7 ms·

I’ve heard so many horror stories in the game industry about being underpaid and sleeping under desks. I don’t understand how anyone would want to be such a pi

I’ve heard so many horror stories in the game industry about being underpaid and sleeping under desks. I don’t understand how anyone would want to be such a piece of a cog of a wheel just because they love games. You aren’t Shigeru Miyamoto, you don’t get to make creative decisions. You’d make twice as much coding boring business logic, it’s not “cool”, but you get to sleep at home. Is it just me or does being given pizza as an adult feel insulting. I get it, I’m a gamer so I obviously don’t care about healthy choices.

lukewrites 4y ago
> You’d make twice as much coding boring business logic, it’s not “cool”, but you get to sleep at home. And, possibly just as importantly, you'll have time for gaming!
- whateveracct 4y ago
  Or even gamedev!
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- lethologica 4y ago
  Unless the coding of boring business logic crushes your soul so much that you burn out and end up losing interest in being creative altogether.
  - justinhj 4y ago
    I let this sentiment keep me in the games industry for 20 years. Since I left I’ve had no trouble finding challenging and fun work, for better pay and no overtime. Wish I had left sooner
  - Asooka 4y ago
    What is quest design if not heaps of business logic with a different name.
  - thesuitonym 4y ago
    Your soul can be crushed in any industry, though, and every type of job can burn you out and make you lose your creativity. It's up to each of us to watch out for ourselves.
  - robonerd 4y ago
    I think you have this precisely backwards. Soulless crunch work in the video game industry as a code monkey given no creative control over the game is more likely to kill your interest in playing video games. If regular boring non-videogame office work killed people's interest in games, there would hardly be a market for videogames at all; who would buy them?
- DawsonBruce 4y ago
  > And, possibly just as importantly, you'll have time for gaming! Facts. One of the main motivators for me to NEVER become a game devs is simply my love for gaming. Anything I’ve ever worked on professionally has become so demystified that the things I once loved become unappealing.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    "Find the thing you love and do that for a living, and you'll never work a day in your life," is such bullshit. Has anyone over 35 - with half a brain - ever said that? If so, then shame on them. Maybe find the thing you love second most, and risk resenting that. Maybe. Importantly, other people are going to exploit your love to take advantage of you, getting you to sacrifice some of yourself for these ideals you hold, and then not share the rewards with you. To you it's your identity. To them it's words that save them money.
googlryas 4y ago
Anecdotal, but everyone that I can recall from my uni's CS cohort who used video games as motivation to learn CS were ultimately bad or middling programmers, who were basically only employable by these game companies that pay crummy wages with bad work culture. It makes sense somewhat - the skills and talents for, say, racing cars has almost nothing to do with the skills or talent to design and construct an engine.
- kaladin-jasnah 4y ago
  The impression I get from video game hackers (eg. finding glitches for speedrunning) are that they are quite talented, and console hackers as well (finding that PS5 jailbreak definitely requires skill) so I'm not sure if it's the best generalization.
  - dankboys 4y ago
    console hackers and game programmers have little overlap, though. If you've spent the time to understand VR/ED you probably want to do that, in which case you're not programming.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    Hacking savefiles and similar stuff (yourself, not just copying things on the web) help teach the key work habits of day to day programming. Problem solving, sticking to a problem, visualizing, decoding, basic computer architecture, tech docs, self starting, debugging, etc. Gamer-motivated CS people with those skills will go far.
- friedman23 4y ago
  I think that would be a bad generalization. Maybe people obsessed enough with video games that you find out that's why they are learning CS are bad coders?
- urthor 4y ago
  My experience is the opposite. I've seen many extraordinarily talented people who got into this field originally because of the dream.
jeromegv 4y ago
How would they know? They spent the last 10 years playing video games, they literally worship those companies. It's still not widespread enough as knowledge that those employers are literally all shit. And if that's your first job, how would you know it's better somewhere else? Got to learn the hard way.
lapetitejort 4y ago
> Is it just me or does being given pizza as an adult feel insulting. I get it, I’m a gamer so I obviously don’t care about healthy choices. This is how I know I'm old. Instead of giving me the cheapest viable dinner possible, why not spring for something more tasty, healthy, and costly? Pizza is the free meal equivalent of minimum wage. If possible, they'd offer free off-brand animal crackers to everyone crunching.
- tobias__ 4y ago
  Facebook managers have used sushi to motivate employees to complete the internal employee sentiment survey routinely every half for the last n years (something between the novelty and properties you describe) makes it attractive to folks Kind of shows the difference in worlds between plain old tech (sushi as motivation for a half hour survey) vs gaming (food as incentive/etc. for ridiculous hours)
  - mavhc 4y ago
    Just give me money so I can spend it how I want to, free perks at work aren't actually free
    - causi 4y ago
      There's something to be said for a guilt-free indulgence.
    - SilasX 4y ago
      Naively, yes. But if they gave you the $X to spend however you want, you'd have to pay income taxes out of it and then sales taxes to buy for yourself. When the workplace does it, they don't -- and it's an expense for them! Plus, they get the bulk price.
      - mavhc 4y ago
        In which case let the employees decide what to spend things on
TrackerFF 4y ago
...and the animation industry ...and the movie industry ...and the music industry ...and the, well - we could go on like this forever. If it's creative work, people will endure all kinds of sh!t in order to work on the stuff they love.
- kodah 4y ago
  I'd be willing to say the wider tech industry isn't much better, it's just one degree less shady and disgusting.
  - the_lonely_road 4y ago
    And about 300,000 degrees more lucrative.
    - kodah 4y ago
      Fair
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  stuff they ^think they love. most people don't have an objective view of the whole market of things they can exchange for, its a compromise of what we are exposed to and what makes enough money then there is a slight gradient containing people that don't care for a variety of reasons, such as some passive income or other financial security
  - TrackerFF 4y ago
    Unfortunately, many of the schools that offer people creative degrees are also more than happy to charge them exorbitant sums of money for tuition - more so for the graduate degrees. I have a feeling that there are plenty of creative artists in the movie / gaming / etc. industry that are sitting on $100k-$200k in student debt, making $50k/year in some high cost-of-living area while being worked to the bone. Hard to know what you really like or hate, before working with it full time.
- 4y ago
spread_love 4y ago
> does being given pizza as an adult feel insulting Yes! Give me better healthcare! I don't care about snacks and coffee. If I was healthy I could afford these things myself. Even worse, using it as bait to return to office. "We're having a pizza party in the office today!" (Now a Waffle Party I might come in for)
- Spivak 4y ago
  I feel like these are crazy different magnitudes though. Buying a team of 10 the most expensive pizza in town is like $150. Giving that same team noticeably better healthcare costs… * $3000/mo to cover employee paid premiums. * $5k-$30k/yr to fund everyone up to their individual deductible. * $5k-$100k/yr to fund everyone up to their individual oopm * $36k/yr to fully find everyone’s HSA. I think there’s a lot of cheap low hanging fruit that makes people happy like pizza, beer, snack, and soda and it’s not like the choice is one or the other.
- ryathal 4y ago
  Pizza parties and healthcare are different ends of the spectrum. Bad healthcare is simply declining an offer, it's part of the compensation package being presented. A pizza party is fine for showing appreciation (better than cheap swag), I would run from a company that adds this in their compensation package though.
ajb 4y ago
I visited a place one where the schtick was to get new employees to make a paint print of their hand on the wall like a primary school kids. I thought, this place infantilises its employees, I will never work here. This comes about because companies see 'culture' as a means of manipulating their employees. It works because long-childhood tokens are a status symbol - poor people need to grow up quickly and demonstrate that they are compliant by wearing suits or other uniforms, middle class show that they can afford long education by retaining the signifiers of childhood. But no-one does this consciously, so people are susceptable to being 'rewarded' by these cheap signifiers instead of real value
- cudgy 4y ago
  The hand print wall sounds like a hokey HR idea. Seems a bit harsh to judge an entire company on it.
  - mavhc 4y ago
    Everyone else in the company went along with it
  - klyrs 4y ago
    It's a lot more fun than getting fingerprinted, and you get the whole palm, too!
  - Geonode 4y ago
    It shows you that HR has clout in the company which is bad. Where HR is necessary they should be silent paper movers.
- robonerd 4y ago
  > I visited a place one where the schtick was to get new employees to make a paint print of their hand on the wall like a primary school kids This sort of thing seems to happen quite a bit. Somebody in HR goes baby crazy and starts treating people in the office as their surrogate children. You can't say shit about it, because it's HR.
- 908B64B197 4y ago
Tiktaalik 4y ago
First off sleeping under desks is a project management failure and not representative of the games industry. Heaps of people making games that haven't worked a day of overtime for years and years. But as you say, boring business logic is boring, so no surprise that people would be interested in games for that reason alone, but more than that, game programming isn't the same sort of work as other programming. Are there jobs for graphics programmers working on some business spreadsheet software company? If you want to do graphics programming you need to work in an industry that needs graphics programmers. Doesn't really matter that you're not the Miyamoto. There's lots of programmers in leadership roles solving hard and interesting problems that don't exist in other sorts of business software.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
newsclues 4y ago
It’s not culture but community that young workers seek. They want fun friends, not boring old coworkers with kids.
mbrodersen 4y ago
This is why I left the games industry. I love working on games but it doesn’t outweigh the cost.
pornel 4y ago
I went through the game dev -> business dev career path. The reason was simple: I did not believe there can be anything interesting or challenging in non-game dev. To my eyes it looked like a choice between making things fly and explode (which was cool and relevant to my peers) and being some "database accountant" writing boring stuff I did not care about. I was a broke student in my first real job. I didn't even consider being underpaid, because I was making more money than I've ever seen. I took a while before I've learned that my manager was paid literally 3x more than I was. From the inside, crunch felt like being a hero and shipping on time. I enjoyed coding and was in good health, so it didn't seem problematic to me. I did not realize how fucked-up game dev business was until I had 3 studios in a row die before releasing their second game.
- entropie 4y ago
  > The reason was simple: I did not believe there can be anything interesting or challenging in non-game dev. Every now and then someone creates new piece of software that just changes things. Twitter as example (I remember saying to myself as I signed up for the bet, "well, that's gonna be not useful at all - who the f needs SMS on the internets?). Another example, in a more software related bubble one could say rails (ruby on rails) was very influential for web development overall. I find thinking out of the box very challenging.
  - Geonode 4y ago
    The jury is still very much out on Twitter's usefulness. Primary engagement is from those who want to be seen and heard. Not sure anyone's listening.
    - stonemetal12 4y ago
      The reporters are. I haven't visited twitter in a couple of years, but I see plenty of news articles that start Musk, Trump, or somebody tweeted something. It seems to be a pretty good press release pipeline.
      - 4y ago
Termitiono 4y ago
I went to a private game academy in Berlin and stoped after a year. I got more insight into game dev and I think that I'm good but you only need a handful of things which are really interesting. Like the game engine or the ai part or whatever. Those people are just better than I am due to just being smarter etc. So do I want to be a normal paid tool developer or dialog system biluilder or do I want a proper carrier and earn money? I earn a good amount of money and I do not work in game dev. I don't regret it and can imagine doing full time private game development when I'm 50 and stoped working.
robonerd 4y ago
One problem with companies buying pizza is they always buy it from whatever pizza shop has the best reputation for reliably filling large catering orders, which is never the pizza shop that makes the best pizza. I like pizza, but I only want pizza some of the time. And when I want it, I want to buy it myself and get what I want, not get something mediocre.
jayd16 4y ago
>you don’t get to make creative decisions. You do. I think it's a major appeal of making games. Miyamoto is not designing every level, art asset, every shader and every post effect.
tablespoon 4y ago
> I don’t understand how anyone would want to be such a piece of a cog of a wheel just because they love games. You aren’t Shigeru Miyamoto, you don’t get to make creative decisions. You’d make twice as much coding boring business logic, it’s not “cool”, but you get to sleep at home. Because they're passionate, and passion can and is exploited because it's irrational.

lukewrites 4y ago

> You’d make twice as much coding boring business logic, it’s not “cool”, but you get to sleep at home. And, possibly just as importantly, you'll have time for gaming!

whateveracct 4y ago
Or even gamedev!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
lethologica 4y ago
Unless the coding of boring business logic crushes your soul so much that you burn out and end up losing interest in being creative altogether.
- justinhj 4y ago
  I let this sentiment keep me in the games industry for 20 years. Since I left I’ve had no trouble finding challenging and fun work, for better pay and no overtime. Wish I had left sooner
- Asooka 4y ago
  What is quest design if not heaps of business logic with a different name.
- thesuitonym 4y ago
  Your soul can be crushed in any industry, though, and every type of job can burn you out and make you lose your creativity. It's up to each of us to watch out for ourselves.
- robonerd 4y ago
  I think you have this precisely backwards. Soulless crunch work in the video game industry as a code monkey given no creative control over the game is more likely to kill your interest in playing video games. If regular boring non-videogame office work killed people's interest in games, there would hardly be a market for videogames at all; who would buy them?
DawsonBruce 4y ago
> And, possibly just as importantly, you'll have time for gaming! Facts. One of the main motivators for me to NEVER become a game devs is simply my love for gaming. Anything I’ve ever worked on professionally has become so demystified that the things I once loved become unappealing.
- hinkley 4y ago
  "Find the thing you love and do that for a living, and you'll never work a day in your life," is such bullshit. Has anyone over 35 - with half a brain - ever said that? If so, then shame on them. Maybe find the thing you love second most, and risk resenting that. Maybe. Importantly, other people are going to exploit your love to take advantage of you, getting you to sacrifice some of yourself for these ideals you hold, and then not share the rewards with you. To you it's your identity. To them it's words that save them money.

googlryas 4y ago

Anecdotal, but everyone that I can recall from my uni's CS cohort who used video games as motivation to learn CS were ultimately bad or middling programmers, who were basically only employable by these game companies that pay crummy wages with bad work culture. It makes sense somewhat - the skills and talents for, say, racing cars has almost nothing to do with the skills or talent to design and construct an engine.

kaladin-jasnah 4y ago
The impression I get from video game hackers (eg. finding glitches for speedrunning) are that they are quite talented, and console hackers as well (finding that PS5 jailbreak definitely requires skill) so I'm not sure if it's the best generalization.
- dankboys 4y ago
  console hackers and game programmers have little overlap, though. If you've spent the time to understand VR/ED you probably want to do that, in which case you're not programming.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  Hacking savefiles and similar stuff (yourself, not just copying things on the web) help teach the key work habits of day to day programming. Problem solving, sticking to a problem, visualizing, decoding, basic computer architecture, tech docs, self starting, debugging, etc. Gamer-motivated CS people with those skills will go far.
friedman23 4y ago
I think that would be a bad generalization. Maybe people obsessed enough with video games that you find out that's why they are learning CS are bad coders?
urthor 4y ago
My experience is the opposite. I've seen many extraordinarily talented people who got into this field originally because of the dream.

jeromegv 4y ago

How would they know? They spent the last 10 years playing video games, they literally worship those companies. It's still not widespread enough as knowledge that those employers are literally all shit. And if that's your first job, how would you know it's better somewhere else? Got to learn the hard way.

lapetitejort 4y ago

> Is it just me or does being given pizza as an adult feel insulting. I get it, I’m a gamer so I obviously don’t care about healthy choices. This is how I know I'm old. Instead of giving me the cheapest viable dinner possible, why not spring for something more tasty, healthy, and costly? Pizza is the free meal equivalent of minimum wage. If possible, they'd offer free off-brand animal crackers to everyone crunching.

tobias__ 4y ago
Facebook managers have used sushi to motivate employees to complete the internal employee sentiment survey routinely every half for the last n years (something between the novelty and properties you describe) makes it attractive to folks Kind of shows the difference in worlds between plain old tech (sushi as motivation for a half hour survey) vs gaming (food as incentive/etc. for ridiculous hours)
- mavhc 4y ago
  Just give me money so I can spend it how I want to, free perks at work aren't actually free
  - causi 4y ago
    There's something to be said for a guilt-free indulgence.
  - SilasX 4y ago
    Naively, yes. But if they gave you the $X to spend however you want, you'd have to pay income taxes out of it and then sales taxes to buy for yourself. When the workplace does it, they don't -- and it's an expense for them! Plus, they get the bulk price.
    - mavhc 4y ago
      In which case let the employees decide what to spend things on

TrackerFF 4y ago

...and the animation industry ...and the movie industry ...and the music industry ...and the, well - we could go on like this forever. If it's creative work, people will endure all kinds of sh!t in order to work on the stuff they love.

kodah 4y ago
I'd be willing to say the wider tech industry isn't much better, it's just one degree less shady and disgusting.
- the_lonely_road 4y ago
  And about 300,000 degrees more lucrative.
  - kodah 4y ago
    Fair
yieldcrv 4y ago
stuff they ^think they love. most people don't have an objective view of the whole market of things they can exchange for, its a compromise of what we are exposed to and what makes enough money then there is a slight gradient containing people that don't care for a variety of reasons, such as some passive income or other financial security
- TrackerFF 4y ago
  Unfortunately, many of the schools that offer people creative degrees are also more than happy to charge them exorbitant sums of money for tuition - more so for the graduate degrees. I have a feeling that there are plenty of creative artists in the movie / gaming / etc. industry that are sitting on $100k-$200k in student debt, making $50k/year in some high cost-of-living area while being worked to the bone. Hard to know what you really like or hate, before working with it full time.
4y ago

spread_love 4y ago

> does being given pizza as an adult feel insulting Yes! Give me better healthcare! I don't care about snacks and coffee. If I was healthy I could afford these things myself. Even worse, using it as bait to return to office. "We're having a pizza party in the office today!" (Now a Waffle Party I might come in for)

Spivak 4y ago
I feel like these are crazy different magnitudes though. Buying a team of 10 the most expensive pizza in town is like $150. Giving that same team noticeably better healthcare costs… * $3000/mo to cover employee paid premiums. * $5k-$30k/yr to fund everyone up to their individual deductible. * $5k-$100k/yr to fund everyone up to their individual oopm * $36k/yr to fully find everyone’s HSA. I think there’s a lot of cheap low hanging fruit that makes people happy like pizza, beer, snack, and soda and it’s not like the choice is one or the other.
ryathal 4y ago
Pizza parties and healthcare are different ends of the spectrum. Bad healthcare is simply declining an offer, it's part of the compensation package being presented. A pizza party is fine for showing appreciation (better than cheap swag), I would run from a company that adds this in their compensation package though.

ajb 4y ago

I visited a place one where the schtick was to get new employees to make a paint print of their hand on the wall like a primary school kids. I thought, this place infantilises its employees, I will never work here. This comes about because companies see 'culture' as a means of manipulating their employees. It works because long-childhood tokens are a status symbol - poor people need to grow up quickly and demonstrate that they are compliant by wearing suits or other uniforms, middle class show that they can afford long education by retaining the signifiers of childhood. But no-one does this consciously, so people are susceptable to being 'rewarded' by these cheap signifiers instead of real value

cudgy 4y ago
The hand print wall sounds like a hokey HR idea. Seems a bit harsh to judge an entire company on it.
- mavhc 4y ago
  Everyone else in the company went along with it
- klyrs 4y ago
  It's a lot more fun than getting fingerprinted, and you get the whole palm, too!
- Geonode 4y ago
  It shows you that HR has clout in the company which is bad. Where HR is necessary they should be silent paper movers.
robonerd 4y ago
> I visited a place one where the schtick was to get new employees to make a paint print of their hand on the wall like a primary school kids This sort of thing seems to happen quite a bit. Somebody in HR goes baby crazy and starts treating people in the office as their surrogate children. You can't say shit about it, because it's HR.
908B64B197 4y ago

Tiktaalik 4y ago

First off sleeping under desks is a project management failure and not representative of the games industry. Heaps of people making games that haven't worked a day of overtime for years and years. But as you say, boring business logic is boring, so no surprise that people would be interested in games for that reason alone, but more than that, game programming isn't the same sort of work as other programming. Are there jobs for graphics programmers working on some business spreadsheet software company? If you want to do graphics programming you need to work in an industry that needs graphics programmers. Doesn't really matter that you're not the Miyamoto. There's lots of programmers in leadership roles solving hard and interesting problems that don't exist in other sorts of business software.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

newsclues 4y ago

It’s not culture but community that young workers seek. They want fun friends, not boring old coworkers with kids.

mbrodersen 4y ago

This is why I left the games industry. I love working on games but it doesn’t outweigh the cost.

pornel 4y ago

I went through the game dev -> business dev career path. The reason was simple: I did not believe there can be anything interesting or challenging in non-game dev. To my eyes it looked like a choice between making things fly and explode (which was cool and relevant to my peers) and being some "database accountant" writing boring stuff I did not care about. I was a broke student in my first real job. I didn't even consider being underpaid, because I was making more money than I've ever seen. I took a while before I've learned that my manager was paid literally 3x more than I was. From the inside, crunch felt like being a hero and shipping on time. I enjoyed coding and was in good health, so it didn't seem problematic to me. I did not realize how fucked-up game dev business was until I had 3 studios in a row die before releasing their second game.

entropie 4y ago
> The reason was simple: I did not believe there can be anything interesting or challenging in non-game dev. Every now and then someone creates new piece of software that just changes things. Twitter as example (I remember saying to myself as I signed up for the bet, "well, that's gonna be not useful at all - who the f needs SMS on the internets?). Another example, in a more software related bubble one could say rails (ruby on rails) was very influential for web development overall. I find thinking out of the box very challenging.
- Geonode 4y ago
  The jury is still very much out on Twitter's usefulness. Primary engagement is from those who want to be seen and heard. Not sure anyone's listening.
  - stonemetal12 4y ago
    The reporters are. I haven't visited twitter in a couple of years, but I see plenty of news articles that start Musk, Trump, or somebody tweeted something. It seems to be a pretty good press release pipeline.
    - 4y ago

Termitiono 4y ago

I went to a private game academy in Berlin and stoped after a year. I got more insight into game dev and I think that I'm good but you only need a handful of things which are really interesting. Like the game engine or the ai part or whatever. Those people are just better than I am due to just being smarter etc. So do I want to be a normal paid tool developer or dialog system biluilder or do I want a proper carrier and earn money? I earn a good amount of money and I do not work in game dev. I don't regret it and can imagine doing full time private game development when I'm 50 and stoped working.

robonerd 4y ago

One problem with companies buying pizza is they always buy it from whatever pizza shop has the best reputation for reliably filling large catering orders, which is never the pizza shop that makes the best pizza. I like pizza, but I only want pizza some of the time. And when I want it, I want to buy it myself and get what I want, not get something mediocre.

jayd16 4y ago

>you don’t get to make creative decisions. You do. I think it's a major appeal of making games. Miyamoto is not designing every level, art asset, every shader and every post effect.

tablespoon 4y ago

> I don’t understand how anyone would want to be such a piece of a cog of a wheel just because they love games. You aren’t Shigeru Miyamoto, you don’t get to make creative decisions. You’d make twice as much coding boring business logic, it’s not “cool”, but you get to sleep at home. Because they're passionate, and passion can and is exploited because it's irrational.