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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 massiv

• 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.
    • anonunivgrad 6y ago
      Any decent software employer in the US will have good insurance that basically guarantees your max out of pocket health expenses won’t exceed a few thousand dollars. That doesn’t really account for the difference.
      • majormajor 6y ago
        Out of pocket maxes in the 10-20K range aren't that uncommon in the US. Even when I've seen places with plans where it's <5K, that's only for single workers, and it doubles with a partner or family.
        • ivalm 6y ago
          And I’d rather have extra 100k and pay the 10k for health.
        • nemo44x 6y ago
          I’ve never seen out of pocket maxes that high but I’m limited to my own experiences. I’d imagine the premiums would be super low for such a high deductible. Even the high deductible plans I’ve seen are no more than $3500/single or $7k family per year out of pocket max. And those allow you and your employer to put money into a high deductible savings account pre-tax like a retirement account. And it can be used for any qualified health payment for the rest of your life and is passed down upon death. It’s really like a 401k for health payments.
        • agensaequivocum 6y ago
          My plan for a family of 5 has an out of pocket max of 4K with no deductible.
      • gambiting 6y ago
        >>your max out of pocket health expenses won’t exceed a few thousand dollars. Wait, that's meant to be good? What kind of insanity is this. Why do you have to pay anything out of your pocket at all??
  • asdfaoeu 6y ago
    That document is not saying they are "worth" less than in America but that they are undervalued which I imagine a lot of them would agree with.
    • 908B64B197 6y ago
      Well, according to the market they are worth less.
  • simonh 6y ago
    Offshoring companies bring investment into the community, while funding startups costs the local community. Also if your startup needs skill and services not available locally that have to be sourced outside that’s more cost, whereas a company coming in will have to provide those services at its own expense. If local salaries are depressed like that, this implies the outside investment is sorely needed. If there was enough investment available locally and local companies had the resources to hire more workers and were successful enough to pay them well, those salaries would be higher, but the resources to make that happen have to come from somewhere.
    • 908B64B197 6y ago
      > while funding startups costs the local community I'm not sure I completely understand. > If local salaries are depressed like that, this implies the outside investment is sorely needed. It's interesting because a lot of capital is flowing into Vancouver right now in the form of real estate speculation.
  • Tiktaalik 6y ago
    The theory goes that the big foreign corp (ie. EA) hires a bunch of locals, and over time those locals get good and leave to form their own company. There's a fair amount of evidence that this works. It's not like Vancouver is solely populated by foreign studios. Local game companies like Kabam, Black Bird Interactive, Relic, United Front, etc would have all either had their roots in EA workers or would have hired ex-EA workers.
  • shaggyfrog 6y ago
    As a Canadian, Vancouver resident, and software developer, I certainly don’t approve of the discount all software companies get here, including ones based here. Not only do companies pay out 60 cents on the dollar, they can also qualify for large refundable tax credit subsidies from provincial and federal governments. In other words, there are plenty of your “home-grown studios” here, who benefit from the manipulated market created by the multinationals that came before them. Salaries won’t rise to meet parity until labour gets organized, but as a previous commenter pointed out about labour laws and overtime pay, it’s a massive uphill battle.
  • theflyinghorse 6y ago
    I am honestly not sure why Canadian developers are paid so much lower than our American counterparts. Vancouver is a large market for tech as is Toronto, and now the rest of the cities in Canada are picking up. Anecdotally I have never seen this much recruiter activity in Alberta as we're seeing right now.
• CivBase 6y ago
  It's sad if that counts as "progressive" business practices in the games industry.
  • meheleventyone 6y ago
    It really, really doesn’t IME. This is basically what the industry was like when I joined 15 years ago.
• illuminati1911 6y ago
  I'm not familiar with Polish labour law, but it could be that in Poland like in many other European countries concepts such as "denying overtime" are inherently illegal.
  • to11mtm 6y ago
    > I'm not familiar with Polish labour law, but it could be that in Poland like in many other European countries concepts such as "denying overtime" are inherently illegal. Which explains why so many Ubisoft games are made in Canada...
    • gambiting 6y ago
      No, the reason why so many Ubisoft games are made in Canada(and other studios as well, take a walk around central montreal, there's tonnes of games studios there) is that the Canadian government is giving out massive subsidies to the game industry to grow it there(last I've heard it's literally half of every salary - an absolutely ridiculous amount of money). If you compare the cost of having an employee in Canada to most other places, Canada works out pretty cheap, and it's an attractive place to move to and live in, without the ridiculousness of the American immigration.
      • astrange 6y ago
        I’ve always thought it was interesting that video games are the only kind of software that’s often made outside big tech hubs - not to mention the only kind an ordinary person enjoys using enough to emulate! Does Canada not subsidize other tech work? I’ve heard the pay at Blackberry was terrible for instance. The only good thing is that Canadians will be impressed if you call yourself a software engineer because they think you have an iron ring.
      • WorldMaker 6y ago
        Ubisoft, specifically, versus some of the other companies has the interesting added factor that with their upper-management being primarily based in France it is useful to them to utilize countries/provinces that can also speak French.
• grouseway 6y ago
  I believe those rules only apply to companies that are primarily tech companies (like EA of course). Tech workers at non-tech companies can get overtime.
• tjpnz 6y ago
  Something similar happened in NZ too under the "Hobbit Law" bought and paid for by Warner Brothers. Now everyone in the film and game industry is considered an independent contractor by default and aren't subject to the usual rights and legal protections afforded to company employees.
  • chrisseaton 6y ago
    > bought and paid for by Warner Brothers Hang on I remember mass protests by the artists themselves in favour of that law?
    • pas 6y ago
      Could you find some details on this? Also, "even a shitty job is better than no job" might lead to people campaigning for that law if that means they get to work on LotR in their home country. Of course this is not really a viable strategy long term.
      • chrisseaton 6y ago
        For example http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/4279251/Jackson-I-feel-enormous-gratitude http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/4279251/Jackson-I-feel-enorm.... I think the union leaders trying to block the law were getting death threats from the workers they were supposed to be representing. There's some documentaries about it online as well. I think the union were completely at odds with their own members. Bizarre situation and an example of why people should be cautious about unions.
    • tjpnz 6y ago
      Some of the people who showed up were colleagues. I wouldn't go as far as to call it a rent-a-mob but there was a lot of misinformation being spread on internal mailing lists leading up to the day.
    • te_chris 6y ago
      Peter Jackson played a blinder on that one.
• SeanBoocock 6y ago
  Not true of EA, at least in the United States. EA hires junior employees as non-exempt for their first couple of years. They are also in my experience among the most progressive big publishers when it comes to overtime and work/life balance. Not perfect, but certainly trying in a real way across most of its studios. Source: Worked for, but not currently employed at, several EA studios over the last decade, including as a junior engineer paid overtime.
  • Agentlien 6y ago
    I worked at EA for five years (2015-2019) in Sweden and during that time I heard a lot of talk about minimising overtime and new measures to prevent it. Every game new alternatives and policies would be introduced. Then, when it became clear that we couldn't deliver on what everyone always said was over scoped, all of that was thrown out the window and we went back to ordinary crunch. We did sometimes get compensated, but always in comp days, never money, and it was usually very uncertain ahead of time if and how it would work.
  • gambiting 6y ago
    I work at Ubisoft(in the UK[0]) and overtime and crunch are heavily discouraged, to a point where as a matter of policy, we are asked to report to higher management if anyne is asked to do overtime - it just shouldn't be happening at all. I've worked on two big AAA releases in the last 6 years and my total overtime was statistically zero, I did some extra hours in the last 2 weeks leading to release, but that was mostly to watch over the server infrastructure to make sure the launch went smoothly. We've had people join from Rockstar, EA, CDPR, and one thing everyone is always surprised by is how good the work/life balance is. I'm personally in around 8am and always done by 4pm(7.5 hours a day). [0] - now, all Ubisoft studios set their own policies. Please don't extrapolate my experience in the UK to experiences in other Ubisoft studios in other countries.
    • davedx 6y ago
      Yeah the games company I used to work for has gradually improved over the years - I have one good friend who stayed the whole time, and it's gone from "mandatory unpaid weekends" to "a bit of paid overtime here and there". The key part I think is just making overtime paid, then the incentives all align much better.
• djmips 6y ago
  Indeed, when I worked at EA in BC we were promised comp time for working 'coverage' (overtime) and I even got into trouble for refusing to work on Labour Day! The comp time fizzled into nothing because they fired the Development Manager of our group on the DAY of shipping the game. He just disappeared along with all of his promises. I alone got paid for the overtime because I refused to work TFT (temporary full time - which they pressured me to do) and instead was a true contractor.
• esyir 6y ago
  I dunno, my impression is that for a game company, CDPR is fairly employee friendly. Of course that's relative to the rest of the gaming industry, which is a well-known employee welfare shithole.
• eru 6y ago
  Programmers in the non-gaming parts of the industry are treated better not because of any labour laws, but because of supply and demand.
• teamonkey 6y ago
  > deny you overtime during the run up to a major release This made me stop. Do you mean deny you paid overtime, because actively preventing extra work in the run up to a milestone is absolutely not normal for the games industry. The opposite is far more common. EA Vancouver might be more carefully watched, but one way of avoiding regulations like this is to make sure employees are only logging normal workday hours - if at all - regardless of how long they actually work.
  • bdhnddnjd 6y ago
    I took it to mean you have to work, but they don’t pay extra for overtime, in the context of others not even being allowed overtime. In the US, that would be standard. I’m not aware of developers in the US getting paid overtime rate for overtime work in development, period, but overtime work is definitely expected a little too often, and if you work for a company where it isn’t, it’s either a large company with other ways of dealing with such things or they just haven’t had it happen yet or recently. However, the US isn’t a bad place to work; whenever overtime is expected, often times there are financial incentives. Just try not to burn out.