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Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

251 points by walterclifford 6y ago

DarthGhandi 6y ago
If they were based in Norway you could just go to the government website and type in their name. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239
- riffraff 6y ago
  Funny story: data on tax declarations in Italy is supposed to be public, but _not easily accessible_. I.e. you can go to the tax agency (or town hall) and ask for data on a given individual since 1973, but you can't just publish it willy nilly. In 2008 the tax collecting agency decided to put all of them online, as that seemed like a reasonable extension of the 40 year old rule, and there was a huge shitstorm[0]. At some point the privacy authority stepped in and imposed them to hide it again, citing a lot of more and less valid concerns. [0] which in my modest opinion proved it was a great idea
wwright 6y ago
Sharing your salary is absolutely not a “revolt” in any sense; this is literally a national worker’s right as an American. Bloomberg framing it as a “revolt” is a not very subtle attempt at casting workers using their rights as the agents of chaos when employers mislead, manipulate, and obscure.
obilgic 6y ago
Link to the spreadsheet?
- nathanaldensr 6y ago
  Presumably it's on an internal server and not public.
  - aaomidi 6y ago
    Would be great if they make it public
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      I'd like to see it, but the optics would be challenging, since Blizzard workers probably make a substantial bit more than most game industry people.
      - Thorrez 6y ago
        Why? The article mentions people making minimum wage.
- throwawayblizz 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24046595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24046595
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
Some producers and engineers at Blizzard can make well over $100,000 a year, but others, such as video game testers and customer-service representatives, are often paid minimum wage or close to it. It's about time this conversation entered the mainstream. It should go farther though — why shouldn't we all be able to buy Lambos or Teslas for the price of a Honda? Or, for that matter, Google shares for the price of GE? Does no one understand modern monetary theory? :clap: Just :clap: print : clap: the :clap: damn :clap: money.
- gault8121 6y ago
  The video game industry takes advantage of young people who have dreams of making video games, and think that suffering through terribly paying jobs is the way to make that happen. That illusion gives cover to the industry to perpetuate terrible working conditions by abusing low paying employees and then having new young people replace them. There isn't accountability when companies do not pay a penalty for the treatment of their staff.
  - ralph84 6y ago
    The video game industry isn’t alone in doing this. Basically every “glamor” industry exploits young people with a dream. Entertainment, sports, airlines. They all have young people working for less than minimum wage in hopes of a shot at the big time.
  - Proven 6y ago
    Did you mean to say young and inexperienced people take advantage of the video game industry? It's self-evident they couldn't get a better job anywhere else.
- war1025 6y ago
  Just printing money is a great way to end up with runaway inflation and a worthless currency.
  - donatj 6y ago
IgorPartola 6y ago
Whenever the topic of sharing salary information comes up I always bring up the algorithm for figuring out the average salary for a group of people without anyone learning anyone else’s exact salary: Say you have 10 people sitting at a round table. Person 1 picks up a piece of paper and on it writes a sum of their salary + randInt(100_000, 10_000_000) remembering what the initial random number was. We can call this number the seed. They then pass the piece of paper to the right and person 2 reads the number, adds their salary and writes that number on a new piece of paper that they pass to person 3. Finally when person 10 hands the paper to person 1, person 1 subtracts the seed from the final number then divides that value by the number of people. That gives you the mean salary of the group.
- kasey_junk 6y ago
  It’s also important to note that in the US sharing salary data is protected by federal law no matter what your employee agreement says.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    That only matters if someone is dumb enough to fire you and writes down somewhere "s/he was fired for discussing salaries". I can't remember the exact phrasing but years ago my boss said at the team meeting something about not discussing salaries, and someone said later "I don't think you can say that" and he was like "oh, ok". The message was delivered though.
    - ncallaway 6y ago
      Here's the thing, though. Wrongful termination lawsuits aren't "proof beyond a reasonable doubt". Most civil actions—including wrongful termination—need to show a "preponderance of evidence". That is, you need to convince a jury that the claim is more likely to be true than not true (e.g. 51%). So, assuming you have evidence of the chain of events: - Group shares salary openly - Employer says: "you cannot do that", someone responds: "You can't say that", employer: "oh, ok" - Group continues sharing salary - Employer shortly thereafter fires 2 members that had shared their salary citing other reasons ("You had 2 1-minute late attendance events within the last 2 weeks") If I'm on that jury, if that's all the evidence presented, that gets me to a "preponderance of evidence" that the termination was wrongful. At that point, I would need to see some evidence from the employer that the attendance events leading to the firing was not pretextual.
john-shaffer 6y ago
I boycotted Blizzard after their censorship regarding Hong Kong. It was a great decision since it saved me from the dumpster fire to end all dumpster fires that was Warcraft III Reforged [1]. I would strongly suggest that if anything about Blizzard pisses you off, just be done with them entirely. The people who created the great games of the past don't work there. Blizzard is no longer capable of producing good products, and has no purpose other than to suck every last penny out of the existing IP. [1] https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/warcraft-iii-reforged https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/warcraft-iii-reforged
- dyslexit 6y ago
  I feel like their entire mission changed around the time of their merger with Activision. I remember reading a long time ago the original devs saying they made games they would want to play, and I believe it showed. The most obvious example of that to me were the game stories. Back then the stories and background lore had depth and were fascinatingly interesting. Characters felt like they had real motivations and reasons for doing things, the worlds felt believable, gritty, and sometimes unforgiving. I don't know if it was Activision's influence, many of the original devs moving on, or World of Warcraft coming out, but since then everything about the company seems to have changed. So much of what they do nowadays just seem like money grabs. They release pay to win content meant to be addictive, dumbed down their art style to looking like cartoons that appeal to the least common denominator, follow trends instead of doing anything innovating, and seem to have completely stopped caring about making any interesting story. The villains in Diablo 3 were comically badly written. At some point they even tried to force users to use their REAL WORLD names on battle.net[1]. It really isn't the same company as it used to be in the early 2000's. [1]https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/blizzard-requires-real-names-on-forums https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/blizzard-requires-rea...
  - john-shaffer 6y ago
    The decline started when Vivendi (the owners) drove off the Blizzard North (ex-Condor) devs. The Blizzard North leaders were ignored to the point that they submitted their resignations in protest. Rather than actually give the team a voice, Vivendi decided to accept the resignations. They shut down the studio entirely a year or two later because it couldn't perform. They would have made a lot more money if they had listened to their proven leaders. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080702062733/http://www.netwars.pl/modules.php?name=news&id=3751 https://web.archive.org/web/20080702062733/http://www.netwar...
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Where is the spreadsheet? Googledocs?
- galoisgirl 6y ago
  Yes
neonate 6y ago
https://archive.is/TDfsD https://archive.is/TDfsD
mlthoughts2018 6y ago
> “ The anonymous document, reviewed by Bloomberg News, contains dozens of purported Blizzard salaries and pay bumps. Most of the raises are below 10%, significantly less than Blizzard employees said they expected following the study.” When oh when are midrange tech companies going to get their shit together with raises and bonuses. 10% should be mostly seen as a (shock) _normal_ raise when the company is doing well, above and beyond annual equity and a bonus at least in the range of 10-15%. Stop giving people reasons to job hop every few years. If you want loyalty and you want your investment in employees to pay off over time, give them good stuff! Give it to them before they reach any point of questioning if they want to go to the next company down the street for that extra 15% raise you were too stingy to give them on merit. As a manager, I can safely say the worst compensation mistakes I made were cases of not giving enough compensation sooner rather than later, and giving good people a reason to leave over money. I learned my lesson fast, and can say later in my career I take compensation planning much more seriously and absolutely do not ever settle for company pay band crap and scheduled 3% / 5% raise crap. If someone is doing good work for you, pay them!
- darth_avocado 6y ago
  ^This. I've always had the philosophy that if you want to retain good employees, pay them more before they ask for more. If they have reached a point where they had to ask for more, they're probably going to leave soon. I don't understand how do companies fail to realize this. Say an engineer leaves because you didn't get him that 20% pay bump. Even in the highest ranks of engineering, that's like what a 100k? 30k-40k on an average. Now imagine you go through the whole recruitment cycle. You have anywhere between 8-12 weeks of productivity loss of an engineer. Then you waste time from the productivity of recruiter, hiring manager, hiring engineers on the team, etc., all of whom are highly paid. You cycle through 8-10 candidates. Then you finally get the person you need. In my experience, it takes at least a month to get onboarded, usually more. And it takes at least 6 months to get to productivity levels of the engineer that just left if your new candidate is good. All in all you wasted almost 6 months of engineering time worth of productivity, which easily exceeds the money you saved not giving that 20% raise. All of this, assuming the new guy didn't negotiate more than the previous one. Seriously, get your shit together.
yurlungur 6y ago
Well, for one I can say I do feel lucky to have the choice not to work in the video games industry. It seems that these companies in general just treat their employees worse when compared to big tech. Video games are my passion of life and I will gladly never put my work in that realm. Being viewed as deriving pleasure and meaning from your job just puts you in such an exploitable situation.
donatj 6y ago
So possibly unpopular point of view here, maybe not on HN, but I think pay discrepancies can be entirely fair. I'm almost certain my pay is different from my colleagues, but I've bargained like hell to get it. When I was hired, every time we've been acquired. I'm no executive either, I'm just a developer with a proven history of give-a-damn. I think it's perfectly fair game in a job where it's hard to replace individuals, jobs where people with the same title can achieve vastly different amounts of value for the company, and especially for a company that values its employees.
- loraa 6y ago
  This is incredibly sexist.
- frickinLasers 6y ago
  As someone who is a strong worker but a bit of a pushover, and whose job description has nothing to do with haggling, I strongly disagree with this. The company benefits if all of their best workers can afford rent, and they gain little by paying effective bargainers a larger slice of the pie.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  I don’t see any reason to think that all engineers contribute the same amount of value (and therefore paying different amounts is entirely reasonable). Thought experiment: if you were going to form a startup and needed two other engineers, would you know across your history which ones to pick from and which ones to avoid?
  - satyrnein 6y ago
    I wholeheartedly agree with your first sentence. However, the thought experiment feels vulnerable to bias and other factors unrelated to performance, (just like the salary negotiation process you're comparing it to).
    - ithkuil 6y ago
      The thought experiment indeed highlights the same dynamics: it's not about whether there are effective differences in quality in people (and thus different "valuations"), but whether the noise in the system is larger than the signal.
deleted 6y ago
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marcell 6y ago
At Google there was an internal spreadsheet to track this also. US law protects the rights of workers to discuss the terms of their employment, which of course includes pay.
vvanders 6y ago
The game industry as a whole was pretty fucked when I left. I remember doing the 40hr+1.5x overtime calculation and realizing that if I wasn't salaried I'd be making $4/hr with the mandatory hours we were working(70-90 hrs/week). I tossed 2 months of PTO to leave that industry(yay Washington laws) and made up the difference in the first 2.5 paychecks of the new gig. Be careful of industries that over-index on "passion" and don't compensate people accordingly. Last I checked that industry was still built on chewing through new faces every ~3 years or so. Taking care of your people makes business sense and I wish more companies got that.
- api 6y ago
  Any industry with more people passionate about getting into it then there are jobs develops a whole host of pathologies from overwork and low pay to influence cliques, nepotism, the "casting couch," etc.
- davidgay 6y ago
  80 hrs/week is ~4000 hr/year. Your salary was only ~$16000/year?
  - vvanders 6y ago
    You have to factor in the 1.5x overtime that's standard on hourly. I went back and did the numbers, it was closer to $6hr but well below minimum wage for a dev position. From the little bit of salaries I heard art, design and test had it even worse.
    - pandaman 6y ago
      80 h/week at 1.5x overtime for 40 hours = 100h/week * 50 weeks (less holidays) = 5000 hours a year. At $6/h it makes 30K/y. This looks very low for the US tbqh, even for a non-programmer. When I started at my first job in the US game industry in the late 90s I've made 75K in a small independent studio. I had probably 3 years of experience at that time but no shipped games, I also was a foreigner on a temp visa so I don't think I had significantly more than a fresh grad would have got at the same position. This looks like QA salary from more than 10 years ago but where did you get a salaried QA job?
deleted 6y ago
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tonitosou 6y ago
i dont understand why salaries should be same for a similar role. If I work twice as fast and with a better work quality than my collegue why shouldn't i get double his salary? are we in a communist country?
- Pxtl 6y ago
  I work in healthcare where this is handled by job titles and it seems a lot healthier. Job title makes it clear that it's about greater responsibilities. "Why is Jeff paid more than me" "Because Jeff is senior dev and you're junior dev" is a much easier conversation to have, and everybody's job title is very visible.
  - tonitosou 6y ago
    im not sure. in a perfect society if the junior dev is better and works harder and bring more value to the company he should be better paid than his senior. it is capitalism and if a company is judget by its output an employee should too
    - Pxtl 6y ago
      If he's better and brings in more value, he'llbecome a SR dev quickly.
      - tonitosou 6y ago
        so 1 senior dev = 1 senior dev? you're surely thinking same for a doctor right? and you will trust with your life a guy who studied less and got 10/20 at all his exams all his life and went party while the other one was practising surgeries?
    - NineStarPoint 6y ago
      If the other dev can’t perform better than a junior dev, they shouldn’t be a senior dev. There’s no reason that you have to go up in the titles over time if you can’t improve your capabilities. Titles should reflect skill, not just be handed out due to age.
CarbyAu 6y ago
I have previously mentioned that employees should be seen as significant investors in the business and should be treated as such. Apart from "The job" work is not a mental and emotional void. You invest yourself. And it hurts when your investment is ignored or treated as lesser than another human. Employee pay should be two parts: - salary as per usual - significant stock in the business. NB: significant. 50% of stock(non-voting, purely monetary) is for an "employee fund" and come dividend time it is shared equally among employees. People get their salary they can preen over. And company profits are tied to individual motivation. Why should I care if the company does astoundingly well as opposed to being mediocre if I don't have a stake in the outcome?
- cleong 6y ago
  Although this sounds like heaven and from your perspective as an employee it makes sense. But the system you built doesn't necessarily achieve the goals you want. If everyone gets the same dividend it becomes a tragedy of the commons since an individual player can do the minimum while profiting off other players actions. Even if its varied in dividend for example one person gets 10% while another gets 40%, this still applies as a player with the strategy of being mediocre will still get benefits of the hard work of all other players while minimizing the amount of work he has to do. Not only that, businesses are meant to make money if the people who start the business is giving out half their money away this system better make 2x the revenue every single quarter or why would they do it.
  - CarbyAu 6y ago
    Well, I don't expect this is a simple perfect system. It isn't new. I just think it might be better than what most places have currently. US business has a history of "stock options" and "yearly bonuses". So this isn't new. (I haven't seen it here in Australia as a common thing.) > If everyone gets the same dividend it becomes a tragedy > of the commons since an individual player can do the > minimum while profiting off other players actions. They still don't get the same salary as you. Unless they do in which case, no real change. Alternately, if the company is making megabucks to the point where salary becomes insignificant, then I am ok with others being better off too, even the dead weight. Also, you could argue that with everyone in the company wanting a bigger share, this puts pressure to remove the dead weight. 1 less employee means a bigger share for me. 1 more productive person(as opposed to dead weight) means more for me. > Not only that, businesses are meant to make money if > the people who start the business is giving out half > their money away this system better make 2x the revenue > every single quarter or why would they do it. This doesn't change the idea of businesses making money. Just who they should be making it for. It doesn't force a bonus every year. It just says that if rentseeking investors get dividends, employees do too. Do we want a society whereby rich people can buy shares and then seek rent forever, using that rent to buy more shares etc. Or where the people who do the work, get the rewards? I understand that floating publicly is used to draw large sums of money for business to do great things. But it is also used as a forever debt, to pay shareholders forevermore for doing nothing more. Under this scheme, those investors would do their sums differently, obviously and it may well come down to the business getting "less for their float action". But I like the idea of trying not to trample salaried employees to make others rich.(Many startups do in fact operate on stock option basis. I'd just argue the stock options should be equal value, from the CEO to the cleaner.) Honestly, I'd prefer more than 50% go to employees - I hate "rentseeking" - but lets not go crazy.
ConcernedCoder 6y ago
The real problem is the artificial caste system of worker vs. executive as it currently exists in the United States today.
daenz 6y ago
>Several former Blizzard employees said they only received significant pay increases after leaving for other companies That's the key quote in the article for me. If you feel that your compensation is below market rate, switch jobs and prove it.
- xenihn 6y ago
  Riot is the only videogame industry employer I can think of that tries to pay fairly. My friends' Riot SWE offers are the only ones that I've seen come anywhere near FAANG compensation. Sadly they still fall short due to no RSUs, but at least they try. Riot offers are ~75% of FAANG TC, and on par with SF/Bay Area base salaries, while Blizzard offers are more typical for the industry and approach 40% of FAANG TC at best.
  - baron816 6y ago
    Someone should do a study comparing the two labor markets. There’s definitely a thesis somewhere in there for an economics PhD student. How is it that two very similar industries that nearly share the same talent pool can have radically different outcomes for their employees? Imagine how many game devs there are who are roommates with web devs, or who went to college together. How is it that the web devs don’t tell their friends “you need to quit that awful 90hr/week job that pays you shit and come work at my company”? Or why don’t startups try to lure game devs? I’m sure many of them could figure out Rails or React in no time. They would surely be able to offer slightly lower wages in exchange for a (comparatively) better work life balance.
umvi 6y ago
Yeah well, I would imagine with the opposite extreme (equalized wages) I would find I would not care as much about work. Why go the extra mile? Everyone gets paid the same anyway. Just min effort your job and save your work ethic for when you are off the clock.
bkuehl 6y ago
I believe all employees should be paid a decent wage and it's clear Blizzard is severely underpaying a good part of their workforce. But it's unfair to say that all employees at one level should get the same salary. We try hard to make sure good employees get raises, cause we want to keep them! If someone shared a document around with salaries and someone came to us demanding why they were paid less we'd either have to come back with, ok this is awkward but you're just not as good/productive/etc of an employee. Or you just didn't negotiate enough when hiring.
kevc 6y ago
I worked in the game industry on the business side and saw all salaries. Game developers are paid well under software engineers at “traditional” software companies. Similar software engineering job requirements, except one pays less and demands far more in terms of hours worked. Of course the depressed wages are consistent as you move to lower paid roles at game companies. It comes down to supply and demand. There are legions of young, passionate gamers who want to “work with their passion”. Why they stick with it, I’m not sure. I certainly didn’t.
deleted 6y ago
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throwawayblizz 6y ago
Here is the sheet, if anyone wants to peek. These salaries are really bad for Irvine, and the raises seem really bad too. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/119RI3oS9XNOjq2X8VLpUOMpyarcMsNzid-nA1OqbXkA https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/119RI3oS9XNOjq2X8VLpU...
- stevenwoo 6y ago
  You know what's crazy? I worked at Blizzard last around 2000 and I made more than 150K in base salary as a programmer, so it looks like salaries haven't increased without inflation adjustment for 20 years.
- cvhashim 6y ago
  That’s pretty bad
sytelus 6y ago
Unpopular opinion: For big companies, if you take all of the exec pay (C suits) and give it out to rest of the employees, the average employee income only rises by 3-5%. While CXX packages are extra-ordinary, one has to understand that its often drop in the bucket for big balance sheets and even less relevant when you have couple of hundreds of thousand employees around. So the metric of disparity we should use is not max/min salary but rather avg % increase if CXX salaries were all given to employees.
- kelnos 6y ago
  I don't understand why you'd think that's a good metric. If the Cxx team each makes 100x what the average employee makes, it doesn't matter if there are 10 employees or 10,000. There's rampant income inequality either way.
  - sytelus 6y ago
    The metric reflects the level of responsibilities. If you are managing and making decisions that directs activities of 100,000 people, then you do have that much more responsibility. So your comp as % of total comp of your report is good metric.
- pembrook 6y ago
  If I embezzle $10,000,000 from a giant company like GE, its also a drop in the bucket on their balance sheet. But that doesn’t make it right. American public company executives are grossly overpaid, and there’s been numerous studies proving this. Both historically in the US (exec pay has ballooned here since the 1980s) and currently in most other developed countries, companies with lower exec compensation don’t show lower ROE when sorted by industry. Exec compensation in many American companies is basically normalized theft from shareholders given the revolving door of incestuous boards and C-suites and the constant conflicts of interest. However, the money execs are looting from American companies doesn’t belong to employees. It belongs to shareholders. So a metric of giving that money to employees is irrelevant. Employee salaries are (and should be) set by broader market demand.
masayune 6y ago
Back when I worked there, they had something called "Blizzard Bucks" to "supplement" your salary. Basically "Blizzard Bucks" was Monopoly money we could use to buy their microtransactions and WoW game-time. In reality, you made approx. $30-40k sans OT, but they would always calculate your "salary" at $50-60k because of all the "Blizzard Bucks" and claim your salary was industry best. The best part was, and they would emphasize this at every meeting, "that the company would pay the taxes for us" as if it were a big deal. People never believe me when I tell them this is how the non-devs got treated.
- Mandatum 6y ago
  That is possibly the most exploitative form of compensation I've heard of in the Western world.
  - tyrust 6y ago
    I'd rank service workers' tips counting towards their minimum wage a worse practice.
    - gnicholas 6y ago
      At least tips are in cash, not funny money.
      - tyrust 6y ago
        With this practice, your total pay is always equal to the minimum wage. You get minimum wage even if you earn no tips. In other words, the tips are worth zero to you, they just save your employer money.
        thaumasiotes 6y ago
        No, your tips can exceed the difference between the tipped minimum wage and the regular minimum wage, in which case you'll be making more than minimum wage. That's the norm.
xenihn 6y ago
Blizzard has always treated their rank-and-file employees poorly, and underpaid/exploited them. The latter is generally expected from the videogame industry, but I don't think that excuses it. It's worse when you consider that Blizzard HQ has always been in one of the richest cities in the world. There's a thing that happened last year that wasn't picked up by any major news sources. It was really troubling to see it completely swept under the rug. I can't even find a "reputable" news site that covered it: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-01-09-former-blizzard-employee-alleges-racism-and-discrimination-drove-him-to-leave https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-01-09-former-bli...
overgard 6y ago
At risk of sounding like a mercenary, in my experience the only realistic way to get paid your market value is to be on the market. It's just way easier to get a pay bump by switching jobs. If you wait for your employer to give you a raise, they usually will drag their feet for as long as possible and then give you something disappointing. One consequence of this is, in companies that are willing to do it, it can be useful to negotiate a title promotion even if they don't give you a raise, because you can then use that title in your next job negotiation. BTW, giving this advice depresses me. I'm constantly amazed companies make such a weak effort to retain employees via good compensation policies. The cost of recruiting and interviewing candidates, not to mention training new hires, is huge.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  >The cost of recruiting and interviewing candidates, not to mention training new hires, is huge. Clearly it's not more than the cost of providing higher pay. Most people would rather not switch jobs as there is considerable risk involved if you're not performing labor that results in very profitable sales. People would rather work with the devil they know than the devil they don't, so unless they're in upwardly mobile careers such as engineering, law, finance, or medicine, they probably don't have many good options.
  - radegast 6y ago
    Why do people think companies act rationally? Behavioral economics shows time and time again people make irrational decisions all the time. Considering company is just a group of people, these irrational decisions are compounded. So I wouldn't say it's 100% clear whether a company saves money retaining employees vs training new.
  - overgard 6y ago
    I think it's more likely this: calculating the cost of giving an employee a raise is very simple. Calculating the cost of finding a new employee is extremely variable (how long does it take and how many people are involved?) and also involves metrics that are very hard to measure (how much more would the team lead and the team members have gotten done that week if they weren't interviewing candidates?) Usually if you're debating management, especially non-technical management, solid numbers win out over hand waivey numbers, even if the hand waivey numbers are representing something far more important and the solid numbers are representing something in a very limited context. An example: Tom is a mediocre programmer, but he's worked for the company for 5 years and has a lot of institutional knowledge. He wants an above average salary now. Should we give it to him? The obvious answer would be to let him walk, he's asking for more than he's really worth. Ok, but how much does the equation change if we factor in that it's going to take 3-5 months to hire his replacement, and you'll need to interview about 20 candidates, some of them for multiple hours, not to mention potentially flying them out? Also now Tom is walking with his institutional knowledge, and the bugs that used to go to him are going to someone that doesn't have the 5 years working with the system he does, so whoever has to pick up his slack is going to be slower than Tom is even if they're a better programmer overall.
LockAndLol 6y ago
I don't know what's in their contracts, but they all leave and make a new company to pay each other fairly? One of those old style companies where employees have a say in the direction of the company, have invested in it and feel like a real part of a family? Or unionize. You are tech people. You can setup setup your own loomio (or whatever decision making software exists these days) server and start making decisions today. Be the change you want to see.
egypturnash 6y ago
I am all for this. I have always said that if I end up running something, I will have a sheet posted in the office that has everyone's salaries (or at least the salaries of everyone willing to share that info) along with their job title. This probably hints at why I am unlikely to actually end up running anything, but in the off chance lightning strikes...
langitbiru 6y ago
This is the premise of the application that I am building: PredictSalary (https://predictsalary.com https://predictsalary.com). It's a browser extension to predict salary from job opportunities currently. Right now it only supports two job opportunities. But I'm adding more job opportunities websites. In the future, I plan to add support to predict salary from Linkedin profile. So based on education, experiences, role, the browser extension can predict the salary range. I'm thinking of adding a way to share the salary range in this application in a safe way. The mission of my application is to democratize the salary ranges. This way, in the future, workers in other companies (other than Blizzard) have the ability to know the salary ranges in a convenient way.
BadassFractal 6y ago
Interesting that their senior software dev is in the 140-170k range, which isn't too far off what you would be making at mid stage startups. Sure, it doesn't compare to FAANG, but most jobs don't, especially if you factor in the "startup tax" or the "passion tax".
turing_complete 6y ago
Wage disparities do not necessarily mean that someone is treated unfairly. It is fair to pay people more (even a lot more) if they are more productive or they contribute in a higher-value way.
dayjobpork 6y ago
“We are constantly reviewing compensation philosophies to better recognize the talent of our highest performers and keep us competitive in the industry, all with the aim of rewarding and investing more in top employees.” This is execspeak for screwing the majority and only giving their chosen few a decent raise.
stunt 6y ago
I can't think of any good solution for this. The only way to get what you believe is a fair salary is by negotiating that directly with your employer or switching to another job that pays better. Unless you are an executive, don't expect someone to give you huge salary increase for your performance. At best, even when your manager is very satisfied about you, (s)he is limited to the percentage range that is defined by HR for salary increase. Even if you get better title, the salary increase is still limited.

If they were based in Norway you could just go to the government website and type in their name. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239

riffraff 6y ago
Funny story: data on tax declarations in Italy is supposed to be public, but _not easily accessible_. I.e. you can go to the tax agency (or town hall) and ask for data on a given individual since 1973, but you can't just publish it willy nilly. In 2008 the tax collecting agency decided to put all of them online, as that seemed like a reasonable extension of the 40 year old rule, and there was a huge shitstorm[0]. At some point the privacy authority stepped in and imposed them to hide it again, citing a lot of more and less valid concerns. [0] which in my modest opinion proved it was a great idea

wwright 6y ago

Sharing your salary is absolutely not a “revolt” in any sense; this is literally a national worker’s right as an American. Bloomberg framing it as a “revolt” is a not very subtle attempt at casting workers using their rights as the agents of chaos when employers mislead, manipulate, and obscure.

obilgic 6y ago

Link to the spreadsheet?

nathanaldensr 6y ago
Presumably it's on an internal server and not public.
- aaomidi 6y ago
  Would be great if they make it public
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I'd like to see it, but the optics would be challenging, since Blizzard workers probably make a substantial bit more than most game industry people.
    - Thorrez 6y ago
      Why? The article mentions people making minimum wage.
throwawayblizz 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24046595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24046595
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago

Some producers and engineers at Blizzard can make well over $100,000 a year, but others, such as video game testers and customer-service representatives, are often paid minimum wage or close to it. It's about time this conversation entered the mainstream. It should go farther though — why shouldn't we all be able to buy Lambos or Teslas for the price of a Honda? Or, for that matter, Google shares for the price of GE? Does no one understand modern monetary theory? :clap: Just :clap: print : clap: the :clap: damn :clap: money.

gault8121 6y ago
The video game industry takes advantage of young people who have dreams of making video games, and think that suffering through terribly paying jobs is the way to make that happen. That illusion gives cover to the industry to perpetuate terrible working conditions by abusing low paying employees and then having new young people replace them. There isn't accountability when companies do not pay a penalty for the treatment of their staff.
- ralph84 6y ago
  The video game industry isn’t alone in doing this. Basically every “glamor” industry exploits young people with a dream. Entertainment, sports, airlines. They all have young people working for less than minimum wage in hopes of a shot at the big time.
- Proven 6y ago
  Did you mean to say young and inexperienced people take advantage of the video game industry? It's self-evident they couldn't get a better job anywhere else.
war1025 6y ago
Just printing money is a great way to end up with runaway inflation and a worthless currency.
- donatj 6y ago

IgorPartola 6y ago

Whenever the topic of sharing salary information comes up I always bring up the algorithm for figuring out the average salary for a group of people without anyone learning anyone else’s exact salary: Say you have 10 people sitting at a round table. Person 1 picks up a piece of paper and on it writes a sum of their salary + randInt(100_000, 10_000_000) remembering what the initial random number was. We can call this number the seed. They then pass the piece of paper to the right and person 2 reads the number, adds their salary and writes that number on a new piece of paper that they pass to person 3. Finally when person 10 hands the paper to person 1, person 1 subtracts the seed from the final number then divides that value by the number of people. That gives you the mean salary of the group.

kasey_junk 6y ago
It’s also important to note that in the US sharing salary data is protected by federal law no matter what your employee agreement says.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  That only matters if someone is dumb enough to fire you and writes down somewhere "s/he was fired for discussing salaries". I can't remember the exact phrasing but years ago my boss said at the team meeting something about not discussing salaries, and someone said later "I don't think you can say that" and he was like "oh, ok". The message was delivered though.
  - ncallaway 6y ago
    Here's the thing, though. Wrongful termination lawsuits aren't "proof beyond a reasonable doubt". Most civil actions—including wrongful termination—need to show a "preponderance of evidence". That is, you need to convince a jury that the claim is more likely to be true than not true (e.g. 51%). So, assuming you have evidence of the chain of events: - Group shares salary openly - Employer says: "you cannot do that", someone responds: "You can't say that", employer: "oh, ok" - Group continues sharing salary - Employer shortly thereafter fires 2 members that had shared their salary citing other reasons ("You had 2 1-minute late attendance events within the last 2 weeks") If I'm on that jury, if that's all the evidence presented, that gets me to a "preponderance of evidence" that the termination was wrongful. At that point, I would need to see some evidence from the employer that the attendance events leading to the firing was not pretextual.

john-shaffer 6y ago

I boycotted Blizzard after their censorship regarding Hong Kong. It was a great decision since it saved me from the dumpster fire to end all dumpster fires that was Warcraft III Reforged [1]. I would strongly suggest that if anything about Blizzard pisses you off, just be done with them entirely. The people who created the great games of the past don't work there. Blizzard is no longer capable of producing good products, and has no purpose other than to suck every last penny out of the existing IP. [1] https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/warcraft-iii-reforged https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/warcraft-iii-reforged

dyslexit 6y ago
I feel like their entire mission changed around the time of their merger with Activision. I remember reading a long time ago the original devs saying they made games they would want to play, and I believe it showed. The most obvious example of that to me were the game stories. Back then the stories and background lore had depth and were fascinatingly interesting. Characters felt like they had real motivations and reasons for doing things, the worlds felt believable, gritty, and sometimes unforgiving. I don't know if it was Activision's influence, many of the original devs moving on, or World of Warcraft coming out, but since then everything about the company seems to have changed. So much of what they do nowadays just seem like money grabs. They release pay to win content meant to be addictive, dumbed down their art style to looking like cartoons that appeal to the least common denominator, follow trends instead of doing anything innovating, and seem to have completely stopped caring about making any interesting story. The villains in Diablo 3 were comically badly written. At some point they even tried to force users to use their REAL WORLD names on battle.net[1]. It really isn't the same company as it used to be in the early 2000's. [1]https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/blizzard-requires-real-names-on-forums https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/blizzard-requires-rea...
- john-shaffer 6y ago
  The decline started when Vivendi (the owners) drove off the Blizzard North (ex-Condor) devs. The Blizzard North leaders were ignored to the point that they submitted their resignations in protest. Rather than actually give the team a voice, Vivendi decided to accept the resignations. They shut down the studio entirely a year or two later because it couldn't perform. They would have made a lot more money if they had listened to their proven leaders. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080702062733/http://www.netwars.pl/modules.php?name=news&id=3751 https://web.archive.org/web/20080702062733/http://www.netwar...

mensetmanusman 6y ago

Where is the spreadsheet? Googledocs?

galoisgirl 6y ago
Yes

neonate 6y ago

https://archive.is/TDfsD https://archive.is/TDfsD

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

> “ The anonymous document, reviewed by Bloomberg News, contains dozens of purported Blizzard salaries and pay bumps. Most of the raises are below 10%, significantly less than Blizzard employees said they expected following the study.” When oh when are midrange tech companies going to get their shit together with raises and bonuses. 10% should be mostly seen as a (shock) _normal_ raise when the company is doing well, above and beyond annual equity and a bonus at least in the range of 10-15%. Stop giving people reasons to job hop every few years. If you want loyalty and you want your investment in employees to pay off over time, give them good stuff! Give it to them before they reach any point of questioning if they want to go to the next company down the street for that extra 15% raise you were too stingy to give them on merit. As a manager, I can safely say the worst compensation mistakes I made were cases of not giving enough compensation sooner rather than later, and giving good people a reason to leave over money. I learned my lesson fast, and can say later in my career I take compensation planning much more seriously and absolutely do not ever settle for company pay band crap and scheduled 3% / 5% raise crap. If someone is doing good work for you, pay them!

darth_avocado 6y ago
^This. I've always had the philosophy that if you want to retain good employees, pay them more before they ask for more. If they have reached a point where they had to ask for more, they're probably going to leave soon. I don't understand how do companies fail to realize this. Say an engineer leaves because you didn't get him that 20% pay bump. Even in the highest ranks of engineering, that's like what a 100k? 30k-40k on an average. Now imagine you go through the whole recruitment cycle. You have anywhere between 8-12 weeks of productivity loss of an engineer. Then you waste time from the productivity of recruiter, hiring manager, hiring engineers on the team, etc., all of whom are highly paid. You cycle through 8-10 candidates. Then you finally get the person you need. In my experience, it takes at least a month to get onboarded, usually more. And it takes at least 6 months to get to productivity levels of the engineer that just left if your new candidate is good. All in all you wasted almost 6 months of engineering time worth of productivity, which easily exceeds the money you saved not giving that 20% raise. All of this, assuming the new guy didn't negotiate more than the previous one. Seriously, get your shit together.

yurlungur 6y ago

Well, for one I can say I do feel lucky to have the choice not to work in the video games industry. It seems that these companies in general just treat their employees worse when compared to big tech. Video games are my passion of life and I will gladly never put my work in that realm. Being viewed as deriving pleasure and meaning from your job just puts you in such an exploitable situation.

donatj 6y ago

So possibly unpopular point of view here, maybe not on HN, but I think pay discrepancies can be entirely fair. I'm almost certain my pay is different from my colleagues, but I've bargained like hell to get it. When I was hired, every time we've been acquired. I'm no executive either, I'm just a developer with a proven history of give-a-damn. I think it's perfectly fair game in a job where it's hard to replace individuals, jobs where people with the same title can achieve vastly different amounts of value for the company, and especially for a company that values its employees.

loraa 6y ago
This is incredibly sexist.
frickinLasers 6y ago
As someone who is a strong worker but a bit of a pushover, and whose job description has nothing to do with haggling, I strongly disagree with this. The company benefits if all of their best workers can afford rent, and they gain little by paying effective bargainers a larger slice of the pie.
sokoloff 6y ago
I don’t see any reason to think that all engineers contribute the same amount of value (and therefore paying different amounts is entirely reasonable). Thought experiment: if you were going to form a startup and needed two other engineers, would you know across your history which ones to pick from and which ones to avoid?
- satyrnein 6y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree with your first sentence. However, the thought experiment feels vulnerable to bias and other factors unrelated to performance, (just like the salary negotiation process you're comparing it to).
  - ithkuil 6y ago
    The thought experiment indeed highlights the same dynamics: it's not about whether there are effective differences in quality in people (and thus different "valuations"), but whether the noise in the system is larger than the signal.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

marcell 6y ago

At Google there was an internal spreadsheet to track this also. US law protects the rights of workers to discuss the terms of their employment, which of course includes pay.

vvanders 6y ago

The game industry as a whole was pretty fucked when I left. I remember doing the 40hr+1.5x overtime calculation and realizing that if I wasn't salaried I'd be making $4/hr with the mandatory hours we were working(70-90 hrs/week). I tossed 2 months of PTO to leave that industry(yay Washington laws) and made up the difference in the first 2.5 paychecks of the new gig. Be careful of industries that over-index on "passion" and don't compensate people accordingly. Last I checked that industry was still built on chewing through new faces every ~3 years or so. Taking care of your people makes business sense and I wish more companies got that.

api 6y ago
Any industry with more people passionate about getting into it then there are jobs develops a whole host of pathologies from overwork and low pay to influence cliques, nepotism, the "casting couch," etc.
davidgay 6y ago
80 hrs/week is ~4000 hr/year. Your salary was only ~$16000/year?
- vvanders 6y ago
  You have to factor in the 1.5x overtime that's standard on hourly. I went back and did the numbers, it was closer to $6hr but well below minimum wage for a dev position. From the little bit of salaries I heard art, design and test had it even worse.
  - pandaman 6y ago
    80 h/week at 1.5x overtime for 40 hours = 100h/week * 50 weeks (less holidays) = 5000 hours a year. At $6/h it makes 30K/y. This looks very low for the US tbqh, even for a non-programmer. When I started at my first job in the US game industry in the late 90s I've made 75K in a small independent studio. I had probably 3 years of experience at that time but no shipped games, I also was a foreigner on a temp visa so I don't think I had significantly more than a fresh grad would have got at the same position. This looks like QA salary from more than 10 years ago but where did you get a salaried QA job?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tonitosou 6y ago

i dont understand why salaries should be same for a similar role. If I work twice as fast and with a better work quality than my collegue why shouldn't i get double his salary? are we in a communist country?

Pxtl 6y ago
I work in healthcare where this is handled by job titles and it seems a lot healthier. Job title makes it clear that it's about greater responsibilities. "Why is Jeff paid more than me" "Because Jeff is senior dev and you're junior dev" is a much easier conversation to have, and everybody's job title is very visible.
- tonitosou 6y ago
  im not sure. in a perfect society if the junior dev is better and works harder and bring more value to the company he should be better paid than his senior. it is capitalism and if a company is judget by its output an employee should too
  - Pxtl 6y ago
    If he's better and brings in more value, he'llbecome a SR dev quickly.
    - tonitosou 6y ago
      so 1 senior dev = 1 senior dev? you're surely thinking same for a doctor right? and you will trust with your life a guy who studied less and got 10/20 at all his exams all his life and went party while the other one was practising surgeries?
  - NineStarPoint 6y ago
    If the other dev can’t perform better than a junior dev, they shouldn’t be a senior dev. There’s no reason that you have to go up in the titles over time if you can’t improve your capabilities. Titles should reflect skill, not just be handed out due to age.

CarbyAu 6y ago

I have previously mentioned that employees should be seen as significant investors in the business and should be treated as such. Apart from "The job" work is not a mental and emotional void. You invest yourself. And it hurts when your investment is ignored or treated as lesser than another human. Employee pay should be two parts: - salary as per usual - significant stock in the business. NB: significant. 50% of stock(non-voting, purely monetary) is for an "employee fund" and come dividend time it is shared equally among employees. People get their salary they can preen over. And company profits are tied to individual motivation. Why should I care if the company does astoundingly well as opposed to being mediocre if I don't have a stake in the outcome?

cleong 6y ago
Although this sounds like heaven and from your perspective as an employee it makes sense. But the system you built doesn't necessarily achieve the goals you want. If everyone gets the same dividend it becomes a tragedy of the commons since an individual player can do the minimum while profiting off other players actions. Even if its varied in dividend for example one person gets 10% while another gets 40%, this still applies as a player with the strategy of being mediocre will still get benefits of the hard work of all other players while minimizing the amount of work he has to do. Not only that, businesses are meant to make money if the people who start the business is giving out half their money away this system better make 2x the revenue every single quarter or why would they do it.
- CarbyAu 6y ago
  Well, I don't expect this is a simple perfect system. It isn't new. I just think it might be better than what most places have currently. US business has a history of "stock options" and "yearly bonuses". So this isn't new. (I haven't seen it here in Australia as a common thing.) > If everyone gets the same dividend it becomes a tragedy > of the commons since an individual player can do the > minimum while profiting off other players actions. They still don't get the same salary as you. Unless they do in which case, no real change. Alternately, if the company is making megabucks to the point where salary becomes insignificant, then I am ok with others being better off too, even the dead weight. Also, you could argue that with everyone in the company wanting a bigger share, this puts pressure to remove the dead weight. 1 less employee means a bigger share for me. 1 more productive person(as opposed to dead weight) means more for me. > Not only that, businesses are meant to make money if > the people who start the business is giving out half > their money away this system better make 2x the revenue > every single quarter or why would they do it. This doesn't change the idea of businesses making money. Just who they should be making it for. It doesn't force a bonus every year. It just says that if rentseeking investors get dividends, employees do too. Do we want a society whereby rich people can buy shares and then seek rent forever, using that rent to buy more shares etc. Or where the people who do the work, get the rewards? I understand that floating publicly is used to draw large sums of money for business to do great things. But it is also used as a forever debt, to pay shareholders forevermore for doing nothing more. Under this scheme, those investors would do their sums differently, obviously and it may well come down to the business getting "less for their float action". But I like the idea of trying not to trample salaried employees to make others rich.(Many startups do in fact operate on stock option basis. I'd just argue the stock options should be equal value, from the CEO to the cleaner.) Honestly, I'd prefer more than 50% go to employees - I hate "rentseeking" - but lets not go crazy.

ConcernedCoder 6y ago

The real problem is the artificial caste system of worker vs. executive as it currently exists in the United States today.

daenz 6y ago

>Several former Blizzard employees said they only received significant pay increases after leaving for other companies That's the key quote in the article for me. If you feel that your compensation is below market rate, switch jobs and prove it.

xenihn 6y ago
Riot is the only videogame industry employer I can think of that tries to pay fairly. My friends' Riot SWE offers are the only ones that I've seen come anywhere near FAANG compensation. Sadly they still fall short due to no RSUs, but at least they try. Riot offers are ~75% of FAANG TC, and on par with SF/Bay Area base salaries, while Blizzard offers are more typical for the industry and approach 40% of FAANG TC at best.
- baron816 6y ago
  Someone should do a study comparing the two labor markets. There’s definitely a thesis somewhere in there for an economics PhD student. How is it that two very similar industries that nearly share the same talent pool can have radically different outcomes for their employees? Imagine how many game devs there are who are roommates with web devs, or who went to college together. How is it that the web devs don’t tell their friends “you need to quit that awful 90hr/week job that pays you shit and come work at my company”? Or why don’t startups try to lure game devs? I’m sure many of them could figure out Rails or React in no time. They would surely be able to offer slightly lower wages in exchange for a (comparatively) better work life balance.

umvi 6y ago

Yeah well, I would imagine with the opposite extreme (equalized wages) I would find I would not care as much about work. Why go the extra mile? Everyone gets paid the same anyway. Just min effort your job and save your work ethic for when you are off the clock.

bkuehl 6y ago

I believe all employees should be paid a decent wage and it's clear Blizzard is severely underpaying a good part of their workforce. But it's unfair to say that all employees at one level should get the same salary. We try hard to make sure good employees get raises, cause we want to keep them! If someone shared a document around with salaries and someone came to us demanding why they were paid less we'd either have to come back with, ok this is awkward but you're just not as good/productive/etc of an employee. Or you just didn't negotiate enough when hiring.

kevc 6y ago

I worked in the game industry on the business side and saw all salaries. Game developers are paid well under software engineers at “traditional” software companies. Similar software engineering job requirements, except one pays less and demands far more in terms of hours worked. Of course the depressed wages are consistent as you move to lower paid roles at game companies. It comes down to supply and demand. There are legions of young, passionate gamers who want to “work with their passion”. Why they stick with it, I’m not sure. I certainly didn’t.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

throwawayblizz 6y ago

Here is the sheet, if anyone wants to peek. These salaries are really bad for Irvine, and the raises seem really bad too. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/119RI3oS9XNOjq2X8VLpUOMpyarcMsNzid-nA1OqbXkA https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/119RI3oS9XNOjq2X8VLpU...

stevenwoo 6y ago
You know what's crazy? I worked at Blizzard last around 2000 and I made more than 150K in base salary as a programmer, so it looks like salaries haven't increased without inflation adjustment for 20 years.
cvhashim 6y ago
That’s pretty bad

sytelus 6y ago

Unpopular opinion: For big companies, if you take all of the exec pay (C suits) and give it out to rest of the employees, the average employee income only rises by 3-5%. While CXX packages are extra-ordinary, one has to understand that its often drop in the bucket for big balance sheets and even less relevant when you have couple of hundreds of thousand employees around. So the metric of disparity we should use is not max/min salary but rather avg % increase if CXX salaries were all given to employees.

kelnos 6y ago
I don't understand why you'd think that's a good metric. If the Cxx team each makes 100x what the average employee makes, it doesn't matter if there are 10 employees or 10,000. There's rampant income inequality either way.
- sytelus 6y ago
  The metric reflects the level of responsibilities. If you are managing and making decisions that directs activities of 100,000 people, then you do have that much more responsibility. So your comp as % of total comp of your report is good metric.
pembrook 6y ago
If I embezzle $10,000,000 from a giant company like GE, its also a drop in the bucket on their balance sheet. But that doesn’t make it right. American public company executives are grossly overpaid, and there’s been numerous studies proving this. Both historically in the US (exec pay has ballooned here since the 1980s) and currently in most other developed countries, companies with lower exec compensation don’t show lower ROE when sorted by industry. Exec compensation in many American companies is basically normalized theft from shareholders given the revolving door of incestuous boards and C-suites and the constant conflicts of interest. However, the money execs are looting from American companies doesn’t belong to employees. It belongs to shareholders. So a metric of giving that money to employees is irrelevant. Employee salaries are (and should be) set by broader market demand.

masayune 6y ago

Back when I worked there, they had something called "Blizzard Bucks" to "supplement" your salary. Basically "Blizzard Bucks" was Monopoly money we could use to buy their microtransactions and WoW game-time. In reality, you made approx. $30-40k sans OT, but they would always calculate your "salary" at $50-60k because of all the "Blizzard Bucks" and claim your salary was industry best. The best part was, and they would emphasize this at every meeting, "that the company would pay the taxes for us" as if it were a big deal. People never believe me when I tell them this is how the non-devs got treated.

Mandatum 6y ago
That is possibly the most exploitative form of compensation I've heard of in the Western world.
- tyrust 6y ago
  I'd rank service workers' tips counting towards their minimum wage a worse practice.
  - gnicholas 6y ago
    At least tips are in cash, not funny money.
    - tyrust 6y ago
      With this practice, your total pay is always equal to the minimum wage. You get minimum wage even if you earn no tips. In other words, the tips are worth zero to you, they just save your employer money.
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        No, your tips can exceed the difference between the tipped minimum wage and the regular minimum wage, in which case you'll be making more than minimum wage. That's the norm.

xenihn 6y ago

Blizzard has always treated their rank-and-file employees poorly, and underpaid/exploited them. The latter is generally expected from the videogame industry, but I don't think that excuses it. It's worse when you consider that Blizzard HQ has always been in one of the richest cities in the world. There's a thing that happened last year that wasn't picked up by any major news sources. It was really troubling to see it completely swept under the rug. I can't even find a "reputable" news site that covered it: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-01-09-former-blizzard-employee-alleges-racism-and-discrimination-drove-him-to-leave https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-01-09-former-bli...

overgard 6y ago

At risk of sounding like a mercenary, in my experience the only realistic way to get paid your market value is to be on the market. It's just way easier to get a pay bump by switching jobs. If you wait for your employer to give you a raise, they usually will drag their feet for as long as possible and then give you something disappointing. One consequence of this is, in companies that are willing to do it, it can be useful to negotiate a title promotion even if they don't give you a raise, because you can then use that title in your next job negotiation. BTW, giving this advice depresses me. I'm constantly amazed companies make such a weak effort to retain employees via good compensation policies. The cost of recruiting and interviewing candidates, not to mention training new hires, is huge.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
>The cost of recruiting and interviewing candidates, not to mention training new hires, is huge. Clearly it's not more than the cost of providing higher pay. Most people would rather not switch jobs as there is considerable risk involved if you're not performing labor that results in very profitable sales. People would rather work with the devil they know than the devil they don't, so unless they're in upwardly mobile careers such as engineering, law, finance, or medicine, they probably don't have many good options.
- radegast 6y ago
  Why do people think companies act rationally? Behavioral economics shows time and time again people make irrational decisions all the time. Considering company is just a group of people, these irrational decisions are compounded. So I wouldn't say it's 100% clear whether a company saves money retaining employees vs training new.
- overgard 6y ago
  I think it's more likely this: calculating the cost of giving an employee a raise is very simple. Calculating the cost of finding a new employee is extremely variable (how long does it take and how many people are involved?) and also involves metrics that are very hard to measure (how much more would the team lead and the team members have gotten done that week if they weren't interviewing candidates?) Usually if you're debating management, especially non-technical management, solid numbers win out over hand waivey numbers, even if the hand waivey numbers are representing something far more important and the solid numbers are representing something in a very limited context. An example: Tom is a mediocre programmer, but he's worked for the company for 5 years and has a lot of institutional knowledge. He wants an above average salary now. Should we give it to him? The obvious answer would be to let him walk, he's asking for more than he's really worth. Ok, but how much does the equation change if we factor in that it's going to take 3-5 months to hire his replacement, and you'll need to interview about 20 candidates, some of them for multiple hours, not to mention potentially flying them out? Also now Tom is walking with his institutional knowledge, and the bugs that used to go to him are going to someone that doesn't have the 5 years working with the system he does, so whoever has to pick up his slack is going to be slower than Tom is even if they're a better programmer overall.

LockAndLol 6y ago

I don't know what's in their contracts, but they all leave and make a new company to pay each other fairly? One of those old style companies where employees have a say in the direction of the company, have invested in it and feel like a real part of a family? Or unionize. You are tech people. You can setup setup your own loomio (or whatever decision making software exists these days) server and start making decisions today. Be the change you want to see.

egypturnash 6y ago

I am all for this. I have always said that if I end up running something, I will have a sheet posted in the office that has everyone's salaries (or at least the salaries of everyone willing to share that info) along with their job title. This probably hints at why I am unlikely to actually end up running anything, but in the off chance lightning strikes...

langitbiru 6y ago

This is the premise of the application that I am building: PredictSalary (https://predictsalary.com https://predictsalary.com). It's a browser extension to predict salary from job opportunities currently. Right now it only supports two job opportunities. But I'm adding more job opportunities websites. In the future, I plan to add support to predict salary from Linkedin profile. So based on education, experiences, role, the browser extension can predict the salary range. I'm thinking of adding a way to share the salary range in this application in a safe way. The mission of my application is to democratize the salary ranges. This way, in the future, workers in other companies (other than Blizzard) have the ability to know the salary ranges in a convenient way.

BadassFractal 6y ago

Interesting that their senior software dev is in the 140-170k range, which isn't too far off what you would be making at mid stage startups. Sure, it doesn't compare to FAANG, but most jobs don't, especially if you factor in the "startup tax" or the "passion tax".

turing_complete 6y ago

Wage disparities do not necessarily mean that someone is treated unfairly. It is fair to pay people more (even a lot more) if they are more productive or they contribute in a higher-value way.

dayjobpork 6y ago

“We are constantly reviewing compensation philosophies to better recognize the talent of our highest performers and keep us competitive in the industry, all with the aim of rewarding and investing more in top employees.” This is execspeak for screwing the majority and only giving their chosen few a decent raise.

stunt 6y ago

I can't think of any good solution for this. The only way to get what you believe is a fair salary is by negotiating that directly with your employer or switching to another job that pays better. Unless you are an executive, don't expect someone to give you huge salary increase for your performance. At best, even when your manager is very satisfied about you, (s)he is limited to the percentage range that is defined by HR for salary increase. Even if you get better title, the salary increase is still limited.