[sulam]

Excuse me? For all intents and purposes $2400 a year is less than I spend on parking every year. This is not a "startup" salary, this is less than 1/10th the salary of your typical QA engineer IN MEXICO.

I see a lot of posts in this thread that seem to be trying to whitewash the work hours and the pay as somehow reasonable. They're not, not even for the notoriously-bad-to-work-for game industry.

[rdiddly]

There's a difference between whitewashing and seeing the bright side. Having been on the dev team of this popular game is useful. Presumably even the $2,400/yr was useful, though obviously only as useful as $2,400/yr is. I'm not saying it's fair, I'm saying "it happened, and what now?" It's Success 101. When you go through something that sucks, by all means enumerate what sucked about it so you can watch out for those things in the future. But the next thing a successful type of person does is take inventory of what positive and useful things they got out of it, or can make out of it. And then go do it. Cry if you want, have yourself a little outrage parade for your Facebook friends, but it's a waste of time. Maybe fester over it for 20 years and get an ulcer, that'll show 'em! Meanwhile if I interview that person I will stay far away, and hire the guy who found the bright side.

[pitay]

So you're saying that it is bad for people to complain when they are shafted. That they should look on the bright side for whatever they were subjected to.

And you are saying that you want to hire people that will not complain when they are exploited. I'd not want to work for anyone like you, since you would think it is my fault that I was stupid enough to get screwed.

What this whole Squad developer thing tells me is there needs to be a way for exploited employees to retaliate legally, because nothing much seems to be happening at the moment.

[rdiddly]

The words you're putting in my mouth are very imaginative, but no, I don't believe in exploiting people. I'm saying people on here pointing out upsides of this, don't deserve to be accused of trying to "whitewash," because finding the upside is actually a good way to handle shitty things that happen.

The advice applies in the mental and emotional realm and isn't supposed to be an answer to "what to do in the practical realm to resolve the issue." People should go ahead and take whatever actions they can toward a satisfactory resolution. But that part is boring to me, because usually the actions to take are obvious, and because even when you do everything right, still the outcome might go the wrong way. You're forced to conclude in that case that the outcome was "outside your control." However, I would argue that even when it goes your way, the outcome probably was outside your control. This sounds defeatist but is actually empowering because you can focus on the things that are WITHIN your control, which is always the interesting part. Learning a lesson from a shitty thing or not, is within your control. How you frame it to yourself, is within your control. Actually it's almost (I'm saying ALMOST) better if things DON'T go your way, especially a few non-catastrophic things that don't ruin your life. But they need to be things that at least hurt a little. Because then you have the chance to practice the kind of magical alchemy I'm talking about here, where you make gold out of lead.