100,000 a year only for senior engineers and producers actually is on the low end for most companies (They're basically limiting themselves to a third or less of what they could be paid elsewhere) which means the ones below will be even worse off.
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Jason Schreier/Bloomberg: Blizzard Workers Share Salaries in Revolt Over Wage Disparities
- Thread starter Kawngi
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100,000 a year only for senior engineers and producers actually is on the low end for most companies (They're basically limiting themselves to a third or less of what they could be paid elsewhere) which means the ones below will be even worse off.
Absolutely.
As a matter of fact, just last year I was in a position where I felt that I wasn't being rightfully compensated for what I brought to the company I then worked. That was bringing me down. You know what I did? I went on LinkedIn, applied to a bunch of jobs, did several interviews and eventually (about 3 months) landed a new job, and a pretty pay bump.
You are mistaking me disagreeing that this is as big as an issue as social media is making it with "not caring". As I said above, I've been in a similar position. It sucks! But, as I said a few times already, no one is forced to work at Blizzard. We've seen a huge number of indie games surging in the past few years, and, of course, there's the big studios. Implying that the outcome of feeling underpaid immediately is a person leaving the game industry is quite a stretch, in my opinion.
Its fine to say that when its any other job where you have multiple companies in almost every city in the world. but the game industry isnt build like that. Its an industry that is extremely hard to get into. saying, just dont work there is an incredibly stupid take when there is only one blizzard.
This, senior engineers can make much more in any other company, but there is only one game industry so people take much more abuse, like being overworked, crunch, underpaid and being force to live in expensive hub cities. but at no point is that an excuse for that abuse especially when the industry is as profitable as it is
Why don't you, instead of stalking my profile and insulting me, explain your thoughts/point of view and try to have a civilized conversation, as I have been doing here?
Some can and will jump ship, others would rather call out bad practices. If everyone did it your way, very little would change.
According to the survey data from Blizzard employees themselves, senior devs (I & II) make between $142-166k (average), while regular devs make $112k. Associate devs, which are generally entry level, make $87k.
Sharing salaries is always a smart thing to do, regardless of how much companies try to discourage you from doing it.
Sad that it often takes some huge issue to occur when it should be common practice by now, but companies have clearly drilled it into enough people's heads that it's taboo to do it.
Sad that it often takes some huge issue to occur when it should be common practice by now, but companies have clearly drilled it into enough people's heads that it's taboo to do it.
I see what you are saying.
However, honest question: is it really a "bad practice" to pay less than the market average?
As in, even though people know that they will be paid less that they could possibly get somewhere else (Glassdoor is a thing), there's still a constant influx of people that are still willing to apply and go work there?
If conditions are so bad, as social media is claiming right now, why is this still happening? Why isn't Blizzard starved of professionals and being forced to change?
This sounds like a bootstrap argument to me. Do you really think it is reasonable for people to go find new jobs every couple of years just because their current company doesn't value them? I also job hopped in May of this year and got a 50 percent raise, but I didn't really want to do it. I was happy with my current job but they refused to pay me what I was worth. I personally think this is pretty shit because as an employee without a union I hold no power over the corporate structure. So now I have to take a giant risk, move across the country, and hope I like my new job, boss and co workers because my last job would only give me a 15 percent raise with a promotion because reasons. Base Salary is everything and it is a huge problem for workers, its not so simple to just "get a new job" and it requires a ton of work and is stressful to do. Employers keep salaries low because they know most of their workers aren't going to leave no matter what they do. Yeah this is a big deal and Blizzard/Activision should pay these people more even if the short term solution is to go get a new job because companies don't care about you. That should not be an argument though to stifle progressive activism.
There are some infuriating numbers in there for sure. I see a Senior Test Analyst 1 hired in the last 3 months making more than all of the other Senior Test Analyst 1 folks. And there's a Associate Data Analyst and Data Scientist making less than I do in Miami working in a data analyst position.
in that same note, why is crunch still a thing? as I said, professionals in this industry learn to live with it since there is only one games industry. its an incredibly hard industry to get into and landing a job at one of the top companies working with the people that made the games that you loved playing is a huge reason for a lot of people to take lower pay or work insane hours in crunch. Especially when you have no oversight about your peers and how much they make and you think, well I guess this is how it is since there is no industry like the game industry, it has many highs and many lows.
But in the end its insane for an industry as big as the games industry, to work for a publisher as wealthy as activision blizzard and still not be able to survive in the city they live in and people have full right to call their employers out on it.
I fail to see how you could with a clear conscious be like, well fuck those underpaid employees, they should just get another job lol.
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You are fully welcome to disagree with be, as most are doing. Still, I am sharing my point of view, being civilized and (mostly) having an honest conversation, so I fail to see how I am overblowing my contribution here.
Personally, I know that when I'm not happy at a job, I'm reassured at how trivial and effortless it is to simply get another job. It's a far easier thing to do than entering a row in a Google document.
Must be nice for you when you don't work in an industry like this one where its not trivial to get another job :)
edit: just in case, was that post with sarcasm? if so, I am sorry, I have a hard time detecting it when I am in one of these threads.
Isn't this what people do in a capitalist society? You acquire experience and learn new skills the you take your newly developed skill set elsewhere to earn more money and the cycle repeats until you max out on your career track or switch to corporate/business side.
They were being sarcastic.
Because people will always want to work for Blizzard and they can keep getting away with a rotating door. Unless they're called out.
In this system yes, that's why unions are a good thing to advocate for because the worker does not have nearly the leverage the employer does. This is not a fair negotiation and never has been. Salary information should be easy to find at the very least so you, as a worker, know what you are worth. Its much easier for the company to replace you than it is to find a new job, or even worse, they just make their existing employees work harder and not pay them more. Yeah, jumping jobs every 2 years will net you significantly more money over the long run because other businesses value you more than the company you work for does, this is sound advice, but it doesn't mean the system should be like that. They employers know how hard and unruly it is get a new job and know a majority of their workforce will not jump. The company I left had a very low average salary for the industry, but they have a ton of workers that have been their for 20 plus years getting minuscule wage increases that barely keep up with inflation.
To be fair, the senior and premium staff making $100k+ are probably doing fine. Yeah, they could be making more elsewhere, but that amount if money is solid, even for SoCal.
On the other hand, the entry and junior level guys making like $25-40k? Probably less so.
On the other hand, the entry and junior level guys making like $25-40k? Probably less so.
Generally speaking employers aren't worried about the majority of their workforce. They only care about the particularly talented individuals who give them an edge. The rest of us are replaceable and compensated accordingly. That has been my experience in big pharma, finance and law. If anything corporations are more upset when they are pitted against each other, as was the case with the tech companies a few years back when they got tired of employees jumping ship to earn more money and started sharing benchmarks and agreed to salary bands to prevent employee mobility. I do think unions or co-ops are a good idea but they have their drawbacks as well.
1. I'm really disgusted by your assertion that my opinion is because I'm to simple to understand the relationship between employers and employees simply because you disagree with it. As a former moderator I would think that you would respect the fact that I was expressing a different opinion based on my life experience without pretending to have researched the issue.
2. After your comment, it took me all of a couple of minutes to google salaries for jobs posted on the Blizzard sheet and understand that there's not a lot
some
3. The internet has allowed us to research what wages are common for what fields in what areas. As others in this thread have demonstrated, I don't need to know what my coworker makes.I can look at all the information of my peers in the area and determine if I am getting screwed.
You know, I remember a bunch of people "speculating" that Nintendo pays their employees poorly because their top executives are modestly paid compared to top execs of other companies back in the Nintendo salary thread.
Where are they here, when one can see an actual clear, disgusting discrepancy of job wages on display here contrast to a Nintendo employee.
I think that is true in most US states (either football or basketball coaches).
For development positions those seem pretty good, although I'm guessing Blizzard is based in California where cost of living is relatively high. In my company however (finance tech), senior to advisory level devs (with 10-15 years experience) would make $65k-$90k living near Toronto which also has a high cost of living.
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This doesn't mean anything. Nintendo can be underpaying folks too, just not as bad as Blizzard. Let's not take a tweet as proof that Nintendo is some great, fair-paying company.
I ain't taking a tweet as proof that Nintendo pays their company above normal rates, I can't know that because there's no individualistic spreadsheets about it. I'm more curious that a lot of the people speaking out about Nintendo possibly maybe underpaying staff are nowhere to be seen In this thread where Activision Blizzard is actually absolutely doing it.
I don't know if I've ever heard of another company being cheeky enough to outright state that swag should be considered as part of an employee's compensation. I would suspect that most big companies give out extra swag to some extent, especially in tech.
Can't pay you a living wage but have this exclusive tracer funko pop from our cancelled blizzcon event.
Man, fuck Activision Blizzard. I was already not buying their games because of the Hong Kong situation but stack this shit on top of that.
Because CEOs get paid less people assumed Nintendo pays it employees less as well? I don't get how one can draw that conclusion.
This was the narrative some were pushing in the Nintendo Executive pay thread.
Yes just like it's people's choices to have to work at Amazon warehouses. /s
Why is it so hard for some people to have the slightest amount of empathy here? Have you ever worked a minimum wage job? Have you ever had to clean shit off the floor of a supermarket because someone came in and had an accident? And when you told them that wasn't your job that you could leave if you didn't like it? Do you know how easy it is to become a QA tester? Or other lower level job in the hierarchy of video game development? You can't just go somewhere else, certainly not during a pandemic, certainly not to just another video game company. That's just ignoring how things are.
I think there's a real element to some of these conversations that consist of "I like x company so I'll forget they use capitalism too". I can't judge how bad Nintendo is compared to other companies but pretending they aren't bad is just being blind to the elements of capitalism. All one has to do is look at how Sakurai talked about developing Smash. That being said, on salaries, it's hard to judge without real data anyway.
This is pedantic nonsense. If this is the basis of your contribution to this thread, you've basically been derailing.
Blizzard is a game development studio. Everyone who works there is involved in some sense in development. Some of those workers are experiencing hardship despite ATVI being immensely profitable. Others are experiencing pay discrepancy for no good reason. That's what this is about.
Perhaps you missed the part in which I gave breakouts and comparisons of "non-dev" Blizzard salaries vs other similar companies?
What's pedantic to some (I'm guessing the same people who don't wanna do their own research), is clearer information to others.
I can explain it to you, but I can't make you understand it.
Always so disappointing to see hyper-capitalist bootlickers shill for billion-dollar megacorps on "progressive" sites like Era.
"Who cares if they're underpaid. They're replaceable."
Jfc. Bobby Kotick got paid more today than almost anyone posting on this site will make all year. It's completely absurd that literally everyone who works for Activision Blizzard, including contractors and freelancers, is not very comfortably compensated for their time and labour.
"Who cares if they're underpaid. They're replaceable."
Jfc. Bobby Kotick got paid more today than almost anyone posting on this site will make all year. It's completely absurd that literally everyone who works for Activision Blizzard, including contractors and freelancers, is not very comfortably compensated for their time and labour.
Yes I know, Era is not progressive.
This whole thread is about the article in the OP. You were calling it fake news and basically claiming that the reports of hardship must be false because of the salary breakdowns you were posting.
Exactly. And then add MTX on top of it. I don't see any of it reaching the employees in a noticeable amount.
I understand that a company needs liquidity and cash and costs most certainly have risen in the past decade as in any other industry, but why a single person should earn or need that much money is beyond me, especially while others make so little.
Also, I'm all in for sharing salaries and I never understood the we don't talk about money mentality in so many parts of the world; there seem to be countries and/or social circles where it is more custom but most of the time people (and companies) make it a big big secret. And I'd immediately raise an eyebrow if someone told me not to share my salary and that it breaks the contract: Why is that? Are you suggesting people aren't paid fairly and equally here? Probably yes.
I've experienced it myself whilst working for a local newspaper: There was wage agreement for newspaper publishers which practically and legally forced them to allow you 30 days of vacation per year, a 35h work week and a fixed minimum salary plus Christmas and holiday allowance. For obvious capitalism reasons newspapers wanted to escape this agreement so they created new companies (compared to Ltds) for which the wage agreement wasn't applicable and they said: We won't continue your fixed-term contract with our head company X. But here, we have this "new" company Y where you can work; same place, same office, same colleagues, same job, but a 40h/week, less days of vacation, same money. I don't know how they legally could get through with this shit but they did for many years.
Fucking pay your employees fairly.
Is there more "prestige" to working at Blizzard than at Nintendo?
You get to be proud of all the work you do while buying from Starbucks.
So, here's the problem with your 'research'...
First is that the salary spreadsheet only has about 390 records in it as of this posting. Blizzard employs more than 10x that amount of people. So the data available from Blizzard employees is <10% of the actual salary distribution. It's impossible to determine if that's the low end, the average, or the high end. Generally speaking, people only share salaries when they are exceptionally high or exceedingly low - so it's probably not a good barometer either way for judging typical pay for Blizzard employees.
This should be compounded by the fact that other developers have shared that Blizzard has widespread association with low pay. And the numbers in the spreadsheet don't actually match up with those experiences at all. There are a lot of inconsistencies between what I know friends who moved to Blizzard were paid, what Blizzard quoted myself and others for salaries for moving over to Blizzard, and the numbers in the spreadsheet - and by that I mean the figures shared are much, much higher than I expected. Maybe that means Blizzard very recently changed their pay structures, maybe that means only people actually getting paid appropriately responded to the spreadsheet, or maybe it means the spreadsheet is bullshit. Who knows.
Then you compared those figures to Glassdoor and Payscale - which themselves have discrepancies between 'average' pay for specific job titles of $10k-$20k+. These have always been widely accepted as nothing more than rough ballparks and not definitive breakdowns of industry averages. Again, the people who tend to shared this data are often at the far ends of the spectrum - which usually makes them artificially high or artificially low. And that's not even considering that job titles between different companies have widely different job duties and levels of experience and pay scales - which I can't really fault you for, since that's not intuitive unless you've worked across multiple studios in the industry. But a Game Designer at one studio is not a 1-to-1 correlation to the same title at other studios. Hell, sometimes they're not even correlated between different teams under the same company.
So... there's limited data. The validity and accuracy of that data is questionable at best. The comparison data is ballpark at best. The job title associations are loosely defined. And the conclusions based on limited, invalid, inaccurate, ballpark, and dissociated data directly conflict with the foundational premise establish by developers themselves - both within and outside of Blizzard.
Which makes me wonder what is more likely...
That all of these developers are full of shit and just whining about Blizzard's notorious pay issues despite the 'data' claiming otherwise.
Or... maybe the 'data' haphazardly slapped together by 'some dude on the internet' may not be depicting an accurate representation of the issue.
Again, that research where you take an extremely narrow view into the industry and only take "software engineers" into account. Programmers historically have the best pay in any company and is usually the most stable across multiple companies. This is not the case for any of the other roles in game development, all those roles you conveniently ignore. The only result you are achieving is derailing the thread with unreliable research to push a fake news narrative under the disguise of "I just want to check it for myself". all the figures you quote from glassdoor are wildly inaccurate and often inflated by the companies themselves who put down anonymous salary quotes or company reviews to make their companies look better since they know people do check places like glassdoor to give them ballparks.
It is actually impossible to fact check this since there is no reliable source of information except those people who are willing to give you their true salaries, and good luck in that industry wide adventure.
And yet, you'd rather trust an article with barely any data.
Gotcha. YSK there are insider terms for folks who just refuse accept analysis because "they know what they know".
I have "an uncle who works at Nintendo" who knows your "friends who moved to Blizzard" - should we treat those as data points?
I stand by my point that based on the data available to us - Blizzard developers (engineers), artists, etc. seem to be fairly compensated. However, CS is not fairly compensated at all. Riot does has better pay in several instances.
I gave breakouts for other roles like CS, Artists, etc. in a follow-up - did you miss that part perchance?
I think those of us who've bothered to look at the actual data will realize what the issue:
While some employees can afford the cost of living in the area, others can't. It is unrealistic to expect test analysts (Avg. $51k), CS agents (Avg. $41k), Game Masters (Avg. $36k) be able to live there if we consider those incomes as Household Income (HHI).
Note: While the figures may be Personal Income (PI) and HHI may be higher, it is not relevant to the discussion and we'll treat them as HHI
The easy, short term solution would be given those teams a raise across the board to:
1. Make salaries competitive if they aren't
2. Reduce turnover, which in turn saves onboarding / training costs
3. Attract talent
However, this isn't always possible because of financial objectives. We are simply putting a bandaid on the real problem - which is high cost of living in the area.
The more viable long term solution is to relocate those teams to an area with lower cost of living, while maintaining competitive wages.
Personally, I believe that happy employees make better employees - and SPECIALLY for Customer Service. Imagine if you will, an unhappy customer has to talk to an unhappy customer service agent. That's a bad scenario. You always want your CS agents WANT to help. Across the board, we have seen that while compensation is not directly tied to performance, paying higher than industry wages usually leads to better attitudes and work ethics.I want my direct reports to focus on their job and not worry about making ends meet. I've given unrequested pay raises because I saw the pay needle move - heck, I want to retain my best employees because as someone mentioned earlier "companies want to retain people who give the company an advantage".
I agree with what your posts are saying. We would all like to be paid what we want for a specific job at a specific company, but at the end of the day you have to do what you have to do, and not leaving a poor paying job or not leaving a bad workplace is never the way to go. I work in a industry that has similar geographic limitations and see people stay at low paying jobs all the time because of the status that a company has on their resume and in their hearts. If you have even the most minimal qualifications, if you are persistent you can always find a better gig.
And I'll be honest, between the line these employees are basically saying to HR that they will not leave. Plus, it's such a small percentage of the employees at Blizzard...for such a large corporation to change course over this is unrealistic. This happens every day at most businesses regardless of size. That "childhood dream" mentality holds back so many careers...don't sell yourself short for name brand recognition because you want people's eyes (or your own heart) to immediately light up when they hear where you work.
Plus, outside of Overwatch, Blizzard hasn't done anything special in well over a decade.
I feel like having my previous boss being the current lead producer on Overwatch 2 is probably a better data point than your uncle, but sure, that's the take-away from breaking down all your data into the bullshit it is.
You didn't actually address any of the inconsistencies, inaccuracies, or questions about the validity of the data I bring up. You just claim I'm wrong and biased because I'm an ex-AAA dev, I'm lying about my industry connections and experience, and that your bad data is still valid because it's the only data you have.
Sure.
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The article does raise solid points thought. We know that there are people working at Blizzard who are experiencing hardship, and we know that there are people working at Blizzard who are unhappy with the pay discrepancies. That's not 'my uncle works at Nintendo', and it's dishonest of you to claim that. It's also dishonest for you to claim the figures you cooked up have any kind of statistical meaning. They say nothing about the spread of wages at Blizzard, which is the point of contentation.
I find it kind of astonishing that you are a working programmer who completely fails to understand these points. At the very least I would have thought you would have a much firmer grasp of statistics. So far all you've done is redefine the discussion to limit it to software engineers, entirely for the purposes of suiting your own argument. Even here you're claiming better wages aren't possible because of 'financial objectives', which again is completely dishonest. We all understand ATVI's financial objectives - that's the central point everyone else is taking issue with. You just hand-wave it away!
Once again, please refer to my breakout of non-dev roles.
Also, if you have access to the wage distribution at Blizzard and have permission to share it - send them my way. In the absence of that data, pray tell - and I'd LOVE to hear this - how would you back up this article with any kind of hard data?
The hard data is that Jason Schrier went and talked to a bunch of people who actually worked there and then wrote us a story telling us what the people who actually work there think. It was published by Bloomberg, one of the leading sources of finance journalism in the world.
Trying to logic police your way around it to basically argue that they must all be wrong just makes you look really fucking stupid.
i'm saying this for your own benefit: you really, seriously need to get your head out of your ass
i know you put a lot of work into copy and pasting numbers from the spreadsheet and Glassdoor, but don't be so proud of your research that your only response to someone breaking down why it's incredibly flawed is "so you'd rather trust this other thing?", for real
additionally, the way you've interpreted this article is incredibly bizarre
yes, it's pretty easy to trust Bloomberg's reporting that more than half of Blizzard workers were unhappy with their compensation, that Blizzard's response to that sparked an outcry, that a number of Blizzard employees have struggled to make ends meet, and that some Blizzard employees anonymously started circulating compensation information - "BUT ACCORDING TO MY RESEARCH BLIZZARD HAS COMPETITIVE WAGES, FAKE NEWS" is a nonsensical response to everything that was reported in the piece, and it's absolutely hilarious that you've convinced yourself we'd be better off believing your conclusion that everything is just fine
maybe center the various Blizzard employees who have stepped forward to express their struggles and frustrations working with the company, seriously