19 ms·

> For that detailed effort, analysis and with a fix, I'd say that is worth around $80k. No good deed goes unpunished. Rockstar went out of their way to thank t

> For that detailed effort, analysis and with a fix, I'd say that is worth around $80k. No good deed goes unpunished. Rockstar went out of their way to thank this person and send them a check equivalent to several weeks of median developer salary. Can we not shame them for this goodwill gesture? $80K would be on the order of half of the annual salary of most developers outside of SFBA.

scrapcode 6y ago
Half? I live in the Midwestern US. Have been dabbling in software for most of my life, have some decent working examples and am finishing my BS:CS this year. I can't even get close to my current salary in my current unrelated field ($85k) to even consider a career switch. Are the jumps from junior to mid-level/pm that high? I am a PM in construction so that may end up being my path.
- srswtf123 6y ago
  As someone searching for employment in the Midwest, I feel your pain. I saw a position yesterday that wanted 15+ years of experience and paid, I kid you not, $17/hr. Compensation in the Midwest is a joke. If my family weren’t here, I’d return to one of the coasts.
  - wavefunction 6y ago
    They're looking to fill the position with a foreign contractor, almost certainly. I wrote some PHP sites 20 years ago and get contacted every now and then about taking a 2 month contract for $16 an hour writing PHP in Pittsburgh, which I'm sure has its charms but is also halfway across the country from me.
- ecshafer 6y ago
  Junior to Mid level is pretty significant, even outside of the bay area. At a finance company, Junior to Senior for me was about $45k base salary over ~5 years, with another $20k in bonuses annually. If you can only find say a $70k job, I would think its not unlikely that you would be able to work 2 years at that, and jump for $90-110k.
- dmix 6y ago
  The terrible smells, pretty sunset, and constant threat of petty violence in SF is offset with significant extra hiring fees.
burnte 6y ago
80k is about the ANNUAL salary for most devs outside of SF.
gambiting 6y ago
>>$80K would be on the order of half of the annual salary of most developers outside of SFBA. Lol, I'm a lead C++ programmer in the UK and I don't make that much. It's American salaries as a whole that are completely stratospheric.
- verst 6y ago
  When you realize how high cost of living is in cities paying those salaries, how much education (for potential kids) is, how you must save for your retirement entirely on your own... and then of course insane out of pocket medical costs... you soon realize that when you adjust for lifestyle you may be in fact much better off than the person with stratospheric salary.
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    Right. A very, very ordinary apartment in NYC is $6000/mo. Figure 30-40% of your salary for taxes. If you made only $240K in NYC, your apartment would use up fully half of your take-home.
    - TMWNN 6y ago
      No "very, very ordinary apartment in NYC" costs $6000 a month.
      - ncmncm 6y ago
        What would be a very ordinary apartment anywhere else is considered palatial in NYC. NYC residents have got used to much reduced standards.
    - bscphil 6y ago
      Even assuming this is true ($6k a month sounds absurd), this is a bad argument. The old "rent should cost no more than one third of your income" rule is basically for people around the poverty line. For them it's a question of whether they can afford to eat that month. Just to give an extreme example: if Jeff Bezos uses half his income this year to build the largest estate the world has ever seen, he's still sitting pretty on the rest of it and has the largest estate the world has ever seen. At a 35% tax rate, your take home income is $156K. At $6K per month ($72K/yr), you have $84K left over after rent. If this is you then YOU ARE WEALTHY. There is simply no getting around this. You are making more alone, after taxes and after rent than my partner and I have ever made together total in a year in our lives, and we live in a city with a relatively expensive rental market and are not "poor". The absurd talk about "only" making over two hundred thousand dollars a year (plus whatever your partner makes if you have one) needs to stop. It's so out of touch with the norm in virtually every city in the world that it would be laughable if it weren't kind of sad.
krn 6y ago
> $80K would be on the order of half of the annual salary of most developers outside of SFBA. If the author of the bug fix is indeed from Latvia (.lv), the median annual income of a senior software engineer in the Baltic states is currently around 30K-40K after taxes.
- munk-a 6y ago
  Sorry is that number in Euros, USD or another currency?
  - krn 6y ago
    It's in EUR, since all the Baltic states are already in the eurozone.
wcarss 6y ago
"It's one banana Michael, what could it cost -- ten dollars?"
- cbozeman 6y ago
  "There's always money in the banana stand."
Someone1234 6y ago
Edit: Nevermind misread it.
- kortilla 6y ago
  we’re punishing rockstar for giving this dev $10k when there was no bounty program in the first place
astrea 6y ago
> $80K would be on the order of half of the annual salary of most developers outside of SFBA. Wow, I need a raise.
paulmd 6y ago
Rockstar will make tens of millions of additional revenue from increased player retention over the years (GTA Online is a massive cash cow, it is pretty much the original hyper-monetized game-as-a-service as a continues to fountain cash to this day), slow load times are an extremely commonly cited reason for marks (excuse me, customers) leaving the casino. This is a product that had made six billion dollars as of two and a half years ago, it is likely the most profitable entertainment product ever created, $10k is an almost insultingly low fraction of the value he created for the company. Better than nothing I guess, but suggesting that it's OK to exploit people because of where they live is kinda crass. This is an industry where you are (should be) valued based on what you can create, not where you live. To flip this around, if this guy lived in Haiti would you say it would have been fine to give him $1k because welp, cost of living is even lower there? Insulting. And again they had years and years they could have fixed this themselves, at in-house prices if they wanted to. They had to be shamed into it by a third-party developer pointing out their "could be fixed in a day by a single developer" tier mistakes. O(n^2) algorithms causing minutes-long load times, repeatedly reported by thousands of customers across the game's 10+ year lifespan. It's like giving a waiter a 1% tip. Is it nice that you gave them a tip at all? I guess. Technically nobody asked them to get you your food. Is it a reasonable fraction of the value delivered by customary standards? Not really. And in this case it's like a 0.01% tip.
pezezin 6y ago
Dude, I'm currently living in Japan and $80k is almost double my salary, and I'm already above the national average and live pretty decently here. Disclaimer: I don't live in a big city like Tokyo.

scrapcode 6y ago

Half? I live in the Midwestern US. Have been dabbling in software for most of my life, have some decent working examples and am finishing my BS:CS this year. I can't even get close to my current salary in my current unrelated field ($85k) to even consider a career switch. Are the jumps from junior to mid-level/pm that high? I am a PM in construction so that may end up being my path.

srswtf123 6y ago
As someone searching for employment in the Midwest, I feel your pain. I saw a position yesterday that wanted 15+ years of experience and paid, I kid you not, $17/hr. Compensation in the Midwest is a joke. If my family weren’t here, I’d return to one of the coasts.
- wavefunction 6y ago
  They're looking to fill the position with a foreign contractor, almost certainly. I wrote some PHP sites 20 years ago and get contacted every now and then about taking a 2 month contract for $16 an hour writing PHP in Pittsburgh, which I'm sure has its charms but is also halfway across the country from me.
ecshafer 6y ago
Junior to Mid level is pretty significant, even outside of the bay area. At a finance company, Junior to Senior for me was about $45k base salary over ~5 years, with another $20k in bonuses annually. If you can only find say a $70k job, I would think its not unlikely that you would be able to work 2 years at that, and jump for $90-110k.
dmix 6y ago
The terrible smells, pretty sunset, and constant threat of petty violence in SF is offset with significant extra hiring fees.

burnte 6y ago

80k is about the ANNUAL salary for most devs outside of SF.

gambiting 6y ago

>>$80K would be on the order of half of the annual salary of most developers outside of SFBA. Lol, I'm a lead C++ programmer in the UK and I don't make that much. It's American salaries as a whole that are completely stratospheric.

verst 6y ago
When you realize how high cost of living is in cities paying those salaries, how much education (for potential kids) is, how you must save for your retirement entirely on your own... and then of course insane out of pocket medical costs... you soon realize that when you adjust for lifestyle you may be in fact much better off than the person with stratospheric salary.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  Right. A very, very ordinary apartment in NYC is $6000/mo. Figure 30-40% of your salary for taxes. If you made only $240K in NYC, your apartment would use up fully half of your take-home.
  - TMWNN 6y ago
    No "very, very ordinary apartment in NYC" costs $6000 a month.
    - ncmncm 6y ago
      What would be a very ordinary apartment anywhere else is considered palatial in NYC. NYC residents have got used to much reduced standards.
  - bscphil 6y ago
    Even assuming this is true ($6k a month sounds absurd), this is a bad argument. The old "rent should cost no more than one third of your income" rule is basically for people around the poverty line. For them it's a question of whether they can afford to eat that month. Just to give an extreme example: if Jeff Bezos uses half his income this year to build the largest estate the world has ever seen, he's still sitting pretty on the rest of it and has the largest estate the world has ever seen. At a 35% tax rate, your take home income is $156K. At $6K per month ($72K/yr), you have $84K left over after rent. If this is you then YOU ARE WEALTHY. There is simply no getting around this. You are making more alone, after taxes and after rent than my partner and I have ever made together total in a year in our lives, and we live in a city with a relatively expensive rental market and are not "poor". The absurd talk about "only" making over two hundred thousand dollars a year (plus whatever your partner makes if you have one) needs to stop. It's so out of touch with the norm in virtually every city in the world that it would be laughable if it weren't kind of sad.

krn 6y ago

> $80K would be on the order of half of the annual salary of most developers outside of SFBA. If the author of the bug fix is indeed from Latvia (.lv), the median annual income of a senior software engineer in the Baltic states is currently around 30K-40K after taxes.

munk-a 6y ago
Sorry is that number in Euros, USD or another currency?
- krn 6y ago
  It's in EUR, since all the Baltic states are already in the eurozone.

wcarss 6y ago

"It's one banana Michael, what could it cost -- ten dollars?"

cbozeman 6y ago
"There's always money in the banana stand."

Someone1234 6y ago

Edit: Nevermind misread it.

kortilla 6y ago
we’re punishing rockstar for giving this dev $10k when there was no bounty program in the first place

astrea 6y ago

> $80K would be on the order of half of the annual salary of most developers outside of SFBA. Wow, I need a raise.

paulmd 6y ago

Rockstar will make tens of millions of additional revenue from increased player retention over the years (GTA Online is a massive cash cow, it is pretty much the original hyper-monetized game-as-a-service as a continues to fountain cash to this day), slow load times are an extremely commonly cited reason for marks (excuse me, customers) leaving the casino. This is a product that had made six billion dollars as of two and a half years ago, it is likely the most profitable entertainment product ever created, $10k is an almost insultingly low fraction of the value he created for the company. Better than nothing I guess, but suggesting that it's OK to exploit people because of where they live is kinda crass. This is an industry where you are (should be) valued based on what you can create, not where you live. To flip this around, if this guy lived in Haiti would you say it would have been fine to give him $1k because welp, cost of living is even lower there? Insulting. And again they had years and years they could have fixed this themselves, at in-house prices if they wanted to. They had to be shamed into it by a third-party developer pointing out their "could be fixed in a day by a single developer" tier mistakes. O(n^2) algorithms causing minutes-long load times, repeatedly reported by thousands of customers across the game's 10+ year lifespan. It's like giving a waiter a 1% tip. Is it nice that you gave them a tip at all? I guess. Technically nobody asked them to get you your food. Is it a reasonable fraction of the value delivered by customary standards? Not really. And in this case it's like a 0.01% tip.

pezezin 6y ago

Dude, I'm currently living in Japan and $80k is almost double my salary, and I'm already above the national average and live pretty decently here. Disclaimer: I don't live in a big city like Tokyo.