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Nearly Half of Game Developers Want To Unionize (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Unionization isn't a new idea for the game development industry, but it is a particularly hot and contentious topic right now. A handful of events in 2018 thrust the unionization conversation to the forefront, including Rockstar boss Dan Houser's comments about developers working 100-hour weeks to finish Red Dead Redemption 2, and the tragic implosion and bitter residue of Telltale Games. Groups like Game Workers Unite have been pounding the pavement (physically and digitally) and gathering support for unionization across the globe, with a goal to "bring hope to and empower those suffering in this industry." In December, a UK chapter of Game Workers Unite became a legal trade union.
With all of this conversation swirling around studio life, the folks behind the Game Developers Conference added new questions to the seventh annual State of the Industry Survey, which included responses from nearly 4,000 developers. The questions were broad: should the games industry unionize, and will the games industry unionize? Forty-seven percent of respondents said yes, game developers should unionize, while 16 percent said no and 26 percent said maybe. However, developers weren't exactly hopeful about unionization efforts. Just 21 percent of respondents said they thought the industry would unionize, and 39 percent said maybe. Twenty-four percent said it simply wasn't going to happen. The survey also found that 44 percent of developers worked more than 40 hours per week on average. Just over 1 percent said they worked more than 110 hours in a week, while 6 percent reported working 76 to 80 hours, "suggesting that deadline-related crunch can go far beyond normal working hours," according to the survey.
With all of this conversation swirling around studio life, the folks behind the Game Developers Conference added new questions to the seventh annual State of the Industry Survey, which included responses from nearly 4,000 developers. The questions were broad: should the games industry unionize, and will the games industry unionize? Forty-seven percent of respondents said yes, game developers should unionize, while 16 percent said no and 26 percent said maybe. However, developers weren't exactly hopeful about unionization efforts. Just 21 percent of respondents said they thought the industry would unionize, and 39 percent said maybe. Twenty-four percent said it simply wasn't going to happen. The survey also found that 44 percent of developers worked more than 40 hours per week on average. Just over 1 percent said they worked more than 110 hours in a week, while 6 percent reported working 76 to 80 hours, "suggesting that deadline-related crunch can go far beyond normal working hours," according to the survey.
56% work less than 40 hours? EA must be better than their reputation.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Neckbeards and Spreadsheet Sam who doesn't believe in unions because he can write a spreadsheet based on CATO institute journals that assure him that unions cause cancer.
The only reason the companies make them work this much is because they actually do it.
If they tell EA or whoever to fuck off at 5PM they wouldn't be in this shit.
The reason you do twice the work of the old fart for half the pay is because the old fart can do four times the work as you in the same amount of time.
As a self employed software developer still going, but long in years. I am not going to say anything pro or con either way.
;)
So go for it! Good Luck and Best wishes!
Just my 2 cents
But I do twice the work of the old fart over there making 155k.
Sure you do. Because you have any idea how much work he actually does, and what value that work has for the company.
"But looking at hours spent physically located in the office at one's desk is a good measure of value to the company!!"
You have a career ahead of you being a terrible manager.
that's in normal world.
in unionized world, the old fart's productivity won't matter at all. his yoe will.
As a poor person in the third world I thank everyone unionizing for sending more jobs our way. Love you guys!
So long as it's okay for the company to hire whomever they want.
You have two years experience. You get paid $72,000/year.
But I do twice the work of the old fart over there making 155k.
Sorry. Union rules. When you have 20 years experience, you too can make 155k/yr.
Sure you do.
But maybe cleaning up your own damn incompetent noob mistakes because you don't think ahead shouldn't count as "work"
Game development is the coal mines of the software industry, these people must be masochists.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Nepotism is everywhere, the company I worked for a year, half people were hired because they knew or were related to someone in the high management.
100% of game developer companies have both the ability and motive to prevent game developers from being able to unionize in the next thousand years.
How dare they! Using historically proven method to get better work condition.
What's next? DRM-free game?
Ha! you see they will ruin everything.
More likely you do twice as much running around with your hair on fire but only accomplish half as much.
This is a fallacy. I lived through the first attempt to unionize the (software) industry.
That was in the mid-ish 90's.
And it failed because we were too stupid to realize that we were being patronized.
"We don't need no stinkin' Union - we can negotiate on our own" and such were said.
Yes that really worked out well for us...
Had it happened (like it should have) it may not have prevented out-sourcing, but it
would have prevented the replacement of skilled workers by cheap Indian labour.
Who knows, a technology Union back them may have postponed / prevented the looming
threat to democracy that China currently represents. A very scary situation right now.
Yes, we shot ourselves in the foot with a tank.
I hope it goes beyond the idea stage and gains some momentum and they do vote
to join a Union. God Bless 'em!
CAP === 'exerted'
You have two years experience. You get paid $72,000/year.
But I do twice the work of the old fart over there making 155k.
Sorry. Union rules. When you have 20 years experience, you too can make 155k/yr.
And old fart over there is four times as productive as you are. You spend a quarter of your time learning to do things, and half of your time fixing your own mistakes. Old fart already knows how to do things and doesn't make nearly as many mistakes.
Apparently the half that "wants to unionize" doesn't want it all that badly, or they would have done it already.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
I come from coal country. Unions can be toxic as hell, note the shit the teamsters continue to do, and government employee unions are straight up crooked. However, I'll say that every company that's gotten a union has deserved a union for their shitty treatment of their employees.
Maybe if developers stop looking at their coworkers old and young as competitors, but as brothers and sisters fighting over scraps their master gives them, then they will both share a fair proportion of the profit that they generate for the owners.
And old fart over there is four times as productive as you are.
Maybe the year the union is voted in. A few years later and the most senior people will do the least work, safe in the assumption that their seniority will prevent them from being laid off.
"His name was James Damore."
protect the unions first then maybe the members.
I have been a member of 4 different Unions on 4 different occasions, all 4 were entirely unsatisfying.
Gaming companies are not a long term employment thing, you have to start somewhere.
Crappy jobs or predatory employers are not limited to gaming companies or coding jobs either.
I have many times voted with my finger to decline further employment from certain companies.
Sometimes my leaving benefited the remaining employees!
There are too many good places to work don't stay with a job with poor conditions. It only reinforces their continued abuse. Some companies operate purely in predatory mode by design, they lie and mask the true conditions dangling carrots while slowly turning up the heat. They prey on workers with low self esteem (willing victims).
Bringing in a third party with it's own agenda doesn't help anyone.
In California I am a Journeyman electrician the very same union will not honor my status in Oregon and offered me an Apprenticeship!
What does geography have to do with a skillset? How did I as a union member benefit.
How can a union president override a membership vote?
How can a union starting their own (for profit) health plan ask the members to vote on said health plan with no written coverage benefits or costs?
How can a union make backroom deals with employers negotiating terms against members wishes?
How can a union sell out members attempting to organize an area, for a favorable unionization deal in another area?
I choose neither of the two evils and move on.
If you're good start your own business, it's the American way.
I've been paid on contract to do things that a union sysadmin (at a community college) couldn't figure out, but which were well within the scope of his job duties. At least some of the time, those guys are worthless.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...If the majority of workers of this important area of economy feel unionizing (that means *standing together* and *fighting for your collective rights*) is the same as becoming lazy bums unable to care about the job they produce, then the system has won. Welcome to the Stalinist States of America. You won't oppose the system, because the system already owns you.
The only thing that saves individual persons from losing their work conditions, their freedom, their right to have a family and actually get to spend some time with them... Is standing together and stopping abusive bosses from demanding to put the company ahead of their own life and health.
Remind me again how well that worked for all the former UAW workers who saw all of the car manufacturing jobs sent overseas.
ya know what this creates? HOLLYWOOD 2.0 where everything ois so costly no fucking way, and you cant do it yourself ever...FUCK THIS SHIT
my experience with older coworkers has not been positive. This isn't going to be a popular thing to say on this forum, but, well, they're often sick, leaving the young guys to do their work. When they're not out sick they seem to have a strong sense of entitlement lacking from the young guys which basically means they're happy to dump their work on them and use their seniority to goof off all day.
Worse, a lot of them have atrophied tech skills. I've seen older coworkers who have to bee kept away from important work because they'll screw it up and make the team look bad. I've seen them repeatedly outmaneuvered when negotiating which team would be responsible for dull, repetitive tasks (which they then stick the young guys with).
I wouldn't care, but bean counters are always looking for teams that do simple, repetitive things and then outsourcing/firing them. In a modern enterprise you're often trying to keep one step ahead of the bean counter's by bringing complex, useful work into your wheelhouse, and every place I've been the old guys just can't do it unless they've been doing it for 20 years.
This is all in line with what we know about age related cognitive decline and just plain what it means to get older. Very few re unaffected by aging. Yes, it happens, but our society has a bad habit of holding freaks of nature up as the norm.
I'd rather see more serious discussions on how to get old folks who are still working to retire sooner. I'm sick and tired of folks who are too sick and tired to be working holding a position they don't particularly want because they need a paycheck after Wallstreet stole their pension and 401k.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Maybe if developers stop looking at their coworkers old and young as competitors...
'
Damn. Wish I had mod points. This is insightful and reminded me of how easily some people go to "versus" mode instead of "us" mode. The toxic pall of divisiveness permeates so much of our thinking.
I would be interested in seeing a map or timeline of the progression of acceptance of violence as a solution for everyday issues. Yea, Americans have always had strong opinions. Yea, there's always been people who spent their life hating, suspecting or resenting others. That's like drinking poison thinking it'll kill the other guy. There have always been extremists, nutt-jobs and thugs who think that killing people would solve their own personal shortcomings. It seems like only in the last 10-15 years has the idea of violence against their fellow citizens become palatable to a wider percentage of people, or at least an accepted part of everyday conversation. No easy answers I can see.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
One of the things I find fascinating about the MAGA crowd who want to bring jobs back paying $50 / hour building refrigerators is the degree to which many of them are anti-union - Because SOCIALISM.
...yet when did America enjoy some of its strongest economic growth? The '50s - The period it seems many MAGA folk want to return to - When union membership peaked at 35%.
I bet many of the people on this thread who are anti-union voted for Trump.
Today it's sitting at around 11%.
you god damn lazy bums
And I've been hired several times to replace all the young contractors who couldn't deliver anything that was in their contract. Turns out some people are just bad, whether or not they're a contractor or in a union.
So many of these "developers" were just teens who assumed that game development was going to be anything like playing the games they love. Then, because they were so excited and didn't look into what that kind of career actually entails, they're shocked to learn that game development is mostly sweatshop work. So now they want a union to find them a safe space because they fucked up.
"Union: Well then, why the hell are you here?"
You: to join the union of course
really, some people have big trouble coming up with correct answers :P
The senior people should be doing less of the work, and more of the organizing and supervising of the work. If the old fart is stuck looking at debug screens all day, you are probably not tapping his experience properly. He should be mentoring the team, monitoring the work, and steering the work packages to the people who can best accomplish them. If something comes his way that he is good at, then he can take that work to "stay in the game". But his value comes from understanding the people around him.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Having a union just gives you a second boss. They generally don't give a crap about the workers and simply manage to kill the business with stupid rules. Hell, some of them were run by the mob. Tell us again how great they were, please, I note that you don't give examples of them actually helping, you merely try to associate them with good times without explaining how they caused those (hint: these things take time, they'd have to cause that *before*)
The same time period you quote was when large portions of the rest of the world had most of their infrastructure damaged, so we had little competition. Once competition came online, heavily unionized industries like the automotive industry were severely hurt by competition that didn't need a union guy to plug in every damned piece of equipment or whatever.
Actually, that's not how unions work. I've brought this up with SEIU in designing a union for IT workers. I have a laundry list of things you see in old factory unions that won't mesh with IT workers, and how to design and operate an IT Workers Union.
Meritocracy and a lack of job protectionism were the first things identified for this type of union body.
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I recollect having discussions with engineers in the early 90s about unions. I argued sure unions can be corrupt or inefficient but you have someone advocating for you. The other guys would say "Oh if you are good at what you do, you don't need a union" and to some extent they had a point. Guess what happend to most of those engineers?..... drum roll .......
They were replaced by cheaper less qualified workers on H1B1 visas.
Having a union would have provided push back to the industry which used the H1B1 visa to replace more expensive labor. I talked to my representative years ago and she said, they were getting INCREDIBLE pressure to allow workers in on visas and there wasn't anyone on the other side advocating for American engineers.
The benefit of "crunch time" is that it forces management to make the decisions they should have made months/years before. It has no benefit for programmers or the product.
Christ on a stick, we've been taken advantage of for 3 decades. Made to be on call 24x7 for any reason, paid less than the idiot marketing dept that keeps making my life a living hell, always scrutinized by upper management because the can't quantify my value if everything is running smoothly and output is normal. All the while, being threatened with outsourcing the job to some 3rd party in india.
Bottom line is that the companies we work for could not run without us.
The UAW workers didn't outsource their jobs overseas, the owners bought the government who made the workers sit idly by while the owners shipped off the jobs. Ya know, EXACTLY THE KIND OF EMPLOYEE ABUSE UNIONS ARE DESIGNED TO STOP.
Troll harder.