Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 126: I'm underpaid and Game Industry Bonuses

Episode Date: October 1, 2018

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: One of my friends recently was hired at a salary 20k more than my own, even though we are at the same level. This caused me to re-think whether or not my company is paying me fairly and planted seeds for making me leave for something better. So the question is: how does one gauge “average salary” (other than at say for example glass door.com) for one’s city and should I interview for a higher salary and come back and ask for a counter offer? How will I be viewed if I did such a thing? I’ve been an engineer in the video game industry for 10 years. I’ve worked for 4 large game studios and at each one the story has been the same. Once it comes time to release our game, the crunch time kicks in. Often the need to work overtime is implied, but on my current project the company president directly spelled out that ALL engineers would be working a minimum of 60 hours per week for AT LEAST six months. In the past I’ve chosen to jump ship before it gets that bad, but I really wanna see this project through to the end. We’re all salaried employees and so far we’ve received no compensation for our overtime hours. No comp time or anything. The only carrot that has been dangled is that ““it will be taken into consideration during bonus time””. How much is reasonable to expect as a bonus for this much overtime? 10% of my annual salary? 50%? A firm handshake and a swift layoff? Thanks guys for any advice you can give!

It takes more than being good at inserting the USB plug right side up the first time to be a great engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering, episode 126. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host and person who has done it once in his life, Jameson Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice show for software engineers about non-technical topics. And we have a bunch of wonderful patrons who help support the show financially. We want to thank them because they're great. We want to thank David Jackson, Dustin Coates, Ken Howard, matthew i did this last time dave how do i pronounce this person's name i think the correct way to mispronounce it is wotowix matthew wotowix nick kantar sean clayton and zach grannon if you

want to be shouted out if you want your name mispronounced or pronounced correctly maybe correct pronunciation is like the ultimate mega tier yeah you have to pay a lot of money go to softskills.audio click support us on patreon we will shout you out and we'll thank you very much. Thank you to all your help in keeping the show going. Yeah, thanks very much. Should I read our first question? Please. Okay. This comes from an anonymous listener who says, one of my friends recently was hired at a salary $20,000 more than my own, even though we are at the same level. This caused me to rethink whether or not my company is paying me fairly and planted seeds for making me leave for something better. So the question is, how does one gauge average salary other than at

say for example glassdoor.com for one city and should i interview for a higher salary and come back and ask for a counter offer how would i be viewed if i did such a thing i'm assuming the friend was hired at the same company not a different company right yeah i made that same assumption okay it'd be weird if my friend got a job and they make more money than i do are they a nuclear physicist they have the most difficult garbage truck route on the planet that's hazard pay yeah it's like on the grand canyon's edge where there are all those garbage cans yes for some reason right on the precipice

that's only slightly more difficult than the job of the people who take the garbage cans out to the precipice those people get hazard pay but just a little bit less yeah yeah so let's assume same company i've had this experience before i found out at the exact same company that i had a friend who joined and they made more money than i did and they joined after i did i feel like that's always how it goes well i guess all one of the times this has happened to me but but it seems like maybe later on the company is more mature has more money is more able to pay there are a bunch of reasons why this could happen or they're just a better negotiator but i did find out that they made more money than i did i didn't do it right that second but when the time came to talk

about um raises and and stuff like that i used the number i found out from my friend i didn't say my friend makes this much i want to make this much i just used it to um anchor what i asked for so that worked out well because that company i think was pretty generous overall and they were pretty they're pretty informal about it it wasn't like a defined review cycle with a set band for a specific level and it was just kind of like yeah okay you asked for it it felt like it was like right on the edge of them being like okay it's worth it to keep you happy but i didn't have to go out and get another offer and it worked out so that's that's like the best possible outcome of this i feel like i just found out like oh i can just ask for more money and then i did and they

said yes and so you didn't have to mention that your friend was making more no so you just use it as your to show how yeah to show how how like pampered i am this came in a conversation where they were giving me a raise and they were like we'd like to give you this much and i said actually i really want this much which was more and then they kind of went away for a day and came back and said okay so like yeah i think that was basically easy mode of this situation but it's possible and so did they end up matching what your friend made yeah yeah they did so they brought you all the way up because i thought another way to have a nice equal outcome would be to go convince your friend to ask for a pay cut oh okay yeah yeah man it's so true like who

cares we just want to be the same or better we don't care what the absolute number is right it's like yeah you make five dollars and i make four dollars all right time to make five dollars or four yeah it's the whole keeping up with the joneses thing right yeah exactly there's two ways you can either crush the joneses go take a sledgehammer to that shiny new rv in their driveway look now we both have broken beat up vehicles in our driveway nice yeah i'm just thinking like who's this boss like if i were this boss i would be sitting here going oh boy i wonder when this person's gonna figure it out like you're just waiting for that moment when you walk through my door and you're like so about my salary like oh yeah figured it out i i think one thing you're

noticing here is that in some ways salary is salary is loosely tied to the value you provide a company and sometimes we like to convince ourselves it's directly tied to it but it's there are all kinds of things besides like how much stuff you got you got done and some of it is how you negotiate and it's way easier to negotiate when you're sitting there in a job offer situation instead of when you already work there because the opportunity cost is a lot higher to like quit your job and go get a different job than to just not accept an offer. So you have more leverage at the job offer time than you do at the current employee time. Yes. I have actually, I've seen this as an argument for having fixed salary bans because since salary is also correlated

with how well you negotiate, that's not really a skill that determines how good you're going to be at your job. And so it unfairly penalizes people that aren't as good at negotiating because they just won't ask for as much so they end up making less so to to create some more equity some organizations will just say like at this level you make this much and maybe there's like a location modifier if they do remote or have so it's not it's not a band it's not a range it's a fixed number per yeah yeah it's just like here is the the number for this level of developer yeah yeah i think i think joel spolsky's company did that uh back in the day fog creek software there's yeah There's a bunch of them that do it.

I always wonder like, yeah, but really? Like there's got to be someone, I guess then the wiggling is like, well, what level are you at? Not where do you fall in the band? Yeah. And you can negotiate for that too. Yeah. So once again, it pays to be good at negotiating.

Well, hopefully level is more tied to what you do at the job. But anyways, we have avoided answering the question so far. How do you gauge the average salary and what should this person do now that they found out that someone else makes more than them at the same level? Well, I'll tell you my tried and true way for gauging the average salary. And that is go out to websites like Glassdoor, which the listener mentioned, and salary.com and things like that, and collect all the data you can and throw out every number that is lower than your current salary and every number that's lower than what you want to

make. And then bring that corpus of data to your manager and say, here's the average salary that I should be making. Do you really care what the average is or do you care what's possible, right? Well, you care what's possible, but you present it to your employer as an average so they feel compelled to pay you that much or else they're going to be, quote, below average. I learned last week that Linus Torvalds makes $1.6 million in salary. So I guess if you like filter your Glassdoor searches enough, then you could end up with one data point that's Linus Torvalds. Just filter it to like 25 years of Linux experience.

Yeah. Okay. So I can't tell how much of a joke that is. You're saying you need some kind of data to back it up. Why not just massage the data? Oh yeah. I mean, the thing is this data is all garbage anyway, right? Like even if you go on Glassdoor, which is supposedly self-reported from individuals who work at that company, it's still like, it's crazy. When I look at some of those numbers, I'm like, it's not clear to me whether this includes a one-time signing bonus or whether this includes like a stock grant after the stock just went on a tear you know upward um and so it's like oh look a google senior software engineer makes 400 000 a year right like what exactly is that you know like is that their base salary yeah there's also some amount of bias in

self-reported numbers where especially if they're tied to people's perception of value in some way if you ask people they'll just give higher numbers that shows up in in in all kinds of things but definitely I think in salary. Like if I don't think I make very much money, maybe I'm less likely to go kind of like throw it up on the internet and brag about it. Absolutely. And there are actually companies that HR departments will buy their annual salary reports, which are in theory a little bit more vetted. And my previous company bought that report every year to check that our salaries were at or above market. But the problem with that is that some of those reports, they aren't sophisticated enough to distinguish between things like it help desk and like

software architect like sometimes those get bundled into the same group and average together yeah so you're doomed none of the data can be trusted what do you do we've talked about the salary game before you just say i'll tell you my salary if you tell me yours and we promise no one will get mad but we both know someone's gonna get mad someone's gonna be bottling it in for a while there's i mean there's an interesting thing happening here which is i predict that you were happier at your job before you found this out yeah even though you made the same amount of money and i'm not saying you should be blissfully ignorant and just take less than your worth but finding out unpleasant information about salary is kind of an inflection point and it can either

affect your happiness if if you tie your worth to it which is really hard not to Or it can lead to this situation you're in which is like well, I have to bump it up What do I do? Do I quit do I get another offer? Do I just go in and demand more? What if they say no, right like you're you're moving towards something where before you were not and the outcome is probably going to be more Money, let's be realistic no matter what happens Even if you quit and get a different job, but like something's going to change you've been shocked a little bit out of out of The I don't know. It's not a rut out of the comfort that you were in without knowing this Yeah, for sure. So you, you mentioned earlier that you one time had this happen and you went to your manager and they matched the salary, even though you didn't have to divulge that you had, um, that you knew this private, this theoretically private information from this other person.

I have gone to management on a handful of occasions, maybe five or six times in my 15 or 16 years. And in situations where I really wanted a big raise, bigger than like the three, four or 5% that you might expect day to day or year over year. And only once in all those times have I ever actually gotten what I asked for. and i did it um i think there were there were two differences that made it actually work the first one was it was a startup company so they had a lot more flexibility yep that was what that was the case with my situation too it was a startup yeah the bigger the company the harder it is for them for your manager to go outside the the box there's more other people to point to and say this person will not let me do it yep yep and there's more other people to point to who say no no we have someone here who works like you and looks like you and does what you do and makes less right so there's that so big company hurts you in in terms of these big spike pay bumps and the

other thing that worked in my advantage i think was i was actually able to cite a friend who had just gotten another job at a different company who never worked at this company making an amount that was even higher than what i was asking for and i think when you have a concrete example like that um it kind of puts the fear in your manager's mind that you might just go join that company with your friend you don't have to threaten it and i wouldn't threaten it this is not blackmail or a hostage situation. But having like one concrete data point where you're like, this is someone who you may as well know working at a company that you're familiar with right down the street making more than I'm even asking for right now, really helps make a good case. I think it's

better than all the data massaging and salary.com reports and everything that you could find. Sure. There's one thing we haven't talked about, which is the case besides like, you owe this to me. It's like the I'm worth it case. So citing all the stuff that you get done and showing how the how you provide value ideally that's something you're kind of doing already just to manage your career i read this article recently that talked about keeping a hype list that's basically just a list of everything cool that you accomplish because it's hard to come up with it on the spot but if you go into a discussion like this and you have this list you've curated over the past year or whatever it's easy to say remember that thing that happened 11 months ago

like we haven't had a salary discussion since then absolutely it's still relevant instead of say you go in and you say i want 20k more and they say well why you're like well what did i let me think through my pull requests in reverse chronological order yeah i move this button so some prep there showing why you are of value to the company i think could be good what if they just say no the question asker mentioned do i go get another offer I would not do that. I would not shop offers just for the purpose of convincing your current company to give you a raise I I think there's some nuance there I think if if you like the company, but you feel like they're not paying you enough

You can use it to say like I want to be paid more That's an important part of my job for me And if you go out and get an offer that pays more you can it feels the same in terms of outcome, but it feels like a different mindset of like this is a thing that would make me happy i could leave or you could make it worth my while to stay here and both of those are okay with me which one is better for you not like not like threatening them if you're gonna quit over salary and that's the only thing why wouldn't you give them an opportunity to let you stay if they think it's worth it well i think i would i would approach

that by telling them that before i go shop around for offers by saying you know i love this company i want to work here i want you to make it a little bit harder for me to say yes when a recruiter comes knocking you know or um the salary is low and that's the only thing that's the only downside here can you work with me rather than saying i have this offer from your competitor from the company down the street and i'm gonna walk right now if you don't meet it you know it's hard to i know you would never say it that strongly but it's hard to sought to word that softly enough to not have that be the message that comes across i think yeah it still is i mean quitting is the ultimate leverage that you have over the company anything below that is kind of down to this

agreement between you two but the way that the the main leverage you have is saying like well i'll just go somewhere else so i don't know that you have to threaten it like dave said but i think it is a thing you could approach and and yeah maybe that's the thing you just say openly like well i'm that that's disappointing to me that you wouldn't pay me that more and that's an important thing for me in my career and for my happiness yeah okay have we answered the question question answered how i'd be viewed if i did such a thing it's happened before to your manager guarantee and if you are the first person to ever do it you're preparing them for when it's going to happen again they'll be fine you'll be viewed fine people quit because of salary all the time

oh yeah for sure especially now where it goes up often if you quit yeah you're not going to get this horrible reputation okay next question this is from another anonymous listener i have been an engineer in the video game industry for 10 years i've worked for four large game studios and each one at each one the story has been the same once it comes time to release our game the crunch time kicks in often the need to work overtime is implied but on my current project the company president directly spelled out that all engineers would be working a minimum of 60 hours a week for at least six months in the past i've chosen to jump ship before it gets that bad but i really want to see this project through to the end we're all salaried employees and so far we've received

no compensation for our overtime hours no comp time or anything the only carrot that has been dangled is it will be taken into consideration during bonus time how much is reasonable to expect as a bonus for this much overtime 10 of my annual salary 50 a firm handshake and a swift layoff thanks for any advice you can give how much is reasonable in this situation based on that quote i would say zero would be very reasonable as a frequent video game player and someone who has never made a video game i feel totally qualified to talk about this yeah i don't think they said i would not expect anything from this company i i know that it is common to get bonuses at the end of of launching a game and also it's common to just destroy your life and and work what me what

to me seems like inhumane hours to pump out a game for a long period of time too i've done crunch time but it was maybe like a month at a time at most it's like little baby crunch time and this is like you hear about studios crunching for years right years of just like sleeping at your desk or working seven days a week or i i don't know there's that sounds horrible and i can't imagine an amount of money that would make it worth that how about 1.6 million dollars yeah okay sure no even no i don't know no then i would live by myself in a very nice house and be miserable i wouldn't even live there i would live at my job yep yeah we talked about leverage in the last question the one sad the source of this in the video game industry is that it's one of the lowest

leverage industries because so many people want to work in games yeah because so many people are into games and they would love to do it as a job so there are lots of people that want to get into it so i think that kind of depresses wages and results in these tougher working conditions because you can be replaced if you leave. Not you, you're irreplaceable. But like there's another person who wants to write engines for video games or whatever, you know? Like it's technically interesting.

It's cool. It seems fun to some people. And I think that's the source of it. Yeah. So what percentage do you think is a reasonable expectation? I have no idea because I've never done this. But I know if you just look at overtime law, it's time and a half.

And so if I did some numbering, I did some mapping. Okay. Say you make $100,000 a year just to keep the math easy. There's about 2,000 hours of work in a year if you do two weeks of vacation. So that's about $50 an hour. So then if you work overtime, that'd be $75 an hour. If you work an extra 20 hours a week for six months, that comes out to, if I did my numbering right, about $37,000 for that six months of overtime. All right.

So that's about a 37% bonus. Sure. yeah if you just i mean time and a half is like the i think that's the law for hourly employees who are eligible for overtime so it's not like i don't know there's nothing guaranteeing this but that's just a thing other people do so maybe it works here that's in line with the anecdotal stories that i've heard from friends who have worked in the gaming industry but um one thing to know about my uh secondhand knowledge is that it's about 10 years old and it predated the casual game industry that has just really blown up in the last

five to ten years you know especially the smartphone game casual game but like you know my friend who used to work at a big name studio developing games you've heard of i want to say they got some pretty big bonuses i think 37 would even be low for what they got but did their boss say you will get these bonuses or did they say you must work overtime yeah i think no i think it was actually like well understood that they would get x percentage bonus after the game launched so this This is from my foggy recollection from a secondhand story. So it was well understood and then it happened. Okay.

Whereas the situation I read here from this question is we reserve the right to pay you nothing. Yeah, that's kind of what it sounds like. I mean, games are kind of like movies in that there are lots of flops and then some gigantic mega winners that make enormous amounts of money. So I could see it being sort of dependent on the performance of the game too. like if the game does really well then there's more revenue to spread around and if not then i'm sorry about the last six months of your life but the one thing the way that it's been phrased

makes me suspicious that nothing is coming it's just like please work really hard yeah thanks in advance yeah yeah and it could be that they're reluctant to make any kind of percentage promise because of what you just described like there's a good chance that their um game will be like totally you know it'll be a flop wouldn't this stuff be part of your employment contract though it feels like i don't know maybe that's only again i know all about pressing the buttons i don't know about making them but it seems like maybe if you worked in the gaming industry when you joined a studio you would have some contract that said like bonus is this amount based on revenue where you get i don't know based on our our sales targets and how we hit them yeah some some kind of defined

thing so it's not just down to like hoping this dude who got up and said hey you have to work over time is going to be nice to you so i have a story from a former co-worker of mine who was about this probably happened about 15 years ago or so do tell he worked for a big name studio and they were in a crunch time situation and they i mean this guy was like sleeping under his desk and stuff and apparently it was taking a toll on his wife and children and they were getting pretty frustrated with him not being around and you know there's probably other things going on there but there was a big promise of a bonus though and sure enough the game delivered finally launched and the bonus did come through landed in the bank account he came home from work after the money had

been deposited uh and had found that his wife had changed the locks and served him divorce papers so super sad story but it's kind of like i think it kind of highlights you know even if there is a big bonus at the end of this crunch time what are you really working for you know like if if people in your life are suffering and and uh you're you know unhappy and unhealthy in the end that money can just slip through your fingers anyway and you can lose all those relationships so i'm not really sure that it could be the best thing especially 60 hours a week for what do we say six months here in this question yeah that's pretty intense well i was just gonna say that sounds mild compared to some of the other stories i've heard there's some harrowing accounts and i

don't know this is all i don't know how to answer how to answer this question without it being through the lens of my own preferences right i i would not enjoy working at a job that had crunch time and i wouldn't feel like it's worth it and maybe the answer is different for you if you are really dedicated to the studio or the game or the product that you're building or whatever but for me especially if there was nothing written down that said you will get this in exchange for this extra effort then i i would i don't know i wouldn't be there in the first place yeah i've heard talk about uh unions for game developers because i mean i hear it for software developers every once in a while in general, but it seems like game developers, because of these conditions

where the work is a little bit tougher than in other parts of software, it seems like it comes up more often. And I imagine this is part of the discussion. How do we handle crunch time in a systemic way? If you just know at the beginning, like, yeah, for 50% of the life of this project, we will have to do crunch time. And that's just built into how you build stuff that just seems unhealthy. I don't know. Yeah. The other thing that stands out, you know, you mentioned that 60 hours is actually not that bad by comparison. What stands out to me is that, you know, I'm familiar with doctors and finance folks and stuff. They work this many hours as a matter of course. That's a light week. Yeah. So I don't know. Maybe 60 hours a week is the price you pay for working

on something that is perceived as really cool. Yeah. Which is why there are so many people who want to get into it despite knowing that's coming. Either way, for this specific thing, how much is reasonable to expect it sounds like 50 ish percent seems reasonable based on how the game does and then if this is actually happening it sounds pretty tenuous i guess i wouldn't bet on it i wouldn't either especially that first sentence of the question this person has worked in the game industry for 10 years for four studios and still is unclear about how these bonuses work it's like maybe they don't work at all maybe the norm is zero percent yeah well we did it we saved the day congrats to us oh good luck with your situation i i would love to know

how it works out if that bonus ends up coming through and if oh yeah if you feel like it's worth it too i'd really be interested to hear that if you have a question that you would like answered or even some perspective on questions that we've talked about today or in past shows you can go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button it says ask a question you can leave a comment there too if you want we won't be upset um we really love seeing your questions come in they make us think about things and often about situations that uh that we haven't encountered which are which are new to us so it makes us grow as people thank you that was a very diplomatic way of saying it makes us speak from inexperience with the authority of a sage master

we're just talking from first principles dave we don't have to know we don't have to have experienced it because we have it figured out nice the grand unifying principle of everything yep be nice be dave those are the principles all right we will catch you next week see ya