[HN Gopher] Anime is booming, so why are animators living in pov...
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Anime is booming, so why are animators living in poverty?
Author : polm23
Score : 279 points
Date : 2021-02-26 15:10 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| meetups323 wrote:
| I have some intimacy with the American animation industry and its
| similar here. All artistry/design/etc. happens on the US side of
| operations, then the brute "{drag sliders around}/{draw
| intermediary frames}/{paint over broken rigs} to match the design
| docs" happens internationally by vendor studios who get paid next
| to nothing.
|
| It's not dissimilar from things like L1 support in tech, which
| are often low cost international folks trained to respond using a
| fixed template. Both don't get paid much because their existence
| is expressly designed to be as easily replaceable as possible.
| bsder wrote:
| So, why hasn't someone in the US with a few bucks pulled these
| animators together and built their own studio simply as a "vanity
| project"?
|
| The anime industry seems like it should be rife for someone to
| pull that off.
|
| I'm always amazed at how little money artists (of any form) make.
| You can get really significant access to them for very little
| money.
| accounted wrote:
| Many anime studios in recent years have thrown in the towel
| despite having high levels of skill at their profession. It is
| repeatedly mentioned here that the reason animators are paid low
| is due to their abundance versus the demand, and that is
| certainly one reason of many. But another big reason is that it
| is strenuous work for which there really isn't that much pay out.
|
| The NYTimes article flaunts a $24 billion market figure, but this
| figure would be the few big names (Naruto, One Piece, DBZ) and
| those series are making money off of physical product sales and
| licensing deals. The anime, at the end of the day, is not the
| product - it's just a commercial for the product. Every so often,
| studios experiment with original anime, sometimes sponsored by
| various other companies, but these rarely turn out to be
| financially fruitful and primarily end up again as advertisements
| or a test of some new technique or technology.
| didip wrote:
| Sadly, the supply and demand of labors really press wages
| downwards. Especially in industries where "labor of love"
| marketing is really strong.
|
| If you want to maximize for total compensation, then you should
| work in an industry where the companies have to compete for your
| talents constantly.
| syntaxing wrote:
| Pretty disappointed at the "its just supply and demand" rhetoric.
| Supply and demand curves is an indicator of the market, NOT the
| ground truth of the market. Policies change the elasticity.
| Perceived value change the elasticity. Collective bargaining
| changes elasticity. Consumer changes elasticity. Simply treating
| the curve as the truth rather than the representation of the
| current state is extremely disingenuous.
| caturopath wrote:
| Certainly, someone can inact policy that reshapes a market.
|
| I don't know why we'd care too much about it here. Japan's
| unemployment rate is 3%: as far as I understand, people are
| working these jobs because they are their dream jobs, not
| because they don't have options with better conditions.
|
| There are lots of other jobs in the entertainment industry like
| this - hard work, low pay, long line of people who want them -
| and I can't find it within myself care all that much about the
| outcome.
| jdlyga wrote:
| Capitalism. Animators are willing to work for what animation
| companies are willing to pay them, which isn't much. Do they have
| unions?
| CyberRage wrote:
| The issue is not with anime but with Japan.
|
| Most "anime" is being created in Japan(That's the literal
| definition of anime) hence the issue.
|
| You don't hear about starving Pixar animators or Disney artists
| overworking to extreme levels.
|
| This is part of the Japanese culture. Moreover, I would say that
| anime is having more difficult time making profit and being
| sustainable.
| pzone wrote:
| Pixar and Disney are at the very top of the elite American
| animation studios. Most animators internationally, or Americans
| working at less competitive studios, are also wrung dry for
| very little pay or job security.
| CyberRage wrote:
| "Elite" animators in Japan are being paid pennies. it's a
| joke basically compared to western regions.
|
| In Japan, you are expected to deliver no matter what, working
| extra hours and grinding is normal. you are not compensated
| for any of that.
|
| Very very few publishers care about the quality of the
| content they ship as long as things pan out.
|
| You have so many numerous examples of that in the industry.
| ravenstine wrote:
| My family's wealth has come from animation, I know animators, and
| I was going into animation before I decided to become a software
| engineer, so maybe my opinions on this mean something.
|
| What distinguishes animation and most other industries from
| software is individual _leverage_. A fed up software engineer has
| a fairly decent shot at either working freelance or starting
| their own operation. This is possible for animation, but there 's
| _way_ more of a hurdle in competing in the market with an
| independent company unless you have prestige or lots of money. It
| 's really not easy to make substantial profit with a shitty
| animated film(unless you can afford exceptional marketing, and
| even then...), and it can take years of making no money to
| produce one. Contrast this with software, which has a possibility
| of being profitable in the first month, and can be improved over
| time, whereas with films and shows you pretty much have a few
| shots or just a single shot at doing it right. In other words,
| most animators know they can't just strike it out on their own if
| the going gets tough, which is one reason why unionization is
| more common in animation. You'd better be insanely talented if
| you think you're going to make a living as an independent
| animator, and most animators aren't excellent at all aspects of
| animation. There aren't many "full stack" animators. Believe me,
| I tried to be one. There's very disparate skills that go into
| making something that's production quality.
|
| There's also a general cultural difference between animators and
| software engineers. I'm painting with a broad brush here but, in
| my experience, animators tend to place more value on prestige and
| there's _way_ more workplace politics at animation studios than I
| 've ever witnessed on any software team I've joined. There's a
| prestige factor with software, too, but I don't think we make as
| much of a value judgment between someone who's a Googler and
| someone who's a freelancer. Again, just my opinion. Since
| animation is a part of the entertainment industry, it inherits
| the good and the bad of entertainment in general, which includes
| not highly valuing anyone except directors and producers. Most
| everyone else, besides big name actors, are expected to be
| treated like trash and disposed of when they aren't immediately
| needed anymore. One reason I ditched animation, besides my lack
| of talent, was that it can be very challenging to stay working at
| one studio for a long period of time. People do it, but they're
| the ones that seem to work a lot of extra hours(for no pay) and
| have a handful of useful talents that make them worth having
| around between projects. Basically, animators are used to being
| treated like crap and have a different sort of work ethic around
| it.
|
| Entertainment also attracts a different type of person. Again,
| another generalization, but there are _way_ more neurotic and
| crazy people in entertainment, animation included, than in other
| fields. I think that 's because it attracts both visually
| creative people and those who are bent out of shape easily if
| they aren't the ones winning, since the field can be so
| incredibly competitive. This leads to a dichotomy of needy
| animators who are always doing anything they can to "get their
| foot in the door" and tyrannical leads and directors who don't
| value their subordinates because they see themselves as Hollywood
| moguls. _Of course_ this isn 't true across the board, but my
| family members and friends in the field all have multiple stories
| of leadership treating people like garbage and getting away with
| insane things that you think would have been rooted out in the
| #MeToo era. In the end, it's all seen as a necessary evil on the
| journey to the glory of producing successful art. I don't think
| this is nearly as common with software(and many other things)
| because the average person doesn't give a flying F about
| software, so the drive to achieve prestige is very limited.
|
| So to summarize, for various reasons, there's far more ego
| involved in animation, which leads to people with power treating
| everyone like crap.
|
| Oh, before I conclude, we can't forget how much it costs to
| produce an animated film or TV show that meets the current
| expectations of the industry. Even though I think a wall is being
| hit in terms of just how much visual spectacle they can produce,
| the precedent to pay animators poorly has been set long ago when
| new studios were popping up and desperate to make something.
| Other industries, such as software, never went through the same
| cost hurdles during infancy; even back in 1996 you could start a
| software company easily with just one guy behind a single
| workstation and maybe a server rack.
| hn8788 wrote:
| It sounds like the same problem as the gaming industry, where
| people are really passionate about it and are willing to work for
| peanuts to be in the industry. I started doing some hobby game
| development, and I was suprised at how many "good enough" art and
| sound assets are freely available because of artists trying to
| get noticed.
| AaronM wrote:
| The Trash Taste Podcast on YouTube interviews an animator working
| in Japan (Ken Arto), really fascinating, and directly related to
| this discussion
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9ulkFRXkvQ
| ulzeraj wrote:
| If by animators you mean people who create the frames between key
| frames designed by the character designers then I'm pretty sure
| this work is often outsourced to chinese and south korean studios
| that pay a penny to their employees.
|
| I think the only exception to that was Kyoto Animation (KyoAni)
| Studio which made fame for treating their employees very well.
| Unfortunately they were targeted by an arson attack in 2019.
| umvi wrote:
| Are the profits not shared with the animators?
|
| It boggles my mind that an anime as popular as One Punch Man got
| awarded to a bottom-of-the-barrel anime studio for S2. I mean,
| you can see the stark contrast between seasons 1 and 2. Season 2
| has very sparse action scenes, and heavily utilizes off-screen
| talking (i.e. the camera is panning some static background while
| a conversation is taking place so the animators don't have to
| animate). That leads me to believe the money/profits generated by
| the success of a season is getting eaten by ip owners and
| middlemen, and that the studio itself is fighting for the scraps.
| If so, that incentive structure needs to change if you want to
| increase the quality of the anime. Can anyone who knows more
| about the anime business model in Japan chime in? Is this a case
| of IP owners holding an iron grip on the rights and profits and
| being stingy with anime studios?
|
| At any rate, I'm surprised more American-based anime studios
| aren't springing up to poach Japan's top animation talent with
| top pay.
| verall wrote:
| In the traditional model, the anime is marketing material for
| the franchise. Money is in figures, merchandise, and manga,
| which usually all existed before the anime was created.
| Generally only established studios with plenty of funds do
| original (not first portrayed in another medium) anime.
|
| OPM went to JC for S2 because the very expensive S1 from
| Madhouse had already satisfied the goal of bringing tons of new
| fans to the franchise.
|
| This is changing though, as anime is getting cheaper to produce
| and international viewers are increasing.
| noodle wrote:
| > OPM went to JC for S2 because the very expensive S1 from
| Madhouse had already satisfied the goal of bringing tons of
| new fans to the franchise.
|
| IIRC it was also scheduling. Madhouse was booked up for a
| while.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| A likelier hypothesis is that for every One Punch Man, there's
| a dozen mediocre series that flop and need to be carried by the
| profits of the series that succeed, analogous to the games
| industry and Hollywood movies, which are also hit-driven
| entertainment.
| Balgair wrote:
| I'd hazard a guess that the industry is Power Law
| distributed, as opposed to Gaussian distributed. Power Laws
| take a few names depending on your field, but some common
| ones are Pareto distributions, winner-take-all, or fat-
| headed/long-tailed. The underlying math is the same though.
| These distributions are also quite wide ranging, everything
| from tax bills to the size of asteroids is Power Law
| distributed.
|
| If anyone knows the 'mechanism' as to why so many disparate
| measures end up as Power Laws, I'd love to read more on it,
| as I;m sure other HNers would too.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
| ulzeraj wrote:
| I don't think the article makes this clear but animators are
| the people who are responsible to create the frames between key
| frames designed by the actual designers. This also means that
| the person described in the article is competing with studios
| in China and other asian countries that do the same work for
| very cheap prices because they have access to cheap labor.
| mc10 wrote:
| I think there are multiple hypothesized reasons, but I haven't
| seen any numerical figures so it's hard to confirm how
| impactful each is:
|
| - Anime production committees
| (https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2017/05/02/what-is-an-animes-
| pr...) take a large portion of the profit from a show, and
| studios often see very little (they're often not on the
| production committees).
|
| - If the studio doesn't own the IP, they'll likely have to pay
| a hefty amount for it.
|
| - There's not much actual revenue from anime: historically
| studios have tried to monetize via _extraordinarily_ expensive
| DVDs of the episodes (such that only die-hard fans would buy
| them), and merchandise, but apparently the studios don 't even
| get all of the revenue from these sources. Streaming is
| becoming more popular but I'm not sure how much revenue
| Crunchyroll/Netflix/etc. shares with the studios.
|
| - Anime is often seen as an advertisement for the original
| source material (usually manga), so there's less incentive for
| certain parties on the production committee to monetize.
| Smithalicious wrote:
| JC Staff, a "bottom of the barrel studio"? Which universe? (and
| I say that as someone who personally really doesn't like the
| studio)
| ramy_d wrote:
| https://deadline.com/2021/02/avatar-the-last-airbender-franc...
| phailhaus wrote:
| > Are the profits not shared with the animators?
|
| Doesn't matter. Even if profit sharing were implemented, the
| boss gets to choose the percentage of the profit that animators
| get. Due to supply and demand, they'll still get the short end
| of the stick. Definitely better than nothing, but the problem
| will continue to exist in another form.
| minikites wrote:
| If workers were paid more, that leaves less money for the
| executives, who are the real heroes under capitalism.
| [deleted]
| stevenwoo wrote:
| For a counter example of why American-based anime studios
| aren't popping up, an ostensibly American production, The
| Simpsons, has had Korean studios in the credits for the major
| parts of animation from the very first episode, same with
| Avatar: The Last Airbender. If you watch The Simpsons on DVD,
| in one of the season one specials Groenig talks about getting
| the animatics from Korea and having to go back and forth with
| the Korean studio until they captured the look that was
| desired. The producers will outsource to get the cheapest
| production. IIRC American animation in all media was dwindling
| at this point because studios didn't want to pay Americans to
| do the animation. The current Japanese studio doing Attack on
| Titan is outsourcing components to Vietnamese and Chinese
| studios probably for the same sort of reason.
| zerocrates wrote:
| Outsourcing of at least parts of the production is
| essentially totally widespread, in both the US and Japan, as
| far as I'm aware.
| gruez wrote:
| >If so, that incentive structure needs to change if you want to
| increase the quality of the anime.
|
| The incentive is that if the anime is low quality, people won't
| watch anymore.
| minikites wrote:
| How does that affect the executive making that decision, who
| is already wealthy? It's not like executives are ever
| punished for poorly running a company.
| gruez wrote:
| >How does that affect the executive making that decision,
| who is already wealthy
|
| But your other comment[1] seems to suggest that executives
| love money and want to make more, so they would definitely
| be affected by that decision.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26275488
|
| >It's not like executives are ever punished for poorly
| running a company.
|
| Their bonuses are linked to company performance, and they
| can be fired just like any other job.
| fishmaster wrote:
| > Their bonuses are linked to company performance
|
| As history shows this isn't really true.
| minikites wrote:
| >Their bonuses are linked to company performance, and
| they can be fired just like any other job.
|
| So they get fired, then what? They get hired by another
| company for more money because now they have experience.
| That's what I mean about not being punished.
|
| No executive ever ends up destitute and on the streets.
| We should strive for all workers to have the same safety
| net as executives.
| s_m_t wrote:
| You shouldn't think of the anime in isolation. They are
| multimedia franchises. The anime is there to sell the manga,
| the figures, the light novel, etc.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| The most recognizables ones are, but I'd wager most anime has
| no such ambitions.
| drewwwwww wrote:
| you'd be wrong, as far as i'm aware. almost all anime in
| the current system is an adaptation of a manga or LN - the
| anime comes at the end of the multimedia expansion project.
| SllX wrote:
| Or an adaptation of a game; the ones with multiple
| endings even sometimes receive multiple anime projects to
| show off aspects of the different paths and different
| endings.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| It's probably widely why Pokemon is so successful. It's not
| about the show, it's about selling all the other products.
| The show is one big advertisement. And it's good, too.
|
| Or at least it was, when I was a kid watching it on a CRT. I
| have no idea what it's like now.
| konart wrote:
| Still there.
|
| Also Gundam. The whole franchise was initially a way to
| promote model kit :D
| jolmg wrote:
| That reminds me of how excited I got when I got a pokedex
| and workable pokeballs from Santa. It's been a long time
| since there were only 150 Pokemon. I wonder if they're even
| still using pokedexes in the series.
|
| I also got a couple of digivices from Digimon, from the
| second and fourth(?) season. I remember they had story
| modes and contacts at the top for multiplayer gameplay, as
| well as a walking sensor for story advancement which you
| could cheat by just shaking the device for hours. My friend
| with whom I battled it out never had a chance because he
| actually tried walking the distance. That's until he
| noticed the gap between our digimon was getting too big
| despite all the walking he did, and I ended up telling him
| the trick. Quite a facepalm moment right there. Those were
| neat little devices for our ages back then.
| Igelau wrote:
| > I wonder if they're even still using pokedexes in the
| series.
|
| The pokedex itself is a pokemon now. It hosts a Rotom.
| kylegill wrote:
| My friend was the one with the working pokedex and boy
| was I jealous. Lots of Pokemon nostalgia thinking about
| all the gizmos and toys I bought, trading cards, video
| games, marbles, action figures, you name it.
|
| Fun time to be nostalgic since tomorrow is the 25th
| anniversary too.
| kylegill wrote:
| Very true pointing out the multi in multimedia. Just like
| musicians, they make a big chunk of their earnings off of
| merchandise and concerts and not just record sales and
| royalties.
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| Actually, the wast majority of musicians make nothing at
| all. Even fairly popular bands don't.
|
| "That you'd better be in it for the music, because you sure
| as hell aren't going to make any money from being in a
| metal band, certainly in this day and age."
|
| https://www.loudersound.com/features/peripherys-spencer-
| sote...
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/uCZTd
| leecarraher wrote:
| Join your local unions if possible:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Animation_Guild,_IATSE_Loc... ,
| and support union made motion pictures.
| ridaj wrote:
| Gee this makes me glad that I'm passionate about software rather
| than anime. I can totally imagine companies pitting workers
| against each other in our field too. I mean they do to some
| extent but people can make a reasonable living.
| coldtea wrote:
| Cleanliness is booming too, but cleaning persons also live in
| poverty.
|
| It's because:
|
| (a) we don't compensate jobs based on their difficulty or the
| financial success of the product, but on how hard it is to find
| people to do them when we need them.
|
| If there were 100 qualified surgeons for every patient needing an
| operation, and would stampede each other for a chance to work and
| get paid, we'd pay them $25/hour too.
|
| (b) we allow businesses to profit wildly while not paying enough
| (by exploiting (a)), because we have the taboo that not meddling
| with the market is the best course of action. A more englightened
| society that didn't pay too much attention to economy pundits
| working for rich people, might find a way for better revenue
| sharing with employees...
| Eridrus wrote:
| Fulfilling/prestigious jobs will also generally get paid less
| because people will take extra pay cuts to have them.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| >(b) we allow businesses to profit wildly while not paying
| enough (by exploiting (a)), because we have the taboo that not
| meddling with the market is the best course of action. A more
| englightened society that didn't pay too much attention to
| economy pundits working for rich people, might find a way for
| better revenue sharing with employees...
|
| Governments meddle with the economy all the time, there was a
| short period of laissez faire being the dominant thought in the
| Western World in 18th and 19th century, but after WWI. Nowadays
| governments command 30-60% of GDP.
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| > (b) we allow businesses to profit wildly while not paying
| enough (by exploiting (a)), because we have the taboo that not
| meddling with the market is the best course of action. A more
| englightened society that didn't pay too much attention to
| economy pundits working for rich people, might find a way for
| better revenue sharing with employees...
|
| And because we've been taught that discussing how much you earn
| is taboo, especially with your colleagues.
| neonological wrote:
| Animators are more rare and much more in demand then
| programmers relative to the size of the industry IMO. The skill
| is also harder overall. Drawing and animating the human form in
| three dimensions is harder then programming.
|
| I don't think it's a supply side problem. Another phenomenon is
| happening here. Animators do have the option of unionizing
| which mitigates these sorts of issues.
| dubcanada wrote:
| Animation is not a difficult task, yes it's difficult in the
| sense to be amazing you need skill (same with programming)
| but the rest is actually just copying and pasting with slight
| tweaks based on someone elses art/direction.
|
| But it's also art. Painting, cobbler, pottery, blacksmith,
| etc have always been sought after jobs and yet are and have
| been the least paid throughout our history.
| neonological wrote:
| No they don't do that. Especially for anime. What they have
| found is that the copy paste and tweak method produces
| stiff results so no one in the industry does that. It's a
| weird phenomenon.
|
| Every frame is literally sketched by hand entirely which
| makes actual skill required. Anime especially given the
| more realistic human proportions and extensive use of
| z-axis. For something like sponge bob or South Park in the
| US it's much easier... but in Japan the animation is a real
| skill.
|
| Take a look at this:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Yglxt331WoY . This type of
| skill of animating is basically non existent now in any
| place other then japan.
|
| Also blacksmiths were not always the least paid. Prior to
| the industrial revolution it was a common job.
| Arnavion wrote:
| You've cherry-picked examples of big budget scenes.
|
| The vast majority of anime is static backgrounds with
| slow pans and static characters with mouth flaps. The
| backgrounds and characters often get outsourced and the
| studio just adds facial features and mouth flaps.
| neonological wrote:
| It's not that cherry picky. There's thousands of scenes
| like the one I posted that require raw skill. Yes the
| majority of anime is mouth flapping but every episode
| usually contains at least one or two or more action
| scenes where real skill is involved.
|
| If anything the people who do these scenes which I'm
| assuming is the same people who do the mouth flapping
| requires raw skill that is not easy to come by.
|
| If there is a role for a low skill artist that
| exclusively does mouth flapping then yes it's an
| oversupply side issue for those people, but it does not
| explain the low wage of the person who does the action
| scenes.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| >Median annual earnings for key illustrators and other top-line
| talent increased to about $36,000 in 2019 from around $29,000
| in 2015
|
| So it would seem this article is truly about the animators
| responsible for the animation between keyframes. Unfortunately
| I can't find the article on the making of anime I had once
| read, but basically, the key frame artists are drawn by those
| truly responsible for the art style you see. The animation work
| between frames truly is grunt work (this is the truth, I'm
| sorry if you find this offensive) that is accomplishable by
| many.
|
| And lets not pretend that shows with good animation are
| automatically a success. You need a good story, good pacing
| (direction), and in most cases you need to choose the story
| from a pile of hundreds of possibilities.
|
| And, as is often forgotten when the whole "revenue sharing with
| employees" is brought up, the employee is staking no capital
| and can leave at any time. If the anime fails, surely you don't
| suggest "revenue sharing" that loss with the employees.
|
| The vast majority of anime does fail, or only serves as an
| advertisement for the source. Just look at any given season of
| anime, the majority of anime is not well received.
| heldrida wrote:
| In contrast to your statement, which sounds wise but I doubt
| it, I find that there's way more programmers, then there are
| animators; and programmers are usually paid very well.
|
| I did some 3d animation in the past, and once in awhile do some
| 2d animation. I've never met anyone else who does traditional
| 2d animation in person, in comparison with the zillions of
| programmers out there in the wild.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Unfortunately 3dpd is all the rage, barely anyone does 2d.
| smabie wrote:
| supply and demand. Not very many companies do animation.
| rhino369 wrote:
| >(b) we allow businesses to profit wildly while not paying
| enough (by exploiting (a)), because we have the taboo that not
| meddling with the market is the best course of action. A more
| englightened society that didn't pay too much attention to
| economy pundits working for rich people, might find a way for
| better revenue sharing with employees...
|
| You have to be careful there because the overwhelming surplus
| of cheaply acquired goods/services goes to the people who
| received the goods and services and not the person selling the
| goods and services.
|
| Businesses only capture it when they have a competitive
| advantage (either because they have no competition or b/c the
| cost savings can't be matched by a competitor).
|
| Grocery clerks are lowly paid. But grocery is a competitive,
| low margin business. So those low wages mostly mean cheap food.
| nullserver wrote:
| So we want government setting pay rates for anime artist? How
| about quotas. Government pays on a per episode completed.
| More content created the more is paid.
| gruez wrote:
| Sounds like a good way to produce cookie cutter shows for
| the sole purpose of getting government funding.
| 0xfaded wrote:
| Lawyers are a counterexample. There are more law graduates than
| jobs. But starting salaries haven't gone down.
|
| David Graeber made this observation, and suggested some sort of
| class tribalism.
|
| Btw, to use cleaning as a specific example, taxation of
| domestic services is broken in almost every (western?) country
| and skews how people spend their time and money. Most
| professionals would happily trade an hour of work for an hour
| of cleaning services, however, by the time you put income tax
| (and VAT in my case) on top, your hours need to be about 2.5x
| times as valuable as your counterparty.
| foolinaround wrote:
| law and med schools act to limit supply..
| eecc wrote:
| My take is that our (economically) liberal social order
| refuses to accept interdependence, especially towards the
| services that guarantee our otherness from our wild state
| (basically all essential ones such as nurses, garbage, etc)
|
| It's basically a psychological refusal of our vulnerability
| in the world
| milesvp wrote:
| I know someone who did law school career counseling at one
| point. The glut of lawyers has had a downward pressure on law
| salaries, but pay and even hiring tends to be highly
| correlated with the tier of the law school a lawyer grated
| from. I'm not sure I'd call this class tribalism, so much as
| a great filter. People who get into top law schools tend to
| be super competitive and are going to tend to be competent as
| well, so you're at least partially filtering out people who
| are likely going to be willing to work for low compensation.
| If starting pay dropped low enough, these lawyers would be
| going and getting other jobs. My friend used to laugh about
| the low end internships complaining about why students
| weren't rushing to fill their position, and she had to
| constantly remind them that if their pay was even marginally
| close to the local minimum wage then her students had better
| options elsewhere.
| dgfitz wrote:
| I believe lawyer salaries (at least in the US) have a bi-
| modal distribution. [1]
|
| Edit: What I mean to say is, the good lawyers make the same
| good money, the vast majority of lawyers do not.
|
| [1] https://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib
| aphextron wrote:
| >Edit: What I mean to say is, the good lawyers make the
| same good money, the vast majority of lawyers do not.
|
| It's also not even about being a "good" lawyer. It is
| completely determined by your law school and GPA. The big
| firms won't even look at your resume if you're not from a
| top 10 school.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The lawyer who helped my mom write her will was a co-
| worker at a department store before he went to night
| school and got a law degree.
|
| He was good at that area of law, one which everyone
| encounters at least once in life. He did not do the work
| million-dollar lawyers do and he did make millions.
| dmoy wrote:
| T13, and with some exceptions (some law firms will draw a
| top few students from more local law schools, for
| example, also certain specialties get different
| treatment).
|
| But generally yes. School first, then class rank.
| 23iofj wrote:
| _> There are more law graduates than jobs. But starting
| salaries haven 't gone down._
|
| Perhaps this isn't true? It's possible that salaries for
| lawyers are not going down, but that salaries for law
| graduates _are_ going down (because not all law grads become
| lawyers).
|
| Also, I thought salaries outside the major firms have
| cratered? (Or maybe were never all that high to begin with
| but law school has become crazy expensive and the lower
| ranked schools are churning out more and more people? IDK.)
|
| My local bartender has a JD and passed the bar. He bartends
| because it pays better.
| duxup wrote:
| Yeah I know some folks who are attorneys and you mention
| another lawyer and they don't care, but once they hear where
| the other attorney works they're suddenly ALL ears.
|
| The difference is vast when it comes to the lawyers who I
| know who are making incredible amounts of money and those who
| are just... somewhat independent small business folks.
| fhrow4484 wrote:
| The difference between lawyer jobs and house cleaning jobs,
| is if suddenly the demand of both jobs surge such that they
| all pay $500k/year, people could quit their $499k-and-less
| job _today_ and start their house cleaning job.
|
| That's not the case for starting lawyering, you have to: Go
| to law school, pass the bar, have a set of specialized skills
| than cleaning doesn't require.
|
| This combination of skill and long (and costly...) processs
| is what keeps lawyer salaries higher.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| It's why comp sci is still a high paying field. You have to
| know low level programming, basic circuitry, and how coding
| works. And the hardest part is you can't bs your way
| through this field. It's extraordinarily easy to point out
| someone bluffing on a resume with a simple linked list or
| binary tree test. With lawyers or business people, it's all
| about connections.
| sidlls wrote:
| > And the hardest part is you can't bs your way through
| this field.
|
| What makes you think that? It's pretty trivial to cram
| for the coding and design questions, and be a mediocre
| engineer on a good career trajectory.
| Shivetya wrote:
| Well there is that pesky problem where animators and cleaners
| not being used or existing won't land you in jail or fined
| beyond your means to pay but having a lawyer can help
| mitigate or prevent it.
|
| we live in a society that is heavily litigated because we
| have governments at all levels churning out laws and
| regulations to their benefit and those of their supporters.
|
| There are some fields that exist to protect you from physical
| and financial harm and those will always exist and be
| desirable until we can eliminate the causes.
| blobbers wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Watching Gantz, you wait for that moment at the end where
| something happens and realize you've wasted 10 hours of
| your life.
|
| Accused of a crime? You may realize you've wasted your life
| in jail because you hired a bad lawyer.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Lawyers don't give away their trade secrets and have
| something like trade union that is not trade union, unlike
| engineers and artists.
|
| If you want to learn how to solve any engineering problem or
| how to create an illustration you can choose from ample
| amount of tutorials that are free or very cheap and teach
| specifics. If that's not enough, you can ask veterans for
| guidance and most will happily help you out and even give you
| specific detailed answers to your problems. People also would
| be hired based on their performance and no one will ask for
| diploma if you show performance.
|
| On the other hand, if you ask a lawyer they will be extremely
| vague and would never solve your problem or guide yo without
| a pay even if the solution is something practical like "Go to
| the Home Office, find the whatever manager and ask for the
| hr-103/B form".
|
| They also would limit practicing through memberships to
| professional organisations, limiting the practice only to
| formally trained lawyers.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Salaries in law are famously bimodal:
| https://www.biglawinvestor.com/bimodal-salary-
| distribution-c...
|
| Law is a very status-conscious industry (even more than
| software) and so most of that oversupply of law graduates are
| not "in the club". They get paid relatively low wages and
| have to fight with each other for peanuts.
|
| Some much smaller fraction of law graduates from top schools
| or who otherwise have the right connections get paid
| extremely high salaries because they are only competing with
| each other.
| YinglingLight wrote:
| Journalism weeds itself of those not "in the club" via
| unpaid or barely paid internships in the highest COL
| cities.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| What's the relevance of journalism? It's not a lucrative
| industry and neither are individual journalists well-
| paid.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| This is pretty recent, I think. There used to be a lot
| more newspapers with dedicated newsrooms in smaller
| cities. Carl Bernstein's first job was in Elizabeth, NJ.
| CJ Chivers started in Providence, RI. Dean Baquet started
| in NOLA.
| ghaff wrote:
| Journalism is quite different in that most journalists
| don't make all that much. Also credentialing isn't nearly
| as big a factor. In fact, a lot of people in the industry
| look down on J-schools. The common career path among the
| non-freelance journalists I know at more prestigious
| publications is knocking around trade pubs and (at least
| formerly) small city papers before getting their break.
| (But, yes, connections matter too.)
| ghaff wrote:
| There is some middle ground of corporate lawyers and
| partners at smaller but relatively prosperous practices.
| But, yes, for the many it's making partner at a white shoe
| firm which tends to require attending one of a fairly small
| number of law schools and getting a prestigious clerkship--
| or you're running ads in the subway.
|
| You do get supply demand corrections over time though. If
| you know you'll be making minimum wage if you didn't go to
| a top law school a lot of people would stop doing so.
| neura wrote:
| There are very few to no situations where your company or
| reputation or even your way of life depends on your
| cleaning service.
|
| Or another way to look at this is that lawyers get paid
| based on their reputation. Firms with a high reputation
| only have the ability to hire so many new lawyers. Those
| positions are indeed highly sought after, because that's
| how you get paid well, by getting in with a firm that
| already has a reputation. You're going to have a hard time
| starting out on your own, building up a reputation. Hell,
| sometimes you need to have built enough of a reputation
| just to get a position with a firm that has a high
| reputation.
|
| While people/companies are looking for the best person/firm
| they can afford to represent them... cleaners are still
| just cleaners.
| chadash wrote:
| > If there were 100 qualified surgeons for every patient
| needing an operation, and would stampede each other for a
| chance to work and get paid, we'd pay them $25/hour too.
|
| The number of surgeons is artificially low because of limits on
| the number of residency spots in this country. So I agree that
| prices can probably come down, somewhat. However, attorneys are
| not limited in the same way but can still cost a fortune,
| because people are willing to pay a lot for perceived value
| when there's a high stakes outcome. Some things just aren't
| worth farming out to the lowest bidder.
| blobbers wrote:
| That's not "artificially" low.
|
| You need to do a residency to be properly trained to handle
| all kinds of situations. Your surgeon can't be in a position
| of "well I've never done this in a supervised setting so let
| me go find someone to teach me" as the lead surgeon. That's
| exactly the reason they do a residency.
| komodo009 wrote:
| That's fine. The artificial part is limits placed on how
| many residencies there are available.
|
| https://www.ucop.edu/federal-governmental-
| relations/_files/f...
| chadash wrote:
| What's artificially low is the number of residency slots.
| In other words, it's not just that you have to clear a bar
| to be a surgeon. It's that there are literally X number of
| slots and if you don't get one of them, you're out,
| regardless of whether you would qualify. I'd say it's an
| artificial constraint since there are far more people
| trying to get into med school (not a specific school... med
| school generally) than there are slots.
|
| With law, for example, you have to go to law school and
| pass a test, but if you do, you are in. There's a lot of
| law schools out there, to the point where a large
| percentage of people graduating don't get good jobs. The
| same isn't true for medical residency graduates.
| ggreer wrote:
| > (b) we allow businesses to profit wildly while not paying
| enough (by exploiting (a)), because we have the taboo that not
| meddling with the market is the best course of action. A more
| englightened society that didn't pay too much attention to
| economy pundits working for rich people, might find a way for
| better revenue sharing with employees...
|
| The highest profit margin I can find is Toei Animation, which
| in 2020 made 11.4 billion yen in profit on 54.8 billion yen in
| sales[1], giving them a 20% profit margin. If every animation
| studio had that high of a profit margin and 100% of profits
| went to workers, industry wages would rise 20%. Though if that
| were the case, the company's profits would be zero and one bad
| year would end them.
|
| 1.
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200930164251/http://corp.toei-...
| newsclues wrote:
| Do we know there is no Hollywood accounting in animation?
| ggreer wrote:
| We can't be completely sure, but the assets, sales, and
| employee numbers look reasonable to me.
|
| The only weird corporate structure I found was Studio
| Ghibli. Their museum's store (but not the museum itself) is
| run by Mammayuto Co., Ltd.[1] This company loses 60 million
| yen a year but has only 1 million yen in liabilities. I'm
| guessing it's a way for Studio Ghibli to avoid taxes of
| some kind.
|
| https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&u=https:
| /...
| cblconfederate wrote:
| There is not an overabundance of quality content. Almost nobody
| pays a lot more for a "better cleaner". Popular art is not
| commodity . The problem here clearly is the lack of an easy way
| to pay .
| duxup wrote:
| When I changed careers and did a coding bootcamp there were a
| handful of "thought I wanted to make video games but too many
| other people felt the same way" guys and girls in there.
| closeparen wrote:
| We don't have unlimited capacity for everyone who wants to make
| a good living doing $X to do be satisfied. They can hustle for
| a low-paying opportunity or they can just be told "no" by a
| central planner, hiring hall union, credentialing admissions
| process, etc.
|
| That may solve an observer's concern about profit/exploitation,
| but it leaves the worker with strictly fewer options.
|
| _People not getting what they want is just as bad whether or
| not anyone else is benefitting at the same time._
| Aerroon wrote:
| > _A more englightened society that didn 't pay too much
| attention to economy pundits working for rich people, might
| find a way for better revenue sharing with employees..._
|
| How would this avoid (a) and (b) though? Your society needs to
| somehow balance what jobs people do. There is no real way to
| measure how difficult a job is. You could argue that hard
| manual labor is a very difficult job, yet there are many people
| who prefer that to sitting down, learning a lot and then doing
| a mentally exhausting desk job. The willingness of people to do
| a job needs to be accounted for when you're deciding whether a
| job is difficult or not, but this very much depends on the
| person. How would you account for this without looking at how
| difficult it is to replace a person doing a specific job?
| koonsolo wrote:
| > might find a way for better revenue sharing with employees
|
| Most people want a steady paycheck at the end of the month and
| (a feeling of) security. This seems to cost money indeed.
|
| At least in Europe, when you are a freelancer, you earn
| considerably more for doing the same job. Why? Because of the
| earlier mentioned point.
|
| You would think most people would start freelancing because of
| this, but it's not true. Most prefer the safety.
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| And this is why we need to break down the apprenticeship based
| training system in medicine. The monopoly on knowledge that
| such a small group of people have is tremendously bad for
| society and more importantly, progress.
| gameman144 wrote:
| What would be a suitable alternative? Not necessarily against
| this, but I can say that I'd personally never go to a doctor
| who hadn't had extensive clinical training as part of their
| education, at least not for anything serious.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| There are plenty of things I'd go to a doctor for even if
| they had 90% less medical training.
|
| Get prescriptions to variously mostly safe drugs anti
| depressants/weight loss drugs/blood pressure medicine,
| dandruff shampoo.
|
| Refill any prescription.
|
| Those two items are probably 80% of the reason anyone I
| know goes to a doctor.
|
| Now for surgeons.
|
| It's true that you want someone with a lot of experience
| for surgery but there are still ways to get more highly
| trained surgeons. Throw out undergrad requirements for med
| school, if the average career for a fully trained surgeon
| in 16 years we've just increased the supply by ~25%.
|
| Allow surgeons from other countries to come practice in the
| U.S. without completing a full residency. We could easily
| suck up the worlds surgeons because we pay so much more.
|
| Open up/pay for more residency spots.
| gameman144 wrote:
| > There are plenty of things I'd go to a doctor for even
| if they had 90% less medical training.
|
| As mentioned below, PAs and NPs already do a lot of these
| tasks. However, the big value-add I see in MDs as opposed
| to seeing NPs or PAs with problems is that they have the
| depth and breadth of training to have first-hand
| experience with the exceptions to normal circumstances.
|
| The standard medical mantra of "if you hear hoof beats,
| think horses, not zebras" works great for normal
| scenarios. If there actually _is_ a zebra situation,
| though, I have far more faith in professionals with
| extensive clinical training at identifying those
| situations.
|
| > Those two items are probably 80% of the reason anyone I
| know goes to a doctor.
|
| Regarding prescriptions, this may be blind faith in
| regulatory institutions, but I assume that there is a
| reason that mostly-safe drugs require a prescription. If
| the criteria for prescription refills or simple
| procedures doesn't require the full breadth/depth of
| clinical training, though, then NPs and PAs already exist
| to fill that role.
|
| > We could easily suck up the worlds surgeons because we
| pay so much more.
|
| I'd argue that this is an explicit non-goal. We don't
| want to attract the most surgeons/doctors, we want the
| surgeons/doctors we have to be trained and practiced to
| an extremely high bar. You're definitely right that there
| are lots of scenarios which don't require this extremely
| high bar, and that's the reason why not all medical
| personnel are doctors. Nurses and physician assistants
| play a critical role in healthcare specifically _because_
| they can tackle those 80% of cases you mentioned, but the
| way around this isn 't to dilute the training of medical
| doctors, it's to delegate the work that's better
| performed by others to those others.
| [deleted]
| lc9er wrote:
| > Those two items are probably 80% of the reason anyone I
| know goes to a doctor.
|
| This role seems to be increasingly filled by Physicians
| Assistants and Nurse Practitioners.
| CyberRage wrote:
| Not relevant at all.
|
| Good artists and animators are very hard to find. It is about
| culture more than anything. Japan is the problem.
| rasz wrote:
| $25/hour is what Surgeons dream of in Europe east of Germany.
| Retric wrote:
| (b) Minimum wage and safe working conditions are a thing in
| most developed countries.
|
| However, enforcement is another story. While Japan's
| prefectural minimum wages range from Y=714 to Y=932 per hour
| (6.71+$) for all workers, that's often ignored.
| diob wrote:
| Follow on to a)
|
| Society is also structured in such a way that for the most part
| every job will have folks clamoring for it. When you are born
| without capital, you have to take what you can get.
|
| Unfortunately I think it's going to keep getting worse as
| wealth inequality increases.
|
| Imagine walking into a monopoly game where each piece is
| already bought and owned. Try to win at that. Instead, I could
| imagine you wind up working for someone, and feed them a
| majority of the profit while you get scraps.
|
| I don't have good solutions for how to fix this, other than
| perhaps universal basic income would alleviate things.
| dystend wrote:
| You should look up the Mondragon Corporation. It's a worker
| owned cooperative. Highly democratic institution. I'd
| postulate that by and large due to the nature of it, and with
| tens of thousands of similar edifices in concert we could
| excise a great deal of power (wealth) from the government and
| corporations, placing it in the hands of the people who
| earned it.
|
| Entities like this can't get funding though, since it
| endangers the contemporary business model and leaves little
| in the way of profit for banksters since by nature company
| stock is traded only internally, exchanged between employee
| and the company to prevent external interlopers from gaining
| a foothold. Governments would also see a great deal of their
| power dissolved as a product of the internal democratic
| processes dealing with social issues.
|
| It comes with issues, but with multiplicity, I think the
| stratification would be greatly remedied. The stratification
| comes from non-owners participating in the business, they
| don't have voting rights and they're subject to lower
| compensation, generally. That's what we're subject to now,
| generally, in any case. With more companies following this
| modality, I believe that would be alleviated to a degree
| where if one was insistent they could always find an
| opportunity to become a worker-owner.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > , but on how hard it is to find people to do them when we
| need them.
|
| This isn't even the case. Last season in my country fruits were
| rotting in the fields cause nobody was there to pick them up.
| Did farmers increase salaries in order to get more fruit
| pickers? No.
|
| Here, I suspect the obvious in the anime industry, like in many
| entertainment sectors including VFX: salary fixing between
| studios to keep pays low.
|
| > If there were 100 qualified surgeons for every patient
| needing an operation, and would stampede each other for a
| chance to work and get paid, we'd pay them $25/hour too.
|
| Given how opaque the healthcare industry is when it comes to
| cost for non elective surgeries, I doubt costs would go down
| even if you multiplied the number of surgeons by 1000. Case
| points: there are loads of restaurants yet the hospital will
| steal bill a meal 20 times what it would cost in the nearby
| restaurant.
| jeffbee wrote:
| So, why didn't the growers offer better wages to get their
| fruit picked? Were they ambivalent because of insurance? Or
| perhaps they thought raising wages was futile? Some other
| reason?
| gruez wrote:
| price elasticity[1] might be an issue. Fruit picking is
| seasonal work, so even if the wage were attractive you'll
| have a tough time finding people willing to quit their
| current job just so they earn slightly more picking fruits.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_supply
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| To a first approximation: the value of the labor is a ceiling
| on how much you can be paid to do it. The availability of
| laborers determines the floor of the price of labor.
| mcv wrote:
| I think pay is largely a matter of power. Even bad managers
| get paid well. CEOs that drive their company to bankruptcy
| often still get massive bonuses on the way out. There are
| lots of people who want to do that job, and the people doing
| it aren't always good at it, yet still get paid a ton.
|
| The worst paid are always the most powerless.
|
| Of course having rare skills that are in high demand also
| gives you power, but it's one of many kinds of power that can
| give you more control over your own salary.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> This isn 't even the case. Last season in my country
| fruits were rotting in the fields cause nobody was there to
| pick them up._
|
| It is the case, but leaves some assumptions on the table.
| Namely that you understand that price exists to be a
| deterrent, and when price rises too high you will decide that
| you don't need something anymore.
|
| The fruits rotted in the fields because they weren't worth
| picking. There was no need to pay anyone to do a job that
| wasn't deemed worthwhile to do in the first place.
| Veen wrote:
| > The fruits rotted in the fields because they weren't
| worth picking.
|
| That may be true, but why weren't they worth picking? In
| agriculture, large buyers often enforce artificially low
| prices (monopsony). Even if farmers were willing to pay
| pickers more, there's no point if the buyers refuse to pay
| a fair price that accounts for increased wages.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> but why weren 't they worth picking?_
|
| The exact same reason. As the price rises in the grocery
| store, you and I stop buying those fruits. When we stop
| buying them, there is no need to produce even more of
| what is already not being purchased.
| [deleted]
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Last season in my country fruits were rotting in the fields
| cause nobody was there to pick them up. Did farmers increase
| salaries in order to get more fruit pickers? No.
|
| Probably because raising the wages would cost them more than
| the loss of the harvest since the price per tonne of fruit
| was already decided by long term contracts and there were no
| financial penalties for spoilage / mis-harvests in these
| contracts.
|
| Ever since food became a global commodity, the conditions in
| food manufacturing became a ruthless race to the bottom -
| with the worst offender being meatpacking. The John Oliver
| segment last weekend was _horrifying_ to watch, even from an
| European viewpoint (where we also have a history of
| exploitation and animal cruelty, but nowhere even close to
| that).
| [deleted]
| wilsonrocks wrote:
| > This isn't even the case. Last season in my country fruits
| were rotting in the fields cause nobody was there to pick
| them up. Did farmers increase salaries in order to get more
| fruit pickers? No.
|
| Sad that this is one of the plot points of The Grapes Of
| Wrath and is still happening today.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > This isn't even the case. Last season in my country fruits
| were rotting in the fields cause nobody was there to pick
| them up. Did farmers increase salaries in order to get more
| fruit pickers? No.
|
| Is the fruit worth picking if salaries need to be increased
| to get workers? In a lot of cases the answer is no.
|
| A lot of work only makes sense at a particular salary. If
| market salaries are above that, the work just isn't done.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >A lot of work only makes sense at a particular salary. If
| market salaries are above that, the work just isn't done.
|
| All sorts of narrow specialized skill jobs (e.g. rebuilding
| electric motors) have gone this way in the west.
| [deleted]
| Retric wrote:
| People can pick a lot of fruit per hour. You would need
| something like 1 cent apples for that to be an issue.
|
| At that point it's not a question of making money, but
| minimizing losses.
| konjin wrote:
| Yet there are automated apple pickers.
|
| There is no money in agriculture. The only reason why
| most farms aren't bankrupt is because of subsidies.
| estsauver wrote:
| That's just not true. It's about 15% of net incomes
| currently, but has hovered around 25% of net (in the US):
|
| https://www.agriculture.com/news/business/us-heads-for-
| highe....
| konjin wrote:
| It can be 1% and still be what keeps the majority of
| farms from going under.
|
| 15% is absolutely "I will go bankrupt if I don't have
| this" territory.
| Retric wrote:
| If you drop that in one year sure, but remove all
| subsidies globally over even 10 years and the market
| would adjust.
| konjin wrote:
| By having firms go bankrupt.
| yardie wrote:
| Food is incredibly cheap. If you can get to a farmers
| market on a not busy day you'd be really impressed what
| you can get.
|
| Food distribution is a complete disaster. Lots of
| middlemen between farmers and consumers inflate prices
| Retric wrote:
| In a competitive market _long term_ subsides don't
| actually benefit the industry's profit margins. Suppose
| we subsidize toilet paper, suddenly prices drop and
| people might start using toilet paper for random other
| stuff if it's cheap. However, the industry would simply
| expand until things stayed about the same.
|
| Where farm subsides play a role is dampening the boom
| bust cycle.
| mcv wrote:
| Fruit picking is a very small part of the cost. Doubling
| the pay of the pickers wouldn't double the price of the
| fruit in the stores. Most likely, they'd cost about 10
| cents extra or something. Easily worth it.
|
| Whenever the milk price is low, we get farmer's protests
| that they don't get enough for their milk. Turns out they
| get 9 cents per liter for which I pay more than a euro. You
| could double their pay, include it in the price, and I
| wouldn't care.
| anm89 wrote:
| You say that and yet they opted to shut down production
| as opposed to raising wages. That seems to be a better
| indicator of the underlying reality than your opinion.
| mcv wrote:
| I think part of the consideration is that if they pay
| fruit pickers more now, they fear they may have to pay
| them more in the future as well. It's also possible they
| simply refuse to pay fruit pickers more because they
| strongly believe fruit pickers don't deserve better pay.
|
| There are often a lot more factors at play in these sort
| of things. Some rational, some maybe not so much.
| merpnderp wrote:
| So they set a whole season's profits on fire to stick it
| to seasonal workers? That seems so irrational as to
| require at least a smidgen of evidence to take seriously.
| notional wrote:
| Ever hear about NYC landlords who leave ground level
| properties vacant for years because they'd rather lock in
| a high paying tenant. Same principal.
| ryandrake wrote:
| "The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must
| be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the
| saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges
| dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take
| the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy
| oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out
| and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on
| the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at
| the people who have come to take the fruit. A million
| people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed
| over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the
| country."
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Yeah, except if fruit is left rotting in the fields, then
| the supply could well be overabundant anyway and the
| profit margin isn't worth even that small cost for the
| workers. Absent evidence to the contrary, I will believe
| that business owners are chiefly rational actors.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Fruit picking is a large part of the farmers' cost. All
| the extra cost of transportatation, storage, wholesale
| logistics, retail and markup matters for the retail
| price, but that's not relevant - the farmer is competing
| for a tiny share of that retail price, and if that extra
| ten cents goes out of _their_ share that easily makes it
| unprofitable.
|
| Your example with milk is a very good illustration -
| something that raises the farmers costs by a few cents is
| much more important than what it might seem based on the
| fact that the difference is small compared t owhat the
| retail buyer pays.
|
| All the leverage that farmers have can't get them more
| than 9 cents/liter. That's it, there's no hope for them
| to earn 18 cents/liter - sure, the wholesalers probably
| _could_ , but why would they gift money to other
| businesses without any need to do so? So if your milk
| production process gets 1 cent/liter more expensive (but
| your competitors, possibly far away, are still willing to
| keep the same price), you can't get 10 cents/liter, it
| simply wrecks your profit margin - if your profit margin
| was 11% (1 cent/liter profit out of 9 cents/liter
| revenue), you might as well go out of business since you
| won't be earning anything.
| anoonmoose wrote:
| Salaries for fruit pickers didn't go up because demand for
| fruit pickers didn't go up. The farmers knew that they were
| screwed no matter what they did- if they paid the pickers
| more and tried to pass the costs on, they wouldn't be able to
| sell the fruit, and if they paid the pickers more but ate the
| cost, they wouldn't actually net a profit. So they were going
| to lose money no matter what, and did it in the least-impact
| way possible (let the fruit rot).
| sigstoat wrote:
| > So they were going to lose money no matter what, and did
| it in the least-impact way possible (let the fruit rot).
|
| and at least that option might help fertilize their fields
| for next season.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| This same story is playing out in the Videogame Industry.
|
| That industry is arguably booming too, making more than it ever
| has in the past and growing wildly year over year.
|
| And yet game programmers make some of the lowest salaries among
| all devs, last I checked. Especially at entry level.
|
| To me, that entire industry seems geared towards grabbing fresh
| faced grads who are loaded up on dreams of making games,
| putting them in infinite crunch, and discarding them later when
| they are burned out.
| nend wrote:
| >To me, that entire industry seems geared towards grabbing
| fresh faced grads who are loaded up on dreams of making
| games, putting them in infinite crunch, and discarding them
| later when they are burned out.
|
| This is the way it's "always been" for game development. When
| I was in college 15 years ago, it was the same environment.
| It turned me off from pursuing a career in game development
| (among other factors). I'm sure more senior people than me
| have similar anecdotes.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Unionize.
|
| Seriously, just do it. Do your passion and earn a decent
| living.
| alaties wrote:
| While there are similarities within the videogame industry,
| one has to understand that the plight of a developer is no
| where near as tragic as that of an animator in Japan.
|
| For a developer, the skills learned for working in the
| videogame industry are highly transferable to better paying
| jobs outside of video games. Skills learned on the job are
| also equally valuable outside of industry. When a developer
| is ready to leave the videogame industry, they have skills
| that are in demand and are able to get positions equal to
| their experience.
|
| For a 2D animator, keyframing and tweening are not well-payed
| skills outside of the anime industry. Skills learned on the
| job are equally not well payed. When an animator is ready to
| leave the anime industry, they have to start at the entry
| level of whatever new industry they're entering.
|
| To find that the last few years of your life are deemed
| meaningless by the job market after working your ass off day
| and night... That is a real gut punch.
| YinglingLight wrote:
| That's when you market out your skills to satisfying niche
| fetishes on the Japanese equivalent of Patreon.
|
| On a serious note, there's a slew of skills an animator has
| on their Talent Stack
| (https://personalexcellence.co/blog/talent-stack/). Mere
| fluency of Photoshop, Illustrator, being able to DRAW
| period, work ethic, are no mere skills at all.
| GVIrish wrote:
| Also why the games industry remains stuck on a lot of bad
| practices. The experienced people keep getting driven out.
| the_duke wrote:
| Do you have some examples?
|
| I've never been in the gaming industry, but what I've heard
| from some developers is that writing very dirty throwaway
| code is the norm, since most of it is thrown away anyway
| when the game is done. Which leads to the buggy mess we get
| even from many triple A games, and a never ending cycle of
| re-writing the same things for each game, even within the
| same studio.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| Engine code is very often a small, small part of what
| makes games "buggy". Bugs come in all sorts of shapes and
| sizes, but a majority of the bugginess of games that I've
| seen stems not from code, but from the large matrix of
| combinatorics that game developers can create for
| themselves in their designs.
|
| Simple, contrived example: if I create an open-world game
| with open-world design, I can complete quests in any
| order. Maybe I can start doing a quest, and then decide
| to stop doing it halfway through, or maybe I can switch
| quests halfway through.
|
| The test case matrix for this is now: every quest x every
| other quest. If some quest spawns a timer that will do
| something in 3 minutes, and something else forgets to
| stop it when I switch quests, that's a bug. Maybe the
| timer spawns some NPC, and it should stop when I switch
| quests. Or maybe the timer will reset some world state,
| and should fire immediately once I switch quests. But
| maybe not always -- if I complete the quest but the game
| internally 'switches quests' to the next one in the
| cycle, I don't want to despawn the NPC.
|
| Is this code? Not really engine code, it's more like
| data, or scripting? It's not really the code that's
| reusable between games, and between engines; it's custom-
| built for the game's flow itself. That's where, in my
| experience, a good majority of "AAA bugginess" happens.
| munificent wrote:
| Ex-game dev. This is really what it's about.
|
| Every engineer knows interacting mutable state tends to
| make code buggier. Well, a game simulating a virtual
| world is essentially a huge ball of deeply interacting
| mutable state _by design_.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| That's actually something kind of funny to me. I've never
| worked in the game industry but I have done game jams in
| the past and I am very interested in making games as a
| hobby.
|
| One of the biggest barriers to me is getting over my need
| to make code that I think is clean. And every time I try to
| read about best practices in game code I come across the
| same mentality: Who cares, write code quick and dirty, as
| long as it works it's fine.
|
| And that's fine, it's just intimidating for me to write
| code like that. Too much perfectionism or something. Maybe
| too much "What if I do it wrong and introduce a bug so
| entangled in everything that I can't unravel it".
|
| I wish there were even some bare minimum best practices
| suggestions for game code.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Look into Jonathan Blow's work. He doesn't churn out
| garbage code. He cares about his craft and that includes
| artisanship in the games he builds.
| smrq wrote:
| With all due respect to Jon Blow (and I respect him a
| whole lot!)-- I don't think he'd be able to do what he
| does if he didn't make a boatload of money off of Braid.
| gameman144 wrote:
| But he made a boatload off of Braid _after_ he coded it.
| Not sure I understand this point.
| slifin wrote:
| Braid itself was novel because it took game state and
| made it immutable, immutability often needs a lot of
| consideration
|
| This is definitely speculation on my part but maybe he
| didn't become a coder focused on his craft because of the
| finances afforded to him from Braid, maybe he created
| Braid a quality game because he was a coder focused on
| his craft?
| sjtindell wrote:
| To me Braid was literally the first example of him doing
| what he does.
| [deleted]
| Jasper_ wrote:
| Let me offer you some advice, based on a few years in the
| games industry: I think every other industry's approach
| to code cleanliness breaks down for complex, intertwined
| simulations with strict performance requirements.
|
| If Google cared at all about the targets that game
| developers cared about, my Gmail wouldn't take 10 seconds
| to load and run at 2FPS once the page is there.
|
| I've read some of the best code I've ever seen, written
| by programmers in the games space. Code with very few
| tests, heavy intertwined behavior, wide-reaching global
| effects, and lots and lots of state.
|
| Ultimately, treat the code as an artifact of the project:
| make it as clean as you need to get the game done, but
| any extra scaffolding you add will only come back to bite
| you later once you want to change how something is wired.
| From that end, all the usual suspects apply: make code
| easy to delete, make it have clearly-defined boundaries,
| and depend on other code as little as possible. Push
| yourself to use copy/paste more than you think you
| should, you'll be surprised how easy it is to delete wild
| experiments if you don't have to untangle the web of
| dependencies.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Thank you for the advice. :)
| munificent wrote:
| I worked at EA for eight years and have worked at Google
| for the past ten. Google and the GMail team most
| certainly understand how to write performance critical
| code. Your favorite game would take 10 seconds to load
| and run at 2FPS too if it had to be pushed over the
| Internet every time it started up and run inside any of a
| few only mostly-compatible VMs for a dynamically-typed
| scripting language never designed for anything more
| important than making buttons light up when you hover
| over them.
|
| You're correct that optimized code is generally harder to
| maintain. Optimization often requires punching through
| abstraction layers or calcifying certain constraints or
| assumptions in the code.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| I'm a game dev, and I work on high-performance websites
| in my spare time (e.g.
| https://noclip.website/#mkwii/beginner_course ). It's
| actually possible to make stuff that runs fast in
| "mostly-compatible VMs for a dynamically-typed scripting
| language never designed for anything more important than
| making buttons light up when you hover over them" if you
| actually try. But Google does not, so we end up with
| gmail.
| katbyte wrote:
| over DRY code is the bane of my existence
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Your take is pretty accurate from what I've seen.
|
| A friend is on the Call of Duty team, and Medal of Honor
| before that. The way MoH turned into CoD is the owner of the
| studio that made MoH was unwilling to sufficiently share the
| profits, so basically the entire team walked out in mass, got
| their own publishing deal and made CoD.
|
| But only the people who've made a runaway hit have that kind
| of bargaining power. The other 90% of the industry is pretty
| grim.
|
| Things are a lot better on the indie/casual/mobile side, as
| those tend to be smaller studios with close
| friendships/partnerships.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| It is also true that it was once really hard, from a
| technical knowledge and skills point of view, to make video
| games. There were no engines like Unity or Unreal. Every
| feature your game needed had to be written from scratch. The
| artistic tools, particularly for 3d modeling, were crude and
| had to be adapted by people who understood what the engine
| was doing.
|
| Now all those things are much easier to do and understand.
| There are thousands of tutorials on the internet. So making
| games is becoming more like writing books, putting on plays,
| making a low budget movie. More people can do it than there
| is an audience.
|
| The best are still very valuable, in every discipline. But
| the supply of average people is almost limitless.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| One could argue the same for almost any field in software
| development. Despite that, game development has always been
| lower paying thanks to its passion industry roots.
| Meanwhile, web development still dominates most of the job
| market and makes big bank even for average developers doing
| mostly data plumbing.
| jerf wrote:
| It's because there are so many young people who think that
| they absolutely want to be video game developers, so it
| simply doesn't matter how much the companies abuse them,
| there's a fresh horde of possibly-misguided fresh faces right
| behind them. Pretty much every other programming job is in a
| shortage, but here there's a glut.
|
| I say "possibly-misguided" because there are some people for
| whom that is their one and only dream, and if that is their
| choice, hey, great. Go for it. I just want people to go into
| it with open eyes. However, I think the bulk of such people
| are simply misinformed about A: the nature of game
| programming and B: the nature of non-game programming. For
| the most part, they're a lot more similar than a lot of young
| people realize. You don't go into games programming and get
| to "design games"; you're going to consume tickets and do a
| lot of repetitive scut work. Frankly your odds of finding a
| good job where you're self-directed and not entirely doing
| scut work is _better_ outside of the game industry.
|
| So... do your part... spread the word that the games industry
| is mostly bad jobs and the non-games industry actually has a
| lot of good stuff in it, so that by giving young people a
| better understanding of the real situation they can make
| better choice, and help starve the games industry of its
| continuous supply of fresh-faced naive grads to exploit.
| Kranar wrote:
| I have to disagree with this, at least as far as the
| statistics are concerned.
|
| According to Stack Overflow [1] the median age of a
| developer is 33 years old, whereas the median age of a game
| developer is 31 years old [2]. That's not likely to be a
| big enough difference to substantiate your position.
|
| [1]
| https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#developer-
| pro... [2] https://igda.org/resources-archive/diversity-in-
| the-game-ind...
| lucisferre wrote:
| Stack Overflow is not exactly validated market research.
| Comparing two completely different sources of statistical
| data with different collection methodologies is not
| evidence.
| Kranar wrote:
| It's not proof, but it's absolutely evidence and it's
| enough evidence to place the burden that the video game
| industry consists mostly of young people back on the
| person making the claim.
|
| If there is such evidence, by all means produce it.
| chowells wrote:
| The median age doesn't contradict the above model at all.
| What it tells you is that of the developers employed in
| the game industry _at any given time_ , half of them are
| under 31. But it doesn't say a thing about the churn
| below that age.
|
| You can have a bunch of people who jump in at 23, get
| super exploited, and burn out in two years balance
| against one single person over the median age, so long as
| that stream of younger people is serial. The median is
| unchanged, but a lot more people leave the industry
| feeling exploited and abused by it than remain.
| Kranar wrote:
| That wouldn't be possible without a corresponding
| behavior in those above the median age as well. If what
| you said was true and there's a disproportionate group of
| people below the median age leaving the industry without
| an equal number of people above the median age leaving,
| then you'd get a constantly rising median age over time
| and at this point that age would have be considerably
| older than 31 years.
|
| I am not disputing that the game industry has a lot of
| churn. I'm disputing that the game industry has
| substantially more churn among younger people than older
| people and that the churn is significantly different from
| the rest of the software development industry.
|
| It's not so much that young people are uniquely exploited
| and leave after a couple of years, it's that the number
| of software developers doubles every 5 years so that
| there is a huge imbalance of young people in the industry
| in general.
| jobu wrote:
| > _I say "possibly-misguided" because there are some people
| for whom that is their one and only dream_
|
| There's also a ton of societal pressure to "follow your
| dreams" or "pursue your passion", and people conflate their
| passion and enjoyment of _playing_ video games for what it
| would be like to make the games.
|
| First off, people need to differentiate the enjoyment of
| something with the making of it. Not the perfect example,
| but I like to eat meat, yet I know I would hate to be a
| butcher.
|
| Second, if you _really_ enjoy something it 's often better
| to keep it as a hobby. Most people find all the joy gets
| sucked out of their passion when it also involves the
| business of selling, supporting customers, and managing
| costs.
| ghaff wrote:
| Furthermore, don't conflate the apparent glamour (which
| is at least apparent) of those at the top of their
| profession with the working routine of the vast majority.
| For example, the very top professional photographers
| probably mostly have a pretty good life. The university
| photographer who spends their days shooting pictures of
| alumni receiving awards? Not so much.
| willismichael wrote:
| > Not the perfect example, but I like to eat meat, yet I
| know I would hate to be a butcher.
|
| That's actually a way better analogy than you think.
| finikytou wrote:
| I don't think that is the reason.
|
| The main reason is that there isn't enough competition.
| Video Game Companies are pretty much in a monopoly. No one
| is making a game like GTA. No one else is making a football
| game (You need the license), No one else is making doom. No
| one else is making Counter Strike.
|
| Games became brands. The only thing that drives you out of
| business is your own greed of recycling your
| franchises/ideas.
|
| Oh and also many of those companies do not need that many
| of the "expensive" devs because many of those video game
| companies are using middlewares like unity or unreal
| engine.
|
| With more competitions better video game companies would
| hire better engineer at better salaries. that will lift
| everyone else.
| castlecrasher2 wrote:
| >The main reason is that there isn't enough competition.
| Video Game Companies are pretty much in a monopoly.
|
| I'm sorry, but this is completely wrong.
|
| First, there is immense amounts of competition in video
| games; the industry is bigger than ever but there are so
| many companies and even small fry indie shops can make it
| big with talent and a bit of luck.
|
| Second, there are tons of GTA/Doom/CSGO/sports games
| clones, licensing notwithstanding, that fail for various
| reasons that usually boil down to "bad game." Brand
| popularity matters, sure, but many studios blasted their
| way to huge sales and fame through having a damn good
| game, like Minecraft, Terraria, and Rocket League, to
| name a few.
|
| There's so little barrier to entry in the gaming industry
| at the moment. If you make a good game, you will
| generally get tons of sales.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| A fair amount of game brands have also been destroyed due
| to "bad game". SimCity basically blew up what was left of
| its brand, Harvest Moon and the whole thing around that
| destroyed its brand, etc.
|
| I wouldn't necessarily say "make good game get sales",
| just because there are a fair amount of devs who don't
| get marketing right, but the point stands.
| jerf wrote:
| Your explanations are all demand-side. That doesn't
| account for why the _supply_ -side of programmers for
| games is so high. Every game programmer also has the
| skills necessary to do a good portion of non-gaming jobs.
| The thing that game companies have a monopoly on is not
| on jobs the games programmers can do.
|
| As evidence of what I'm talking about I also cite the
| absolutely _huge_ number of "indie" developers, the vast
| majority of them not being the ones you've heard of,
| because most of them aren't famous and face sales figures
| in the hundreds, if not dozens. Many of them are actively
| taking a _negative salary_ (that is, burning somebody 's
| savings) to work in the game industry.
| TheCapn wrote:
| I think it be both at the same time.
|
| People make weird career choices for the perception of
| prestige or being able to call themselves part of a team.
| I got a friend who is an Agricultural Mechanic who works
| for some local owned companies. A few years ago John
| Deere built a facility nearby and you'd be surprised how
| many mechanics, who by all accounts liked their jobs,
| moved to work for John Deere for less pay, less benefits.
|
| Video games aren't that much different. People will harm
| their own career goals thinking they can work for a brand
| name when an unknown company might have a better fit. I'm
| sure they have valid reasons for making the decisions
| they do, but from the outside looking in, it just looks
| like fanboyisms.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| It's abusing the definition of monopoly. There isn't a
| single super-dominant games company choking out
| competition. In fact, companies steal each others' lunch
| all the time; Fortnite surpassed PUBG, Cities Skylines
| from a small Finnish dev surpassed EA's SimCity, and
| Stardew Valley was created by a single developer who
| surpassed Harvest Moon before him.
|
| Monopoly doesn't just mean "this company is bigger than
| I'd like."
| andi999 wrote:
| Also if you look at ID software, they were just a tiny
| (but very skilled and highly dedicated) team who churned
| out one game per month for a year.
| caymanjim wrote:
| Where are you getting monopoly from? Large game
| franchises that have launched (or become popular) in the
| last decade or so all started from small, independent
| studios, or even just a couple people modding an existing
| game. DotA and PUGB are big, started as mods, and have
| spawned (or at least popularized) entire new genres.
| Valve has a history of buying popular mods and turning
| them into franchises (TF, CS, Portal), and they pay
| exceptionally-well. Minecraft exploded from a one-man
| endeavor to a gaming behemoth.
|
| Successful games tend to get purchased by larger
| companies, but there are a lot of large game companies.
| Valve, Epic, EA, Nintendo, Sony, Rockstar, Activision
| Blizzard, Ubisoft, Bioware, etc. And that's not even
| getting into mobile/Facebook games, which are easy to
| speak derisively about, but are still major players in
| the game space.
|
| Game companies are about the most-diverse and least-
| monopolistic of all media we consume.
| [deleted]
| munificent wrote:
| I worked in the game industry for eight years before
| leaving and I have a more nuanced perspective on this. Yes,
| the large supply of aspiring game devs has a lot to do with
| it. And I think the crunch is driven in part by a lack of
| project management expertise caused by the brain drain that
| endemic crunch leads to.
|
| But it's not just that. Every job has a mixture of tangible
| and intangible rewards. Game development scores relatively
| poorly on the tangibles: less pay, fewer benefits, less
| free time. But for many people, it scores incredibly highly
| on the intangibles:
|
| - Spending your day writing code that makes insurance rate
| calculations comply with the latest changes to Iowa tax law
| versus making an orc explode if you hit it with an axe just
| right.
|
| - Working in an office that lets you wear chinos on casual
| Friday versus wearing whatever you like, coming in when you
| like, and being surrounded by culture and people that
| resonate with you.
|
| - Working with accountants and lawyers versus artists and
| sound designers.
|
| - Working on a product used begrudgingly by employees of
| some giant accounting contractor versus make a game you
| love to play.
|
| - Sitting next to folks doing the bare minimum just to get
| a paycheck versus the comradery of being on a team that
| really believes in what they're doing.
|
| - Writing code that's difficult because it encodes
| Byzantine legal regulations versus code that's difficult
| because it uses the latest graphics algorithms to push
| hardware as much as possible.
|
| - Being at a company no one's heard of making software know
| one knows versus being at a brand your friends all know
| working on products they're excited about. (Anecdote: When
| I flew to Orlando to interview at EA, I ended up mentioning
| it to a guy sitting next to me at the airport. He looked at
| me like an absolute celebrity. "Dude, you're gonna be
| working on _Madden_? " I still remember that moment.)
|
| So, yeah, the hours and the pay suck. But when you're in
| your twenties you tend to have a lot of time and not a lot
| of bills. Working on something that resonates with your
| peers, your culture, and your passions is really valuable.
|
| I wish big companies exploited that less, sure. But you see
| low pay and crunch even at small non-exploitive companies
| which implies to me that much of this is simply people
| rationally trading off tangible rewards for intangible ones
| that are more meaningful to them.
|
| I find it really weird how much software engineers
| criticize taking a pay cut to make games while
| simultaneously romanticizing leaving tech completely to
| become a farmer, writer, chef, social worker, etc. (all of
| which, for the record, have miserable hours and shit pay).
| Game devs are essentially doing the same thing but at least
| they get to use their tech skills in the process.
|
| I'm glad I'm not at EA anymore because my values and
| priorities changed. But I don't regret my time there and it
| got me my current job at Google. If I'd spent that time
| chasing some other low-paying dream like writing fiction,
| it's much less likely I would have been able to make that
| transition.
| [deleted]
| cellularmitosis wrote:
| Great post! Something which particularly resonated with
| me:
|
| > Being at a company no one's heard of making software
| know one knows versus being at a brand your friends all
| know working on products they're excited about.
|
| I noticed a dramatic shift in people's reactions when my
| introduction conversations changed from "I'm a
| programmer" to "I make iPhone apps".
| cogman10 wrote:
| I think you've got a warped notion of what non-game dev
| is like. Most of the statements you've made are untrue.
|
| > Working in an office that lets you wear chinos on
| casual Friday versus wearing whatever you like, coming in
| when you like, and being surrounded by culture and people
| that resonate with you.
|
| Most dev jobs are the second thing. Most dev shops don't
| have a dress code. Many have adopted flex time. And
| further, with covid, a lot are fully remote now. Modern
| development is nothing like Office Space.
|
| > Working with accountants and lawyers versus artists and
| sound designers.
|
| You seem to think accountants and lawyers are boring,
| uninteresting, etc. That's just silly. Just because
| someone's job is boring, doesn't mean they are. A lot of
| my co-workers have hobbies in art, music, blowing shit
| up, etc. Just because they spend their day job combing
| over the tax code doesn't mean they aren't every bit as
| fun and interesting as someone who's day job is art.
|
| > Sitting next to folks doing the bare minimum just to
| get a paycheck versus the comradery of being on a team
| that really believes in what they're doing.
|
| I find it hard to believe game dev doesn't have the "I'm
| just here for a paycheck folk" Probably not for long, but
| again, surprised if that's the case. In anycase,
| comradery and teamwork exists in a lot of dev shops. Just
| because you aren't making an orc's head explode doesn't
| mean you can't get excited about increasing stability,
| performance, or getting a product that saves a bunch of
| time and money for the company. There's a lot to
| celebrate beyond "That looks pretty".
|
| > Writing code that's difficult because it encodes
| Byzantine legal regulations versus code that's difficult
| because it uses the latest graphics algorithms to push
| hardware as much as possible.
|
| Both are puzzles to solve, so why diss the one you don't
| understand? Further, what makes you think regular dev
| DOESN'T look to push hardware harder and faster than it
| previously went? Performance work is universal for
| development.
|
| This isn't to say there aren't boring dev jobs that pay
| well. Certainly a large number of jobs are "Make REST API
| over the database". But even those can have opportunities
| for growth, learning, and finding coworkers you love to
| work with.
| munificent wrote:
| I'm painting an extreme picture for emphasis here, but it
| is the case that there are a lot of crushingly boring dev
| jobs. I've done some.
| shiohime wrote:
| I agree with you in some regards - but honestly, the
| intangibles you described were just not enough to
| overcome the tangibles for myself. I had the choice to go
| into a game development concentration and focus entirely
| on going into that market, which I thought I'd love as
| I'm a life long gamer (and probably would have, really).
| However, really the thing that drove me away from the
| industry was exactly the lack of tangibles - more hours
| at work and less pay. I opted to go into a field that I
| wasn't entirely a fan of, purely because of this. I ended
| up working long hours anyways, but did end up receiving
| significantly above average pay, especially compared to
| game dev, letting me pay off my student loans and get a
| mortgage on a house in a relatively short period of time.
|
| Also, I'd argue the number one tangible you're missing vs
| something like, say web dev, is flexibility. Pre-covid,
| none of my friends in the gaming industry had any
| flexibility to work in a remote fashion and was very
| studio based. Whereas remote working has been becoming
| increasingly popular in the web dev world, and I've been
| working remotely for years now which was a huge QoL
| improvement.
|
| I do romanticize about leaving the tech industry in a
| kinda similar-ish fashion to what you were stating in
| that example, but really it's more about romanticizing an
| early / soft retirement for myself, which is only made
| possible because I took a higher paying path than game
| development. But yeah, I do have friends in the industry
| that love it despite the hours and lower pay, because the
| people they work with are great and they're very
| passionate about their projects, whereas yeah, I'm not
| exactly passionate about some of my projects and am doing
| it purely for financial and career advancement reasons so
| it contributes to sometimes really extended burnout
| periods and decreases in my mental health.
|
| So yeah, to each their own with this. I love gaming and
| have made some of my own games as a hobby, but I just
| couldn't justify it as the core of my career despite
| loving it. Kind of a shame in some regards I would say,
| but it is what it is.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| This is absolutely the trajectory I took. I wanted so badly
| to make games. Still do, one of my life goals is to make a
| game that I actually publish.
|
| But I had some great professors in university that steered
| me away from the game industry. I'm quite happy working as
| a web dev now and I can do games as a hobby.
| legohead wrote:
| Both of you are missing a key ingredient that the article
| goes over -- fanboyism. "A lot of people just
| felt that there was value in being able to work on anime that
| they loved," Mr. Hirakimoto said. "No matter how little they
| got paid, they were willing to do the work."
| Looking back at his departure, he said, "I don't regret the
| decision at all."
|
| And the same story is in the video game industry. Take
| Blizzard for example. When I moved to SoCal I applied for
| lots of tech companies including Blizzard, and got several
| offers. Blizzard was _by far_ the lowest offer. And I noticed
| during the interview process, everyone I talked to kept
| asking what I thought about Blizzard, and it wasn 't the
| standard "why do you want to work here?" I got the impression
| they were testing how much of a fanboy I was. And from others
| I've talked to afterwards, that is exactly what they were
| doing.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| You see similar pan out in medicine.
|
| Physicians at "renown" institutions actually tend to make
| less (on average) than the average physician. They can do it
| because so many physicians are willing to move to a high CoL
| location, work more, and take a pay cut.
|
| The best jobs actually tend to be in rural states and areas.
| Pay is better and work/life balance tends to be better.
|
| CNN article:
| https://money.cnn.com/2016/01/27/pf/jobs/doctors-
| pay/index.h...
| cercatrova wrote:
| I mean, they know what they're getting into, it's supply and
| demand. More people simply want the job more than there is
| demand, so they'll be paid less.
| m8s wrote:
| Not only do they make some of the lowest salaries in the
| industry, they work the longest hours as well. Employers that
| allow people to "work on their passions" use that as a
| bargaining chip to lower salaries.
| trentnix wrote:
| _Employers_ use the reality that someone equally talented
| will do it for the same wages or less. It 's that simple.
| coldtea wrote:
| "If you have large profits you should share more with
| your employees [1]" could also be a reality encoded into
| law woth harsh penalties for doing otherwise...
|
| ([1] "And don't try to bypass it by building in another
| country and then come to sell your wares here")
| anm89 wrote:
| Define large, more, share, and should.
|
| There is a reason this is not what laws look like.
| sigstoat wrote:
| gee, shouldn't they be required to reduce their costs for
| the consumer, first? a lot of the folks buying video
| games have even less money than video game developers.
| mejutoco wrote:
| Seems difficult to implement. Suddenly a lot of small
| companies could appear, each barely making any profit.
|
| Maybe an easier incentive would be to give tax breaks to
| cooperatives?
| omginternets wrote:
| I think most people agree with this in general, but the
| difficulty is in the specifics. How large of a profit are
| we talking? How much sharing do we expect?
|
| On the one hand we want to incentivize risk-taking and
| entrepreneurship. On the other, we recognize that it
| takes a village to launch a successful company, and we
| want to share the wealth.
|
| On the one hand we recognize that all work is not equally
| valuable. On the other, we we value people beyond their
| work.
|
| Abstract discussion of this is always disappointing and
| policy based on abstract discussion is always disastrous.
| I really wish we could be more precise in our language,
| because then we would at least recognize the tremendous
| difficulty at hand.
| chongli wrote:
| _If you have large profits you should share more with
| your employees [1] " could also be a reality encoded into
| law woth harsh penalties for doing otherwise_
|
| Hollywood is already one step ahead of you [1]. No reason
| game studios wouldn't follow suit, given a law like that
| to incentivize them.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Hollywood accounting doesn't actually work anymore. It
| depends, in part, on the people getting played not being
| willing to sue for their correct share and just taking
| their lumps.
|
| In part, this is because so many people were burned in
| the past that it's now standard for contracts to include
| provisions specifying _which_ profits the talents
| /investors are getting a % of. There's also many A-list
| talent that simply refuse to work for a studio which uses
| Hollywood accounting. And finally, the public-trading
| status of so many studios today basically renders
| Hollywood accounting impossible at a legal and financial
| level.
|
| But the primary killer of the Hollywood accounting system
| is the big switch to streaming, in which royalties/etc
| are paid _upfront_ (at a time-value discount) rather than
| over time, which essentially eliminates all of the
| opportunity to include "costs" (like usurious interest
| or marketing expenses) that had been used to generate
| paper losses on otherwise successful films.
| chongli wrote:
| A lot of what you said doesn't apply to game developers
| or animators in the anime industry. Hollywood workers,
| famous and otherwise, are all represented by powerful
| unions. Game developers and anime animators ( _cf._
| western animators) are not.
| trentnix wrote:
| Strangely there is always lots of talk about "profit
| sharing" and not "profit and loss sharing". And I've
| never had to sign a business loan guarantee as an
| employee, but I've done so as a business owner.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> Strangely there is always lots of talk about "profit
| sharing" and not "profit and loss sharing"._
|
| That's because corporate limited liability shields
| stakeholders from losses beyond their sunk costs.
|
| As an employee, you probably are close to last in line
| behind most of the other creditors, and may have to just
| write off that last (missed) paycheck. But that paycheck
| you are never going to get is the full extent of your
| liability for the company's losses, even theoretically.
|
| Not that it encompasses all the _risks_ you 're exposed
| to (time not working, looking for a new job, etc.) But
| those are the same regardless.
| [deleted]
| motogpjimbo wrote:
| Would you also argue that when companies need additional
| funding during hard times or to expand, the employees
| should be forced by law to invest their own money into
| the company? With harsh penalties if they refuse?
|
| If not, then it seems like someone else is taking all the
| risk but the employees are reaping all the rewards.
|
| It would be great for me personally if my employer was
| forced to share his profits with me during the good
| times. But the reality is that during the hard times -
| when there's a global pandemic for example - he's the one
| who has to remortgage his house and max out his credit
| cards to make payroll, whereas I'm just a guy who can
| walk away with a month's notice.
| AngryData wrote:
| No, because that was their risk to take in starting a
| business and if it fails the worst position they are in
| is the exact position their employees were always in.
| Businesses should have no guarantees, individual people
| on the other hand probably should, if not for moral or
| ethical reasons, just for the fact that it improves our
| economy, our culture, and out entire society.
|
| Artificially supporting failing businesses has negative
| consequences upon society, supporting a struggling
| individual has positive benefits to society.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Right, putting your time into working for a struggling
| company isn't taking any risk, and the executives deserve
| further rewards than just their salary.
| hhjinks wrote:
| >Would you also argue that when companies need additional
| funding during hard times or to expand, the employees
| should be forced by law to invest their own money into
| the company
|
| What, you mean, like, bailouts? Because we do bailouts.
| Only difference is that, while the taxpayers pay, they
| see no return.
| foolinaround wrote:
| Only those with lobbying clout get bailouts. See the
| situation of the small businesses now...
| Chris2048 wrote:
| When did the VG industry get a bailout?
| analognoise wrote:
| Oh boo hoo for the ownership class, somebody might have
| to sell a yacht to make payroll!
|
| They got 40 years of sending labor to developing
| countries, dismantled our infrastructure to privatize it,
| ALREADY got a 1.9T tax break (from Trump, even though
| almost all economists were AGAINST it) now they might
| have to SCROUNGE DEEP as...as people flock to the
| information services they largely own?
|
| Boo hoo for them! Oh no! They might lose a house,
| something the millions of people who are going to be
| evicted as soon as the moratoriums end will also get to
| experience! They'll be left without their SUMMER home!
| What a terrible loss! We'd better give them another tax
| loophole!
|
| I know programmers are insulated and have a very warped
| view of the world, but let's not forget we're (generally)
| labor, and let's not lick the boot that's on all of
| labor's collective necks TOO hard, neh?
| sigstoat wrote:
| > I know programmers are insulated and have a very warped
| view of the world
|
| look in the mirror.
|
| most businesses aren't giant megacorps owned by folks
| with yachts.
|
| and, hell, the megacorps? large chunks of them are owned
| by folks without yachts, too.
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/holders?p=AAPL
|
| this sort of hyperbolic rage only makes understanding and
| improving things harder.
| analognoise wrote:
| They already got a 1.9T tax cut. It's hard not to have
| rage when we're collectively getting fucked.
|
| I know there are a lot of wantrepeneurs here, but let's
| not pretend we're all not mostly still...workers.
| toyg wrote:
| The reality of LTD companies is precisely that investors
| _don't_ have to do that. If the company goes under, well,
| too bad; they will take some of the fat accumulated in
| good years, and start again. That's the _whole point_ of
| modern capitalism: the capitalist is insulated from the
| worst outcomes of his enterprise.
|
| At the moment, the risk/reward equation is unbalanced.
| For owners, it goes from outsized risk at startup to
| outsized reward at success; for employees, it goes from
| outsized risk at startup to moderate risk at success
| koolba wrote:
| > Employers that allow people to "work on their passions"
| use that as a bargaining chip to lower salaries.
|
| That sounds like every startup job pitch.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| To be fair, part of the startup pitch is also that you'll
| be building systems from the ground up and getting
| exposure to lots of different aspects of engineering,
| rather than being stuck optimizing or maintaining one
| small part of that gigantic unknowable web of technology
| you can get at a larger company.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Big difference is that Startups usually offer some amount
| of equity. Instead of just being exploited, you're
| gambling on taking a lower salary now and having it pay
| off later.
|
| It never really pays off later for game programmers.
| neonological wrote:
| Honestly it's a losing gamble too. You rarely win those
| options.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Often the dice are loaded, you can find many stories on
| here on about some financial trickery whereby the options
| become low value or worthless as the founders and VC's
| cash out. I personally evaluate them at $0 because of
| this. It's a shame too because that sounds like my ideal
| work setup.
| hhjinks wrote:
| Pretty sure this article was posted on HN, which is why I
| remembered it: https://marker.medium.com/my-company-sold-
| for-100-million-an...
| xiphias2 wrote:
| What startups fail to disclose is that the equity they
| offer is not the same class as the investors have, even
| though they are taking a huge risk of the startup
| failing.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Even if the equity is in the same category, it's unlikely
| to be extremely valuable.
|
| A $2M exit sounds great until you factor in the extra
| taxes and 5 to 10 years to realize that. Many software
| developers could make a substantial amount of that,
| without the risk, simply by aggressively working career
| changes.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| They should unionize.
| ehnto wrote:
| Raising the minimum wage would help with that. Why would
| someone clean for $25/hour when they could do something less
| physically demanding for the same money? Then you would have to
| pay cleaners more in order to attract them.
|
| People would complain about cleaners getting more money than
| their white collar jobs, but that's classism embeded in part
| because of the current situation. As soon as people realise job
| X makes good money, suddenly the stigmas go away.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Are the animation companies profiting wildly?
|
| > They typically pay animation studios a set fee and reserve
| royalties for themselves.
|
| > While the system protects the studios from the risk of a
| flop, it also cuts them out of the windfalls created by hits.
| blondin wrote:
| not sure i get (a). maybe someone can help me understand.
|
| software engineers are one of the best paid people today. i
| highly doubt that we are hard to find.
| tantalor wrote:
| The software developer shortage (demand minus supply) is 1.4M
| in the US.
|
| https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/software-
| develo...
| MMAesawy wrote:
| If this is the case, how come the entry level job market
| for CS graduates stink so much?
| tantalor wrote:
| Meaning what?
|
| > Less than 1 year $103,269
|
| Sounds like it's pretty hot!
|
| https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries
| blondin wrote:
| can someone provide a link to the US bureau of labor
| statistics that has these numbers? (for my own edification)
|
| it has been often mentioned but i don't think i have ever
| seen a link to the report people are quoting.
| notional wrote:
| Here you go. It's your homework not ours to find it if
| you care. https://www.bls.gov/bls/blswage.htm
| blondin wrote:
| are you just assuming that i haven't done my homework?
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Mind you, american work ethics is an omnibenevolent angel
| compared to japanese work ethics. See "Sewayaki kitsune no
| Senko-san" for an example how people work there.
| smabie wrote:
| ehh, people are at work a lot in Japan, but no one really
| does anything.
| [deleted]
| merpnderp wrote:
| We don't allow businesses to profit "wildly" because we don't
| want to pay people more. We allow businesses to profit because
| it isn't fair to make someone pay X when someone else is very
| happy to get paid a fraction of X. It's about justice and
| fairness. I mean I'd love to get paid Silicon Valley programmer
| wages, but I'm perfectly happy to program for a fraction of
| those wages. And it would be an injustice for me to be
| unemployed because my employer was forced to pay Silicon Valley
| wages.
|
| And what are "wild" profits? Because most companies are making
| far less than 8% of revenue as profits.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| I think I understand where you come from. A job is better
| than no job.
|
| But I don't think that is necessarily true nor that things
| would follow suit if we think like that.
|
| I mean, we employ much more people today than in the
| industrial revolution. Yet, people are paid significantly
| more, child labor has been abolished, all that working 8-9h a
| day instead of 14-18 which was common. We are not in a
| cooperative environment, when it comes to salaries. Companies
| are legally obligated to show gains to their investors, and
| if they can cut salaries and keep the profits they will do
| so. We are in a competitive game against employer, where the
| balance is found when both parties compromise. But make no
| mistake, as soon as the working force stop fight for better
| working conditions, it will not stay the same, only degrade.
|
| Don't read that in a personal way. We are in no way
| personally against the employer, but the employer as an
| authority figure. The balance is not found through
| cooperation but rather through clash of professional
| interests.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > And it would be an injustice for me to be unemployed
| because my employer was forced to pay Silicon Valley wages.
|
| No, it would be good, because it would mean that they were
| more efficiently utilizing their current workforce, probably
| through technological advancement that should ultimately
| benefit the entire industry. Technology is almost entirely
| driven through higher labor costs and dictating better
| conditions for employees. The benefits of technology
| improvements are also not zero-sum (equal to their costs to
| develop or maintain), and are redistributed through those
| higher salaries and through taxes.
|
| If you end up unemployed at that wage level because your
| skill level has not made the new cut, there are other things
| you can do. Wanting to program but not being able to find
| somebody who wants you to program at the minimum wage is no
| more tragic than wanting to program but not being able to pay
| your rent doing it.
| peruvian wrote:
| Because labor is a liability to most companies.
| rcheu wrote:
| Obviously high supply of animators is the main reason, but I
| wonder if part of it is that pirating/illegal streaming sites are
| extremely common for anime. All of the people I know that watch
| anime do so without paying for it. It's trivially easy to find
| anime for free online, so much so that it's easier to find it for
| free than pay for it.
| missedthecue wrote:
| I think this has something to do with it. Piracy is a big
| problem for Hollywood too, but they make most/a great deal of
| their money at the Box Office anyway, something the this
| industry does not. At least in the western market.
| SllX wrote:
| The Western Markets are a drop in the bucket for anime. It is
| very much still a Japan-first industry.
|
| One Piece is younger than both Lord of the Rings and James Bond
| but as a franchise has grossed more than either of those. [1]
|
| Fist of the North Star and Dragon Ball are also in higher
| positions on this list than One Piece.
|
| [1] https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-
| finance/the-...
| kinghtown wrote:
| Real money is in merchandising. Demon Slayer is big out here in
| Taiwan.. every kid has pencils, erasers, buttons, shirts, pencil
| cases, backpacks.. the animators are seeing none of that money
| yet they are a core part of why the show is successful.
|
| Too many predatory gatekeepers offering dream jobs to kids who
| don't know any better. It's not just anime. In music, you got
| acts with albums in the top ten albums of the year lists with
| millions of plays making like hundreds of dollars per year on
| Spotify, same people are on tour each year in the red financially
| after being on the road. The economy isn't kind to the creators
| who entertain everyone.
| NalNezumi wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken the IP rights still remains at the
| publisher + the original creator (The manga writer), and often
| the animation studio just do it as contract work. So I would
| guess the studio won't get a proportionate slice of the
| merchandising success.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| >the animators are seeing none of that money yet they are a
| core part of why the show is successful
|
| because they are worker. they get paid with the wages that they
| agree on. Koyoharu Gotouge probably get a big chunk of that
| money since she created the manga.
| sigstoat wrote:
| > the animators are seeing none of that money yet they are a
| core part of why the show is successful.
|
| and the animators of shows that flop still got paid something.
|
| if you want upside risk, you have to be exposed to downside
| risk.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| When there are more people who want to do a job, than there are
| slots for doing that job, no matter what the economic system you
| have to do one of three things:
|
| 1) pay lower wages until some of the people leave the profession
|
| 2) use some kind of essentially random (even if theoretically
| bureaucratic or administrative) method to assign those slots to
| people; for example, you can only do this job if your parents
| happen to be people in the industry
|
| 3) vicious back-stabbing politics and sharp elbows, as people who
| want those jobs suck up to the ones who get to choose who gets
| them
|
| 4) conditions (other than wages) in that profession get so bad
| that people become dispirited and drop out
|
| You also see this in certain areas of academia, or in the music
| industry, or many other fields. There can be combinations of
| these methods, of course.
|
| The best way around this conundrum (that I know of), is to do
| this as an avocation rather than a vocation. For example, the
| many people who have composed music, written novels, etc. on the
| side while earning their money in other ways. It's not a perfect
| method, but it's the best (least soul-eating) way I know of.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > These workers earned an average of $12,000 in 2019, the
| animation association found, though it cautioned that this figure
| was based on a limited sample that did not include many of the
| freelancers who are paid even less.
|
| How is that either legal or possible to survive on such wages?
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Live with your parents until you are married (to a spouse that
| has income).
|
| This isn't just limited to collectivist societies, either.
| Being 'sponsored' by family is pretty common for artists and
| writers all over the world.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Cost of living is lower too. Prices in USA are easily 10 times
| higher than in other parts of the world.
| ghaff wrote:
| Really? Tokyo isn't super-expensive for an American compared
| to NYC or SF but it isn't especially cheap in my experience.
| The same could be said of at least most of Europe. There
| _are_ cheap countries where _maybe_ 10x is a reasonable
| figure for living like a local in a developing country vs.
| living like most Americans in the US.
|
| Median household income in Japan is about 30K USD, which is
| lower than the US but a _lot_ more than $12K.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| If two people with $12K salary make a household, that's
| $24K household income.
| ghaff wrote:
| Do you actually think that's the norm in Japan,
| especially for animators making $12K per year? In any
| case, the exact same logic applies to the US where there
| are more two household incomes. The claim that the US has
| 10X higher costs than other countries in the developed
| world is simply nonsense.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| Exactly my thoughts, maybe they're all interns that live at
| home with their families? Idk it seems surreal! But this part
| .. Freelancers paid even less? What on earth?
| karaterobot wrote:
| I'm not sure either. Minimum wage in Japan (2019) was about
| $8.50 USD/hour, and working 40 hours/week at that rate would be
| about $17,000 USD/year. My guess is they are not working 40
| hours every week, or they have signed contracts that pay them
| less than minimum wage.
|
| I wish the article had been clearer about this. I'm sure
| animators in Japan work really hard and aren't paid much, but
| while the article made it clear how I should feel about the
| situation, it left me uninformed on the details, which would
| seem the more important part of a news article.
| [deleted]
| scruffyherder wrote:
| They aren't slaves they can refuse work. The problem is they
| keep taking these "work for hire" deals which revolves around a
| project not hours.
|
| There is this magical internet they can create their own IP and
| charge whatever they want. Nobody is obligated to buy it, just
| as they aren't obligated to go into crap contracts.
| yummypaint wrote:
| So the entire industry is just stupid people who can't look
| out for themselves? They are clearly being taken advantage of
| and are suffering as a result.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Clearly, animators need to lobby for additional licensure, safety
| and educational requirements, and restrictive trade organizations
| to thin the herd of "acceptable" laborers.
| Aunche wrote:
| Here's an estimate of how different people in the anime industry
| are paid (it's from an anime about creating anime):
|
| https://i.imgur.com/ORAFhaN.png
|
| If this is accurate, then only A-list voice actors are making any
| serious money because they're scarce and in high demand. I think
| that most of the money in anime just gets spent on creating more
| anime, so very few people end up making money.
| busterarm wrote:
| Keep in mind the average salary in Japan is about 66k. And only
| about 40% of Japanese clear that.
| offtop5 wrote:
| Same issue with the video game industry. Even when you compare
| QA, a manual game tester is lucky to hit $15 an hour. A manual
| normal software tester can easily hit 80k.
|
| I find video game programming to be the most difficult of all,
| just because you have to account for so many things, yet game
| programmers make the least.
|
| It's the problem of every dream job, no one dreams of working on
| software for waste treatment facilities. So the people willing to
| do that job can do much better than the new grads trying to work
| on the next battlefield or whatever
| vwnghjmjew wrote:
| People want to work in the video game industry so they are
| willing to take less pay in order to work in it.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Too true. The _" teenager who likes to play a lot of video
| games and therefore enrolls in a compsci undergrad program"_
| is an extremely common pipeline.
|
| Not too many teens choose a career in programming because
| they want to build a robust framework that allows
| construction of large-scale analytical queries on
| unstructured data.
| merpnderp wrote:
| Yeah, writing boring HR software pays a whole lot better
| than game programming because one brings you joy and the
| other makes you a nihilist.
| atombum wrote:
| Based on what I've read about working in the games
| industry, joy is fleeting between ridiculous crunches,
| which seem to be nearly ubiquitous.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Pretty sure software for waste treatment facilities is much
| better than another spa garbage full of spyware, that ideally
| should go straight to those facilities.
| dudul wrote:
| > I find video game programming to be the most difficult of
| all, just because you have to account for so many things
|
| Can you give some examples? How many things does a VG
| programming have to account for compared to, for examples, a ML
| programmer, or a programmer in the HFT space?
|
| Sure, video game programming is not a game, but I don't know
| why it would be "the most difficult" compared to other fields.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I had a chat on the topic with a game dev. Essentially, the
| argument was that games tend to have original UI and
| interaction models. For example, a web dev can get away with
| a <Button /> and a CSS/JS framework and make spectacular UI
| but when it comes to games the creatives would demand that
| button to be designed to match games concept, therefore for a
| game dev to build a button it may require to deal with all
| the styling and button states that a web dev would never
| touch(because it is taken care by the browser or the UI
| library).
|
| An average game dev would have much deeper knowledge on the
| stuff they do than the average dev that build corporate
| software since the game devs would de bespoke work every
| time. Sure, they also have assets etc. but in the gaming the
| originality is much more important since the product itself
| is meant to be enjoyable, not simply a medium to accomplish
| something else(like ordering pizza or keep track of
| payments).
| dudul wrote:
| So a game dev would need to do something that a front end
| dev wouldn't have to do. OK, I'm sure the front end dev has
| to deal with a lot of things the game dev doesn't need to
| touch.
| mrtksn wrote:
| >OK, I'm sure the front end dev has to deal with a lot of
| things the game dev doesn't need to touch
|
| Yep, like NPM and various dependency hells. Maybe that's
| where the compensation difference comes from?
| ketzo wrote:
| A couple good comments here, but I'll add my $0.02.
|
| Video game programmers often need to be very deep
| generalists. It's a combination of 1) the reality of small
| teams working on ambitious games, 2) increased expectations
| for what a videogame can do by default ("what do you mean I
| can't join a party with my friends?!"), and 3) video games
| are deeply, deeply bespoke software, and to implement one
| feature means you need to know the limitations of many
| subsystems.
|
| A good friend of mine works on the World of Warcraft gameplay
| development team. They have ~50 engineers, and they're almost
| _all_ full-stack to some degree. He said that when he was an
| _intern_ on the team, to build a feature he needed working
| knowledge of:
|
| 1. Blizzard's battle.net network layer
|
| 2. The way textures were rendered onto character models,
| pixel-by-pixel
|
| 3. The intricacies of their in-house Lua engine and parser
|
| 4. The way that NPC AI was written
|
| None of these requirements, by themselves, are too crazy; but
| he was using all of these, every day, as a junior in college!
|
| And that was for a _three-sprint project!_ As an intern!
| headcanon wrote:
| IME they're roughly equal in terms of raw skill and
| experience required to publish a finished product. Its a bit
| apples to oranges however, there are some things in
| developing video games that are much more difficult than what
| I've experienced in non-game programming. A lot of it depends
| on the complexity of what you're making - you can make games
| that require almost no programming whatsoever, but some games
| require a great deal of technical skill to program. For
| instance, running a large-scale multiplayer game isn't so
| different from managing a large-scale web business.
| dudul wrote:
| Thanks for sharing first hand experience. So basically, "it
| depends".
| offtop5 wrote:
| Depending on the game, you might need to do some machine
| learning programming.
|
| Forza heavily uses ML. You have Network programming, in
| there. Well I'm sure some specialties exist which are more
| difficult, it doesn't change the fact of video game
| programmer can make half as less as a normal business
| programer.
| dudul wrote:
| ML and network programming can be found outside of video
| games.
|
| > I'm sure some specialties exist which are more difficult
|
| OK, so we agree. Video game programming can definitely be
| very tricky, but it's like any other specialties once you
| reach a certain threshold of sophistication/scale/whatever.
| andrewprock wrote:
| In addition, real-time systems, graphics programming,
| modelling, and more.
| dudul wrote:
| But usually these are 3 different jobs done by 3
| different people.
| offtop5 wrote:
| Depends on the shop.
|
| I've seen video game studios which essentially have a
| single wunderkind who has to dabble in everything because
| no one else reaches his or her skill level. No other
| industry has low pay and crunch
| dudul wrote:
| Just like some companies in different industries where
| some dev need to understand design, front end, backend,
| database, QA, devops, etc.
|
| > No other industry has low pay and crunch
|
| I wasn't talking about the workload or low salaries. I
| was talking about the statement that "video game
| programming" as a discipline is the most difficult of
| all.
| offtop5 wrote:
| If someone's going to offer me $150,000 to do a job, I'm
| going to find it much easier than if I'm only offered
| $75,000.
|
| And plus I started my statement with "I find" , if you
| happen to program quantum systems and that's 10 times as
| difficult compared to writing a game engine in CPP,
| that's cool
| klmadfejno wrote:
| I do data science for a job and game dev as a hobby. When all
| is said and done, I don't know if it's really that much
| harder. But game dev products must run fast, might need to
| run efficiently over a network, almost inevitably has tons of
| unique stateful objects whose interactions can cause
| something to cease being fun, and that sucks.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Animators as a profession are like factory workers. Japanese
| animators compete with Chinese, Vietnamese and everyone else.
|
| If something can be produced with little differentiation - bulk
| or standardized quality product or service, its all about cost
| and supply and demand. This is how competitive market economy
| works. Profit margins become razor thin.
| minikites wrote:
| There are so many problems where the cause is just "capitalism"
| and the way it works. Sometimes the answer really is that simple.
| goto11 wrote:
| I know Eastern Europe under communism produced some great
| animation, but were the animators well paid?
| tokai wrote:
| The salary range was small so they properly got an relative
| okay wage. Demands of workers was heavily suppressed in the
| east bloc though, so the soviet system is not something
| championed by organized labour nowadays.
| minikites wrote:
| Why is every anti-communist/socialist argument in the form of
| "It didn't work once, clearly we have no reason to learn from
| it or try again."
| samr71 wrote:
| I feel that's a bit of a strawman.
|
| It's generally closer to: "Every time it's been tried it's
| been either bad or disastrous, clearly we have no reason to
| learn from it or try again"
|
| Which I think is fair! Hell, even the original strawman is
| a fair argument IMO. Fascism didn't work once, and I don't
| think there's much there to learn from (and we certainly
| shouldn't try it again).
| password321 wrote:
| Anyone can state what the problem is but until you can come up
| with a solution it means nothing.
| godelzilla wrote:
| Capitalism has always been based on exploitative relationships
| between the user (aka employer) and the used (aka employee). Why
| would anime be any different?
| blhack wrote:
| Because there are a lot of people willing to live in poverty to
| be animators.
| dennis_jeeves wrote:
| Hence the phrase "Starving Artist"
| jseliger wrote:
| Another story that can be answered with "Supply and demand,"
| like so many news stories.
|
| My favorite sub-genre concerns adjuncts:
| https://jakeseliger.com/2016/02/25/universities-treat-
| adjunc.... All of them can be summarized as, "When supply
| exceeds demand, prices fall."
| gruez wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starving_artist
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| How dare you bring logic and reason into a discussion about
| social issues on hacker news.
|
| /sarcasm
| snarf21 wrote:
| While this is true, I think there is more nuance to it. We also
| value cheap food but we don't care that migrant food pickers
| make $10 an hour (or less). We are a selfish race, as long as
| we get a deal, screw everyone else. As long as the exploitation
| benefits us, we don't care. Amazon, diamonds, food supply, new
| mobile phones, etc.
| Aerroon wrote:
| On the other hand, I'd like to assume that other people are
| making the best decisions they can in their own lives.
| Picking fruit for $10 an hour could likely be better than
| their alternatives. I've worked for much less than that as a
| programmer. At the time I didn't see better options. People
| have different limitations. Some limitations might not even
| make sense to others, but those are the constraints that they
| work around.
| yamrzou wrote:
| https://archive.is/DuxBD
| gnarbarian wrote:
| Supply and demand. It's disappointing I'm not surprised by the
| profound ignorance of this article at what used to be a
| prestigious organization.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| Blindly following 'supply and demand' for the labor market does
| not make sense, for the obvious reason: participation by the
| suppliers is effectively mandatory.
|
| For the vast majority of people who need to work to be able to
| afford rent/food/etc, they _must_ sell their labor somewhere,
| and that choice is additionally restricted by the skills and
| experience they have (you can switch careers, but an animator
| can't just pack up and become a programmer immediately -
| significant time/money is invested to gain the skills and/or
| experience and/or credentials needed for another job).
|
| In aggregate, the labor market generally follows "higher skill
| (i.e. lower supply) job = higher wage", but zoom in on any
| smaller part and that is not guaranteed.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > Supply and demand. It's disappointing I'm not surprised by
| the profound ignorance of this article at what used to be a
| prestigious organization.
|
| Was it also supply and demand when a bunch of silicon valley
| corporations decided to keep salaries low with secret
| agreements?
| neartheplain wrote:
| Do you have credible suspicion of such collusion in the anime
| industry?
|
| And to answer your question, no. It was a crime, and law
| enforcement put a stop to it.
| gnarbarian wrote:
| Monopolies and colluding oligopolies break capitalism. It's
| why we have antitrust law, which we don't really seem to use
| anymore (probably due to regulatory capture).
| ggreer wrote:
| Most people who know about that case are mistaken about
| certain crucial facts. The collusion was that some companies
| agreed not to cold call each other's employees.[1] Hiring was
| still allowed, as were other recruiting methods such as
| e-mail or LinkedIn messages.
|
| The particularly nasty bit of collusion was between Apple and
| a few other companies (Google, Adobe, Pixar). This collusion
| only happened because of Steve Jobs's vindictive personality
| combined with interlocking directorates[2]: Jobs was on the
| board of Pixar, and Google & Adobe executives were on Apple's
| board. Despite Jobs's best efforts, the collusion fell apart
| after only 4 years because the companies kept poaching from
| each other. It was over a year later that the DoJ filed its
| first complaint.
|
| Despite what most people think, it's really hard for
| companies to cartelize. There is a massive incentive for any
| one member of the cartel to pretend to collude while secretly
| not colluding. Typically, such arrangements fall apart unless
| there is a governing body that can sniff out and punish
| defectors.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
| Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocking_directorate
| LesserEvil665 wrote:
| right, in OC's mind that should be A-OK. Viewing everything
| through the lens of supply & demand without any other
| consideration will make monsters of us all.
| dfilppi wrote:
| Bingo. It's amazing how this simple concept continues to
| confound otherwise intelligent people.
| gnarbarian wrote:
| It's easy to understand once you realize it's a propaganda
| outlet. We have smart minds doing their best to tell a
| particular story regardless of facts. Here is some good
| reading on the phenomena
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/145660.The_Captive_Mind
| protastus wrote:
| A lazy and mediocre software developer gets paid more than a
| world class concert pianist who obsessively practices 10 hours a
| day.
|
| The world doesn't need pianists like it needs software engineers.
| This demand was also different 200 years ago.
|
| This is basic economics that not enough people seem to understand
| when they choose a job. Or maybe they do understand but want to
| ignore the problem early in their careers.
|
| As a student in my 20s, my love for mathematics exceeded my love
| of engineering. I studied both and was good at both, but never
| went far beyond undergrad level mathematics due to job
| opportunities.
|
| Sometimes in life we need to clearly separate what to do as an
| amateur (for the love) and as a professional (for the money).
| Sometimes the interests align, and if they do, good for you! But
| it's important to be honest with yourself about goals and
| planning.
| vinger wrote:
| And sometimes we need to check our facts before we make ill
| informed decisions.
|
| A world class pianist makes 25 to 75k per show. Far more than
| any developer lazy or not.
|
| A concert pianist makes 50k a year. Getting a seat is the hard
| part.
|
| And someone majoring in math can go as far as someone majoring
| in engineering. Your college doesn't teach how to code, you
| need to do that on your own.
| protastus wrote:
| > A world class pianist makes 25 to 75k per show. Far more
| than any developer lazy or not.
|
| Even if we picked such an outlier, the bookings would be
| sparse.
|
| A mediocre SWE in the Bay Area has a paycheck every 2 weeks
| over the course of decades.
|
| > And someone majoring in math can go as far as someone
| majoring in engineering
|
| The choice in my personal story was about becoming a
| professional mathematician, not majoring in math and then
| getting a job in engineering. The latter in fact is what I
| did.
| dartharva wrote:
| Being from a third-world country, it it feels weird how western
| media so casually uses the word "poverty". Where I come from,
| living in poverty mostly means living in abject poor living
| conditions- without a decent place to live in, without guarantee
| of being able to secure meals for the day, etc.
|
| People who can afford daily food and internet and computers will
| never be classified as living in "poverty" here.
| bargl wrote:
| Gah. I can't remember the book but it classifies the different
| levels of poverty. There were 4 levels.
|
| I'm going from memory but level 1 was what you describe.
|
| Level 2 is being able to meet your needs but all your time goes
| into meeting those needs.
|
| Level 3 is having enough extra money to pay for things you
| don't need.
|
| Level 4 was IIRC basically not having to work.
|
| Most countries have a range of 1-3 or 2-3 or 3-4 or some
| distribution of that.
|
| Anyway long story short, western countries mostly have 2-4 and
| don't know what 1 even looks like (on a lived experience
| level). They've seen pictures of it and there are people living
| in Level 1 in western countries, they just aren't as front and
| center. If you've lived near Level 1 you know what real poverty
| looks like. If you haven't you think that Level 2 is real
| poverty. Both need to be addressed, but I agree that Level 1
| poverty is so much worse for people living there.
| Aerroon wrote:
| I think it's much more about expectations. People from poorer
| countries have much lower "needs". They live in smaller
| homes, use worse electronics, use older cars etc. They expect
| less, so their needs are lower. Once they become richer their
| needs will grow too.
| mattmanser wrote:
| I don't think so, it's about relative cost. Everything is
| so much more expensive in richer countries, but
| comparatively speaking, cars, TVs, phones are much cheaper.
|
| Like a phone is PS20, but a weekly shop for a family might
| be PS100. A TV might be PS250, but rent is PS500.
|
| So you can be in the paradoxical situation of being able to
| afford to buy a phone or a TV one month, then next month
| run out of money for food or rent.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| It's difficult to change habits. What if the needs don't
| grow, what do?
| MattSayar wrote:
| "Factfulness" by Hans Rosling
|
| Did a really good job of defining the levels and putting them
| in perspective. In addition, it's a refreshingly optimistic
| take on the direction humanity is trending. I read the book
| because it was recommended by Bill Gates
| bargl wrote:
| That's IT!
|
| Thank you for reminding me.
|
| I totally agree, we hear so much negativity his approach to
| showing how humanity in general is better off today than
| any time in the past is encouraging.
| walshemj wrote:
| Poverty is defined as a certain % of the average (normally the
| median) income.
|
| And there are plenty of people living rough in the west.
| rtkwe wrote:
| When you're looking at policy to address lifting up the people
| struggling at the bottom in various ways the only reasonable
| course is to define it relative to local conditions. Looking
| globally ignores local prices and needs for example.
| [deleted]
| majani wrote:
| The way I see it, constant dissatisfaction is a core part of
| making progress
| [deleted]
| iscrewyou wrote:
| The article isn't talking about just western countries. The
| subheading is: "The workers who make the Japanese shows the
| world is binge-watching can earn as little as $200 a month. "
| dartharva wrote:
| I know, but NYT is western media. My point was that they have
| too low of a bar for classifying "poverty".
| didibus wrote:
| You mean too high a bar?
| adamredwoods wrote:
| Glamorous jobs tend to be extremely competitive, and therefore
| pay out less. If anyone is interested in animation as a career, I
| suggest specializing in design and motion graphics, it has better
| demand and therefore pays a little better.
| password321 wrote:
| I feel the solution now for highly talented yet underpaid people
| is to go solo on places like Youtube. Countless people are
| willing to learn from some of the best.
| s314159265358 wrote:
| Well the answer to the heading is just hyper capitalism imho
| toto444 wrote:
| I don't have time to find source on the web to support that but
| in his graphic novel about Pyongyang, Guy Delisle describes how a
| lot of anime are made (if I am correct he is talking about Disney
| but it is all from memory so correct me if I am wrong). Basically
| Westerners make some designs and all the animation in between 2
| designs is made in North Korea.
|
| EDIT : I have found this
| https://www.gpic.nl/producing_animation_in_North_Korea.pdf
|
| "Q:How is the North's animation seen in abroad? A:Compared to
| North Korea's general image around the world, their animation
| sector has a remarkably good reputation. The nation has been
| receiving many orders from abroad for quite some time, including
| many from France and Italy. The workers usually participate in
| original drawings and coloring. Some of the well-known foreign
| animation projects the North has been involved in include "Lion
| King", "Les Miserables", "Pocahontas" and an Italian production
| of "Hercules" and "Billy the Cat" from France"
| pradn wrote:
| Super interesting, thanks for sharing!
|
| Quotes from this article:
|
| "But even many grown-ups enjoy [animation in North Korea]
| because it is one of the rare television programs in the North
| free of political messages"
|
| "Actually most researchers estimate that almost half of the
| households in the North have television sets. It's just another
| common misconception about the North to think that only the
| rich get to watch television. There are also many animated
| films released in theatres."
| ancorevard wrote:
| Music is booming, so why are musicians living in poverty?
|
| Remember this is extremistan, top 1% of artists earn pretty much
| all the industry's revenue.
| ExcavateGrandMa wrote:
| Truth is that if you do such job to live and eat...
|
| You'll need to not only produce the production but also handle
| market sells... involving rights on your product... it's usually
| in form of contract with big distributors...
|
| depending your shit... you'll get a certain amount of cent(s) for
| being used through the "distributors"...
|
| WTH you expected? :D
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| Because they're a dime a dozen? When a 15 year old can do your
| job and has access to the same tools the outcome is predictable.
|
| A friend of mine runs a motion graphics studio. He does work for
| big names. He said his number one fear is a teenager in his
| mothers basement with Adobe After Effects.
| neura wrote:
| Supply, demand and reputation.
|
| This quote is the most telling to me: "I want to work in the
| anime industry for the rest of my life," Mr. Akutsu, 29, said
| during a telephone interview. But as he prepares to start a
| family, he feels intense financial pressure to leave. "I know
| it's impossible to get married and to raise a child."
|
| He knows it's impossible to get what he wants in life, as an
| animator, but he still wants to do it for the rest of his life.
|
| This isn't the case for most of the "jobs" that people are
| mentioning in the comments here, like people don't dream of being
| "cleaners" for the rest of their life, but there are other
| reasons why that might seem like their only reasonable choice.
| Lack of other marketable skills, probably being the most common.
| For cleaners, it doesn't even require that they can speak
| English, just that they can do the job they say the can.
|
| My personal theory on anime, as that's the specific subject of
| the article, is that if there were a much lower supply of
| competent animators and the animations were more expensive to
| purchase, they wouldn't be so popular, people would find other
| things to do/watch, etc. Which really boils back down to supply
| and demand. It's not as simple as "people demand anime", but more
| something like "people are willing to pay $x for y hours of time
| watching anime", where services like Netflix (or more specific to
| the subject of anime, Crunchyroll) charge some small amount per
| month and give access to hundreds of seasons and full movies. If
| the masses had to purchase each season or episode individually,
| I'd suppose people would be watching a lot less or pirating a lot
| more.
| CyberRage wrote:
| Anime profits are actually quite low compared to other similar
| content.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| It may also have to do with why game companies in the US pay
| coders, testers and artists lower wages than non game
| companies. Game companies have "sold the dream" of working at a
| game company. Riding on a razor scooter, eating free snacks,
| wearing a hoodie while earning a subscale wage for the same
| work and longer hours during "crunch time". Executives and
| producers make the lions share because the above people's
| dreams are easily manipulated, not unlike the Anime industry in
| Japan.
| jonfw wrote:
| It's pretty disrespectful to game developers to imply that
| their 'dreams are easily manipulated' when they take less
| money to work in a field that's more interesting to them.
|
| This is a simple function of supply and demand, not naive
| developers too weak minded to resist executives. Developers
| interested in gaming are in high supply, while gaming pales
| economically in comparison to the fields where most of us
| work (presumably tech and fintech).
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| I didn't mean to imply that developers are weak minded (I
| hope not - it's the industry I have worked in for the last
| 20 years). In 2020 alone the video game industry took in
| 179+ billion dollars vs. the "tech" industry's 409+
| billion, so I'm not sure that saying it "pales" in
| comparison is completely fair. Meanwhile the term "tech" is
| pretty broad, while games is a very narrow focus that might
| well be included in the "tech" sales... I'm unsure how that
| umbrella term is calculated.
|
| Either way, I certainly meant no disrespect.
| salamanderman wrote:
| Well, the executives, and the cult mentality within those
| companies, will tell the developers that they don't deserve
| more, and that they couldn't find better if they tried to
| leave, and that they are also easily replaceable. It is
| toxic manipulation. It would be fine, in some sense, if it
| were just supply and demand, but having seen the emotional
| breakdowns of a number of my friends, it is definitely more
| than that.
| jonfw wrote:
| I can't imagine that the industry is so uniquely
| emotionally abusive that it would drive a disparity in
| earnings across such a large sample size. I'm sure that
| there are some bad apples though, and I'm sorry that your
| friends experienced that.
| HellDunkel wrote:
| This claims hand crafted anime is booming when in reality it is
| fighting for survival and that is why animator get paid next to
| nothing.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| Dumb question but has a country ever implemented a mandatory
| profit-sharing law?
|
| I.e. still capitalism but the owners of companies are required to
| share X percent profits with employees?
| scrame wrote:
| Because it's work for hire.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| This is a sad story. I have been working on a project for a
| couple years now called Pastel Network (http://pastel.wiki/) that
| is all about making NFTs/rare digital art on the blockchain
| accessible and affordable to everyone with very low fees. This is
| unlike all the hot NFT projects based on Ethereum, where it
| currently costs hundreds of dollars to "mint" an artwork, which
| makes it risky for artists in case the work doesn't sell, and
| also makes it impossible to sell art for low dollar amounts while
| still making a decent profit margin. My hope all along was that
| artists like this from poor countries would be able to
| participate, and I was thinking about anime in particular (the
| project started out being called Animecoin).
| jayd16 wrote:
| I guess Japanese animators do not have a union?
| motohagiography wrote:
| Short answer: because you are either money or you are talent and
| they are totally different understandings of how the world works.
| Skills aren't capital - people with skills are capital. What is
| capital? Something that grows and creates value while you sleep.
| How do you get some of that productive capital? Leverage. How do
| you get leverage? By promising a potentially better risk adjusted
| return on someone elses surplus capital than they can get from
| interest or an index fund. How do you create the better return?
| By moving something from one place to another better than the
| alternatives, etc.
|
| While this is very high level, it is important to observe that
| none of this has anything to do with being really good at making
| hand drawn tentacle porn, or writing code for that matter.
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