Good, and I wish them luck. The practices that companies are willing to engage in to prevent unionization are cartoonishly evil.
The best part is that they could have avoided all of this by paying their QA more for fewer hours. The changes they'll likely be forced to make by a union are probably much more dramatic than what they could have quashed pro-union sentiment by simply introducing themselves. Put another way: As an engineer, I have a great salary, good stock options, and decent hours. I favor unions in principle but don't have a drive to force my company to set one up because I am not so poorly treated that I think I need it. Why not treat QA the same way?
The exploitative practices that some in tech - especially the games industry - are exposed to are a long-term bet that those people won't mind being exploited and won't be convinced they can do better. It's a shame that bet pays off as often as it does.
> The practices that companies are willing to engage in to prevent unionization are cartoonishly evil.
Yesterday, after a Chipotle in Maine became the first location to vote to unionize, corporate decided it would rather shutter the store than risk giving anyone else any bright ideas. The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Honestly, I don't even particularly like the idea in principle of adding another layer of bureaucracy to any organization. I would rather have a country where strong labor laws made unions unnecessary. But it's plain to see that these companies need internal opposition in order to stay honest.
Countries with strong labour laws also have strong unions. Their existence is precisely the reason why such labour laws exist. It's a matter of power balance, and laws swing the way power is.
Spoiler: the labor laws create their own layer of bureucracy. Companies have to hire extra people to observe these laws. There have to be lawyers and courts which specialize in those laws. These laws are inefficient and get in the way on many occassions (i.e. both employer and employee would rather not have them), but you're still required to observe them. You can't make things more regulated without making it more rigid and inefficient at the same time.
That's.... All in order, no? If workers want to be able to not be abused, they need to collectively bargain. Which, adds extra steps. But necessary ones? What am I missing?
Negotiating your salary on an individual basis is common sense yet when put in the context of collective bargaining suddenly it's "extra steps" and "bureaucracy". Despite the fact that once you're in the job your employer rarely even gives you an opportunity to renegotiate the terms of your employment.
You know, laws in general get in the way. You need to understand them, hire extra people to observe them. We need lawyers and courts. The laws are inefficient if not just straight up outdated, but you're still required to observe them.
Not quite a balanced representation of what happened. The store had been closed for a month due to an inability to hire people. Washington Post article has fuller explanation of both sides - https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/20/chipotle-...
Isn't it kind of weird that a Bezos owned media outlet is publishing an anti-union argument? "There's two sides to the story" falls apart when your siding with Corporate over Fast Food workers.
I did not get the impression that the article was "siding with Corporate over Fast Food workers". Can you quote the sections of the article that made you think differently?
To see whether 20 is a low number, I searched for how many employees an average Chipotle branch has, which brings up this page (from 2018), where multiple commenters leave estimates that all hover around 20: https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Chipotle-Mexican-Grill/faq/how-ma...
Regardless of how close it is to the target staffing: was it open (and presumably operational at some level of customer satisfaction) or closed at the time it was shut down? What does it mean to have 20 employees but closed for a month? Wouldn't those employees be seeking other employment already?
We can also ask, was the store closed for a month in an attempt to force out the union-sympathizing employees? Does the fact that it still has 20 employees after a month of closure suggest there were even more employees a month ago? The last time the store opened was on June 17th, and the vote to unionize was held June 23rd. All that upstairs needs to do is not send a manager with the keys.
The gist of the Washington Post article is they could not hire sufficient staff for the store. They dedicated two recruiters to the task and were still unsuccessful. For the staff they did have, there was "excessive call outs and lack of availability..." I do not have any facts beyond the article, but would not surprise me that an understaffed store (described as in a remote location) would enter a downward spiral that leads to a shut down.
The company representative described it as remote. The journalist described it as in a strip mall just off the highway in Augusta. Augusta is the capital.
It would not surprise me if the store couldn't hire workers because of a reputation for poor working conditions. It would not surprise me if call outs and lack of availability were proportional to excessive call ins from an under staffed store.
Are you familiar with the economics of the store? Maybe they were having a hard time staying afloat anyway. Augusta, ME has a population of like 15k - my city of 100k(with 20k college students) only has 1 Chipotle.
I'd imagine that locations which are struggling to hire would be correlated with disaffected employees looking to unionize.
Yeah, based on my industry experience I am convinced it is not a coincidence that we're seeing games QA teams unionizing in particular. The QA department always is mistreated by management (and often other developers) and they're typically overworked contractors or temps who are at constant risk of being fired so they can't push back on mistreatment.
Games don't get shipped in a quality state on time without the hard work of skilled QA testers but the industry really treats them like they're disposable. Game design and game programming are both MUCH easier if you can rely on a good QA tester to spot issues and help you figure out reproduction steps, etc.
We had one netcode bug in Guild Wars that haunted us for at least 6 months (probably longer?) that players would frequently report but we never managed to find a reliable repro for, despite having extensive server-side logging. One of our best QA testers spent an hour or two every day trying to find a repro case and eventually was able to hand it to a lead to be fixed - something like that simply isn't possible unless you put skilled people in an environment where they can do focused, specialist work like that. (Sadly, that studio - ArenaNet - also had a tendency to mistreat QA staff and it got worse and worse over time.)
That tester ended up going on to be a design lead on multiple big AAA titles at other studios, so it was nice to see him get the recognition he deserved for his work ethic and skill.
I find it staggering that there exist companies where they don't value their QA people. As far as I'm concerned, QA is one of the most important roles on a development team. I've had meetings with higher ups where I told them we need to get our QA on the call to voice their opinion or the conversation in question can't proceed. The ability to systematically and reproduceably break things in ways that nobody else thought of is a powerful skill, and should not be overlooked.
> That tester ended up going on to be a design lead on multiple big AAA titles at other studios, so it was nice to see him get the recognition he deserved for his work ethic and skill.
If the best people in a given job always choose the leave if given the chance, then it will always suck to do the job. Custom service, qa, warehouse workers. These are all jobs that need to get done. But if anyone with the skill and drive to do something else leaves, then you are left with people who are abused because they are stuck and powerless. How many people dream of doing Video Game QA? I doubt very many. They only do it because they cannot program/draw/write/etc.
The gaming industry has it particularly bad. The industry is high risk. Like any type of software but gaming is a very competitive market in addition. Like the rest of the entertainment industry it really makes dependable employment more difficult. It only works as long as you manage to produce successful titles.
That said, a company the size of Blizzard should be able to pay decent wages for QA. I don't know how it is today but older Blizzard games had excellent QA and their products were very polished compared to the rest of the market and they were recognized by that. So trying to save a few bucks in this department is negligent management and should immediately be stopped as it would undermine their successful strategy.
I work in a union shop, and ive been in shops that have unionized.
before the inks dried the company is going to throw every single thing they have at you to fight. youll get calls, youll get meetings, youll get your hours chopped stretched and moved all over the place. management will tell you what youre doing is illegal, that they can close the shop and walk away, that all your benefits will go away.
and in the end, youll take a 15k raise, pick up some nice new PPE, sit at the same table as management and ask them to recall why they said all these things that werent true while they tell you they do not comment on any prior business conducted outside of a union agreement.
our union ended mandatory overtime, slashed shift injuries, got healthier vending machines, and got health insurance for everyone.
The article said 1 of the QA workers' complaints is crunch. Crunch is mandatory overtime. And they want to change disciplinary processes. Many office workers have fancy chairs and so on to prevent injuries. And how are healthier snacks and drinks not relevant to office workers?
If you spend all day eating carrot sticks and peanuts and drinking unsweetened iced tea vs. eating Snickers bars and Cheetos and drinking Coca Cola (or whatever), after a few months you’ll see a pretty big difference.
Many people will eat whatever snacks are available against their better judgment, and then regret it later. Having unhealthy snacks there and in people’s faces is a kind of psychological manipulation that takes some people nontrivial willpower to overcome.
If someone really wants candy bars, they can bring them from home.
If people want unhealthy options they can just bring them from home as well.
And yeah if the vending machines were the primary reason behind unionizing... Probably an overreaction (then again I'm not going to tell someone else what should be important to them), but in this case it's literally the least of the benefits mentioned.
If presenting (the most profitable for the vending machine company) choices is the only criterion, we should skip foods and just have vending machines that offer porn magazines, cigarettes, and hard liquor. Or just install slot machines.
Seems like it's adding choice, once there was only junk, now there's some healthier options.
Even if it removed the junk in favor of health food it's still the same amount of choice, now it's just the people who want junk that have to source it elsewhere instead of the people who want healthier options.
It wasn't that long ago that I've have also been disappointed in the change, but today I'd be happy about it.
So yeah, so long as there's more options, rather than just completely changing everything to be "healthy", I think it's an improvement. Otherwise, someone gets the shaft.
>and in the end, youll take a 15k raise, pick up some nice new PPE, sit at the same table as management and ask them to recall why they said all these things that werent true while they tell you they do not comment on any prior business conducted outside of a union agreement.
And all your up and coming young techs you were hoping to train into more advanced positions leave to your competitors who can actually offer them a quick promotion and raise outside of the stupid seniority and job title based system the union got you and the workplace steadily inches toward "everyone does exactly their job and nothing more" type clock punching culture that makes everyone hate work.
Whether the tradeoffs are worth it is an argument I'm willing to have. but don't lie to us and act like there's no downsides.
I meant like the processing equipment fucks off and starts spilling product on the floor and the half crippled janitor has to struggle to turn it off while everyone else looks on because they're on their lunch break so it's not their problem. And then they all give the one fork lift driver who stops to help clean it up the stink eye. Or the front end loader operator who leaves at exactly 5pm rather than staying the extra 10min to complete the task at hand on the Friday before a long weekend leaving the people he was supporting to do a ton of less efficient work with a different machine causing his coworkers to not leave until 7pm because they were actually responsible for finishing the task. Both those are examples from real life BTW. And in both cases management wanted to chew the people being selfish jerks out but because of the rigidly defined job requirements as a result of the various agreements with the union nothing would have come of it so they didn't get chewed out. That's the kind of toxic "not my job" attitude that unions provide a heck of a lot of cover for.
Frankly I think it's moronic that people don't realize that just because something benefits the company doesn't mean it doesn't also benefit your coworkers.
The difficulties in your example all stem from the employer not having proper staffing. The fault is entirely with the employer, and if I was one of those guys I'd also fuck off right at 5PM. I'm not getting paid to stay late.
There's this certain mentality that's been deeply culturally embedded by anti-union propoganda, especially in tech, that unions are a sort of blue collar organization designed strictly for appeazing underperforming and lazy.
What people forget in their arrogance is that unions also just bring more leverage back to the table to fight off abuse, setup better conditions, etc. Yes, they can be abused and yes, they can lead to stagnation but without collective bargaining power your only leverage is how easy/difficult you are to replace and how abundant acceptable (e.g., do I need to uproot my life?) competitive or acceptable openings are at any given point of time so you can vote with your feet.
It's perfectly OK to embed your idealistic meritocracy within a union as part of your negotiations. You don't have to appease the lazy and 'medicore' if that's your great fear, you can negotiate and codify fair evaluations for these things if your union so wishes this. At the same time you also can negotiate nifty things like: not being on call, not working overtime, making sure theres adequate number of engineers on a project, improving the type of work you do, etc. Unless you're leading a startup where you're on the other side of the table, I don't see how these ideas aren't appealing to you--the opposite is very appealing to your employers.
In general, labor has been on the losing side for decades and there's this degree of condescension that "I am professional making great TC, I don't need those piddly unions" mentality that does nothing but props up continued erosion of standards and expectations of work and compensation in this industry. I've been working in software and tech for quite awhile (my mentor who shared their experiences of such declines since the 60s), and I can assure you it's gotten worse over the years for workers. This industry has been mostly fortunate because of growth outstripping supply that continues to give some leverage, but that may not be the case indefinitely and if that happens, unless you are near the absolute top of the field, you too will continue to see declines in working conditions in this field indefinitely.
I had conservative in-laws, who lived through the 80's unions, indoctrinate me into the anti-union view by portraying all unionized workers as lazy. They believed Unions are the sole reason why companies like Eastern Airlines dissolved. Perhaps unions did grow more corrupt in the past.
As I looked into it further, it was similar to the argument how conservatives don't support certain social services because it'll cause people to be lazy and underperform in society. There is probably some truth to that, and there's always going to be people taking advantage of the system.
I do agree with you that the balance has shifted too much on the anti-union side. I hope these new unionizing efforts help shift the balance back to the middle.
It's the norm, rather than the exception, here in Europe. My employment contract is set through collective bargaining and I work at one of the largest tech employers in Switzerland. Being represented by a union is just standard fare. I don't understand the hostility to it across the pond.
But in the US the history of unions often ended up with ties to organized crime. In addition unions seemed to become more interested in serving the needs of the union rather than the well being of the workers. One example is a buddy of mine that had to be party of a bag boys union who had to end up paying basically the entirety of a pay check in union dues each month simply to be employed, without him getting anything from it.
From what I understand there is a literal and figurative ocean of difference between the unions in the EU and the US.
I'll further add that trying to conflate the two is a tactic I've often seen used by dishonest people to manipulate the conversation.
> But in the US the history of unions often ended up with ties to organized crime.
Organized crime takes root in groups that don't benefit from government protection. Do you think that unions would've turned to organized crime if the authorities and privatized security groups didn't regularly attack them without any intervention by the US government to protect them?
In the history of unions in the US, who do you think turned a bind eye to the infiltration by organized crime? During the depression labor organizing was mostly the work of people who the government persecuted after the war for their politics. That left a power vacuum that organized crime was happy to fill.
> But in the US the history of unions often ended up with ties to organized crime.
Is this true, or just another case of historical revisionism based on pop culture?
Not denying that there aren't examples of this, but it does seem a bit like people like to go back to a few famous criminal individuals to justify that unions are "bad".
I highly doubt this - everytime I have heard people complain about this it terns out to be a percentage of their paycheck (which is pretty standard for all unions - rarely it is a flat fee).
What potentially could be a whole paycheck are the payments for healthcare that is provided by the union
I kind of feel the same way - I think that, in the long run, unionization will be bad for everybody involved... but the employers have really, really, really brought this on themselves. All they had to do was try to be human beings from time to time, but apparently that was too much to ask.
There was a huge scandal that basically killed tech unions in the US. Big names like Steve Jobs, George Lucas, etc. It also killed the chance of a VFX union (at the time VFX and tech jobs were basically seen as the same industry).
This is in contrast to the rest of Hollywood which is probably one of the best examples of a union success story the US has. Every single little niche has its own union (Animation Guild, Editors Guild, etc)
This all ended with a huge lawsuit and a (supposedly) massive settlement without a court decision. But the end result was that the tech unions never formed - the assholes won
I have friends in VFX and in animation, and the VFX friends are... less happy than the animators. The animators bitch about how the corporations are constantly trying to get one person to do the job of two but the union is constantly pushing back, the VFX people just accept that shit like "oh we didn't get paid for the last month of work because the shop closed up" is normal for them.
What is the structure of unionized employment where you work?
In particular:
1. Do you have a choice of union?
2. Do you in theory have a choice of union even if in practice there is only one applicable union?
3. Can you leave the union/not engage in collective bargaining via the union if you believe the union is not representing your interests?
4. Can you in theory form your own union if applicable unions do not represent your interests?
From a cursory inspection of the structure of German and Swiss trade unions, I believe the answer to all of these questions is yes, though I do not have any in-depth or firsthand experience indicating the truth of my belief, so it would be helpful to get input from someone with firsthand experience.
In contrast, based on a more in-depth analysis on the nature of legal recognition for unions in the US, in the US the answer to all of these questions is no. I hypothesize this distinction, assuming it is true, is a key reason for the different attitudes towards unions in the US and Europe.
Serious question though, what’s the pay like for a software engineer in Switzerland? The last time I checked it was something around half or less of what a software engineer can make in a third tier city in the USA. I can deal with not being in a union when I make close to three times the average cost of living in my area and would be very surprised if a union could negotiate a better rate or better working conditions as a software engineer.
So many tech workers bring out this line, that they don't think a union could negotiate a better deal for them.
Really? You really think that you are the best negotiator out of everyone who could join a union local in your area? You really think that by yourself you have more leverage than if you were negotiating alongside everyone else in a similar position within your company?
You look at the amount, and see that it's good, and you make a whole bunch of assumptions founded on stereotypes about unions, and come to the conclusion that you are the specialest person around...and it's a very seductive thing to believe.
But it's just one more way the people making dozens or hundreds of times more than you screw you over.
> You really think that you are the best negotiator out of everyone who could join a union local in your area?
That's not the sole determining factor. The question is not "can someone else do a better job negotiating for what I want", the question is "will someone else do a better job negotiating for what I want, and will I be able to successfully convince them to do so".
It's valid to ask "does this negotiating body actually represent me". Sometimes it does, sometimes it does not. But it's not reasonable to ignore and dismiss people who believe it does not, and who believe they're unlikely to be able to change that.
In the context of the article, it sounds like this organization is quite likely to represent the goals of its members, and I hope that it stays that way.
I think it’s just another way of saying they think unions level the pay scale (bring up the bottom, bring down the top) and they believe they’re above the median line.
I’m not sure if that’s actually the effect unions have, but assuming it is - that position is still so incredibly selfish. Even if you are on the high end, you weren’t aways. Hold the door open for the next generation. Lift everybody up. Let everyone get a first helping before you go back for seconds.
1. Are you paid for the value you bring to the company, or are you paid for some function of the value you bring and the market value of your skills? Seems to me the largest portion of your pay is the market value. Collective bargaining is playing with the market value, not the value you bring.
2. "Value you bring to the company" is an odd way to look at most jobs. Like what's the impact on productivity of the 25 engineers in an office if the trash hasn't been taken out in three weeks? Janitorial labor is contributing to the overall income of the company in ways that may not be direct, but ARE real. Same would apply for junior engineering tasks.
3. While I'm a fan of the idea of everyone earning the same hourly wage within a company for above reasons, unions MIGHT flatten the payscale a bhit, but they don't usually result in a FLAT payscale. So you will still earn more based on some ladder - years with the company, title, value you bring, etc.
Although you quoted "Value you bring to the company" I did not say that. Your value to the company is separate from the value you bring the company.
If a company has button that when pressed makes them $1M. A person they hired for that role brings them $1M in value assuming they had no one to push the button before. The value of that person is very low since they can easily find a replacement.
I am over 40, get paid over 700k a year. Just a normal software engineer at a normal company.
Unions would mean I get paid less, and the guy sitting next to me who can’t find his way around a computer would get paid more.
I know you folks like to say it’s a stereotype of unions, but unions really only protect the lazy. If you do your job well companies will fight over you. If you are not so good at your job that union sure does sound like a good idea.
As if twenty years of employment implied any particular level of competence or automatically entitled one to a job. There's plenty of demand out there for anyone halfway decent regardless of age.
In the 1970's Reagan ushered in an era of busting unions and they have been declining ever since. Ironic as Reagan in his youth had actually fought for unions.
On top of that, the percentage of millionaires on HN is probably closer to 80% than 8% so that hackneyed slogan has little resonance with this audience. Then add in that many, many developers get a massive chunk of their compensation in stock or options, which literally aligns their interests with the owners of the company because they _are_ part-owners of the company, and that slogan is DOA.
Is it a feeling of imminent wealth? Or is it a feeling of equal opportunity for everyone? It seems disingenuous to frame it as "those silly Americans thinking they're about to be rich". You might as well frame unions as "protecting the most useless employees from being fired".
You're right - unions don't do that. They could be incorrectly perceived as doing that though, which is the comparison I'm making to "Americans love feeling like they're about to be rich". That's very clearly not how Americans feel and framing it that way is pure propaganda, as you put it.
You might want to look into the practices of police unions. The inability to fire for bad behavior is part of why police forces turn into self serving monstrosities.
I'm sure its a complex mix of 200+ years of socioeconomic development that goes well beyond my glib comment. I do really believe there is something to it though and understanding American culture (and politics).
In the US, unions historically excluded Black labor. Management was able to play the two labor forces against each other when there was a strike.
Eventually the Civil Rights Act passed, forcing government-mandated equality in many places, especially around employment. White labor abandoned the labor party (Democrat) in favor of the anti-government party (Republican).
Since then, the Democrats have been pro-minority, pro-government and at best fairly ambivalent about labor issues. Only the management perspective played in the media, and when Clinton came in to power he brought a strongly anti-labor platform to the Dems.
Americans for the most part have not had a labor party to oppose management narratives, and don't generally even have the common vocabulary to discuss labor issues.
My father worked for a union bridge building company for 33 years. He was very pro union. He retired after 33 years from a massive heart attack, which was alarmingly common for people with his job description. He was still very pro union, as his employer left him with little medical debt after an extremely expensive heart transplant. However, I destincty recall his throwing a magazine across the room published by his union when he vehemently disagreed with the political stance they took. The stance was very liberal, he was very conservative. It's very easy to say it's all about race, but when the blue collar workers don't feel at all represented by their union what do you expect to happen? He didn't feel represented in any way by the national union even when we literally said he'd never work a day non union in his life. The unions lost support at the ground level and never got it back.
I think that the Dems decided that their other planks (largely racial/identity/cultural) were more important than their labor planks. Simultaneously, union workers decided that their other political beliefs were more important than their labor-related ones. It's hard to pick apart which happened first, if either could be said to happen first, because each magnified the other in a feedback cycle.
The political realignment was rather sudden, and the upshot was that the party that previously represented labor didn't particularly care about "labor vs management" anymore. They cared about equality within the labor force, which is a totally different thing.
> even have the common vocabulary to discuss labor issues.
This was one of the warnings of Orwell. A good example is how communism and socialism are synonymous for many people limiting their capability to discuss social improvements.
I think it was mostly a result of a never ending free for all. Now that the economy is cooling, all the toxic traits of tech are soon going to be out in the open and more workers realize that it is better to have a union than not.
Toxic management, PIP as a tool to overwork people, hire to fire, etc all needs a little dose of unions.
Unfortunately, the biggest hole in unionization is that the company can unilaterally shut down the store/office AFTER the union is granted by the NLRB.
It is illegal to go after individuals responsible for helping unionizing. It's also illegal to say that they will shut it down prior to unionization as a threat. But doing so afterward is 100% legal.
Walmart's done this. Starbucks is doing this right now. And many other stores that are unionizing/unionized are being just closed with no warnings.
Not really, major companies are already using end users for beta testing, a/b testing and relying on user reports for bug fixes. It's becoming more and more standardized to release an inferior, bug filled product and just wait till users complain about something before fixing it. Reactive vs proactive is cheaper.
As someone who has worked in game dev - QA is absolutely essential. Beta testing is more of a PR move than anything else - you do potentially get useful automatically collected statistics but surveys are absolutely loaded with rubbish responses making it hard to find good information in the bad. If you want to use Beta testing to do a wide bug sweep you need a QA team anyways to actually sort through all the crap and reproduce the issues - if you expect devs to actually chase down "The game crashed this one time after I built this building" with no attached save file you have no appreciation to how time crunched game devs already are.
The other half of what you said, releasing a buggy product and fixing it afterwards - that happens all the time and it's usually a bit PR win since users appreciate "bug fixing velocity" more than they appreciate a bug free game... However, negative patches (where more things are broken than fixed) can be a death knell for a game - one good example of this is the Leviathan DLC for EU4[1]... Paradox spent months afterwards doing PR catch up to try and re-ingratiate themselves with the community.
Based on the QA people I've worked with over the years it can be grueling work with an unusually high level of responsibility and, from what I've seen, low pay compared to developer salaries. Seems like an obvious part of tech to be at the forefront of unionization.
As for the companies fighting tooth and nail against unionization attempts, I don't blame them any more than I blame a dog for eating food I drop on the floor. It's just what they do. If we want a more equitable playing field for unionization we need to support policies and politicians to make that happen. Waving fists at for-profit enterprises accomplishes nothing.
This is more true for game testers/QA (notorious for low pay and turnover) than software QA in other industries. SDET's are developers that focus on testing and get paid on par with devs.
If you're still holding onto Blizzard stock at this point, you've accepted that it's not going to rise in value anytime soon and just hoping for a beneficial acquisition or as a long investment.
Unionization actually generally helps company growth in the long term since it's beneficial to the company - it just hurts stocks in the short term because the stock market hates unions.
Maybe he means that a company famous for shit culture, in an industry famous for shit culture, that has employees forming a legal entity to defend themselves against the company has bad management?
What’s the general feeling? I can’t see their working conditions being genuinely terrible or unsafe, or the pay being that unfair. Perhaps they’re being driven too hard?
I don't think looking at hacker news as a hive mind is a good idea tbh.
I'm on the side of those unionizing. Work conditions don't need to be unsafe for folks to unionize, and I'm fairly confident in saying that the vast majority of folks everywhere (in tech anyway) are paid an unfairly low amount for the value they generate.
Except value you generate is not a good metric for salary.
If I have an employee that generates 100M a year, but I have boundless applicants that can perform that same task then the unfortunate reality is that person is not that valuable.
... and it doesn't matter how easy the job is, you need people to do those jobs. In this labor market, it's hard to find people of all skill levels. I'm not suggesting QA is easy or doesn't require a lot of skill either -- it's very hard to find a really talented QA person.
People outside the industry really undervalue talented QA people - yes there are hordes of 20 year olds that have always wanted to "work on the fortnite" but their productivity compared to someone long in the industry who understands how to effectively test, can write clear test plans and knows the importance of reproduction steps and who understands test automation... it's a night and day comparison.
How do you know they can do the exact same task? After how many months? And what if the new guy quit after a month and after you wasted weeks on trying to hire them?
Value generation should be +/- the only metric for salary(besides whether or not you negatively affect the rest of team because of your behavior)
It’s also very difficult if not impossible to calculate generally and many people tend to vastly overestimate their personal contribution to value generation.
I remember McDonalds workers striking and a post about how their CEO makes ~1300x their salary. I looked up our dual CEO salary and together they were making like ~2000x our salaries.
A friend of mine was on the QA team at Blizzard Albany and his complaints were straightforward: the pay is awful & the hours are long (especially during crunch).
Crunch is likely why the gaming companies will throw everything they have at stopping unionization. The first thing the unions will do is get rid of crunch.
Rightfully so too -- none of the programming jobs I've had have made me believe that crunch time is actually necessary. But, management has to plan not to have crunch time rather than rely on it regularly.
Under a union, the gaming industry will have to give a lot more time to work on tasks that have a specific deadline that can't be moved (like tie-ins with external events that won't get delayed, such as the super bowl for example).
When I was working in the gaming industry there were days we (on the server team) had overtime because the client team was behind on their work and everyone staying late was better for morale... but we were ahead on ours since we'd fought hard for our timelines and my manager was a badass. The result was we server people sitting around chatting in the office while the client team struggled not to be distracted, I don't think it helped morale.
That is a good thing. Crunch time is due to poor project planning. Limits on employee abuse can lead to needed productivity innovation. Another thing that could help is if customers would stop buying AAA games that push graphical limits to unnecessary extremes. Nintendo has demonstrated what you can accomplish through good game design and less reliance on extreme graphics.
Is this in general or in this specific case of defending their decision to unionize?
In general, I feel that QA should be paid as much as devs, when they are good. I've worked with a couple of "holy shit, how did you find that?" level of exceptional, and I felt they deserved more than I was paid and actively argued as much with our manager. Those people made me better, they made the products better, which ultimately made the company better. Keeping these people around make other QA people better. Instead, they get hired away because nobody pays them their worth, and you're left with a much less capable QA team.
Workers have a right to bargain for fair working conditions, it doesn't really matter what we think tbh. But why would you say that you assume the pay is 'fair'? We got bought by Oracle and no-one saw a raise in years, even through pandemic, where the ceo that makes 2000x our salary emailed us about how he was over the pandemic and decided to move to his private island in hawaii and make it 'a better place with the locals'
This comment has drawn the ire of hackernews, simply for posing it, with a slight tilt.
The general consensus seems to be that good QA is highly valuable. As for if their pay were unfair, would they not leave for a better pay/safer working conditions?
My personal take is that people in the software industry don’t understand what terrible working conditions are. Running out of odwalla or having non-organic fruit in the micro kitchen is not terrible.
They sell a position to a qualified candidate. Keyword is sell. They're not going to tell you what frustrations other staff have, or if they treat their workers like shit, or if they make unreasonable demands that aren't in the job description, or if scope-creep on a project 4 months down the line will require me to start putting in overtime I didn't agree to, etc.
If you know of an accurate way to determine what the day-to-day working conditions are for any arbitrary position in any company over an extended period of employment (including how work conditions will change with things like leadership changes, mergers, departmental transfers, special projects, etc.), shoot me an email because I will invest in whatever magic it is.
Considering the churn at most QA shops I'm pretty sure they accepted the job while being told it was all rosy and are just there long enough to realize they were duped and find another job. EA in particular is famous for literally vomiting out disillusioned QA veterans.
That is such a trash comment. Good QA/test/validation engineers are worth their weight in gold! It is a absolute crime we don't pay the profession more.
The best part is that they could have avoided all of this by paying their QA more for fewer hours. The changes they'll likely be forced to make by a union are probably much more dramatic than what they could have quashed pro-union sentiment by simply introducing themselves. Put another way: As an engineer, I have a great salary, good stock options, and decent hours. I favor unions in principle but don't have a drive to force my company to set one up because I am not so poorly treated that I think I need it. Why not treat QA the same way?
The exploitative practices that some in tech - especially the games industry - are exposed to are a long-term bet that those people won't mind being exploited and won't be convinced they can do better. It's a shame that bet pays off as often as it does.