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I would strongly consider supporting a video game union, if only to help formalize the things that the good shops do and bring those practices industry wide. P

I would strongly consider supporting a video game union, if only to help formalize the things that the good shops do and bring those practices industry wide. Personally I haven't done a day of overtime in seven years and I feel reasonably compensated but there are clearly other places out there that are still exploiting their workers. Improving worker input into production schedules and creating clear guidelines around overtime compensation time would probably reduce companies that rely on "crunch time" too much. Over time is ok if the work needs to be done, but workers should have a reasonable expectation of knowing how much of a break they'll get after. Not that it's some random (small) number in their managers' head. There are plenty of other workplace issues aside from over time and wages that a union could help address. Increasing transparency and input from workers into company finances and road maps, improving hiring practices, creating more opportunities for young new grads to break in, increasing diversity. Standardizing crediting would be one close to my heart. One time I was laid off from a company along with hundreds others due to various company issues, and eventually the project I was working on made it to market. I made it into the credits, but instead of having a "software engineer" title and naming the significant feature area I worked on, I was reserved in a long list of "Special Thanks". This sort of thing is totally unacceptable. Would be an area addressable by an industry union.

hpoe 7y ago
> creating more opportunities for young new grads to break in Just going to point out, everywhere, I have ever heard of a union it generally made it harder for new people to come in, not easier, by increasing the commitment an employer is expected to make to an employee, and by making it harder to remove employees that need to be removed but can't because of their seniority with the union.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- conanbatt 7y ago
  It is the only way a union can raise wages for its members. But that won't work in the video game industry, there's no barriers to the industry.
  - metalliqaz 7y ago
    "no barriers to the industry" lol
    - conanbatt 7y ago
      You can make a game and publish for $$ in a day. In fact, many people do.
- Tiktaalik 7y ago
  The screen writers guild has some systems in place to ensure that a certain amount of scripts from 'new writers' have to be taken in. Not sure how effective that is, but that's a thing. I was basically thinking about my present company that has done a great job of bringing in coops from local universities for work terms. We've had a great experience with this. However, this is one of the only games companies I've worked at that does it.
  - mc32 7y ago
    How does that square with what David Simon has to say in, “But I’m not a lawyer. I’m an Agent”?[1]. It seems pretty fanning about what happens to novices in the industry. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19570735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19570735
  - walshemj 7y ago
    As does BECTU in the UK to encourage diversity - that's the equivalent of IATSE
- slg 7y ago
  One key difference for unions is whether a job is project based or more of a permanent placement. The problems you mentioned are often a problem in the latter like with teacher or police unions. Project based workplaces are different in that they have a natural turnover and people need to be continually rehired so seniority or difficult to remove employees are less of a problem. The various unions in the entertainment industry are a good example of this. Video games are closer to the project based end of the spectrum.
- false-mirror 7y ago
  There's definitely a tension. When employers can treat employees as disposable, there is more firing and thus (sometimes) more hiring. However, unions increase the value of jobs. Union workers enjoy a better QOL and career stability, and they can actually build a life for themselves without worrying about being fired on a whimsy. Luckily for something like game development, it is a growing industry with a low barrier to entry. Finding a job or starting a new company is very realistic-- until the next economic downturn, which will hurt union and non-union workers alike
  - uerobert 7y ago
    Game dev is not a low barrier to entry industry. It is WAY easier to get a SDE job at a FAANG straight out of college than it is to get a job as a programmer at a big name studio, even with experience.
    - unapologetic 7y ago
      lol, no. Maybe at a place like Valve, but that's a special case. a private company swimming in cash and having basically zero urgency to innovate or produce even derivative content.
      - uerobert 7y ago
        Any of the Rockstar Games studios, Naughty Dog, SCE Santa Monica, Bungie, Epic Games, any of the main Activision-Blizzard (Ininity Ward, Treyarcht) or EA studios (Respawn), etc... basically any major studio rarely hire straight out of college.
    - shitpostbot 7y ago
      I'm pretty sure there are exactly zero SWEs weighing a 200k rest-and-vest offer from google and an 80k slave labor contract from Blizzard and struggling to decide where to go. I'd be interested to be proven wrong though
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Just going to point out, everywhere, I have ever heard of a union it generally made it harder for new people to come in, not easier My observation has been the opposite. I believe because the unions have an interest in increasing their membership, not letting it atrophy and decrease due to time and deaths. A union that doesn't have a growing membership is a union that will disappear. In fact, some unions I've seen have teams of people (including lawyers) whose sole purpose is taking illegal immigrants working in their industry and getting them properly documented and teaching them English for free so that they will eventually join the union. Where I have seen this is in carpenters, bartenders, maids, food service, stagehands, and a few others. The industries you've seen may be different.
  - ZeroGravitas 7y ago
    Worth noting that if they didn't do this, then those same people would be easily exploitable competition in their profession, so it's probably self-interest even for the individual existing union members, as well as the union itself to bring them inside the system.
    - sudosysgen 7y ago
      Yep, it benefits everyone except exploitative employers that hire illegal immigrants to treat them poorly
  - mc32 7y ago
    My experience is that new members subsidize veteran members as junior non-full time pay in but don’t get a lot back.
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      That applies to pretty much everything in life — The more you put in, the more you get out.
      - mc32 7y ago
- unapologetic 7y ago
  you still need people. Less open jobs because people aren't switching every 18 months doesn't sound like a bad things.
- trianglem 7y ago
  Not true, afaik unions make it easier to get the job initially if you have the right education/credentials
- walshemj 7y ago
  Your repeating anti union propaganda here and M&P unions are not the same as American "trade" union's What they do do is make it harder to get rid of experienced people and replace them with cheaper ones.
- everdev 7y ago
  > everywhere, I have ever heard of a union it generally made it harder for new people to come in I'd imagine unions are most prevalent in industries with a surplus of workers. If you have a rapid growth industry with competitive hiring practices, you're probably getting treated great and courted to switch jobs for higher pay pretty frequently. If your industry is stagnant and management is constantly trying to replace you with less expensive workers that can be quickly trained to do the same job I can see why there would be a strong desire to unionize. In that sense, I can see how the union would be protecting it's workforce by stemming the inflow of new employees. The fewer the supply of workers, the higher demand for the one's you have.
vvanders 7y ago
> Standardizing crediting would be one close to my heart. Oh hell yeah. I did 3+ years on a title, nearly killing myself to ship it. When I realized that doing that much OT was doing to my personal relationships, health and sanity I left with a generous transition ~8mo before ship(including tossing 2.5mo of PTO because they didn't have to pay it out and I could never take it). Listed under "special thanks" as well, it would have cost them nothing to do proper crediting but instead a giant middle finger for "betraying" the company. There's so many aspects of that industry that are messed up, I heard similar stories across the board form co-workers at the places they had worked at. Since everyone had gone through the hazing process it was a self-perpetuating cycle that didn't stop.
- midnightclubbed 7y ago
  With less and less titles shipping as boxed-product and very few of those having anything approaching an instruction booklet crediting is almost dead already. Some in-game credit screen buried in the options menu or after completing a 50+ hour campaign is about as un-readable as the end credits on a Netflix TV show. The argument against you getting a full credit is that it would list your contribution to the game as the same as a colleague who worked through the ship process. I'm not sure how it works in the production side of the film industry but I imagine it is not dissimilar. You definitely did the right thing by getting out and looking after yourself and those around you. The industry has and is responding to the loss of good people due to burn-out, not at every developer but some of the most notorious have realized the level of churn hurts their ability to hire and retain the best. The more push-back there is against the onerous work practices the more quickly they will stop.
  - sangnoir 7y ago
    > The argument against you getting a full credit is that it would list your contribution to the game as the same as a colleague who worked through the ship process. There should be universally-agreed rules around how crediting works: how about a case where a noob who joined a month before shipping gets credit, but someone who slogged for 2 years but quit gets relegated to "Special Thanks" despite putting more effort. Does that seem fair to you?
crimsonalucard 7y ago
Don't think that good times are forever. It never hurts to join a union even when things are fair.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  That's saying that being in a union is cost-free. I suspect it's not. There's usually dues of some kind, and if you're in a union shop the rules may be less flexible - not just for the company, but for you. And the rules being less flexible for the company may have consequences for you. That said, insurance costs, too, but most of us have it...
  - crimsonalucard 7y ago
    Yeah I guess I'm more supporting the ideal of a union. The whole point of a union is so that the benefits outweigh the costs but the actual benefits are hard to measure experimentally. I would say anecdotally that in the majority of cases it's worth it, but the perception is biased towards it being not worth it.
burntoutfire 7y ago
I don't really understand this obsession with credits in the game dev industry. There's no credit list in GMail for example, and yet everyone is fine with it?
- digsy 7y ago
  Video games are part tech, part art and part storytelling. So in a sense they are closer to movies than pure software. That distinction is where some of the wish for credit comes from I believe.
- danbolt 7y ago
  In some ways it's more akin to having a FAANG on your resume. Games are traditionally much more project-based than a service such as GMail and employers, colleagues will use it as a benchmark for hiring and networking. I'm an example myself, as I started in the industry working on a strategy-genre game, and talking shop about the genre makes me more appealing to studios that serve that.
- walshemj 7y ago
  Because is the entrainment BiZ, there are super arcane rules about tv and film credits for example.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  Maybe there should be? If we had a union to fight for it there could be. I think it'd be cool if my name was on the credits list of every software I've ever written. Hell, there should be. This is something open source gets right that companies don't -- in open source, there is a credits list. Both in the contributors listing and in the actual publicly accessible history of commits itself (which in turn auto-generates contributor lists e.g. on GitHub).
- pandaman 7y ago
  Game studios believe that the relevant experience is much better indication of a prospect's value than the ability to solve programming puzzles for a few hours. Credits are the proof of this experience. Google, on the other hand, appears to be exactly opposite [1]. So, it appears that, for somebody who worked on Gmail and pursuing the similar line of work in a company similar to Google, proofs of experience would be of little value. 1. https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejecting-Max-Howell-the-author-of-Homebrew-for-not-being-able-to-invert-a-binary-tree https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...

hpoe 7y ago

> creating more opportunities for young new grads to break in Just going to point out, everywhere, I have ever heard of a union it generally made it harder for new people to come in, not easier, by increasing the commitment an employer is expected to make to an employee, and by making it harder to remove employees that need to be removed but can't because of their seniority with the union.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
conanbatt 7y ago
It is the only way a union can raise wages for its members. But that won't work in the video game industry, there's no barriers to the industry.
- metalliqaz 7y ago
  "no barriers to the industry" lol
  - conanbatt 7y ago
    You can make a game and publish for $$ in a day. In fact, many people do.
Tiktaalik 7y ago
The screen writers guild has some systems in place to ensure that a certain amount of scripts from 'new writers' have to be taken in. Not sure how effective that is, but that's a thing. I was basically thinking about my present company that has done a great job of bringing in coops from local universities for work terms. We've had a great experience with this. However, this is one of the only games companies I've worked at that does it.
- mc32 7y ago
  How does that square with what David Simon has to say in, “But I’m not a lawyer. I’m an Agent”?[1]. It seems pretty fanning about what happens to novices in the industry. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19570735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19570735
- walshemj 7y ago
  As does BECTU in the UK to encourage diversity - that's the equivalent of IATSE
slg 7y ago
One key difference for unions is whether a job is project based or more of a permanent placement. The problems you mentioned are often a problem in the latter like with teacher or police unions. Project based workplaces are different in that they have a natural turnover and people need to be continually rehired so seniority or difficult to remove employees are less of a problem. The various unions in the entertainment industry are a good example of this. Video games are closer to the project based end of the spectrum.
false-mirror 7y ago
There's definitely a tension. When employers can treat employees as disposable, there is more firing and thus (sometimes) more hiring. However, unions increase the value of jobs. Union workers enjoy a better QOL and career stability, and they can actually build a life for themselves without worrying about being fired on a whimsy. Luckily for something like game development, it is a growing industry with a low barrier to entry. Finding a job or starting a new company is very realistic-- until the next economic downturn, which will hurt union and non-union workers alike
- uerobert 7y ago
  Game dev is not a low barrier to entry industry. It is WAY easier to get a SDE job at a FAANG straight out of college than it is to get a job as a programmer at a big name studio, even with experience.
  - unapologetic 7y ago
    lol, no. Maybe at a place like Valve, but that's a special case. a private company swimming in cash and having basically zero urgency to innovate or produce even derivative content.
    - uerobert 7y ago
      Any of the Rockstar Games studios, Naughty Dog, SCE Santa Monica, Bungie, Epic Games, any of the main Activision-Blizzard (Ininity Ward, Treyarcht) or EA studios (Respawn), etc... basically any major studio rarely hire straight out of college.
  - shitpostbot 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure there are exactly zero SWEs weighing a 200k rest-and-vest offer from google and an 80k slave labor contract from Blizzard and struggling to decide where to go. I'd be interested to be proven wrong though
reaperducer 7y ago
Just going to point out, everywhere, I have ever heard of a union it generally made it harder for new people to come in, not easier My observation has been the opposite. I believe because the unions have an interest in increasing their membership, not letting it atrophy and decrease due to time and deaths. A union that doesn't have a growing membership is a union that will disappear. In fact, some unions I've seen have teams of people (including lawyers) whose sole purpose is taking illegal immigrants working in their industry and getting them properly documented and teaching them English for free so that they will eventually join the union. Where I have seen this is in carpenters, bartenders, maids, food service, stagehands, and a few others. The industries you've seen may be different.
- ZeroGravitas 7y ago
  Worth noting that if they didn't do this, then those same people would be easily exploitable competition in their profession, so it's probably self-interest even for the individual existing union members, as well as the union itself to bring them inside the system.
  - sudosysgen 7y ago
    Yep, it benefits everyone except exploitative employers that hire illegal immigrants to treat them poorly
- mc32 7y ago
  My experience is that new members subsidize veteran members as junior non-full time pay in but don’t get a lot back.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    That applies to pretty much everything in life — The more you put in, the more you get out.
    - mc32 7y ago
unapologetic 7y ago
you still need people. Less open jobs because people aren't switching every 18 months doesn't sound like a bad things.
trianglem 7y ago
Not true, afaik unions make it easier to get the job initially if you have the right education/credentials
walshemj 7y ago
Your repeating anti union propaganda here and M&P unions are not the same as American "trade" union's What they do do is make it harder to get rid of experienced people and replace them with cheaper ones.
everdev 7y ago
> everywhere, I have ever heard of a union it generally made it harder for new people to come in I'd imagine unions are most prevalent in industries with a surplus of workers. If you have a rapid growth industry with competitive hiring practices, you're probably getting treated great and courted to switch jobs for higher pay pretty frequently. If your industry is stagnant and management is constantly trying to replace you with less expensive workers that can be quickly trained to do the same job I can see why there would be a strong desire to unionize. In that sense, I can see how the union would be protecting it's workforce by stemming the inflow of new employees. The fewer the supply of workers, the higher demand for the one's you have.

vvanders 7y ago

> Standardizing crediting would be one close to my heart. Oh hell yeah. I did 3+ years on a title, nearly killing myself to ship it. When I realized that doing that much OT was doing to my personal relationships, health and sanity I left with a generous transition ~8mo before ship(including tossing 2.5mo of PTO because they didn't have to pay it out and I could never take it). Listed under "special thanks" as well, it would have cost them nothing to do proper crediting but instead a giant middle finger for "betraying" the company. There's so many aspects of that industry that are messed up, I heard similar stories across the board form co-workers at the places they had worked at. Since everyone had gone through the hazing process it was a self-perpetuating cycle that didn't stop.

midnightclubbed 7y ago
With less and less titles shipping as boxed-product and very few of those having anything approaching an instruction booklet crediting is almost dead already. Some in-game credit screen buried in the options menu or after completing a 50+ hour campaign is about as un-readable as the end credits on a Netflix TV show. The argument against you getting a full credit is that it would list your contribution to the game as the same as a colleague who worked through the ship process. I'm not sure how it works in the production side of the film industry but I imagine it is not dissimilar. You definitely did the right thing by getting out and looking after yourself and those around you. The industry has and is responding to the loss of good people due to burn-out, not at every developer but some of the most notorious have realized the level of churn hurts their ability to hire and retain the best. The more push-back there is against the onerous work practices the more quickly they will stop.
- sangnoir 7y ago
  > The argument against you getting a full credit is that it would list your contribution to the game as the same as a colleague who worked through the ship process. There should be universally-agreed rules around how crediting works: how about a case where a noob who joined a month before shipping gets credit, but someone who slogged for 2 years but quit gets relegated to "Special Thanks" despite putting more effort. Does that seem fair to you?

crimsonalucard 7y ago

Don't think that good times are forever. It never hurts to join a union even when things are fair.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
That's saying that being in a union is cost-free. I suspect it's not. There's usually dues of some kind, and if you're in a union shop the rules may be less flexible - not just for the company, but for you. And the rules being less flexible for the company may have consequences for you. That said, insurance costs, too, but most of us have it...
- crimsonalucard 7y ago
  Yeah I guess I'm more supporting the ideal of a union. The whole point of a union is so that the benefits outweigh the costs but the actual benefits are hard to measure experimentally. I would say anecdotally that in the majority of cases it's worth it, but the perception is biased towards it being not worth it.

burntoutfire 7y ago

I don't really understand this obsession with credits in the game dev industry. There's no credit list in GMail for example, and yet everyone is fine with it?

digsy 7y ago
Video games are part tech, part art and part storytelling. So in a sense they are closer to movies than pure software. That distinction is where some of the wish for credit comes from I believe.
danbolt 7y ago
In some ways it's more akin to having a FAANG on your resume. Games are traditionally much more project-based than a service such as GMail and employers, colleagues will use it as a benchmark for hiring and networking. I'm an example myself, as I started in the industry working on a strategy-genre game, and talking shop about the genre makes me more appealing to studios that serve that.
walshemj 7y ago
Because is the entrainment BiZ, there are super arcane rules about tv and film credits for example.
CydeWeys 7y ago
Maybe there should be? If we had a union to fight for it there could be. I think it'd be cool if my name was on the credits list of every software I've ever written. Hell, there should be. This is something open source gets right that companies don't -- in open source, there is a credits list. Both in the contributors listing and in the actual publicly accessible history of commits itself (which in turn auto-generates contributor lists e.g. on GitHub).
pandaman 7y ago
Game studios believe that the relevant experience is much better indication of a prospect's value than the ability to solve programming puzzles for a few hours. Credits are the proof of this experience. Google, on the other hand, appears to be exactly opposite [1]. So, it appears that, for somebody who worked on Gmail and pursuing the similar line of work in a company similar to Google, proofs of experience would be of little value. 1. https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejecting-Max-Howell-the-author-of-Homebrew-for-not-being-able-to-invert-a-binary-tree https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...