "the jobs" before you do, and about their fixed pay scale, and what are the consequences if they take non-union jobs.
The tradition means of labor taking their control of a company is through a strike, and you really can't unionize unless 75% of all game developers are willing to strike to keep wages high.
You'll find I think that most game developers would be willing to be paid pennies to be a part of the next big video game. And if that's the market you're trying to compete in, maybe you should be in a different market if you're worried about wages.
With regard to crazy work hours, our platform is used by lot of VFX studios and freelancers. From our frequent interaction with them, we observed that the amount of work hours they put in are really insane.
Its the same story but unlike game developers they get into that grind very often too. I don't think this scenario is unique to game developers alone and it exists in other domains - most prevalent when artistic expectation gets mingled with technology.
What would entering a union mean for the developer?
I've read that it would increase their protection (legal, and sometimes financial, I suppose?), and that it's supposed to improve working conditions (because unionized workers will have a more solid foundation to push against as they demand those conditions).
How deep does this go? Is there any other benefit? Something specific to the industry, perhaps?
The biggest problems that game developers face is working conditions (Demand for unpaid overtime), and lack of protection from capricious behaviour by management (Management promises not fulfilled, retaliatory firings, firing people so that you don't have to pay them a ship bonus).
People who make comfortable livings sitting at desks near company cafeterias, then disparage unions, need to remember that unions brought them labor laws and weekends, and paid in blood:
Capitalism and productivity had significant impact on giving us more leisure time, not demanding it. This pattern has been repeated in many places with or without strong labor. Making more with less lets people work less over time.
Making more with less, let's you make more. If you're not making more, you're losing money. The only thing that reduces working hours is reducing workers, as a cost cutting move. The workers eliminated have more "leisure" time because they're not working at all.
Working hours are longer [0].
Capitalism did not give you a weekend. Capitalism did not give you a workday that ends after 8 hours. These are things that people literally died for. Business owners hired Pinkerton thugs to murder workers, to try to get them to fall in line. Never say that capitalists gave people leisure time and benefits. My grandfather stood in a field in Southern Illinois when he was boy and watched men gunned down during a strike. These things were demanded and taken.
>Capitalism did not give you a weekend. Capitalism did not give you a workday that ends after 8 hours.
Both of those things were offered by Ford (and others) without federal law forcing it as a way to attract the best workers away from his competitors, and as companies saw it worked, many followed suit. They've been obtained in many countries without using labor unions to force the govt to legislate them. Unions in the US fought for them, but those things were likely coming anyways as people got richer through producing more goods. And there are enough cases of those things being offered in non-union places long before federal law that it's not honest to say they are here solely because unions.
The point is unions did not solely give us those things, or they would not also appear in places without such a labor movement. Many factors contributed to these things, unions, more production, i.e., more wealth for everyone, which are results of lot of pieces of progress.
>Working hours are longer [0].
Americans working more then other OECD countries is not the result of unions or capitalism. It's culture. Hours worked has fallen as wages rose over the past few hundred years, wages rose because people became more productive. [1]
China is a perfect example of how capitalism, not labor laws, release people from work and given them leisure and money. Under communism, there is ample labor law, which is the point of communism - all men are equal and all share. China got a two day weekend without needing unions to fight it through, they got more vacation, etc. [2] This is a result of the people making more, giving them more power, which is a result of people being more productive. It was not labor union there obtaining these things.
As they've opened to capitalism, allowing growth by more efficient allocation of capital, the everyday person has vastly improved quality of life. The same pattern played out in USSR->Russia for a while, which then went back some on the capitalism part. India did the same. Other countries followed suit.
>Americans working more then other OECD countries is not the result of unions or capitalism. It's culture.
Ironically, this is one of the topics which Marx (wearing his sociologist hat) tried to get at, as well as his descendants (Weber and the Frankfurt School etc.)
>Under communism, there is ample labor law
Under Communism there wouldn't be labour law because there is no such thing as "labour" requiring a law - labour law literally only exists due to its position in relation to capital.
>China got a two day weekend without needing unions to fight it through
This is due to a combination of China being founded by Socialists (and despite not being a Socialist state, needing to keep up appearances of being one) and importing already established Western ideas (in a very similar way to what Japan did).
>more efficient allocation of capital, the everyday person has vastly improved quality of life.
This is not contrary to the Marian thesis that capitalism requires free workers, free in the first sense of being able to sell their labour how they wish, and free in his more ironic sense of freedom from the means and produce of production.
I think power and politics matter more than you believe. The two graphs on page 12 here (sorry, giant PDF), suggest that things have worked out very differently for the US and Western Europe, two similarly wealthy areas:
Share of income can hide much more important items, like absolute income. Most people care less about what share of national income they make and care more about what total income they make.
It's easier to have low inequality when everyone is poor. It's harder to keep inequality low when people as a whole, including median, get richer. It's also harder to keep inequality (say, by Gini) for larger populations. (As neat evidence of this last fact, 45 US States last I checked had Gini below the aggregate US Gini - it's how the math works, hiding nuances).
For example, from your graphs: US median wage is higher than Western Europe (very few countries higher, most decently lower) - so they have lower inequality, but the people have less income.
I'd like to see how this >50% is distributed across various measures, especially in terms of salaries and lines of codes produced. My bet is that according to Pareto's distribution they fall in the bottom 50% in terms of headcount whose output and compensation is ~15% of the total.
Unions can't solve everything, but considering the most prevalent complaints game devs seem to have is getting overworked, underpaid, and fired as soon as a project is done, unions seem like a perfect fit.
At my last corporate job I was very vocal about the benefits that unions would have for software engineers. I still believe that.
There is a vast market of companies willing to scoop up talented software developers - many don't require the demanding work schedules that the gaming industry takes for granted. Especially in such a highly-skilled field, I don't see the need for unionization when switching industries can be done easily.
As always: 100% support them wanting better situations, and they have a right to pursue it. I would just not want to end up with a situation where I want to put my own self-developed game up on itch.io or otherwise and they require me to send a copy of my union approval.
Ironically, despite the famously abysmal working conditions in the game industry, they might have a hard time organizing, because there is such an enormous supply of qualified people who want those jobs.
Unions can add value in industries that need vast numbers of highly specialized individuals.
If you think of a film or a play, both unionized industries, a production works by hiring a mess of specialists who show up ready to go. Everyone knows what they're doing, why they're there, etc. There's a very good discussion (with a libertarian economist, no less) here[1] about it.
There is a large part of game development, especially in the "blockbuster" game development that seems like it fits this model quite well.
It might not apply to more specialized elements like game engine design, but for modern games that are designed more like movies than games, it could be highly effective.
I neither think there should be impediments on unions nor should union dues malndatory, nor that there should be restrictions on the number of unions active in a workplace or industry. People should be able to go it alone and suffer/benefit from the consequences, or form a union spontaneously consisting of just a couple of fellow workers with shared demands. Let unions compete in their own marketplace to achieve both better and flexible representation of labor. And to those that will ojext that this puts a heavy burden on business by having to negotiate with multiple parties, well too bad.
Yes, I'm sure that 20 something dev would look forward to waiting for years to get on the game dev team due to union seniority rules. And I'm sure the junior devs on the team would feel great about not getting the choice vacation times because the senior devs would have first choice due to union rules. After all, its fairer if those people who have put the time in get the most benefits, right?
As I've said before-- game development is the sort of industry that everyone thinks they'll want to work in, only to change their minds very quickly once they see how the sausage is made. Never mind unionizing, even just raising awareness about the work conditions in the industry - and making it clear that they're not representative of "tech" more generally - would help a lot!
this. When I was a little kid I wanted to make games. Worked in the industry for 13 years. It's pretty brutal. 10AM to 10PM for months on end (this was when games were deployed on disks so there was a hard deadline, hence brutal crunch). The basic (but unsaid) feeling inside was that there are a ton of people who would be happy to replace you, so don't complain. Its an art form (visuals, audio, story, mechanics, math etc) so maybe suffering is innate. :). I don't miss it, but, I have always wanted to flesh out some ideas that have bouncing around for years.
It absolutely does imply a high standard of living, to suggest it doesn't is incredibly ignorant. The biggest issue in the US is inequality between states. 10 US states have a higher human development index than every country in the world short of Norway. Even with the US's homeless population, it's still far less than that of the UK, Australia, France.
There are a lot of things wrong with the US, but to say that the country doesn't have a standard of living to be proud of comes from an incredibly privileged place.
How can you possibly say we have a high standard of living when it has been in freefall since WW2? No one can WORK HONESTLY and afford a family and retirement anymore. You have to play dirty corporate ladder climbing games or go far into debt to get the essentials for the next generation now. But, we're techies and those are poor people problems, amirite my good man?
For lots of people, it absolutely does. For people in the video game industry, it doesn't, but it's their own damn fault because it's a "sexy" industry that every teenage and 20-something boy wants to work in, so there's a huge oversupply which means there's zero incentive for companies to treat their employees well.
Go to work in some "boring" industry and you won't see this.
The US has the world's highest median (middle income) household disposable (after taxes and services paid for) income in the world. [1] This correlates pretty highly with standard of living measurements, which is much more vague.
Yes, but the reason the rest of us in the other parts of the developed world has lower salaries is because we use our taxes to buy lots of stuff we will need later on for situations you can't really plan for. When an American household gets two kids, one of whom develops a disease and the other one needs to go to day care because both parents have to work, it's not exactly cheap but in Sweden ending up in a situation like that wouldn't make nearly as much of a difference to what's left after taxes and bills. Same thing if the other provider in the household gets sick, even if that disease is rare and expensive to manage.
The US pays as much in tax for nationally provided healthcare as % of GDP as does most of the OECD. The difference is healthcare costs twice as much here, so the govt ends up paying about half the cost through taxes.
For example, Sweden pays ~$5500 (PPP) per capita. US spends ~$10,209. US Medicare and Medicaid paid out about $1.3T, private healthcare paid about $1.2T.
So we're paying the same tax towards healthcare as most of the OECD. The healthcare angle is not the difference in taxation between the countries. The underlying costs are the difference, represented at every level here, from nurse and doctor salaries to drug costs to administrative costs to legislative costs.
I also mentioned day care, I could go on beyond medical expenses if you'd like? Elderly care, fully funded schools (students get meals, books, you name it), paid parental leave, safety net if you get laid off... lots of stuff.
Unions are formed, and are profitable for the members, when the work is the same for everyone and they are easily replaceable, since in that case, the workers can be easily exploited. The best engineers would not want to join a union since they'd have no reason to. Unions can help mediocre engineers who are replaceable code monkeys (Many of us are, including myself I think). But the thing is, why would I want to associate myself with that group? I'd rather try to be one of those awesome engineers. This dynamic doesn't exist in other well-unionized jobs. For example, all plumbers can do the same work in mostly similar way. So nobody is losing out by unionizing.
A game industry union might look like a Hollywood Guild (SAG-AFTRA, etc.) instead of a trade union. SAG-AFTRA already negotiates with the game industry in support of voice actors and performance capture actors. You can make the argument that actors are replaceable, but I'd argue that star performers are less replaceable than rockstar engineers. The majority of game industry workers are also not software engineers, so even if engineers don't unionize, because of their ability to get hired in other industries and the overlap between games and tech, it might benefit artists, animators, sound designers and game designers.
No idea if unions are the solution, but this is definitely an issue specific to the game industry right now.