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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.
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.
Real developers are proud to work crunch time to get a game out on time. They know it makes for a better product.
Given the enormous numbers of bugs that are shipped in virtually every title these days, I'm gonna put a [Citation Required] on this one.
They put out 3/4ths done crap, and hope they can patch it fast enough to quell the uproar.
You seem to be misinformed about where violence against workers comes from (and hint: it's not from unions):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You are welcome on my lawn.
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
More likely you do twice as much running around with your hair on fire but only accomplish half as much.
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.
You really think getting rid of crunch time would solve that? You'd get fewer bug fixes, so there would be more bugs left.
Part of crunch time is resolving bugs.
If you want more bugs, get rid of crunch time.
Real developers are proud to work crunch time to get a game out on time. They know it makes for a better product.
Long work weeks make developers exhausted. Exhausted workers make mistakes. Mistakes cause bugs down the line, i.e. more work, causing an ever increasing need for longer work weeks. The death march takes its toll, and the end result may very well be worse for it. I have seen it happen, and the solution is rarely to increase hours, but for management to show actual leadership and reduce the scope to something manageable.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
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."
Probably so - crunch time means everyone is working burnt out, which means they have more trouble fixing bugs, and are more likely to introduce new ones.
Plus the fact that it's been repeatedly shown that doing mental work for more than about 30-40 hours per week on a regular basis actually *decreases* per-week productivity as the hours worked increase
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
For a week or two. After that, they are crispy and progressively more useless.
The best business reason to limit hours is so the crew has enough in the tank to handle a real emergency. That means you can't be in constant emergency mode.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
Yes. Your anecdote carries much less weight as a factual source than an historical article that cites many sources.
Do you not know how factual sources even work, dude?:
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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 really think getting rid of crunch time would solve that?
Yes. The error rate of a programmer goes up after 30 hours/week. It skyrockets after 60 hours/week.
Crunch time means getting 20 hours/week of work done while being at the office 80 hours/week......if you give a damn about bugs.
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.
I hope they bring beer.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So long as it's okay for the company to hire whomever they want.
In a more civilised part of the world - they can.
But they can't refuse to hire somebody just because they belong to a union, and the union doesn't get any say in whether a nonunion person gets employed.
(#58017826) Actually, every big game studio has fought tooth and nail to ensure it never happens and that anyone involved in any such effort never works in the industry again.
And in the same more civilised part of the world - they can't. See above.
In some parts of the world people act like grownups.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
And as a result, EA has never made a bad or broken game in their lifetime.
"I'm a well-wisher, in that I don't wish you any specific harm."
The problem is in the numbers. Quoth the summary:
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.
While a lot of them want a union, they expect "the industry" to plop it in their lap. They want someone else to do the work of rallying everyone to do it. This means that while they want it, they don't want to work or sacrifice for it, which means they really don't want it.
Software engineering jobs are in high demand right now. If you don't like your working conditions, beat feet and get another job in a different industry. You'll take a hit in pay/prestige because you need to start over, but you might find that your game software design skills bring a new perspective to your new industry, which can be very lucrative. I've bounced from PC peripherals, to medical devices and am now in defense work. That varied experience makes me more valuable to my boss than the guy next to me who has been with the company for 30+ years and only know one way to do things.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
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.
They want someone else to do the work of rallying everyone to do it.
I'm on it.
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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.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Modern union security contracts require new hires to join the union after 30 days.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
It worked for Red Dead Redemption 2. [...]Real developers are proud to work crunch time to get a game out on time.
Yay, you got your game. Good for you. I mean, some other folks got royally fucked, but who gives a shit about them? You got to play a game.
They know it makes for a better product.
No it doesn't. We KNOW exactly the opposite is true: Once you start working more than 40, 50 hours a week, your per-hour productivity takes a big hit. You make far more mistakes, have to clean up far more messes, you're less creative, and your work is just generally shoddier. Working 80-120 hours? I don't care how superstar you think you are, you're far less effective than you think at that level of hours. Worse, that is burnout mode -- that grinds up all your talent and forces them to leave the industry. Games devs don't last very long in such an environment, so you'll have a studio full of newbies.
It's only bad developers that want unions, and solely to protect themselves from being judge on the merit of their work rather than their membership in the union.
There's just so much bullshit here, I have to think this is an anti-union executive trolling.
If they want a family and a social life, then what the heck are they doing in the game dev business?
That says really shitty things about the games industry.
If 40 hour weeks made people more productive, game companies would have figured that out decades ago.
No. The games industry is too new. They are extremely immature. The software development industry is immature in general compared to others, but games seem to be at the very low end. Full of bad management that doesn't understand how people operate, full of incredible amounts of turnover because no one can work at that level for years on end, and full of recent college grads with no family who are too young and stupid to know that there's any better way to work.
Oh. I'm sorry. Is my personal experience with real live people in my circle less of a factual source than a Wikipedia article?
Yes. Yes it absolutely is. Your experience is what we call an "anecdote." That is, it gets a "uhh, cool story, bro" because it doesn't reflect what happened to a far, far greater number of people.
EA hasn't made games of their own in _decades_. Their studios are in a constant state of birth/death as EA churns.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
'Have you ever had the solution to a tough coding problem occur to you when doing something completely unrelated?' would make a good interview question. If it didn't have such an obvious 'correct' answer. Only catch the honest, who I would assume never got through HR.
The people that can honestly say 'Yes, it's part of the process.' are the born coders.
I pretty much assume my first solution will not be the best one (for new problems). Better solutions (even if it's just 'doh, wrong pattern') often occur to me while single stepping code.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'