As I am back working for a European company now its interesting to see the different work cultures and attitudes of each studio , that goes for diverse cultures in the US based studios and the European based ones.
I could write paragraphs but it has reinforced my personal bias that game development professionals are most happy, productive and give the most value for the companies investment in them when they have three things.
1.) Fair compensation & healthcare
2.) Creative freedom and respect for their craft
3.) The chance to get rich
I think that the idea of regulation “protecting” people neglects the idea that there are jobs that would exist that don’t now because of the regulation that exists to protect existing workers. What’s the trade-off,
I understand your points. It’s just that what I feel is not discussed is the effects of these attempts to make everyone happy. The world works on an inexorable, relentless competition between apex predators called humans. This reality eventually overwhelms everything.
Having lived in the US and in Europe, I think it’s an idea that doesn’t really translate.
First of all, as I said, income distributions are much flatter around here, so the median European is much more wealthy than the median American. We also have a pretty good welfare state with world leading health care and decent education (with obvious problems in both in certain areas, this is not an utopia). So regulations seem to create a better living standard despite the countries being way less wealthy than the US.
Even if certain jobs would appear with deregularization, experiments in liberalization in Europe seem to imply more jobs appear indeed, but the total working hours are the same and the pay gets worse. Germany and the UK are infamous for this. You give an unemployed person a shorty job and make two already existibg jobs more shitty. Guess who wins? The employer, not the worker.
Things are not perfect, and there’s glaring inequality in Europe, but I’ve seen what working class and middle class (2x median income tops) looks in the US and it’s not pretty compared to here.
The first two I couldn’t agree more. The third one I think it’s not really something people look up to here. There’s a drive to do well, but there’s no culture that success equals getting rich.
Most devs I’ve worked with didn’t care about that (they cared about “not having to worry about money” which translates to about 40k€ gross annually).
That’s the biggest cultural difference I saw when living in the US, by far. The concept of “loser” is something that took me a while to understand. Here I would say the ideal is to have a job you like that doesn’t take too much time and pays well.
You have success driven people, but they are rare and a cultural exception.
Edit: I would add a good work/life balance as something critical for devs to commit long term to a project. Much, much more important than the chance of getting rich.
Your example of regulation being excessive is the French getting pissed off at the increasing deregulation and accompanying inequality mandated from a Goldman-educated political non-entity that shifts onto workers all the costs of trying to comply with having random numbers look pretty.
Unless if by excessive regulation you mean the SGP, but excessive corporate welfare is never a problem, for some reason.
You are not unable. It just cost you between a month a month and a half of salary per year worked (depending on wether the business is incurring loses or not). With a maximum of two year’s salary (these are Spanish numbers, it might be different there, but probably in the ballpark).
Which is ok. As and employer, that’s something you need to factor in in a salary, as well as employer Social Security contributions. It’s not rocket science. You open an account and put about 8% of the employee gross monthly salary in there.
It’s mandatory severance pay.
Any company that truly is unable to fire because of costs it’s broke, and then it won’t have to pay anything since the government takes care of that.
Those employers in the article are not unable, but unwilling to fire the person. And one needs to wonder why is that (it’s probably borderline illegal to keep somebody on salary doing something different than what the contract says. I think the employee could sue if he/she was willing).
This is also something Ubisoft Canada is famous for doing. And I don’t think you have such regulations there.
You would, but others wouldn’t. There are plenty of people who are willing to shift the work/life balance hard to the work side for potential monetary compensation. That is not a moral or character flaw.
As for an 8% tax being “just fine,” that’s from your perspective. Many companies could not afford an 8% tax on their operations as it would put them out of business. I could say the same to an individual: just put 8% of every paycheck in a trust that you can’t withdraw, and eventually you’ll have some financial security. Many people would go bankrupt.
Eh, it’s not an 8% tax. It’s part of the salary calculation and salaries are adjusted because of that. Because you know those are the terms of the contract (they literally are, contracts have a set of imposed terms on them by law).
Equally, you have to pay about 30% of the gross salary of each employee as social security contributions. Again, it’s not a tax, it’s a mandatory term of the contract that you know before signing.
A company that does not take that into account is doing negligent accounting.
As for losing work/life balance for financial compensation: that’s just not how most Europeans think. It’s an American idea that does not translate well here. It’s not a flaw, you are right, but it is a non-common choice, as wanting six months of paid maternity and paternity leave is in the US. We limit maximum working hours by law for a reason, and people overwhelmingly support those laws.
I was just saying that’s something devs value over here, and therefore it’s one of the priorities you need to focus on to have happy productive devs here (and since I’m hiring right now, believe me, that’s something I’m thinking a lot about lately). More than having a chance to be rich, which I do not think it really computes over here (the few people with that mindset are not devs, but MBAs, lawyers and such -not doctors, though, that profession is really different here-).
Companies and employees can also reach an understanding on overtime and for being on-call. However, around where I live, companies regularly don’t even use work contracts, they subcontract the job to companies that pay workers as service providers, and for those they do hire, protections have been severely cut.
I am unconvinced that any significant group of people is better off, while being much severely at risk of being unemployed and/or unemployable due to God’s RNG, but I’ll take the hints and take controversial politics elsewhere.
And it’s especially weird when those grudges involve giving small independent game developers more money and massive multinational corporations less money
It actually involves giving whoever the publisher is more money, it’s only developers if they’re big enough to earn Epic’s look while being able to fund themselves - not a big set of developers there.
But if you think Valve’s take is high, which it may very well be, I don’t understand why you’d want to single them out as meanies and not the industry as a hole, or why you’d trust Epic of all companies to do otherwise on the long-term.
I’d say it’s game quality OR marketing. Some absolite stinkers have sold extremely well, simply from marketing. But game quality is definitely the aspect indie devs should focus on most,as it’s the easiest and most tangible thing for them to control, and it’s easier to compete with something like FIFA in terms of quality/“fun” than it is on marketing reach.
Also that blog reminded me that Kudos exists! He should make a sequel to Kudos: Rock Legends
