[sillysaurus3]

Some people live in small towns where the cool programming positions are adapting invoice management software for small businesses.

That's a legitimate programming job. Cool software rarely makes money. Cool software that makes money (game development) doesn't pay very much.

Then you stumble upon a IRC channel and a world of challenges opens in front of you.

A book is far more challenging, because in an IRC channel you're a fish in a small pond. Eventually you grow to be the biggest fish, or forever limit yourself to being small. What a book can't give is peer recognition. But peer recognition is a vain motive, and vanity is rarely lucrative. A book also can't answer questions, but you can use IRC or a website like stackexchange for that.

If anyone reading this has personal experience flirting with blackhattery, please carefully consider what you're doing and why you're doing it. (And if you'd like someone to talk to, please feel free to shoot me an email. I'd like hearing about your experiences and your thoughts.)

[FiloSottile]

I think I should stress I'm speaking about young people.

Peer recognition is critical when starting at that age. Also careful consideration is not exactly common.

I'm in no way alleging that it is a reasonable way to go for a mature professional, but I acknowledge the charm it has for the young high-schooler that is being "taught" Excel at school and being told not to fiddle with that weird black terminal.

These boys and girls should not have their lives destroyed by a harsh punishment for their curiosity, that in a different setting would have been highly rewarded. I can totally picture myself doing the same errors in different conditions.

Btw, management software is a legitimate programming job of zero interest to security people. Just different curiosity fields.

[jakejake]

It's a kinda strange thing. Before the digital age kids like myself just did not have access to many things that could get them into so much trouble. I caused my share of mischief when I was a kid, just like most boys will do. Probably the worst tools I had at my disposal were eggs or snowballs to throw at cars. The opportunity for me to reach out from my bedroom and cause damage to a multi-national corporation or government just was not available to me or anybody at the time. It's hard to imagine what I could have done as a kid to even get the attention of the FBI, let alone have them trying to trap me in a sting operation. Kids today have a lot more ways to do some serious damage and get themselves into real trouble.

[atmosx]

I wonder what % of HN people never made anything illegal, like:

    * Hack into a remove computer server/friends PC.
    * Broke a WEP/WPA wifi network to gain access
    * Performed MiTM to see what kind of data can sniff
    * Performed brute-force dictionary attack without being asked.
    * Shared illegal digital material with friends

I feel it's about ~ 3%.

[SixSigma]

Add :

* Scraped website and used the data for some other opportunity

[psykovsky]

I sense optimism in that number...

[esrauch]

I would think the first 4 together is probably a bit more than 3%, but the last one alone is probably >40%

[icebraining]

You probably didn't have access because you didn't look for it. A kid with the right mindset and a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook or similar could cause a lot of panic and draw a lot of attention.

The difference is not access, it's the inherently nonviolent nature of digital. It's easier to get a kid to care about not hurting others than about not hurting an abstract legal entity like a company.

[CJefferson]

Before the Internet, how would I ever had acquired a copy of the anarchists cookbook in rural England? I did know the book existed, and I am sure I would have tried some of it out if I could have got a copy.

[jakejake]

It's probably true there were ways to get yourself into real trouble before the Internet. I guess phone phreaking or calling in threats and such. Still it seems like there's a lot more temptation out there for a kid to cause mischief now that the entire world is wired together.

[psykotic]

> Cool software that makes money (game development) doesn't pay very much.

Your thinking must be stuck in the last century. By the time I entered the game industry 13 years ago, salaries were already on par with the software industry at large. My first full-time position was in 2003 and paid $85,000/year. Based on the numbers I've seen, game programmers currently earn significantly more than web developers with an equivalent amount of experience, despite the wage-inflationary effect of the VC money faucet.

The coolness factor used to play a greater role. I would say it still affects the supply side for QA, design and very entry-level positions in programming. For programmers with any level of competency and experience, its role is negligible.

[Bahamut]

Are you sure about that? After 1 1/2 years in web development I am making significantly more than all of my game developer friends (even 2x some).

[psykotic]

I'm going on personal knowledge and IGDA salary surveys. What part of the industry are your friends in? I should maybe have mentioned that the growing F2P, casual, mobile segment bears little resemblance, economically and otherwise, to what I would consider the traditional AAA game industry (which may eventually go the way of the dodo).

[Bahamut]

I have friends in various parts of the industry - F2P, AAA, mobile, and indie.

The consensus amongst my friends in game development is that it doesn't pay well for the amount of work they're doing, but it's what they enjoy doing so they're willing to tolerate it.

I should also mention that I am a bit of an anomaly - I'm an AngularJS expert, which seems to be in extremely high demand right now. I'm making around $160k (including stock compensation), and I may have even lowballed myself in salary negotiations.

[jere]

You make almost twice the median for developers in the US, so I'm not surprised that you make twice as much as some of your friends (and more than twice as much as me).

To be honest, I had no idea such salaries were to be found in web dev, especially by specializing in popular JS frameworks. Thanks for sharing! I'd be curious to know your location and how much experience you have in Angular. [update: Oh, I see you posted 1.5 years in web dev.... wow, maybe I should reevaluate things]

[sillysaurus3]

Wow, thanks for the salary datapoint! Do you live in a high cost of living area like California, New York, etc (anywhere it costs $2k/mo for a 1 bedroom) or a less expensive area?

[Bahamut]

Silicon Valley, recently moved from Washington, DC - I could have easily nabbed compensation for a little less around Washington, DC for what I do though. My move out west is for largely personal reasons.

[damon_c]

I have experienced similar. I have surmised that it's because as a web developer, sometimes the work I do for my clients one day translates into actual dollars either saved or generated the very next day.

It seems easy to justify paying well given that immediacy as opposed to a developer spending much more time/money optimizing GPU physics engines whose benefits would not be felt until the game was slightly better than its competition when it is released in a year.

[n1ghtmare_]

As a web developer, that's very strange to me. Honestly game development seems MUCH harder (from what I've experienced). Not sure why that's the case.

[Retric]

Difficulty has minimal impact on pay. It's really just a supply / demand issue and plenty of people want to be a game dev at least for a while which drives down pay.

Not necessarily total compensation but defiantly pay / hour.

[sillysaurus3]

What are your thoughts on this alternate hypothesis? Rather than the whole gamedev industry being on par, perhaps only RAD's salaries have been.

I know your personal network is extremely large. If you have a lot of knowledge about the topic of gamedev salaries, I'd love to hear more. Since talking about salaries with colleagues is typically verboten, I'm curious how you collected your salary datapoints and what your sample size is.

There's a lot of anecdotal evidence of studios underpaying interns and programmers who are straight out of college, and regularly working people 60 or 80 hours a week. The anecdotal evidence fits my own personal experience, but perhaps my experience isn't representative of the whole industry; maybe I was just unlucky with my first couple studios.

[psykotic]

I'm not using my own salary history as a benchmark. The IGDA salary surveys and my exposure to a range of developers seem to bear out my remarks. As for how I know salaries outside of public surveys, I am on a private forum where people talk about both their own salaries anonymously and what their companies typically offer when hiring.

I appended a paragraph to the original post explaining the effect of coolness on first-job salaries. I do think it plays a role there. Companies like EA are notorious for using fresh graduates as a revolving source of underpaid labor. As for long hours, my impression (here I have no survey data) is that it's become much rarer.

I think what happened economically is that by the early to mid 2000s, the main technical challenges of game development had almost nothing to do with anything specific to games. Compare that to the impression of game development you might have gotten from reading Abrash's articles on Quake. Because of that, good game programmers were able to easily get jobs outside of games, and good non-game programmers were able to quickly get up to speed on gamedev specifics. Hence wages equalized. That also explains why wages for designer and artists are still relatively lower.

[sillysaurus3]

Thank you for your insight. I'm trying to track down the surveys you mention. Is this one? http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/1108/game_developer_...

It's from 2012. Average salary for devs with less than 3 years experience: $66,116. The average for 6+ years experience is $103,000.

Here's a survey from 2001 with 1,801 datapoints: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010715/Salary_Survey_200...

Average salary in 2001 for the same position: about $55,000. For those with 6+ years, it was about $70,000.

It seems like a webdev outside the Valley who has 6+ years experience should be making more than $103,000.

If those surveys are to be trusted, it sounds like your $85k starting salary was about 50% higher than average at the time.

[psykotic]

From what I know, the three major salary surveys are from IGDA, Developer and GDMag (now defunct). Here's the summary of GDMag's 2012 survey: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/189893/Industry_in_flux_W...

It puts the US average at $84,337. The 2012 averages I can find for web developers are significantly less than that ($60,000-80,000). Part of the problem with these comparisons is that "web developer" is a much wider category.

> It seems like a webdev outside the Valley who has 6+ years experience should be making more than $103,000.

I don't see why, unless you are in a special high-demand bracket of web development. That's a very respectable salary in most areas!