5 ms·

Working in games isn't courageous. As GP said, there's a glut of people who want to do it. It's oversupplied, and the lower wages reflect the lower marginal uti

Working in games isn't courageous. As GP said, there's a glut of people who want to do it. It's oversupplied, and the lower wages reflect the lower marginal utility to society for engineers to work in games over other kinds of software.

user-the-name 5y ago
And that is exactly why we need to fight like hell for better conditions.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  It's why more people should quit. Then the supply will go down until management offers better working conditions. Choosing to work there despite poor working conditions and the availability of work you're qualified to do with better working conditions is the thing that causes the poor working conditions.
  - scrollaway 5y ago
    Why should supply go down for this particular field? Just make more games then demand will go up? Wtf is wrong with people here asking thousands of people to quit their job? Would you quit your beloved job to improve other peoples working conditions?
    - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      > Why should supply go down for this particular field? Because it's too high, enabling employers to offer poor working conditions. The poor working conditions then drive away prospective employees, lowering supply until working conditions improve. Unless you for some reason volunteer to suffer the poor working conditions unnecessarily. > Just make more games then demand will go up? Making more games doesn't cause demand for games to go up. It causes the price of games to go down. Then each game maker has less to pay workers with. What you need is for the industry to make fewer games, so they cost more (or at least have higher sales volumes at the same price), allowing workers to be paid more. But fewer games means fewer employees and some of them have to go do something else. > Would you quit your beloved job to improve other peoples working conditions? You can't have it both ways. Either your working conditions are bad, in which case quit, or your working conditions are "beloved," in which case what are you complaining about?
      - scrollaway 5y ago
        Your can love a job despite the working conditions being bad. This is an absurd argument.
        AnthonyMouse 5y ago
        Jobs are trade offs. You get to choose which one you take. If you love making video games and one video game company has worse working conditions than all the others, quit that one and go work for one of the other ones. If you love making video games and all the video game companies have poor working conditions because too many people love making video games and therefore the market is saturated, this a thing that only you can do anything about. The company you work for is already trying to maximize profits in a competitive market. To improve your working conditions they'd have to make more money, but if they could do that so easily they'd have done it already. You, by contrast, have an actual choice. Do you love this job, working conditions and all, better than your other available alternatives? If the answer is yes, you've made your choice. But for some people the answer is going to be no, and it's those people, choosing something else, that establish the floor for working conditions. They can only go as low as you're willing to put up with. So don't put up with less than you find reasonable. It's the thing that creates change. Less people are willing to do the job, so less video games get made, competition is less aggressive so each company makes more revenue which allows working conditions to improve. Other solutions will have results no better than this and most of them are just roundabout ways to achieve the equivalent result with higher transaction costs or some kind of perfidious rent seeking or gatekeeping. The real "problem" is that people want fun and interesting jobs that everybody wants to pay as much as dull and dirty jobs that nobody wants, but that's not how it works. At the same skill level, the shittier job pays better. Because if it doesn't, you quit.
      - user-the-name 5y ago
        > You can't have it both ways. Either your working conditions are bad, in which case quit, or your working conditions are "beloved," in which case what are you complaining about? This makes zero sense. You can be doing a job you love while your boss is a piece of shit. You can be doing a job you love but not getting paid enough for it. You can be doing a job you love but being put at risk while doing it. And a million other things. Come on, man, you are not this dense.
- JimmyAxod 5y ago
  Start your own company if you think you can do better / be fairer / be a better employer etc etc workers fighting their employers never ends how you think it will. They won’t raise conditions, they’ll just get rid of the jobs, outsource, use AI, etc etc etc Has it ever occurred to you that improving working conditions doesn’t necessarily always result in “making the world better”? And that measurement is completely arbitrary. eg The west has very little manufacturing left because we chose to raise working conditions instead of remaining competitive - thus all the manufacturing jobs disappeared anyways. Is that “making the world better”? It’s simple supply and demand - a large number of programmers want to work on games. Therefore the pay and conditions aren’t great compared to other less ‘cool+trendy’ options.
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    > workers fighting their employers never ends how you think it will. Absolute factually untrue. Learn from history.
    - JimmyAxod 5y ago
      hehe I have. You should try it. I suggest watching something like ‘Newsies’. It’s a great musical, and all the kids selling newspapers today have fantastic working conditions /s
ehnto 5y ago
> and the lower wages reflect the lower marginal utility to society for engineers to work in games over other kinds of software. That's not what it reflects. It reflects the monetary value that it takes to get someome to do work for you. In games, it takes less money because people want to work on games. To get me to work on your advertising plaform you would have to pay me a ridiculous sum, because I don't want to work on an advertising platform. Companies pay people as much as it costs to get them to work, not an amount reflecting the value they provided to the company. Sometimes those values line up, but usually when profits go up salaries don't linearly follow along, so it's clearly not the latter.

user-the-name 5y ago

And that is exactly why we need to fight like hell for better conditions.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago
It's why more people should quit. Then the supply will go down until management offers better working conditions. Choosing to work there despite poor working conditions and the availability of work you're qualified to do with better working conditions is the thing that causes the poor working conditions.
- scrollaway 5y ago
  Why should supply go down for this particular field? Just make more games then demand will go up? Wtf is wrong with people here asking thousands of people to quit their job? Would you quit your beloved job to improve other peoples working conditions?
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    > Why should supply go down for this particular field? Because it's too high, enabling employers to offer poor working conditions. The poor working conditions then drive away prospective employees, lowering supply until working conditions improve. Unless you for some reason volunteer to suffer the poor working conditions unnecessarily. > Just make more games then demand will go up? Making more games doesn't cause demand for games to go up. It causes the price of games to go down. Then each game maker has less to pay workers with. What you need is for the industry to make fewer games, so they cost more (or at least have higher sales volumes at the same price), allowing workers to be paid more. But fewer games means fewer employees and some of them have to go do something else. > Would you quit your beloved job to improve other peoples working conditions? You can't have it both ways. Either your working conditions are bad, in which case quit, or your working conditions are "beloved," in which case what are you complaining about?
    - scrollaway 5y ago
      Your can love a job despite the working conditions being bad. This is an absurd argument.
      - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
        Jobs are trade offs. You get to choose which one you take. If you love making video games and one video game company has worse working conditions than all the others, quit that one and go work for one of the other ones. If you love making video games and all the video game companies have poor working conditions because too many people love making video games and therefore the market is saturated, this a thing that only you can do anything about. The company you work for is already trying to maximize profits in a competitive market. To improve your working conditions they'd have to make more money, but if they could do that so easily they'd have done it already. You, by contrast, have an actual choice. Do you love this job, working conditions and all, better than your other available alternatives? If the answer is yes, you've made your choice. But for some people the answer is going to be no, and it's those people, choosing something else, that establish the floor for working conditions. They can only go as low as you're willing to put up with. So don't put up with less than you find reasonable. It's the thing that creates change. Less people are willing to do the job, so less video games get made, competition is less aggressive so each company makes more revenue which allows working conditions to improve. Other solutions will have results no better than this and most of them are just roundabout ways to achieve the equivalent result with higher transaction costs or some kind of perfidious rent seeking or gatekeeping. The real "problem" is that people want fun and interesting jobs that everybody wants to pay as much as dull and dirty jobs that nobody wants, but that's not how it works. At the same skill level, the shittier job pays better. Because if it doesn't, you quit.
    - user-the-name 5y ago
      > You can't have it both ways. Either your working conditions are bad, in which case quit, or your working conditions are "beloved," in which case what are you complaining about? This makes zero sense. You can be doing a job you love while your boss is a piece of shit. You can be doing a job you love but not getting paid enough for it. You can be doing a job you love but being put at risk while doing it. And a million other things. Come on, man, you are not this dense.
JimmyAxod 5y ago
Start your own company if you think you can do better / be fairer / be a better employer etc etc workers fighting their employers never ends how you think it will. They won’t raise conditions, they’ll just get rid of the jobs, outsource, use AI, etc etc etc Has it ever occurred to you that improving working conditions doesn’t necessarily always result in “making the world better”? And that measurement is completely arbitrary. eg The west has very little manufacturing left because we chose to raise working conditions instead of remaining competitive - thus all the manufacturing jobs disappeared anyways. Is that “making the world better”? It’s simple supply and demand - a large number of programmers want to work on games. Therefore the pay and conditions aren’t great compared to other less ‘cool+trendy’ options.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  > workers fighting their employers never ends how you think it will. Absolute factually untrue. Learn from history.
  - JimmyAxod 5y ago
    hehe I have. You should try it. I suggest watching something like ‘Newsies’. It’s a great musical, and all the kids selling newspapers today have fantastic working conditions /s

ehnto 5y ago

> and the lower wages reflect the lower marginal utility to society for engineers to work in games over other kinds of software. That's not what it reflects. It reflects the monetary value that it takes to get someome to do work for you. In games, it takes less money because people want to work on games. To get me to work on your advertising plaform you would have to pay me a ridiculous sum, because I don't want to work on an advertising platform. Companies pay people as much as it costs to get them to work, not an amount reflecting the value they provided to the company. Sometimes those values line up, but usually when profits go up salaries don't linearly follow along, so it's clearly not the latter.