[masayune]

Back when I worked there, they had something called "Blizzard Bucks" to "supplement" your salary. Basically "Blizzard Bucks" was Monopoly money we could use to buy their microtransactions and WoW game-time. In reality, you made approx. $30-40k sans OT, but they would always calculate your "salary" at $50-60k because of all the "Blizzard Bucks" and claim your salary was industry best.

The best part was, and they would emphasize this at every meeting, "that the company would pay the taxes for us" as if it were a big deal. People never believe me when I tell them this is how the non-devs got treated.

[Mandatum]

That is possibly the most exploitative form of compensation I've heard of in the Western world.

[setr]

Then you dont know your western history :-)

There used to be whole towns where you'd get entirely paid in, and shop with, corporate funny money

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip

[chrisco255]

I visited one of these ghost towns at an old zinc mine in Arkansas. The town literally popped up to service the zinc mine workers back in 1900-1920ish. Because it was in the middle of nowhere, the company was the only real provider of goods and services. Some good photos:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/rush-ghost-town https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/media/morning-star-zinc-m...

[kalleboo]

At least company scrip was used to buy food/normal goods, albeit at a large markup. "Blizzard bucks" sound completely useless unless you're really into games

[oefrha]

Since you can trade WOW (and many other MMOs’) items for real world cash, I wouldn’t call Blizzard bucks useless. In fact I’ve heard people playing WoW for a living...

Basically, say Blizzard compensates you $20k in Blizzard bucks, and you auction off $20k worth of items at a reduced rate, you end up taking $20k * discount rate from Blizzard’s revenue, roughly speaking.

[Xelbair]

>Since you can trade WOW (and many other MMOs’) items for real world cash, I wouldn’t call Blizzard bucks useless. In fact I’ve heard people playing WoW for a living...

You cannot do that, ToS forbids that, and if you were caught i expect that consequences would be harsher than just a ban.

[masayune]

Yeah you can't do this w/o risk of getting fired. Blizz had an internal affairs division that would track this kind of stuff down.

[oefrha]

Huh that really sucks.

[dqpb]

Not to mention all those people who got paid nothing at all.

[tluyben2]

> hen you dont know your western history

Seems not too many tech people like history: if they did we would not be looping Greenspuns 10th rule derivatives on everything ; nosql, microservices, js, query languages, etc.

[biggy_sauce]

Could you please elaborate?

[tluyben2]

Microservices for instance; companies spend a lot of money to manage microservices to end up with a really bad implementation of Erlang OTP. Bad enough to mostly see they now also created a very bad version of the monolith they should have started with and thus go back to a monolith. Or macroservices as Uber now calls them.

Nosql usually ends up as a really bad version of a rdbms with a query language that is a very botched version of sql. And then we move to postgres as it is actually better in every way.

Javascript was literally (the author wanted to implement scheme but that did not look like Java) a really badly done version of Scheme which had to look like Java. So this is directly Greenspuns 10th rule.

And we can go on: all these things have solid and scientifically sound implementations and yet we reinvent the wheel, badly and then usually drop it or try to reverse the damage by actually thinking about history for a second (wasm).

[tyrust]

I'd rank service workers' tips counting towards their minimum wage a worse practice.

[gnicholas]

At least tips are in cash, not funny money.

[tyrust]

With this practice, your total pay is always equal to the minimum wage. You get minimum wage even if you earn no tips. In other words, the tips are worth zero to you, they just save your employer money.

[imtringued]

This is correct if you were working for door dash. Door dash deducts the tip per order. Regular restaurants deduct it monthly so if you can gather enough tips in a month to exceed minimum wage you get paid more in that month. If you earn $1000 (minimum wage in this example) and $2000 in tips for $3000 total compensation your employer takes away $1000 and you end up with $2000. There is an opportunity to earn more with tips.

However, door dash does not follow this simple model. What happens is that door dash calculates how much an order is worth, if the customer tips then it deducts the tip from the order. If your order is worth $10 and the customer tips $5 the tip will always be deducted entirely. You get paid $5 for the order and $5 for the tip. Even if you somehow manage to complete 400 orders and all of them are tipped $5 you won't get a single cent from tips even though the tips alone are enough to pay minimum wage + some. The only scenario in which you can earn money from a tip is if the tip exceeds the order's value. Someone tips $50 on a $10 order. You get $0 for the order and $50 for the tip.

When you consider that in the restaurant arrangement it's actually intended for waiters to be primarily paid by tips (at least that's how I heard it works in the US??) they'll likely exceed minimum wage and only get the minimum wage during bad months.

With door dash you're the one who's being paid for every order you complete, not the cook + rest of the restaurant. Therefore getting a tip at all actually requires a heroic effort because people are not going to tip more than the order is worth. The tips might as well not exist at all and are a pure cash grab.

The reason I'm bringing up Door Dash is that it's an example of a truly evil company vs restaurants where it's just a very unusual but fair payment arrangement.

[tyrust]

I remember hearing about this, but I think they fixed it last year [0]. Or do I not understand?

[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/nyregion/doordash-tip-pol...

[thaumasiotes]

No, your tips can exceed the difference between the tipped minimum wage and the regular minimum wage, in which case you'll be making more than minimum wage. That's the norm.

[tyrust]

That's true, see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24052955

I shouldn't have said "always".

[Gibbon1]

In a few states like California there isn't a difference in the minimum wage for tipped and untipped workers.

[pests]

Unless you get more tips to push you past minimum wage.

[vincnetas]

I assume parent meant that if you do not collect enough tips to reach minimal salary, employer pays you more to reach minimal salary, but if you collect enough tips, employer adds nothing.

[waihtis]

Not following. Don't tips go directly to the recipient without any reductions?

[tyrust]

They do, but in many states it goes towards your minimum wage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage

The most extreme example is in a state like Alabama where the minimum wage is $7.25 and the minimum tipped wage is $2.13 (these are the federal minimums):

   +------------+----------+----------+
   |Tips        |Wage      |Final     |
   |            |          |Wage      |
   +------------+----------+----------+
   |0           |7.25      |7.25      |
   +------------+----------+----------+
   |<5.12       |7.25-$tips|7.25      |
   |            |          |          |
   +------------+----------+----------+
   |>=5.12      |2.13      |2.13+$tips|
   |            |          |          |
   +------------+----------+----------+

So your first 5.12 (=7.25-2.13) in tips are worth nothing. Of course, you can eventually earn more than the minimum wage, in which case the tips aren't exactly worth nothing, but they are worth the value of pushing your final wage above this threshold.

[ornornor]

Don't know about US, but in Canada you're supposed to report them as income and pay taxes on them.

[people_not_bots]

My daddy was a miner and I'm a miner son

https://youtu.be/5iAIM02kv0g?t=52

[Gibbon1]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqDVObM1kxc

True story. My ex-wifes grandmother was the daughter of a sharecropper who grew tobacco. Start of WWI a friend wrote her dad that if he came to California his friend could get him a job. Well her old man sold everything, bought a broken down car, and drove the family to Santa Clara. When they got to California she remembers her absolute joy when she asked her mother where the tobacco fields were and her mother told her they don't grow tobacco in California.

[QuesnayJr]

It's like a plot point in a satirical novel about the games industry.

[CobrastanJorji]

Is it possible to spend $20k per year in WoW?

[masayune]

Quite a few people I worked with dumped it into Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm loot boxes.

Oh, and Hearthstone packs

[edit: forgot Hearthstone]

[konart]

Never player WoW, but I had a few friends who were into MMO in general and I'm pretty sure it is possible to spend $20k in a month.