[HN Gopher] CDPR pays its junior developers $700/month
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CDPR pays its junior developers $700/month
Author : sim_card_map
Score : 36 points
Date : 2021-01-17 16:56 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| finnthehuman wrote:
| Shouldn't a reporter know better than to just drop that number
| without saying anything about the cost of living in Poland?
|
| So now I have to go look it up if I want to gain any actual
| information from this tweet. Then as I'm looking up what city
| their office is in, I realize the only reason I'm checking at all
| isn't because he told me CD Projekt is based in Poland, I just
| had a recollection they were based in a formerly-communist state.
|
| So now I've been able to fully determine this Schreier guy is a
| scumbag faster that I can determine just how scummy $400/mo or
| $700/mo is.
|
| Spoilers: Warsaw and https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-
| living/in/Warsaw?displayCurre...
| senko wrote:
| He does know better. This headline draws more clicks, retweets
| and shares than "Eastern European game devs paid less than US-
| based ones."
| approxim8ion wrote:
| Why is Schreier a scumbag? I'm not very interested in games so
| I don't follow his reporting, but I read his book and felt it
| was rather good.
| finnthehuman wrote:
| The misleading nature of the Tweet to avoid putting the
| numbers in context. It's a drawdroppingly low number for
| those of us in cities that even the rest of the U.S.
| considers overpriced. That's what he's playing to, the people
| who will be shocked by the number using their own hometown as
| a frame of reference.
|
| He's not Tweeting any context like that it's X% below median
| SWE wage in Warsaw. If it's still an insultingly low wage
| even by the standards of the area, it doesn't hurt to put it
| in context.
| approxim8ion wrote:
| Okay, you meant in this context. I agree, but I suppose
| that's the nature of engagement-centric journalism today.
|
| I feared there was a bigger pattern about his
| behaviour/ethics/deeds that I was missing.
| rasz wrote:
| He did compare fastest selling game of all time to Anthem,
| game EA planned to sell 6 million copies in first 3 months,
| but ended up selling ~2 million in two years, a total flop.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| He's not a scumbag but he is part of that "left coast" subset
| of people that find it agregious people work for lower wages
| than people do in SF. The kind where the "the hand that
| feeds" is all low income people who willingly move to high
| cost of living cities and demand californianism to dominate
| policy.
|
| I wish games and tech press didn't have to even acknowledge
| this stuff. It's just ridiculous I already know all political
| affiliations of people in tech journalism just by reading one
| page of their twitter. I just want the days of independent
| and intelligent journalism again.
| rasz wrote:
| Mmm, another one of those what went wrong with the fastest
| selling game of all time pieces. Author goes on comparing it to
| BioWare's Anthem :o. $700/month is a starting salary in this poor
| part of Europe, especially for a game tester turned first time
| coder.
| Traster wrote:
| The claims of Cyberpunk being the fastest selling game were
| baed entirely on pre-orders which tells you basically nothing
| about the quality of the game. Sony followed up by removing the
| game from their store and Microsoft added a quality warning to
| their store in an almost unprecedented move. Microsoft, Sony
| and Gamestop all offered refunds. It's a nice claim, but it's
| pretty irrelevant to what actually happened.
| rasz wrote:
| They had 8m preorders. 13m in 10 days takes into account
| refunds and returns. They are sitting at >10 million copies
| on Steam alone right now. Its quite possible they made their
| 2021 goal of selling 20 million copies at this point, less
| than a month after release.
|
| Where was Sony and Microsoft when Remedy released Control
| running at 10fps on PS4 and Xbox One?
| b212 wrote:
| In general $800 after taxes is the bare minimum for juniors in
| Warsaw. But yeah, gamedev...
|
| Experienced devs can get up to $5000-$6000 after taxes but I know
| of a few making even more. The thing is you can rent a studio for
| $300-$400 and food is dirt cheap compared to western countries
| (another $300 or so, but $200 will do). All in all I'm Warsaw
| you're saving much more money than you'd in Berlin or Prague at
| the same position. So $700 might look really bad but that's
| actually enough to get by.
| DeusExMachina wrote:
| When I was a kid, I wanted to be a game developer. I am happy I
| didn't go down that route, all I hear from the industry are
| nightmare stories.
| dafelst wrote:
| I've been doing software development for the past ~21 years and
| have been doing game dev for the past 6 of those, and I've
| experienced a lot of what the traditional software industry and
| game dev have to offer, from massive corporate FAANG or AAA
| behemoths to small startup like indies.
|
| Like most industries there is bad and good, but the nightmare
| stories are the ones you tend hear about, there's not a lot of
| juicy material in "game dev studio provides satisfactory work
| environment". There are definitely exploitative horrible
| studios out there, but there are also plenty with satisfied
| workers.
|
| Just my anecdata as a software dev who happily moved into game
| dev and has no regrets about the decision.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| What were you doing before and how big of a career change was
| it in terms of the new things you had to learn?
| eznzt wrote:
| Salaries in Eastern Europe much lower than in the valley, news at
| eleven.
| incrudible wrote:
| It's a low salary even by Polish standards. Moreover, there are
| huge differences between salaries in different Eastern European
| countries. Poland is on the higher end.
| SebastianKumor wrote:
| Its sad but junior devs in easter Europe do not get more than
| 1000EUR/month from my experience.
| radu_floricica wrote:
| "[...] he made around $400/month when he started as a tester in
| 2015. In 2018, as a junior programmer, he said he was making
| ~$700/month"
|
| Take this in context. $400 for a starting tester (aka zero
| qualifications) is standard for eastern europe. As a career, it's
| on par with call center operator.
|
| 2-3 years later, he switched to "junior developer" in the same
| company. I'm reading this to mean there was a conversation with
| the management that went like this: "You seem like a smart guy
| and you did a couple of javascript online classes. We'll switch
| you to dev and teach you how to program properly - oh, and you
| get 10% raise along with it. When you can do useful work we can
| renegotiate".
|
| One may teach himself useful programming in a couple of years
| while working full time as a tester - it's definitely possible.
| But the baseline probability is that at that stage he wasn't yet
| productive, and still required what's basically paid training for
| 3 to 6 months.
| joombaga wrote:
| I'd like to live in a world where a noob developer can advance
| their skills by familiarizing themselves with a company's
| codebase, and get paid a living wage to do so. The call center
| operator deserves the same.
| rubyn00bie wrote:
| This is ideally how QA should be run at most organizations.
| Help familiarize juniors with tooling like git, the command
| line, deploying things, writing tickets, communicating with
| the team-- have them see different parts of the engineering
| organization and then let them choose where they think they
| have the most interest.
|
| I know because I've done this with wild success and
| everywhere that doesn't do this has had by comparison awful
| QA.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Game Dev. is not a lucrative SWE career in Europe, unfortunately.
| Pays less than most SE jobs. (and SWE salaries are lower in
| Europe to begin with, compared to the US)
| Bakary wrote:
| How much is that compared to the average for Poland? Here[0] I am
| seeing a figure of 1,234EUR/month gross or 890EUR net (US$1075)
| for 2020.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_..
| .
| Kuraj wrote:
| It's really not that much. Rent will consume a half of that
| right away.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| Nobody knows the real average salary in Poland. The
| government's statistics office is calculating average only
| based on reports from businesses with >10 employees (IIRC).
| This excludes a couple millions of microbusinesses and of
| course the biggest employer in the country, aka the state
| itself (millions of teachers, policemen, soldiers, all the
| paper-pushers in various parts of bureaucracy etc. etc. are not
| included). The computed national averages are good for
| comparing year-to-year salary growths, but they're not
| informative w.r.t. absolute salary levels.
| incrudible wrote:
| In creative industries, some people will accept almost any
| salary, because the alternative is not working as a creative.
| Video game development is notorious for this, but it's even worse
| in other areas. Try becoming a professional painter, sculptor, or
| writer.
|
| I always advise people against going down that route, unless they
| are literally ready to sacrifice half of a lifetime of earnings
| for it. Unfortunately, choosing wisely requires a level of
| maturity that you do not possess when it is time to make the
| choice.
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(page generated 2021-01-17 23:02 UTC)