How come technical “directors” get paid more than programmers?
Money isn’t everything.
For “Technical Director” read “Manager of All Programmers at the Company”, generally the senior most technical track management position.
There’s nothing wrong with that - input from inexperienced players is quite important to find errors that people, who’ve been involved in the project for ages, may not perceive as such. However, that (ideally) should be done through frequent focus group tests.
-Julian
If salary is the most important thing to you and you are a game programmer then yeah you went into the wrong field. I know several programmers who got out of games and they make a lot more money and in some cases work a lot less hours.
If you didn’t like your programming classes in school then you made a wise decision to stay away regardless of how much pay is involved. Programming (games or otherwise) is one of those jobs that makes no sense to do unless you have a deep-seeded love for the activity. If you don’t really love it, you’ll be lousy at it, and you’ll just be wasting your time as well as the time of your coworkers.
For me it was the opposite. I’m moving from application development to games industry this month and got a decent income boost. Probably atypical though (and a different continent).
Software Development did annual salary surveys before the magazine folded. Here’s the one from 2005. My recollection is that the “game tax” was less than I’d expected… just a couple thousand dollars a year on average, with game developers making more in some cases.
I would be wary of regional cost-of-living bias skewing things a little bit – there are only a few clusters of game jobs in this country (most of them in relatively high COL areas), but there are general software development jobs everywhere.
I also suspect that job titles/responsibility levels in the surveys don’t correspond on a one-to-one basis, either. This is anecdotal evidence, but the people that I’ve known who have worked in both games and other industries have pulled in much higher salaries outside of games.
Only if you don’t do the math to figure out your hourly rate.
That can be true anywhere. I work at a bank and I can tell you, there’s no such thing as “banker’s hours”.
Depending on the studio, that might be a CTO or VP of Software Development. I think the role has evolved over the past several years, dev studios may have more than one TD. The TD roles I’ve been in involved managing the engineering leads from multiple projects and being a buffer for producer/executive insanity (internal and external). Problem is a lot of time the TD track ends up being a blue-sky position for senior folks who just want to disappear into an office and tinker with tech. There’s such a shortage of experienced engineering management in the game industry it isn’t even funny.
No idea, but just as an aside as regards your ambition, we had a lot of candidate designers at Turbine coming out of QA. Few if any stuck, but it was an opportunity path, anyhow. I would say the candidates usually had a year of QA – but perhaps needless to say, they were working their butts off during that year as testers for bad pay, hoping to establish some credibility that way.
As regards our QA population, I would say that as a group they were mostly relatively inexperienced and uneducated (I doubt most of them had college degrees or past credentials in the industry), but however as a group they did not strike me as being stupid or antisocial. Mostly they were surprisingly dedicated and capable, considering what they were asked to do and the low pay scale. I don’t remember a single Turbine tester who I talked to about a bug they posted to my queue who seemed clueless, dull, or incompetent, unlike some of the Microsoft testers we used to use.
Game Tester sounds like Will Ferrell movie.
I’d like to see someone do a similar study on game journos, just so I can link it in reply to the daily “omgz ur job rlz i wnat 2 b like u how do i get ur job lol?!?!?!?!” emails I get.
Hey, I sent that to you in confidence.
Also, does this mean my attempt to demonstrate a chameleon-like ability to mirror GI’s normal editorial style didn’t go over well?
/Rimshot
also known as the peter principle -> people get promoted to their level of maximum incompetence. In other words, you are good at job X == promote to job Y. Good at Y? == promote to Z. crap at Z? then you stay at Z, where you are least good at your job.
Solution is simple, you let people have the option to stay in their exact current role, on higher pay.
My missus is in the same predicament. she doesn’t want to be management at all, but she keeps getting promoted, and therefore shifted into a different job. inevitably, everyone below her is crap, because all the good ones get promoted to management, which not everyone is good at. Many of them are thus now crap at their job, and their old job is filled by a n00b who is also crap at theirs.
the idea that managers must get paid more than staff has wrecked many a decent company. management is a skill, like any other.
Except what Soren was saying wasn’t Peter Principle at all. Sorry but promoting people “from the ranks” as it were because they are “valuable” doesn’t immediately point to Peter Principle.
Maybe it does where you work.
— Alan
I left the game industry, for significantly more money, significantly fewer hours, and more interesting work.
Oh, and my career path doesn’t require me to ever become a manager of anyone ever again…