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This company has probably the shittiest gamified bonus system that I've ever heard of: "CDPR leaders would hand out tokens every month to staffers who went abo

• CamelCaseName 6y ago
  Doesn't sound much different than getting paid in equity at a startup.
  • pavlov 6y ago
    There's centuries worth of legislation about equity. You can still get screwed, but "I'm giving you the right to own shares in this company" means something in the eyes of the law. Getting paid in participation tokens doesn't.
    • nthj 6y ago
      This is absolutely technically correct. Practically speaking, maybe not so much. http://stockoptioncounsel.com/blog/standards-ownership-canthecomanytakebackmyvestedshares http://stockoptioncounsel.com/blog/standards-ownership-canth...
    • 29athrowaway 6y ago
      You can be employee #2 of a startup, receive a lot of stock early on and then see it dillute to fractions of a cent. Perfectly legal.
      • MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
        That's what happened to Eduardo Saverin.
        • leereeves 6y ago
          Leading to a lawsuit that was settled with undisclosed terms, but he's reportedly worth $15B now [1], so he must have received quite a lot. 1: https://www.forbes.com/profile/eduardo-saverin/?sh=1b75ae527bd5 https://www.forbes.com/profile/eduardo-saverin/?sh=1b75ae527...
          • munk-a 6y ago
            It happens to a lot of other folks that aren't currently worth 15B. He made out well but the majority of folks are left with nothing.
          • bnjms 6y ago
            So is Zuckerberg an actual villain?
            • fakedang 6y ago
              Took you way longer than enough
            • MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
              Well they state it right in the movie that he deceptively tried to screw Saverin over and his own lawyer in a nutshell said "Settle. Because what do you think a jury will say?"
      • verst 6y ago
        Unsure why you are being downvoted. Perhaps some founders and investors don't want this to be known...
        • jimbob45 6y ago
    • munk-a 6y ago
      Most areas of the world use at-will employment but I'm specifically familiar with the US and Canada. In either of those you can kill options dead due to expiration clauses[1] - actual equity issuance tends to be rarer due to the tax liabilities around it and, either way, dilution can destroy your value and it's completely legal. Additionally, if you crunch for work, you can be denied promised bonuses[2], be fired before they arrive[3], or just be suddenly downsized and end up needing to eat that bonus while you find another job. Do not work overtime without compensation, no company is your baby and companies have no legal obligation to remember your service. Labour laws are terribly slanted against employees so be very conservative about your expectations from work and never sacrifice your health (mental or physical) due to some B.S. team oriented camaraderie. I work hard at my shop, I really love all the things we've managed to accomplish and I appreciate all the folks I've built them with. But when it comes to money it is good to be incredibly self-interested because no one else will do it for you. 1. You can be put in a position where you're able to exercise your options but you'll be doing so blindly - trading personally held cash for stock and hoping the company doesn't end up tanking. 2. Bonuses are almost never legally promised in practice, so they remain at the grace of the employer. 3. At-will employment laws means that all future implied payments can be retracted if employment is terminated excepting those that are contractually owed.
  • errantspark 6y ago
    I thought that was PascalCase and this is camelCase? Have I been wrong all these years?
    • butt_hugger 6y ago
      Yes. CamelCase is such, you're referring to mixedCase. (The first letter is the camel's head.)
      • mixedCase 6y ago
        I would say the same.
    • leetcrew 6y ago
      wikipedia, the world's highest authority on matters of nitpicking, says camel case can be either; capitalization of the first letter is unspecified. in practice, I've certainly heard people use camel case to refer to either convention. I hear pascal case a lot when people specifically mean a capitalized first character. wikipedia lists dromedary case as the complement of pascal case, but I've never actually seen this term used IRL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel_case
    • moron4hire 6y ago
      This is something that I miss about forums of yore and sort of hate about HN, Reddit, and their ilk: the deprioritization of a post author's identity. It took me way too long to figure out you were talking about the username of the person you were replying to. I miss being able to scan through a forum's post listing and readily pick out names of posters I recognized after being involved in the site for a while. It was an additional signal of post quality (or lack thereof, depending on the user). Here, the username is hidden in a sentence of status text, on the same visual level of the number of minutes ago the post was made, all of which is rendered in a light grey font. It's clearly intentional, and I can't for the life of me figure out why the forum owners don't want users to be able to build a consistent identity.
      • 6y ago
  • aspaceman 6y ago
    If I got paid in tokens at a startup, I would riot. That’s some “company town” bullshit.
    • fastball 6y ago
      Did you not know about the tokens when you were hired? Why is your first reaction to "riot" instead of just "quit"? Unless it's in your contract, you don't deserve a bonus.
      • aspaceman 6y ago
        Because I want to. It’s my job, and I’d like to keep it. I take great pride in my position. I do graphics programming myself, and those jobs aren’t exactly numerous. Quitting is for cowards.
        • jokethrowaway 6y ago
          I hope you'll reconsider your position because it greatly benefits your employer. You don't have to be your job. I wish you well.
        • Godel_unicode 6y ago
          > Quitting is for cowards No, quiting is for people who want something they don't have. Loss-aversion is a very powerful force, especially in the hands of senior leadership.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • blackearl 6y ago
        I can't imagine HR going into it any more than "there is possible bonus compensation" when hiring.
        • Godel_unicode 6y ago
          My company's HR people and recruiter both spelled out the bonus plans in great detail (cash vs equity, what you're rated on, typical amounts for my incoming level, etc etc). Don't just accept wishy-washy answers, this stuff matters.
• Closi 6y ago
  Lots of companies have a bonus which is a combination of 'corporate wide' bonus, 'performance' bonus and 'personal contribution'. This just seems to formalize some of the parts which are often just arbitrarily decided by some governance committee.
  • vsareto 6y ago
    No reason to not give the bonuses when accomplishments are recognized then, instead of tying it to the team's success at a singular date (delivery). It forces everyone to work in overdrive. It's plainly not a personal contribution/performance bonus at all. If CDPR makes a bad hire that causes a delay (even outside of development, like marketing?), then everyone suffers for that from a lack of a bonus. This is particularly shitty when combined with the stress and demands and low pay of the game industry as it is. Also, super curious if the tokens can be forged. Can I just show up at the end of release with 50 tokens and cash in? Surely they were tracking it elsewhere, making the tokens useless.
    • michaelt 6y ago
      Plenty of companies recognise contributions by handing out tokens that can't be cashed in immediately, that have a value that depends on the fortunes of the company, and that might fall in value precipitously. Just usually they name the tokens "stock options" or "pre-IPO shares" I agree there are plenty of shitty practices in the games industry, of course.
      • sfkdjf9j3j 6y ago
        It would also be weird if managers were to capriciously hand out options to employees as short term performance bonuses.
        • Godel_unicode 6y ago
          Weird, normal-and-accepted, guess it depends what part of the industry you work in.
• frakkingcylons 6y ago
  CDPR is paying their staff the full bonus for Cyberpunk 2077 due to the circumstances of the release. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-11/cd-projekt-changes-developer-bonus-structure-after-buggy-release https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-11/cd-projek...
  • Rapzid 6y ago
    Probably need them to stay and fix the bugs instead of rage quitting when their bonuses are withheld likely because decisions made outside their control.
    • washadjeffmad 6y ago
      I felt like management withheld the bonuses to get them to stay on to finish the game. Major patches have already been promised for Jan and Feb because it's basically early access quality, and I bet more than a few devs are ready to walk away. I know if tensions were high after a long crunch and I just got a big payout before a major family holiday, I'd need some convincing to go back in.
  • Latty 6y ago
    Making it less terrible after-the-fact, after tons of bad press and outside pressure, and when you desperately need the devs to stay on and fix the problems left after the launch they no doubt told you was not going to work… not sure that deserves much praise. Don't get me wrong, it's better than not doing it, but it doesn't fix the underlying issue with the system there.
    • frakkingcylons 6y ago
      I'm not praising them, just stating facts.
  • krainboltgreene 6y ago
    I heard the bonuses were paid out prior to the last release bump, so they got much less than they could have.
• Tade0 6y ago
  Good practices in management are still developing in Poland, unfortunately. Many companies around here do experiments like this one hoping to see improvements. Most of such attempts fail miserably. I've seen my share of weird, counterproductive ideas from grades like in school to work logged down to the second. My last company, even though it was over 500 people strong, was basically winging it.
  • ballenf 6y ago
    I think the hardest part about running such "experiments" is ever knowing whether they were success or failures. Even here, we (and I doubt CDPR) don't know enough to really judge whether the tokens things helped or hurt. Or if it helped, whether it helped as much as a more traditional system. Except for small experiments that can be run many times (or in many similar departments in parallel), circumstances just change too much to ever compare apples to apples. (Here, devs may have loved this game's concept so much that they worked hard in spite of the tokens. Or didn't love the game concept but loved the tokens.) Frankly it's why it doesn't make too much sense to veer very far from practices proven to work. But what's shown to work in a HBR studies may not apply in a different cultural landscape than the US. All that being said, I'm sure there are many possible practices that are better than traditional approaches. It's just risky trying to find them.
• alliao 6y ago
  sounds like a sure fire way of baking in "low hanging fruits" in release, and heroically picking them to get the bonus :) don't game the game devs man...
• munk-a 6y ago
  CDPR sounds like a relatively progressively run game company tbh. A lot of game dev companies deny you overtime during the run up to a major release and massively layoff staff after releases. Up here in British Columbia all technical workers[1] are overtime exempt because EA ran roughshod over our labour laws a number of years ago and people are too afraid to change them for fear of driving off businesses. 1. Vaguely defined - in practice includes anyone who uses a keyboard or has anything to do with the film industry.
  • 908B64B197 6y ago
    Never understood why they tried so hard to be the destination for offshoring instead of fostering home grown studios. That and pitching Vancouver as an ideal HQ2 location since tech workers are worth ~50K less than in America[0]. Is this something that Canadians approve? [0] https://www.vancouvereconomic.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Vancouver-Amazon-HQ2-Proposal-Feb-2018.pdf?utm_source=Website&utm_medium=Button&utm_campaign=AmazonHQ2Download&utm_content=ViewPDF https://www.vancouvereconomic.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02...
    • badloginagain 6y ago
      You'd be shocked at what Canadians put up with. Look closely at any industry here and corruption/abuse run rampant.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • munk-a 6y ago
      Nope, and most software developers in Vancouver aren't participating with foreign companies at those rates. The laws remain how they are mostly to disenfranchise QA testers which remain a very hard labour segment to mobilize. There are thousands of "I can make money playing games?!?" folks out there that drown out the really good QA folks and insure that EA can maintain its churn. For regular dev jobs, I think the market is less imbalanced than it appears on the surface. Cost of living isn't cheap in BC but free medical care is a big bonus and the city is quite pleasant. Senior devs will end up pulling senior dev money - it's mostly the entry level wages that are depressed.
• zionic 6y ago
  On some level it makes sense: -if we succeed massively, you should get an outsized portion of those winnings because of your immediately obvious hard work in the now that paid off later. If not, then it literally doesn’t matter.
• spamizbad 6y ago
  Why is this sort of practice so common with video game studios but not elsewhere in the technology industry?
  • Godel_unicode 6y ago
    This is well-trod ground, but it's common with any job where the supply/demand ratio is severely in the employers favor. Not a ton of those jobs in tech, but the dynamic is frankly pretty similar to professional cheerleaders. Lots of people want the job, relatively few of them, and the skill floor isn't all that high.
  • speedgoose 6y ago
    Because they have a line of people wanting to work for them despite everything.
  • SkyPuncher 6y ago
    It's common in tech two. Of the places I've worked that promise some form of bonus, I have only been paid a single one - $172. In my experience, bonuses are almost solely a carrot to hang over people's head. They rarely actually get paid out even if the company is doing well. Stock and options have there downfalls, but at least their terms are in writing.
• cbozeman 6y ago
  Awful? This is miles ahead of nearly ever other game studio out there. How do I know? One of the people I served with aboard the USS Honolulu is a game designer for Darkpaw Games. They have nothing like this. Not even close. Another person is a high-level executive at Activision-Blizzard. He has compensation that is generous, but it took him 17 years to get there. Yet another personal friend is a junior developer at Obsidian Entertainment. They don't have anything like this, at his level. Maybe their system isn't perfect, but its a hell of a better than nothing.
  • tgtweak 6y ago
    Changing the terms post-hoc is pretty scummy. Logically you would assume having something is better than nothing, as I assume most would - simple math. The reality is anticipating more than you actually receive can be more detrimental. You make sacrifices you normally wouldn't if you are lead to believe there is a reward. Perhaps you turned down another job offer since you had been factoring those extra projektbucks and then they suddenly devalue at the end of the race. Maybe you treated yourself or your loved ones to a gift as a small token of appreciation for the effort spent on this rather than them. That $2000 in fairy-bucks turns out to be $500 and those extra hours amount to less-than-legal-minimum-wage. Regardless of whether it's better than nothing - there is a tangible risk to having something accounted for that turns out to be short. The game development industry has been a cesspool for worker exploitation for the longest time and this adds to a long list.
  • xenihn 6y ago
    Obsidian is downright abusive towards any of their staff that isn't part of the old guard, and doesn't compensate any more to make up for it. source: three people I know who worked there
• Impossible 6y ago
  I worked for a game studio that did this. Tokens could be used for a raffle. It was kind of a silly thing though and wouldn't be considered compensation, there were normal bonuses and stock grants. It also (usually) wasn't tied to crunch. The tokens were handed out by peers
• oliwarner 6y ago
  That seems far more like being paid for the windfall of hard work than most (eg) executive bonus schemes, where you're disproportionately rewarded for the work of others. But no, they should absolutely also pay overtime.
• dusted 6y ago
  If getting anything at all for overtime and crunch is your definition of shittiest, you've not seen shit :)