6 ms·

Not only do they make some of the lowest salaries in the industry, they work the longest hours as well. Employers that allow people to "work on their passions"

by m8s 6y ago

Not only do they make some of the lowest salaries in the industry, they work the longest hours as well. Employers that allow people to "work on their passions" use that as a bargaining chip to lower salaries.

trentnix 6y ago
Employers use the reality that someone equally talented will do it for the same wages or less. It's that simple.
- coldtea 6y ago
  "If you have large profits you should share more with your employees [1]" could also be a reality encoded into law woth harsh penalties for doing otherwise... ([1] "And don't try to bypass it by building in another country and then come to sell your wares here")
  - chongli 6y ago
    If you have large profits you should share more with your employees [1]" could also be a reality encoded into law woth harsh penalties for doing otherwise Hollywood is already one step ahead of you [1]. No reason game studios wouldn’t follow suit, given a law like that to incentivize them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
    - gamblor956 6y ago
      Hollywood accounting doesn't actually work anymore. It depends, in part, on the people getting played not being willing to sue for their correct share and just taking their lumps. In part, this is because so many people were burned in the past that it's now standard for contracts to include provisions specifying which profits the talents/investors are getting a % of. There's also many A-list talent that simply refuse to work for a studio which uses Hollywood accounting. And finally, the public-trading status of so many studios today basically renders Hollywood accounting impossible at a legal and financial level. But the primary killer of the Hollywood accounting system is the big switch to streaming, in which royalties/etc are paid upfront (at a time-value discount) rather than over time, which essentially eliminates all of the opportunity to include "costs" (like usurious interest or marketing expenses) that had been used to generate paper losses on otherwise successful films.
      - chongli 6y ago
        A lot of what you said doesn’t apply to game developers or animators in the anime industry. Hollywood workers, famous and otherwise, are all represented by powerful unions. Game developers and anime animators (cf. western animators) are not.
        gamblor956 6y ago
        The Hollywood guilds were fine with Hollywood accounting for decades. It was individual actors and directors and producers that filed the lawsuits that made Hollywood accounting too much of a risk for the big studios. And more importantly, unlike Hollywood talent, game developers and anime animators as a group have never been entitled to a share of the profits of the products they helped create.
  - anm89 6y ago
    Define large, more, share, and should. There is a reason this is not what laws look like.
  - sigstoat 6y ago
    gee, shouldn't they be required to reduce their costs for the consumer, first? a lot of the folks buying video games have even less money than video game developers.
  - motogpjimbo 6y ago
    Would you also argue that when companies need additional funding during hard times or to expand, the employees should be forced by law to invest their own money into the company? With harsh penalties if they refuse? If not, then it seems like someone else is taking all the risk but the employees are reaping all the rewards. It would be great for me personally if my employer was forced to share his profits with me during the good times. But the reality is that during the hard times - when there's a global pandemic for example - he's the one who has to remortgage his house and max out his credit cards to make payroll, whereas I'm just a guy who can walk away with a month's notice.
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      Right, putting your time into working for a struggling company isn't taking any risk, and the executives deserve further rewards than just their salary.
    - analognoise 6y ago
      Oh boo hoo for the ownership class, somebody might have to sell a yacht to make payroll! They got 40 years of sending labor to developing countries, dismantled our infrastructure to privatize it, ALREADY got a 1.9T tax break (from Trump, even though almost all economists were AGAINST it) now they might have to SCROUNGE DEEP as...as people flock to the information services they largely own? Boo hoo for them! Oh no! They might lose a house, something the millions of people who are going to be evicted as soon as the moratoriums end will also get to experience! They'll be left without their SUMMER home! What a terrible loss! We'd better give them another tax loophole! I know programmers are insulated and have a very warped view of the world, but let's not forget we're (generally) labor, and let's not lick the boot that's on all of labor's collective necks TOO hard, neh?
      - sigstoat 6y ago
        > I know programmers are insulated and have a very warped view of the world look in the mirror. most businesses aren't giant megacorps owned by folks with yachts. and, hell, the megacorps? large chunks of them are owned by folks without yachts, too. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/holders?p=AAPL https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/holders?p=AAPL this sort of hyperbolic rage only makes understanding and improving things harder.
  - trentnix 6y ago
    Strangely there is always lots of talk about “profit sharing” and not “profit and loss sharing”. And I’ve never had to sign a business loan guarantee as an employee, but I’ve done so as a business owner.
    - webmaven 6y ago
      > Strangely there is always lots of talk about “profit sharing” and not “profit and loss sharing”. That's because corporate limited liability shields stakeholders from losses beyond their sunk costs. As an employee, you probably are close to last in line behind most of the other creditors, and may have to just write off that last (missed) paycheck. But that paycheck you are never going to get is the full extent of your liability for the company's losses, even theoretically. Not that it encompasses all the risks you're exposed to (time not working, looking for a new job, etc.) But those are the same regardless.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - sigstoat 6y ago
        > As an employee, you probably are close to last in line behind most of the other creditors, and may have to just write off that last (missed) paycheck. you're simply making things up. stop it. you can look up the hierarchy of creditors, and see where employee compensation lands. they're fourth priority, after domestic support obligations (probably not relevant to a business), administrative expenses (gotta pay the courts and court-appointed bankruptcy trustee), and claims from involuntary bankruptcy. employee benefits are in the fifth priority. there are four more priority levels (6 through 10), and then all of the unsecured creditors.
        webmaven 6y ago
        Look, businesses don't go bankrupt completely out of the blue. There are so many ways to ensure that various parties get their pound of flesh while loading up the company with additional liabilities that it is ridiculous. Sure, technically employees are near the top, but that doesn't help if all the cash and assets are long gone.
  - omginternets 6y ago
    I think most people agree with this in general, but the difficulty is in the specifics. How large of a profit are we talking? How much sharing do we expect? On the one hand we want to incentivize risk-taking and entrepreneurship. On the other, we recognize that it takes a village to launch a successful company, and we want to share the wealth. On the one hand we recognize that all work is not equally valuable. On the other, we we value people beyond their work. Abstract discussion of this is always disappointing and policy based on abstract discussion is always disastrous. I really wish we could be more precise in our language, because then we would at least recognize the tremendous difficulty at hand.
  - mejutoco 6y ago
    Seems difficult to implement. Suddenly a lot of small companies could appear, each barely making any profit. Maybe an easier incentive would be to give tax breaks to cooperatives?
  - jlawson 6y ago
    It is encoded into law, except instead of sharing just with employees, you share it with everyone through taxes. There's no reason that an employee who just happens to work at a firm that becomes successful should get profits from that, while a similar employee doing the same work who just happens to work at a failing company should get nothing. How could you justify that? Putting business profit taxes in a big pot and spending them on everyone evens this out. Fundamentally all you're really saying is you want corporate taxes to be higher. Which is arguable given the well-understood negative consequences of that which hurt everyone (e.g. taxes dissuade business formation, which means no jobs at all).
koolba 6y ago
> Employers that allow people to "work on their passions" use that as a bargaining chip to lower salaries. That sounds like every startup job pitch.
- bluefirebrand 6y ago
  Big difference is that Startups usually offer some amount of equity. Instead of just being exploited, you're gambling on taking a lower salary now and having it pay off later. It never really pays off later for game programmers.
  - neonological 6y ago
    Honestly it’s a losing gamble too. You rarely win those options.
    - willcipriano 6y ago
      Often the dice are loaded, you can find many stories on here on about some financial trickery whereby the options become low value or worthless as the founders and VC's cash out. I personally evaluate them at $0 because of this. It's a shame too because that sounds like my ideal work setup.
      - hhjinks 6y ago
        Pretty sure this article was posted on HN, which is why I remembered it: https://marker.medium.com/my-company-sold-for-100-million-and-i-got-zilch-how-can-that-be-f7be0563f1f8 https://marker.medium.com/my-company-sold-for-100-million-an...
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    What startups fail to disclose is that the equity they offer is not the same class as the investors have, even though they are taking a huge risk of the startup failing.
    - 6y ago
jonnycomputer 6y ago
They should unionize.
IQunder130 6y ago
So what you're saying is that when supply goes up, market price goes down? Not much of an insight there. Not something you really could (or even should) fix.

by m8s 6y ago

trentnix 6y ago

Employers use the reality that someone equally talented will do it for the same wages or less. It's that simple.

coldtea 6y ago
"If you have large profits you should share more with your employees [1]" could also be a reality encoded into law woth harsh penalties for doing otherwise... ([1] "And don't try to bypass it by building in another country and then come to sell your wares here")
- chongli 6y ago
  If you have large profits you should share more with your employees [1]" could also be a reality encoded into law woth harsh penalties for doing otherwise Hollywood is already one step ahead of you [1]. No reason game studios wouldn’t follow suit, given a law like that to incentivize them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
  - gamblor956 6y ago
    Hollywood accounting doesn't actually work anymore. It depends, in part, on the people getting played not being willing to sue for their correct share and just taking their lumps. In part, this is because so many people were burned in the past that it's now standard for contracts to include provisions specifying which profits the talents/investors are getting a % of. There's also many A-list talent that simply refuse to work for a studio which uses Hollywood accounting. And finally, the public-trading status of so many studios today basically renders Hollywood accounting impossible at a legal and financial level. But the primary killer of the Hollywood accounting system is the big switch to streaming, in which royalties/etc are paid upfront (at a time-value discount) rather than over time, which essentially eliminates all of the opportunity to include "costs" (like usurious interest or marketing expenses) that had been used to generate paper losses on otherwise successful films.
    - chongli 6y ago
      A lot of what you said doesn’t apply to game developers or animators in the anime industry. Hollywood workers, famous and otherwise, are all represented by powerful unions. Game developers and anime animators (cf. western animators) are not.
      - gamblor956 6y ago
        The Hollywood guilds were fine with Hollywood accounting for decades. It was individual actors and directors and producers that filed the lawsuits that made Hollywood accounting too much of a risk for the big studios. And more importantly, unlike Hollywood talent, game developers and anime animators as a group have never been entitled to a share of the profits of the products they helped create.
- anm89 6y ago
  Define large, more, share, and should. There is a reason this is not what laws look like.
- sigstoat 6y ago
  gee, shouldn't they be required to reduce their costs for the consumer, first? a lot of the folks buying video games have even less money than video game developers.
- motogpjimbo 6y ago
  Would you also argue that when companies need additional funding during hard times or to expand, the employees should be forced by law to invest their own money into the company? With harsh penalties if they refuse? If not, then it seems like someone else is taking all the risk but the employees are reaping all the rewards. It would be great for me personally if my employer was forced to share his profits with me during the good times. But the reality is that during the hard times - when there's a global pandemic for example - he's the one who has to remortgage his house and max out his credit cards to make payroll, whereas I'm just a guy who can walk away with a month's notice.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    Right, putting your time into working for a struggling company isn't taking any risk, and the executives deserve further rewards than just their salary.
  - analognoise 6y ago
    Oh boo hoo for the ownership class, somebody might have to sell a yacht to make payroll! They got 40 years of sending labor to developing countries, dismantled our infrastructure to privatize it, ALREADY got a 1.9T tax break (from Trump, even though almost all economists were AGAINST it) now they might have to SCROUNGE DEEP as...as people flock to the information services they largely own? Boo hoo for them! Oh no! They might lose a house, something the millions of people who are going to be evicted as soon as the moratoriums end will also get to experience! They'll be left without their SUMMER home! What a terrible loss! We'd better give them another tax loophole! I know programmers are insulated and have a very warped view of the world, but let's not forget we're (generally) labor, and let's not lick the boot that's on all of labor's collective necks TOO hard, neh?
    - sigstoat 6y ago
      > I know programmers are insulated and have a very warped view of the world look in the mirror. most businesses aren't giant megacorps owned by folks with yachts. and, hell, the megacorps? large chunks of them are owned by folks without yachts, too. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/holders?p=AAPL https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/holders?p=AAPL this sort of hyperbolic rage only makes understanding and improving things harder.
- trentnix 6y ago
  Strangely there is always lots of talk about “profit sharing” and not “profit and loss sharing”. And I’ve never had to sign a business loan guarantee as an employee, but I’ve done so as a business owner.
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > Strangely there is always lots of talk about “profit sharing” and not “profit and loss sharing”. That's because corporate limited liability shields stakeholders from losses beyond their sunk costs. As an employee, you probably are close to last in line behind most of the other creditors, and may have to just write off that last (missed) paycheck. But that paycheck you are never going to get is the full extent of your liability for the company's losses, even theoretically. Not that it encompasses all the risks you're exposed to (time not working, looking for a new job, etc.) But those are the same regardless.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - sigstoat 6y ago
      > As an employee, you probably are close to last in line behind most of the other creditors, and may have to just write off that last (missed) paycheck. you're simply making things up. stop it. you can look up the hierarchy of creditors, and see where employee compensation lands. they're fourth priority, after domestic support obligations (probably not relevant to a business), administrative expenses (gotta pay the courts and court-appointed bankruptcy trustee), and claims from involuntary bankruptcy. employee benefits are in the fifth priority. there are four more priority levels (6 through 10), and then all of the unsecured creditors.
      - webmaven 6y ago
        Look, businesses don't go bankrupt completely out of the blue. There are so many ways to ensure that various parties get their pound of flesh while loading up the company with additional liabilities that it is ridiculous. Sure, technically employees are near the top, but that doesn't help if all the cash and assets are long gone.
- omginternets 6y ago
  I think most people agree with this in general, but the difficulty is in the specifics. How large of a profit are we talking? How much sharing do we expect? On the one hand we want to incentivize risk-taking and entrepreneurship. On the other, we recognize that it takes a village to launch a successful company, and we want to share the wealth. On the one hand we recognize that all work is not equally valuable. On the other, we we value people beyond their work. Abstract discussion of this is always disappointing and policy based on abstract discussion is always disastrous. I really wish we could be more precise in our language, because then we would at least recognize the tremendous difficulty at hand.
- mejutoco 6y ago
  Seems difficult to implement. Suddenly a lot of small companies could appear, each barely making any profit. Maybe an easier incentive would be to give tax breaks to cooperatives?
- jlawson 6y ago
  It is encoded into law, except instead of sharing just with employees, you share it with everyone through taxes. There's no reason that an employee who just happens to work at a firm that becomes successful should get profits from that, while a similar employee doing the same work who just happens to work at a failing company should get nothing. How could you justify that? Putting business profit taxes in a big pot and spending them on everyone evens this out. Fundamentally all you're really saying is you want corporate taxes to be higher. Which is arguable given the well-understood negative consequences of that which hurt everyone (e.g. taxes dissuade business formation, which means no jobs at all).

koolba 6y ago

> Employers that allow people to "work on their passions" use that as a bargaining chip to lower salaries. That sounds like every startup job pitch.

bluefirebrand 6y ago
Big difference is that Startups usually offer some amount of equity. Instead of just being exploited, you're gambling on taking a lower salary now and having it pay off later. It never really pays off later for game programmers.
- neonological 6y ago
  Honestly it’s a losing gamble too. You rarely win those options.
  - willcipriano 6y ago
    Often the dice are loaded, you can find many stories on here on about some financial trickery whereby the options become low value or worthless as the founders and VC's cash out. I personally evaluate them at $0 because of this. It's a shame too because that sounds like my ideal work setup.
    - hhjinks 6y ago
      Pretty sure this article was posted on HN, which is why I remembered it: https://marker.medium.com/my-company-sold-for-100-million-and-i-got-zilch-how-can-that-be-f7be0563f1f8 https://marker.medium.com/my-company-sold-for-100-million-an...
- xiphias2 6y ago
  What startups fail to disclose is that the equity they offer is not the same class as the investors have, even though they are taking a huge risk of the startup failing.
  - 6y ago

jonnycomputer 6y ago

They should unionize.

IQunder130 6y ago

So what you're saying is that when supply goes up, market price goes down? Not much of an insight there. Not something you really could (or even should) fix.