Blizzard Workers Share Salaries In Revolt Over Wage Disparities (bloomberg.com) 210
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Employees at Blizzard Entertainment, a division of Activision Blizzard Inc., began circulating a spreadsheet on Friday to anonymously share salaries and recent pay increases, the latest example of rising tension in the video game industry over wage disparities and executive compensation. Blizzard, based in Irvine, California, makes popular games including Diablo and World of Warcraft. In 2019, after an internal survey revealed that more than half of Blizzard workers were unhappy with their compensation, the company told staff it would perform a study to ensure fair pay, according to people familiar with the situation. Blizzard implemented the results of that study last month, which led to an outcry on the company's internal Slack messaging boards. One employee then created a spreadsheet and encouraged staff to share their compensation information. The anonymous document, reviewed by Bloomberg News, contains dozens of purported Blizzard salaries and pay bumps. Most of the raises are below 10%, significantly less than Blizzard employees said they expected following the study. "Our goal has always been to ensure we compensate our employees fairly and competitively," Activision Blizzard spokeswoman Jessica Taylor said. "We are constantly reviewing compensation philosophies to better recognize the talent of our highest performers and keep us competitive in the industry, all with the aim of rewarding and investing more in top employees." This year, Blizzard top performers received a salary increase that was 20% more than in prior years, and more people got promotions, Taylor added. "Our overall salary investment is consistent with prior years," she also said.
Almost sounds like they need a union (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure sounds to me like this is the sort of issue a union would deal with.
Re:Almost sounds like they need a union (Score:4, Insightful)
But, then the employees would have the union to deal with.
Fun with numbers (Score:5, Informative)
This year, Blizzard top performers received a salary increase that was 20% more than in prior years
If your increase last year was only 1%, then this year it was 1.2%. Don't make it sound like you gave everyone a 20% bump in pay this year.
One veteran Blizzard employee told Bloomberg News they received a raise of less than 50 cents an hour.
Ah, there it is.
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;D, percentages and negative numbers, if your pay increase was negative 20% and you pay increase is a 20% improvement on last years pay increase, that means a further 22% paycut.
Suck it up Blizzard employees, they know they got you by your fears and you associations with fellow employees. Use those associations much more smartly, start your own business with other disaffected employees.
When they say this "Our goal has always been to ensure we compensate our employees fairly and competitively," they are g
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>One veteran Blizzard employee told Bloomberg News they received a raise of less than 50 cents an hour.
Which, unless they were making less than about $17/hour is actually a pay *cut* thanks to inflation.
Re:Fun with numbers (Score:4, Insightful)
and they are complaining about not making what developers make.
No, they aren't. They're complaining that they're not making a living wage and that the raises are barely cost-of-living increases. No one is under the illusion that they should be making >$100k for doing entry level work.
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Having enough money to buy or rent a place to live within a reasonable distance of your job, being able to afford groceries that fully meet your nutritional needs, able to keep yourself dressed. If you can do this without going into debt, then you might have a living wage.
Are you wholly unfamiliar with the abusive pay practices of game developers? These are usually low-paying, high-skill jobs.
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And I suppose the problem there is because of high pay in the industry where Blizzard in based. I'm sure they could relocate the company to Bangalore and find that half the pay is the equivalent of millionaires, but becuase they are located in a place where the cost of living has been pushed up so much by the same pay rises they demand, they need the pay rises to keep up with the other companies paying more.
And so you end up in an inflationary spiral that helps nobody but the high-paid, while the rest of th
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Hey, it worked for gender studies mayors! If anything can be learned from that, then that if you hold a basket weaving degree, all you have to do is create a huge stink.
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If the pay is bad, tell the employer by leaving. When said employer can not hire anyone for the job, the employer will be forced to raise compensation.
What you're advocating for is paying people by supply and demand. But people are not commodities. You can't simply pay less because you can find workers who will work for less, and expect society to continue to function. That results in a race to the bottom, and there's nothing good there.
That is how markets work for any resource. Why do you think jobs which require no training pay so little while jobs which require training such as Engineers, Doctors, Lawyers, etc... pay so much?
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But humans aren't just resources, they're also the fundamental building blocks of society. Underpaying them has serious knock-on effects for society.
One of the biggest problems with capitalism* is that it prices things based on scarcity rather than value. Which is fine for inanimate resources, but extremely problematic for social integrity since it drives people away from the most valuable fields (the most valuable occupation in every endeavour is waste management - without that all else would be impossibl
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You have a very small, myopic view of the world.
Humans are just resources from the job market view. Blizzard gives shit pay, because their are truck loads of (mostly) young men that are willing to work for shit pay so that they can have the glamour job of being a "game developer". They get older and figure out that they can get a higher paying job that isn't quite so glamorous and use the extra money to play more games or maybe even get a hobby that doesn't involve computers. The owner of the other compa
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>You have a very small, myopic view of the world.
>Humans are just resources from the job market view.
Speaking of myopic views. Yes, from the *job market* view, people are just resources. From the view of a socially responsible person, they are far more. The inconsistency between those two views is one of the great weaknesses of capitalism - it's highly efficient at allocating resources, but extremely ineffective at equitably distributing wealth. (i.e. distributing wealth in proportion to the value
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The problem with your view is that supporting everyone in a society is the one and only valid objective of an economy. As a society, we do not on average give a crap if billionaires can't make that second billion off the sweat of our brows.
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> But humans aren't just resources,
You mean the Human Resources department should be renamed Human Assets instead?
Next you'll be saying people should be invested in because they aren't some cog-in-the-wheel ! Crazy talk! /s
Who knew that people weren't resources to be strip mined and thrown out when they are too old and/or burnt out! /s
Re:Fun with numbers (Score:4, Informative)
Doctors and lawyers (to a lesser extent) cost so much because they are guilds that artificially restrict supply, so not a great example. Engineers are reasonably free market entities, except for the requirement to be certified.
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So college drop-outs like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg must not get paid very much.
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What you're advocating for is paying people by supply and demand. But people are not commodities. You can't simply pay less because you can find workers who will work for less, and expect society to continue to function. That results in a race to the bottom, and there's nothing good there.
Bullshit. I've spent DECADES (the first of which before even being able to land a job due to "lack of experience") honing my development and software architecture skillset. While these slobs were fucking around drinking and having fun I was studying and practicing. All of Human progress is founded upon one thing and one thing along: delayed gratification. Yes, having a well developed technical skill DOES make you worth more to a company than having no such skill, it means you can make the company more m
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If that's your goal, congratulations. Mission accomplished (tm). However, if you believe that everyone has the right to at least earn a living to eat and put a roof over their hea
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You don't penalize the skilled by bringing up the floor.
Bullshit. You don't penalize the skilled by capping pay scales at the high end, you absolutely penalize skill by raising the lower end if you aren't also scaling all the mid-grade payscales. In an economy based on scarcity giving to anyone necessarily detracts from everyone else. Now you could argue (and I'd absolutely agree with you) that income inequality is a major factor in play and the bottom of the payscale should at the very least be a livable wage, but that doesn't mean getting there doesn't take
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If you mean that the skilled get penalized because the wealth gap is smaller, you'd be right. That doesn't hurt the wealthy, other than their ego. But bringing up the floor doesn't affect the high earner wage. If you're making the argument that the economy will slowly come to adapt to the wage, you're right. But so will the high-earner's wages.
You're trying to demonize a system that works in many other places around the globe.
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If you mean that the skilled get penalized because the wealth gap is smaller, you'd be right. That doesn't hurt the wealthy, other than their ego. But bringing up the floor doesn't affect the high earner wage. If you're making the argument that the economy will slowly come to adapt to the wage, you're right. But so will the high-earner's wages.
Again, absolute bullshit. It takes a span of a couple of years at the longest for the local economy to adjust after such events such that the skilled workers are making less than they were in terms of purchasing power. It IS a zero sum game, it's literally the definition of a zero sum game. There are finite resources managed by the monetary system. If we had a post-scarcity supply chain, sure, you'd be right, but we don't. You're always taking from someone if you're giving to someone in an economy base
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Again, absolute bullshit. It takes a span of a couple of years at the longest for the local economy to adjust after such events such that the skilled workers are making less than they were in terms of purchasing power.
[Citation needed]
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The wealthy benefit from a smaller wealth gap. Poor people commit more crimes, spread more disease, and are generally unable to perform high skill jobs that disproportionately make money for the wealthy.
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Bullshit. You don't penalize the skilled by capping pay scales at the high end, you absolutely penalize skill by raising the lower end if you aren't also scaling all the mid-grade payscales. In an economy based on scarcity giving to anyone necessarily detracts from everyone else. Now you could argue (and I'd absolutely agree with you) that income inequality is a major factor in play and the bottom of the payscale should at the very least be a livable wage, but that doesn't mean getting there doesn't take from someone else.
I call this crabs-in-a-bucket economics and it does serve the rich well, everyone else, not so much...
Re:Fun with numbers (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with not raising the minimum is that you effectively allow employers to use the social safety net as a payroll subsidy.
Just being capable of showing up for a shift at all carries minimum costs in food, clothing, shelter, and transportation. From a practical standpoint, your business will fail if your waitstaff are all homeless, haven't showered in a year, carry communicable diseases. etc. You probably won't do so well if they all have to sleep in the parking lot either.
Minimum wage is the rest of society's way of saying it's up the employer to pay at least enough to avoid those conditions.
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I've also spent a literal lifetime honing my own industry-specific skills (videogame programming), which I absolutely view as a marketable commodity. But some people just look at the end result. They don't see the incredible amount of work that top programmers, artists, and designers invest in their skills and craft, and think it's unfair that somehow a programmer with a few decades of specialized experience earns significantly more than others without those skills, because it's not "fair". Or it's someh
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Translation: I worked hard while others slacked, so I DESERVE it.
You deserve jack shit. Life ain't fair, get used to it.
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You can't simply pay less because you can find workers who will work for less, and expect society to continue to function. That results in a race to the bottom, and there's nothing good there.
Welcome to capitalism. We've been here for a while and the water is slowly getting warmer. Not boiling yet as far as I can tell.
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"You can't simply pay less because you can find workers who will work for less...That results in a race to the bottom"
Sure you can. If you owned a business and were paying employees $50/hour and could hire new people for half that, why wouldn't you? What you left out is the ability to find qualified competent workers who will work for less. Sure, you can hire coders or whoever for $8/hour all day if you'll take anyone off the street. That said, your results will not be the same as people who are trained wit
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Why are you replying to me quoting someone instead of the person who actually said that?
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You get what you pay for.
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Yes, you can pay less. That's what happens all the time in every industry.
Its not good, but there's no other way to decide who gets paid what - you get paid what the boss can get away with giving you, the negotiation is between how little he wants to give against how much you want to receive, there's no answer to what that amount should be.
However, if there are lots of people ready to work, then your position becomes more and more "take it or leave it". It happens in all the low-skilled industries. Why else
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This is why you set a floor with minimum wage laws and payroll taxes. And there ought to be something like a ceiling too, as existed in the US in the New Deal~Cold War era. And making all tax returns public Scandinavian-style would put a lot of pressure on companies to end ridiculous pay disparity fuckery, and on wealthy people to hold off on "creative accounting."
That's the problem (Score:2)
Yeah, that's the problem. The salary investment was inadequate in prior years. If the top performers got 20% more than in prior years, and the investment is consistent, then it stands to reason that everyone who is not a top performer got fucked. The expectation was that the salary inv
Re:That's the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
If the top performers got 20% more than in prior years
The increase was 20% more. So instead of a 2% raise, they get a 2.4% raise.
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If the top performers got 20% more than in prior years
The increase was 20% more. So instead of a 2% raise, they get a 2.4% raise.
But his point is that if Blizzard increased salary commitments by x every year then the people who aren't top performers got even more screwed this year than previous years. There's only so many ways to divide x and if your top 10% get a bigger portion of it this year than previous years the other 90% of get less. The employees complained about wage stagnation which would require Blizzard to invest extra money into wages if they really wanted to fix that problem.
Eyebrows were raised (Score:2)
When one disgruntled employee shared his salary of $100M on the spreadsheet. "Only 1% raise last year? Well fuck that!" was the comment in column D.
Bloomberg (Score:3)
The data is anonymous, so why doesn't Bloomberg share it? We have no way of knowing how the role descriptions are.. I mean someone could be a "programmer" that could be anyone with basic coding simple business logic to someone optimizing the graphics engine in assembly. Yet the business logic guy will feel slighted if the other guy gets paid more. God knows we deserve pay according to how important we feel we are.
Hit the virtual bricks! (Score:2)
Watch for the game to suddenly sprout a new level filled with striking characters. The only way to get past it will be to uniformly give them more gold and powers.
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your forgot to say Mic drop! (Score:2)
This just in.... (Score:2)
You know, if you don't like it, there are other places to work. Nobody is forcing them to work at Blizzard.
Get another job outside the video game industry (Score:2)
Sounds to me like the problems in the video game industry are the same as ever. Too many people come out of school wanting to make games which saturates the market and drives down wages. Why would Blizzard pay you good money when you can easily be replaced by a new grad that desperately wants to get into the industry? Of course they aren't going to give out generous pay increases.
If you are unhappy with your pay, go get another job that will pay you what you are worth. Preferably one in a different industr
ABSOLUTE SHOCK (Score:3)
It's so terrible! Are you kidding me?
Hostile working environment (Score:2)
10 G*ddamn percent?!? (Score:2)
Jeez, lucky bastards. The two companies I worked for (before I went solo) gave out raises less than 5%. These people should be lucky they're getting any raise these days.
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I work for the state. In 22 years I've never seen a raise of more than 4.5%, and that was the year they started deducting 3% towards the state retirement fund (I was already vested, etc).
Salaries result from negotiations (Score:2)
* Employers prefer to negotiate one-on-one with employees regarding salaries.
* Employers typically have much more information and leverage when negotiating salaries. For example, they typically have your entire salary history, they ask how much you're willing to take - while you have no idea what they are willing to pay for these kinds of positions.
Having employees even talk about their wages to each other is suppressed. That is brazen. But employers have the leverage to be able to do it. This is why unions
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If Blizzard has the standard employee contract which specifically prohibits talking about your pay, there will be many jobs open for others interested in game development.
Re:If you are unhappy with your pay... (Score:5, Interesting)
In the vast majority of cases, such clauses are illegal and cannot be enforced. Companies like to put threatening terms in contracts and employee handbooks that they cannot legally enforce... got to keep the peasants living in fear to keep them in line!
Re:If you are unhappy with your pay... (Score:5, Informative)
They don't have to legally enforce anything. They can still fire everyone. California is an at-will employment state. Outside of being fired specifically for being a member of a protected class, you can be fired for literally any other reason.
Re:If you are unhappy with your pay... (Score:5, Informative)
If you are fired shortly after sharing your salary info (and with no prior issues like poor performance reviews), you'd have a pretty good case for a lawsuit. If they fire a bunch of people that shared salary info, it'd probably get a class-action lawsuit (because then it's even more obvious).
Just because a state is at-will doesn't mean they can fire people for illegal employment contract clauses.
Re:If you are unhappy with your pay... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are fired shortly after sharing your salary info (and with no prior issues like poor performance reviews), you'd have a pretty good case for a lawsuit. If they fire a bunch of people that shared salary info, it'd probably get a class-action lawsuit (because then it's even more obvious).
Just because a state is at-will doesn't mean they can fire people for illegal employment contract clauses.
Technically correct that even in an at-will state you cannot be fired for illegal reasons, such as retaliation for sharing your salary. Practically incorrect though. If you, after being fired from Blizzard, sue them, here is what will happen:
1. You won't have the money to see it through.
2. You will lose.
3. You won't get another job in the industry.
If you want to have a fair chance to defend yourself against illegal dismissals, you need a third party pursuing it on your behalf. You need a union.
Re:If you are unhappy with your pay... (Score:5, Informative)
You're wrong. So wrong that you need to turn in your law license. Wait, you don't have one? I thought so.
California law says otherwise [shrm.org]. Specifically,
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You'd think so, but with most companies it is very difficult to fire someone. It's even harder if you want to replace a worker (ie, it's easier to fire someone if the company is trying to reduce head count). Sure, the CEO can do it, the VP can probably do it. But the bottom line manager has difficulties getting rid of a poor performer. HR has rules to follow, and the poor performer may be the only one doing a particular job badly, which is better than no one at all doing that job. You have to prove that
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A lawsuit from the shareholders. The employees have no such protections.
However, if they're all fired because of discussing salary numbers, I've found that it's covered by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act.
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Or what?
Continued to get publicly embarrassed and called out?
I don't know why you assume that there has to be an "or what."
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If Blizzard has the standard employee contract which specifically prohibits talking about your pay, there will be many jobs open for others interested in game development.
Those portions of contracts are almost never upheld in court.
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It wouldn't make it to court. California is an at-will employment state.
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Pretty sure you can still sue for wrongful termination - otherwise there wouldn't be much point in making such conditions illegal.
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Putting something like it in the employment contract in the first place is very nearly isomorphic to such an admission.
Having an illegal clause in the employment contract complicates their firing process for even just one individual, since if the employee had done the so-called "prohibited" thing prior to getting fired, and the employee was not otherwise obviously guilty of any other infraction of note, then the employer will very likely have to
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I think workers should be able to share salary information with no ill effects though. It's beneficial to them and isn't necessarily bad for management. If someone else is making more you should be able to ask for the same, and management should be able to justify the reason. Be prepared to get told you need to perform more like the person who gets paid more.
If they can't or won't justify disp
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Of course, although if a company had an illegal clause such as prohibiting employees to discuss their pay in their employment contract, that would pretty much leave a company's ass quite wholly uncovered.
Not necessarily irreconcilably so, but the mere existence of such a clause could still otherwise be sufficient to show wrongful termination when no other obvious infractions had occurred, and would be why no sane company would put it in their employment contract in the first place.
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My point is that neither Blizzard nor any other remotely reputable company would actually have such a clause spelled out in their employment contract because the mere presence of such a clause is tantamount to an outright admission of wrongful dismissal if any employee happened to engage in the practice.
I'm not saying that there aren't any companies that have such a policy as an unwritten rule and will even invoke disciplinary action against employees that violate it, but it sure as heck would *NOT* be w
Re:If you are unhappy with your pay... (Score:5, Insightful)
"If Blizzard has the standard employee contract which specifically prohibits talking about your pay"
In the US, it's illegal to prohibit employees from talking about pay.
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That's not why we fire you. It just is such a bad economy and we have to let you go.
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That "standard employee contract" is unquestionably illegal and grounds for an enforcement action and/or wrongful termination lawsuit.
You cannot do that [govdocs.com]. Even in the Obama-free Great State of Texas [texas.gov].
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If Blizzard has the standard employee contract which specifically prohibits talking about your pay, there will be many jobs open for others interested in game development.
Things may be different in software development but OI've never had an employment contract that forbid discussing salaries.
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Those clauses that say you can't talk about pay are illegal. They are a violation of your collective bargaining rights and are not upheld in court.
prohibits talking about your pay is an anti union (Score:2)
prohibits talking about your pay is an anti union thing that they can't do by law
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In the US, it is illegal to forbid workers talking about pay with other co-workers. So internally sharing this information is protected by federal law, and if Blizzard terminates anyone for this activity, I hope they face lawsuits for unlawful termination.
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An employee contract can't supersede federal law. Talking about your pay with your co-workers is protected by the national labor relations act.
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If Blizzard has the standard employee contract which specifically prohibits talking about your pay,
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Heh. Where I work our HR dept says the same. Unfortunately, I work for a state agency, and state law says that with a simple written request to HR they have X days to deliver the name, job title, and salary of just about every employee (all of 'em other than the protected class BS stuff like police officers, people related to police officers, etc)
We've had our info published on various news paper sites and once in a real printed newspaper int the 22 years I've worked here.
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They can't fire the entire company, you know.
Of course not, they'll keep the "top performers". There's enough poor deluded saps lined up desperate for a job that they can fire everyone else.
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The tech sector isn't hurting anywhere near that hard from the worker side with the h1b crackdowns
We're talking about the game industry. There's always hordes of prospective workers.
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There's hordes of wannabe game programmers. I would not exactly call them prospective workers, any more than I would call the average horny basement dweller a prospective porn star, just 'cause he'd really love to get laid.
Re:If you are unhappy with your pay... (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a naivete there too. It sounds like the dream job, just like mattress tester, but in reality it ends up with low pay, long hours, and low job security (game is done, entire team laid off, sometimes the entire building). You can go several years at a game company and never once get out of crunch time.
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These are not necessarily "tech" workers. Many are probably artists, drawing and creating game assets. And that makes a huge different in salary. Blizzard though is in Irvine. It has tech jobs, but trying to find a new job there might still require a relocation depending upon what you do or how glutted that local market is.
Even in silicon valley I have seen HR give a higher salary range for software workers just to be competitive in hiring, whereas hardware workers had a distinctly lower salary range de
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I just read it. It says you file a complaint and it is investigated. It does not make special provisions for protecting the discussion of salaries, even if that would obviously be a good way to find out if you have a valid complaint.
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However, I'll admit to being wrong about the legality. It's legally protected under federal law:
Under the National Labor Relations Act, enacted in 1935, private-sector employees have the right to engage in "concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection."
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There you go, you got there eventually. Of course you didn't bother to get there before commenting a half dozen times and leaving a permanent record of your lack of judgment.
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I was still the first to cite it.
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I realize out-of-context John Kerry parody jokes are about two decades expired, but I can't keep the phrase "I was repeatedly against it, before I was the first one for it" from echoing in my skull.
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You were the first to fuck it up too. He beat you to it [slashdot.org] and just didn't put a name to the statute.
Also, it's not my job to race to correct to your fuckups and while searching for corrections that you bury within the comment thread. Did you reply to your own comment with the correction? No? No credit.
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McDonalds is always hiring
Yeah, 6% of the applicants, right? [businessinsider.com]
Re:If you are unhappy with your pay... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you like bugs, treat them like garbage (Score:5, Insightful)
...working in an overcrowded glamour field, just remember, McDonalds is always hiring.
I've worked in high pressure software engineering jobs and low-pressure ones. High pressure has more adrenaline, less documentation, less testing, more bugs. There's a nice balance between making a job hell and allowing developers to become lazy and entitled. Most big tech companies with budgets that dwarf Blizzard's as well as lean startups choose not to make people's lives hell....not because they're "woke" to worker's rights or nice charitable people. They figured out it doesn't make sense, from a business perspective, to burn out your employees.
I don't have a dog in Blizzard's fight. However, I like games. I like them to work without bugs. I like for them to create DLC years afterwards giving me fun new levels to play. If you're constantly pushing your employees to get things done and creating a hostile work environment, you get lots of shortcuts. You get code with bugs that only the original author can figure out why it was written that way. You get code that tends to be larger and more verbose, not smaller and concise. Ironically people write more code under pressure and usually introduce more bugs.
Programming is a creative endeavor, like writing or drawing. Too much crunch time hurts the product. Staying up all night drastically reduces productivity. A little pressure can light the fire under the ass, but overworked and burnt out employees don't produce the best work. They cost more in the long run. This craziness is pretty much limited to the gaming industry. Every other sector has figured out the problems this introduces.
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"This is a bad option though as there is a lot of managers and they have a hard time finding jobs. I have seen managers break down and cry at job fairs in DC as no-one wants to talk to them. If tech talent walks in though, companies fight with each other to get an interview."
And this is why things like this article exist - because tech companies don't value and are terrible at developing management skills. Instead, they're willing to let top coders with no people skills or empathy become managers. Then th