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I left the game industry for FAANG and I'm getting paid 2-3x more. I'm happy with this situation if I consider the big picture but, at least in my case, my game

I left the game industry for FAANG and I'm getting paid 2-3x more. I'm happy with this situation if I consider the big picture but, at least in my case, my game job was much, MUCH better than FAANG. No matter how many fancy drinks and energy bars FAANG gives me, if the pay in the game industry was higher I'd have stayed without a doubt. What this means is that FAANG is actually paying what it needs to pay to get employees, otherwise many people would simply work elsewhere. There is a myth that working at FAANG is amazing for everybody, but most people I know there are actually kind of miserable and doing fairly dull work for which they are massively overqualified. Nonetheless, these companies have money and they want the "best" (in their eyes) people for everything, so they pay for it... Well, it's a decent deal.

thewarrior 5y ago
There’s some truth to this I’ll admit. But if most of the work is dull why do you need the “best” ? I saw an explanation later in this thread that made more sense. FANGs do have a lot of good employees. And if they didn’t pay high salaries other companies would simply swoop in and free ride on all the hard work they do to find and groom talent. FANGs spend a lot of money scouring the entire globe and interviewing so many people in detail. It’s a juicy target for recruiter raiding. And just like you can’t get fired for hiring IBM you can’t get fired for hiring FANG. This attracts yet more talent. But yes the level of the engineers is not as great as the salaries would suggest. But on the flip side for anyone doing hiring. If you want some wicked smart devs who don’t ask for as much then look at game devs.
- Sevii 5y ago
  FAANG needs good employees because of how big and complex everything is. A lot of work is just integrating the 100s of services that already exist into whatever new product is coming out. Is the work novel, not really, but it is difficult and very complex.
- kenhwang 5y ago
  FAANG doesn't need "the best", but they do need to deny upstart competition that talent.
- tayo42 5y ago
  Theres no reason to not pay for the best. Engineer's provide so much value compared to an individuals cost. I can give an a example of what I'm working on. I'm doing maybe 2-3months of work, the project cut a one time cost in half saving 10million dollars. I make about quarter million in a year. A tiny fraction of the value I provided this year alone. Why penny pinch on pay and risk having employees that might not be as good? 100k is 1 percent of that value. Now that I type this out I feel like I'm getting ripped off. BRB to demand a raise lol
  - nsoonhui 5y ago
    >Why penny pinch on pay and risk having employees that might not be as good? Because they can afford to not pay you as well, and your value ( or rather, the "damage" caused by the not-so-good employee) is hard to prove.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - johnnyanmac 5y ago
    >Why penny pinch on pay and risk having employees that might not be as good? with regards to the game industry: because outside of maybe a dozen studios worldwide (EA and Rockstar studios level of profit), most of the games industry literally cannot compete with the salaries FAANG offers. all those trillion dollar companies have dozens of services and products to monetize off of (indirectly or directly). Games need hundreds of employees to deploy one short lived project in a few years minimum. And attempts to monetize in a service format (the default for FAANG) has been met with much criticism. So games operate on razor thin profits.
- Mauricebranagh 5y ago
  Dull doesn't mean you can half ass it - I worked for telco billing systems and getting it right to the penny is important.
paxys 5y ago
You are adjusting too hard in the other direction. "Most" people at FAANG companies are absolutely not miserable. The typical engineer at Google/Facebook works 40 hours a week, gets a good salary and is content with their life.
- wildfire 5y ago
  > The typical engineer at Google/Facebook works 40 hours a > week, gets a good salary and is content with their life. Two of three things you've said here are true. 40 hours a week would guarantee you will not be effective.
  - paxys 5y ago
    I'm not sure if you're trying to say that is too much or too little. In my experience at several such companies, no one is putting in more than 2-4 productive work hours a day.
  - Mauricebranagh 5y ago
    Rubbish week on week no one can sustain more than the average work week.
    - canadianfella 5y ago
      That’s not true. Source: me.
- reducesuffering 5y ago
  The typical FB engineer works 50/hr a week, eats 3 meals a day there, and is stressed out. Their life IS Facebook. Source: extensive discussion on Blind from FB employees and personally know 5 of them.
  - ncn 5y ago
    Blind is a cesspool.
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
My theory is FAANG pays for "the best" not because they necessarily need them. But because it's better for them if nobody else has them.
- Aliabid94 5y ago
  Something that also plays a big factor in the general over qualification of FAANG employees is that mistakes can be very very costly. It’s worth paying one engineer that gets things right 99.99% of the time twice the salary of engineer that gets things right only 99.9% of the time.
  - rxhernandez 5y ago
    From what I recall of the training I received from a somewhat well-known Chief Quality Officer, you don't get things right more often by getting better people, you get things right more often by making better processes for people to follow (the latter of which isn't as directly tied to better people as you may think). Frankly, I don't get the hype. I've interviewed FAANG engineers and have given a thumbs down almost as often as I did for engineers from other companies.
    - daniellarusso 5y ago
      Yes, the McDonald’s philosophy. Having clearly articulated processes certainly help consistency.
      - ByteJockey 5y ago
        The problem with consistency is that if you're not already doing the right thing, you'll never do the right thing. Not even by accident.
        daniellarusso 5y ago
        I disagree. Even if you are doing the wrong thing consistently, one has a much greater chance of knowing what parameters can be tweaked to alter the outcome. Consistency is easier to monitor/log. It is easier to experiment. Without consistency, it is much more difficult to know which of your decisions changed the outcome, or was it just good or bad luck. Toyota and McDonald’s are successfully companies, but they are not perfect. Kaizen and consistency are not mutually exclusive.
balls187 5y ago
I would take a pay-cut to work in games.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Well, I have some great news for you...
sanxiyn 5y ago
My theory is that while work is dull, people are not overqualified. They need smart people not because logic they write is complex, but because navigating total chaos of internal system complexity needs smartness. If they could refactor and get internal systems in order they could lower qualification bar, but that refactoring requires super duper overqualified people, etc.
- titanomachy 5y ago
  I think this might be about right. Google's internal tools were built by very smart engineers for use by other very smart engineers. (I'm thinking especially of the Producers Framework as I write this, but there are other examples.) I've seen plenty of intelligent people struggle to get their heads around Google's abstractions. The tools are powerful enough, though, that once you get it you can pretty easily build stuff that scales to ridiculous levels. It could be that better design will make these kinds of tools more accessible in the future.
  - onekorg 5y ago
    Producers Framework is awesome. Took me a while to wrap my head around writing code that way. Is there anything open source that is similar to it?
    - titanomachy 5y ago
      Not that I know of. I don’t think it’s user-friendly enough to succeed as an open-source tool.
- notJim 5y ago
  I think that's about right, and the "mess" isn't just code, but organizational. You might be hired to maintain some simple widget, and then 1–2 years later be writing a large scale job processing service, or designing a new front-end rendering system, or any other number of high-impact, challenging projects. Theoretically, these could be different sets of people (like techs vs engineers or something), but since companies are constantly re-orging and don't know what they need, it's the same people doing both. I have to say however, that for engineers this is a massively good thing, both in terms of being able to work on lots of different stuff, and the compensation implications.
hintymad 5y ago
It's all about finding a company that's small enough so revenue per employee is north of a million and your work is visible to your entire organization and the quantity of work far exceeds the number of people. With these three conditions, you will get both meaningful work and high pay without even trying (except trying to get into the company).
wikibob 5y ago
Can you go into some detail about the specifics ways that the game job was better?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sokoloff 5y ago
I left games 24 years ago in large part over pay. The work itself I loved doing, but it was never going to let me buy a house nearby or retire. I’m glad I did as I don’t think the was enough extra enjoyment over being able to enjoy other work (albeit less) but have some amount of financial security.
chris11 5y ago
> if the pay in the game industry was higher I'd have stayed without a doubt. There are exceptions. Roblox has a reputation for being competitive with FAANG. You should check them out. It's also a platform company, so it has all the technical challenges of the gaming industry without the crunch-time that comes along with releasing a major game.
Impossible 5y ago
This was my experience at FAANG as well. I had some terrible game industry jobs, but I've been at a few studios where I had a much better experience than FAANG even if pay was lower
hnick 5y ago
As an outsider looking at this it seems like you can just work a decade in that job and earn what you'd earn in 2-3 decades in the game job. Even more if you can invest. Unless you're truly miserable, it seems like the obvious choice. You can always go indie or head back after that first decade and at that point it's all gravy.
- pjerem 5y ago
  A decade is pretty long. Long enough to not be into video games anymore, long enough to raise your life expenses to match your income, long enough to burn out, long enough to have children and other interests … Going back to lower income is really difficult, a lot of people bore themselves to death, dreaming of another job but stay just because they are well paid. I’m not saying you are wrong, but how can you be sure that the « you » in ten years will have the willpower to follow your initial plan ? Good pay can sometimes be a trap.
- Agentlien 5y ago
  A decade is a huge portion of your life and I certainly wouldn't want to spend what little time I have doing something I'm less fond of in the hope that I'll be sitting on a pile of money one day and maybe then I can go do what I actually want.
  - hnick 5y ago
    I understand that sentiment. I'd rather not be working at all, but alas.
Agentlien 5y ago
The picture seems to be different here in Sweden. It's possibly related to the difference in wages being less extreme overall. The best salary I ever had was as a software engineer at a AAA studio, and I used to work outside the game industry and had offers from a consulting firm which I know offer competitive salaries. I did end up leaving for a smaller studio who couldn't offer quite the same level of compensation, but the difference is still less than 20%. I've thought about it a lot and even if the pay difference was much bigger I couldn't imagine leaving the game industry. Being surrounded by people who love games, getting to spend my days on serious technical challenges in the service of making something which brings joy to millions. It is an amazing feeling. I make enough that money isn't something I need to worry about and I love what I do in a deep and intense way. No regular frontend/web/dev ops/ whatever development job will ever be able to compete with that.
- Oddskar 5y ago
  Anecdotally the way to achieve a high salary in the software industry in Sweden is to do solo consulting. Most companies seem to keep the salaries from inflating by getting seniors from consulting agencies or freelancing consultants; which comfortably segments the high earners from the internals.
  - Agentlien 5y ago
    This does match what I have seen as well. It's part of why I myself briefly considered a consulting gig. I also know two people who, when we worked together at one studio, were unable to move from junior designer roles to producer roles. They quit and started a consulting agency together, and now get contracted as assistant producers.
anotherqqq 5y ago
How is the work different? The core businesses have a lot in common. Gamification of attention?

thewarrior 5y ago

There’s some truth to this I’ll admit. But if most of the work is dull why do you need the “best” ? I saw an explanation later in this thread that made more sense. FANGs do have a lot of good employees. And if they didn’t pay high salaries other companies would simply swoop in and free ride on all the hard work they do to find and groom talent. FANGs spend a lot of money scouring the entire globe and interviewing so many people in detail. It’s a juicy target for recruiter raiding. And just like you can’t get fired for hiring IBM you can’t get fired for hiring FANG. This attracts yet more talent. But yes the level of the engineers is not as great as the salaries would suggest. But on the flip side for anyone doing hiring. If you want some wicked smart devs who don’t ask for as much then look at game devs.

Sevii 5y ago
FAANG needs good employees because of how big and complex everything is. A lot of work is just integrating the 100s of services that already exist into whatever new product is coming out. Is the work novel, not really, but it is difficult and very complex.
kenhwang 5y ago
FAANG doesn't need "the best", but they do need to deny upstart competition that talent.
tayo42 5y ago
Theres no reason to not pay for the best. Engineer's provide so much value compared to an individuals cost. I can give an a example of what I'm working on. I'm doing maybe 2-3months of work, the project cut a one time cost in half saving 10million dollars. I make about quarter million in a year. A tiny fraction of the value I provided this year alone. Why penny pinch on pay and risk having employees that might not be as good? 100k is 1 percent of that value. Now that I type this out I feel like I'm getting ripped off. BRB to demand a raise lol
- nsoonhui 5y ago
  >Why penny pinch on pay and risk having employees that might not be as good? Because they can afford to not pay you as well, and your value ( or rather, the "damage" caused by the not-so-good employee) is hard to prove.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  >Why penny pinch on pay and risk having employees that might not be as good? with regards to the game industry: because outside of maybe a dozen studios worldwide (EA and Rockstar studios level of profit), most of the games industry literally cannot compete with the salaries FAANG offers. all those trillion dollar companies have dozens of services and products to monetize off of (indirectly or directly). Games need hundreds of employees to deploy one short lived project in a few years minimum. And attempts to monetize in a service format (the default for FAANG) has been met with much criticism. So games operate on razor thin profits.
Mauricebranagh 5y ago
Dull doesn't mean you can half ass it - I worked for telco billing systems and getting it right to the penny is important.

paxys 5y ago

You are adjusting too hard in the other direction. "Most" people at FAANG companies are absolutely not miserable. The typical engineer at Google/Facebook works 40 hours a week, gets a good salary and is content with their life.

wildfire 5y ago
> The typical engineer at Google/Facebook works 40 hours a > week, gets a good salary and is content with their life. Two of three things you've said here are true. 40 hours a week would guarantee you will not be effective.
- paxys 5y ago
  I'm not sure if you're trying to say that is too much or too little. In my experience at several such companies, no one is putting in more than 2-4 productive work hours a day.
- Mauricebranagh 5y ago
  Rubbish week on week no one can sustain more than the average work week.
  - canadianfella 5y ago
    That’s not true. Source: me.
reducesuffering 5y ago
The typical FB engineer works 50/hr a week, eats 3 meals a day there, and is stressed out. Their life IS Facebook. Source: extensive discussion on Blind from FB employees and personally know 5 of them.
- ncn 5y ago
  Blind is a cesspool.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

My theory is FAANG pays for "the best" not because they necessarily need them. But because it's better for them if nobody else has them.

Aliabid94 5y ago
Something that also plays a big factor in the general over qualification of FAANG employees is that mistakes can be very very costly. It’s worth paying one engineer that gets things right 99.99% of the time twice the salary of engineer that gets things right only 99.9% of the time.
- rxhernandez 5y ago
  From what I recall of the training I received from a somewhat well-known Chief Quality Officer, you don't get things right more often by getting better people, you get things right more often by making better processes for people to follow (the latter of which isn't as directly tied to better people as you may think). Frankly, I don't get the hype. I've interviewed FAANG engineers and have given a thumbs down almost as often as I did for engineers from other companies.
  - daniellarusso 5y ago
    Yes, the McDonald’s philosophy. Having clearly articulated processes certainly help consistency.
    - ByteJockey 5y ago
      The problem with consistency is that if you're not already doing the right thing, you'll never do the right thing. Not even by accident.
      - daniellarusso 5y ago
        I disagree. Even if you are doing the wrong thing consistently, one has a much greater chance of knowing what parameters can be tweaked to alter the outcome. Consistency is easier to monitor/log. It is easier to experiment. Without consistency, it is much more difficult to know which of your decisions changed the outcome, or was it just good or bad luck. Toyota and McDonald’s are successfully companies, but they are not perfect. Kaizen and consistency are not mutually exclusive.

balls187 5y ago

I would take a pay-cut to work in games.

sokoloff 5y ago
Well, I have some great news for you...

sanxiyn 5y ago

My theory is that while work is dull, people are not overqualified. They need smart people not because logic they write is complex, but because navigating total chaos of internal system complexity needs smartness. If they could refactor and get internal systems in order they could lower qualification bar, but that refactoring requires super duper overqualified people, etc.

titanomachy 5y ago
I think this might be about right. Google's internal tools were built by very smart engineers for use by other very smart engineers. (I'm thinking especially of the Producers Framework as I write this, but there are other examples.) I've seen plenty of intelligent people struggle to get their heads around Google's abstractions. The tools are powerful enough, though, that once you get it you can pretty easily build stuff that scales to ridiculous levels. It could be that better design will make these kinds of tools more accessible in the future.
- onekorg 5y ago
  Producers Framework is awesome. Took me a while to wrap my head around writing code that way. Is there anything open source that is similar to it?
  - titanomachy 5y ago
    Not that I know of. I don’t think it’s user-friendly enough to succeed as an open-source tool.
notJim 5y ago
I think that's about right, and the "mess" isn't just code, but organizational. You might be hired to maintain some simple widget, and then 1–2 years later be writing a large scale job processing service, or designing a new front-end rendering system, or any other number of high-impact, challenging projects. Theoretically, these could be different sets of people (like techs vs engineers or something), but since companies are constantly re-orging and don't know what they need, it's the same people doing both. I have to say however, that for engineers this is a massively good thing, both in terms of being able to work on lots of different stuff, and the compensation implications.

hintymad 5y ago

It's all about finding a company that's small enough so revenue per employee is north of a million and your work is visible to your entire organization and the quantity of work far exceeds the number of people. With these three conditions, you will get both meaningful work and high pay without even trying (except trying to get into the company).

wikibob 5y ago

Can you go into some detail about the specifics ways that the game job was better?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sokoloff 5y ago

I left games 24 years ago in large part over pay. The work itself I loved doing, but it was never going to let me buy a house nearby or retire. I’m glad I did as I don’t think the was enough extra enjoyment over being able to enjoy other work (albeit less) but have some amount of financial security.

chris11 5y ago

> if the pay in the game industry was higher I'd have stayed without a doubt. There are exceptions. Roblox has a reputation for being competitive with FAANG. You should check them out. It's also a platform company, so it has all the technical challenges of the gaming industry without the crunch-time that comes along with releasing a major game.

Impossible 5y ago

This was my experience at FAANG as well. I had some terrible game industry jobs, but I've been at a few studios where I had a much better experience than FAANG even if pay was lower

hnick 5y ago

As an outsider looking at this it seems like you can just work a decade in that job and earn what you'd earn in 2-3 decades in the game job. Even more if you can invest. Unless you're truly miserable, it seems like the obvious choice. You can always go indie or head back after that first decade and at that point it's all gravy.

pjerem 5y ago
A decade is pretty long. Long enough to not be into video games anymore, long enough to raise your life expenses to match your income, long enough to burn out, long enough to have children and other interests … Going back to lower income is really difficult, a lot of people bore themselves to death, dreaming of another job but stay just because they are well paid. I’m not saying you are wrong, but how can you be sure that the « you » in ten years will have the willpower to follow your initial plan ? Good pay can sometimes be a trap.
Agentlien 5y ago
A decade is a huge portion of your life and I certainly wouldn't want to spend what little time I have doing something I'm less fond of in the hope that I'll be sitting on a pile of money one day and maybe then I can go do what I actually want.
- hnick 5y ago
  I understand that sentiment. I'd rather not be working at all, but alas.

Agentlien 5y ago

The picture seems to be different here in Sweden. It's possibly related to the difference in wages being less extreme overall. The best salary I ever had was as a software engineer at a AAA studio, and I used to work outside the game industry and had offers from a consulting firm which I know offer competitive salaries. I did end up leaving for a smaller studio who couldn't offer quite the same level of compensation, but the difference is still less than 20%. I've thought about it a lot and even if the pay difference was much bigger I couldn't imagine leaving the game industry. Being surrounded by people who love games, getting to spend my days on serious technical challenges in the service of making something which brings joy to millions. It is an amazing feeling. I make enough that money isn't something I need to worry about and I love what I do in a deep and intense way. No regular frontend/web/dev ops/ whatever development job will ever be able to compete with that.

Oddskar 5y ago
Anecdotally the way to achieve a high salary in the software industry in Sweden is to do solo consulting. Most companies seem to keep the salaries from inflating by getting seniors from consulting agencies or freelancing consultants; which comfortably segments the high earners from the internals.
- Agentlien 5y ago
  This does match what I have seen as well. It's part of why I myself briefly considered a consulting gig. I also know two people who, when we worked together at one studio, were unable to move from junior designer roles to producer roles. They quit and started a consulting agency together, and now get contracted as assistant producers.

anotherqqq 5y ago

How is the work different? The core businesses have a lot in common. Gamification of attention?