[ericdykstra]

I don't mean to be callous, but the game industry is one where much of the benefit comes from the fact that one gets to work on games as opposed to B2B SAAS apps or other banal businesses. In exchange for getting to work on games, you are taking a lower salary, higher competition, and much less stable working environment.

It's very similar to sports; there are many more people who want to work in sports than there are jobs available, so the ones that do end up with jobs working for a team are overworked and underpaid despite being in the top single-digit percentile of applicants. I imagine the same is true for other entertainment industries, but I don't know enough about them to comment.

There are, of course, people in these industries who do have bargaining power, but it's a very small minority of those with outstanding reputations.

[gaius]

much of the benefit comes from the fact that one gets to work on games as opposed to B2B SAAS apps or other banal businesses

I’ve sometimes wondered if that’s true. I mean debugging a race condition in C++ is going to be the same in a game engine as in a trading engine right? Except the latter will be well paid and secure.

[ericdykstra]

For some people, the mere fact that what they're working on produces joy rather than ??? is worth the pay/security difference, even if the everyday work itself is nearly the same.

I can imagine quite a few benefits, to be honest. You get to work with other people who decided to make the same sacrifice, meaning you have something more in common with your coworkers through your work than just picking the highest paying job. You get to say "I did this" and point to a part of a game that potentially millions of people are playing.

If I were evaluating two otherwise equal jobs, I could see myself taking a $5k or maybe even $10k lower salary for those kinds of benefits. The cost is much higher, though, (in terms of salary, job security, and overtime requirement) which is why I've never worked for a game company and probably won't in the future.

[badpun]

> For some people, the mere fact that what they're working on produces joy

Besides joy, games can also bring social alienation and stunted development for kids and teenagers. I for one am not sure if games are making the world better or worse.

[zemo]

If you view your work through a lens of pure abstraction and intellectual curiosity, what's to stop you from working on something that hurts people, just because the problems are interesting?

[gaius]

There are dark sides to every industry, for example when does a game cross the line into being a Skinner box? I don’t think it’s as simple as industry A unalloyed good, industry B unmitigated evil.

[zemo]

A company is not either "good" or "evil"; it's not binary, there's no evil bit in corporate ethos. Some companies are more evil than others, and to pretend everything slots into either "good" or "evil" and all "evil" companies are equivalent is an act of cowardice. Working for IBM during the Holocaust is not comparable to working at Zynga during the peak of Farmville. It is dishonest to look at your own life from a standpoint of pure rationalism and reject your own humanity, your own human experience, and how your actions affect other people's lives.

[ericdykstra]

It would depend on that person’s moral preferences and perceived value of benefits/drawbacks a company offers. Your “harm” might be someone else’s “good” (see: other person in this thread condemning games).

[zemo]

of course it's not callous, you're describing purpose as a motivator. Most people in most industries in most societies in most parts of the world are at least partly motivated by purpose. It's the opposite that is callous: to see every C++ programming job as being equivalent. Seeing programming jobs only through the lens of "what programming problems am I solving" and "what tools am I using" is nihilist.

Callous would be working for a company that hurts people when your labor has enough optionality that you could work elsewhere.

[ericdykstra]

Callous in that my comment might be read as “the people who got fired with no severance deserved it.”

I’m closer to “The people who got fired with no severance knew what they were getting into with this industry, and if they didn’t that ignorance is their own fault,” which might also be read as callous.