I live in Mexico, I've never seen anyone in Mexico make minimum wage, ever. And I do know people from all walks of life.
As to what they earn, again, I live in Mexico, I am employed by a Mexican company, and work for Mexican clients. I make their yearly salary in 15 days or so. It really is disgusting that they would treat employees this way, specially when they were such a big success.
The minimum wage in Mexico is only used as a unit to pay fines, no one earns that, you simply can't live with that kind of money. Even $200 per month is low for a engineer. A Junior Engineer's salary is around $500-$1k per month.
~13% of the fraction of the country that is formally employed earns minimum wage[1]... just not usually people in any sort of specialized profession working in cities.
13% are reported earning minimum wage. This is a known way for employers to avoid paying more taxes, seguro social, etc. Then they get all other part of their salary marked as 'bonus'
I don't see any reason to think that there aren't a number of laborers being paid the minimum wage in Mexico, or else why would anyone go to the trouble and risk of illegally crossing the US border to take sub-minimum wage work?
The very large population earning $30-$50 a week work for companies or individuals who will never report that salary in order to avoid paying taxes on it. This means any statistics related to this issue are going to be hard to trust namely, the situation looks better than it is and thus why so many desperately want to cross the border. It's not like Mexican companies don't make money, they make tons of it. They just don't share or invest it.
Oh there are. But we can not say if all the 13% reported earn minimum wage or not. I'm not saying there isn't. There just isn't 13% that's for sure. Even if it is at 12.9% we just really can't know.
Moreover, they know they were directly working on a game that made at least (1.5M * 39.99) ~60 million USD. I admire dedication to one's work and love of the game and all, but that's just not rational.
It doesn't change your broader point, but I suspect that could be a significant over-estimate. Steam take ~30%, and many copies was have been sold at a discount price (I paid ~$15) due to the frequency of Steam sales.
In open source you keep the rights. Which for this game probably means millions. They did not get the rights or Rúe money. It just baffles me to no end.
It's entirely likely they didn't know that - apparently none of the people working on it were told how much it sold and the company tried to stop outsiders estimating its sales figures through services like SteamSpy.
A homeless beggar can clear $2400 a year easy; that's less than $7 a day. You're essentially working for free at that point. I don't understand why they ever agreed to it, at least not without some sort of profit-sharing thing.
Delivered Kerbal Space program version 1.2 on time and on budget. Managed team of 5 geographically distributed developers and graphic artists. Reduced defect count by 17%
Reads way better than:
July 2015 - Oct 2016: Panhandler, Mission and 16th
Achieved 11% month on month growth in revenue. Exceeded all set goals and milestones. Migrated from crack to high grade Bolivian cocaine without incurring mob debt or serious personal injury.
;-)
(Though with a little more polishing and embellishment, I bet you could get that second entry past a typical recruiter... Maybe change to "July 2015 - Oct 2016: Growth Hacking Contractor, Bay Area Startup still in stealth mode (under NDA)... " and "Migrated from legacy processes to best practice agile methodology without incurring technical debt or serious downtime." - there, that ought to do it...)
Hard to judge without knowing the full story. There are many possible reasons for taking a job with less than average pay. Tough job market, lots of competition, wanting to get some (any) experience on the resume. It's not like plum, high paying tech jobs are growing on trees, despite what you might hear about the mythical "shortage of developers".
Jurisdictions are quite important when deciding whether something's "illegal".
Seems like that's twice the minimum wage where it happened (just from reading the post/comments), so it's extremely unlikely to be "illegal" where it happened.
(it's a curious question as to whether there's anything illegal, and if so, on who's part, if a Mexican business is paying above-local-minimum wage salaries to people who are not local. If you _accept_ a remote job where the renumeration is disclosed but below your local minimum wage - I wonder if any law has been broken, and if so, by who?)
>>If you _accept_ a remote job where the renumeration is disclosed but below your local minimum wage - I wonder if any law has been broken, and if so, by who?
Yes. That is a crime. The employee has committed a crime by negotiation/accepting the wage. The employer has too. Regardless of where they think they "work" they are employing someone standing in the other jurisdiction. If one allows offshore companies to bypass wage laws then every single local company would be run through an offshore shell, negating the local law. So it is near-universal that offshores must comply with local wage laws.
In practical terms, a flesh-and-blood 'employee' isn't going to be prosecuted. That side of things is reserved for sub-contracting entities that aren't real people. Negotiating a sub-minimum wage contract remains a crime for subcontractors. This is necessary to prevent one-person "companies" negotiating illegal pay for their one employee under the fiction that they are an arms-length subcontractor when everyone knows the person is effectively an employee.
This is only as an employee. You're free to contract your own rate at whatever you'd like (including for free); while "salary" implies a full employment that doesn't look like the case here.
EDIT: none of what I said applies; this was in Mexico.
While I may agree with some criticisms of minimum wages, there are jurisdictions that mandate a minimum hourly rate. Most of the US states are such jurisdictions.
None should, but this is ~2x the Mexican minimum wage.
I guess the question here (as per nine_k comment) becomes, if you are working remotely, for a position listed in country A, but you are located in country B, do country B's minimum wage laws apply? If so, does that mean the company in country A should pay you a higher wage, or simply means you don't qualify for the position (note that developer positions in Mexico with Mexican companies are often advertised with offer details such as the salary, in a way that is not common in the U.S.)
Edit: huge correction on the multiplier on minimum wage. For some reason I had been comparing monthly rates with annual ones and arriving at 24x. Upon careful examination, that is ridiculous, but the overall point remains. With the correction, this is actually hugely subpar wages for developers even in Mexico, but not quite illegal wages... for reference, entry level dev work at software companies might be around $20,000 MXP, which is currently $1,000 USD monthly.
> To be fair to Squad, the Mexican minimum wage is about $100 USD monthly, so they weren't technically paying anyone lower than the minimum wage...