When someone posts a long list of “goodies” that their company provides, don’t be jealous. If you get an offer from that company, make sure the money is awesome. I mean, take your usual salary and add twenty grand.
Why? Why would I be warning you away from a company that feeds you three meals a day, free snacks, free drinks, kickball tournaments during lunch, backcountry camping trips on weekends, movie nights, make your own sundae bars, and gives every employee an iPhone AND an iPad?
Two reasons. One, who’s paying for all that stuff? The answer isn’t the company – it’s you. You’re paying for it. Maybe not you-you if you’re in management, but someone’s paying for it, and it’s probably one of the hundreds of “contract” workers who is eating a crap cupcake and pretending to like it in hopes of being hired full time.
But there may be exceptions. Maybe everyone at the company is a fairly-paid, full-time salaried employee with excellent benefits and a golden parachute. Awesome! That means this other reason applies.
Welcome to the Hotel California, where you can check out any time you like. You can just… never leave.
All that stuff is there to distract you from insane, impossible hours and expectations. They’ve transferred all the social life stuff normal people expect (and need, in order to recharge and function creatively and efficiently) inside the company walls to hide from you the fact that you’re always at work. If your boss is bowling with you and treating you to drinks, you won’t notice that your boss knows where you are 24/7. The free gadgets come with the expectation that no matter where you are or what time it is, you will answer work email and phone calls. And frankly, it’s done to give you the feeling that you OWE them more than just your best efforts during the work day. Don’t take vacations, don’t take sick days, and definitely don’t create anything outside the company, because gosh darn it, they’ve given you so much.
Sometimes these jobs are still awesome. You’ll meet great people. You’ll make money. You’ll have a hell of a lot of fun. Just don’t lose that job, because you’ll realize too late that it was your whole life and now you’re starting over in every possible way – professionally, socially, and personally.
TANSTAAFL.
VALVe has all that stuff, but neither of your warnings really apply. We just want everyone to be so happy that they never want to work somewhere else. Hiring new people is expensive so its better to just keep everyone you get.
Valve bribes the families too. That’s why I’m writing this from our hotel room in Hawaii where the company has taken us all on vacation for a week.
(Also: we’re hiring)
@Joe, But… But…. *Boston…*
@Sanya: I agree, watch out for the hook in the grilled cheese and bacon sandwich. I love the company I’m at, we have no frills but have ok bennies and pay decent. The big thing is most of the folks here are happy and mostly living fulfilled lives, (some work all the time, but that’s what they want,) hustle and effort are rewarded and we have growth opportunities. (we, too, are hiring.)
Sorry @Joe.. I forgot where Valve was (I blame lack of coffee in my cup.) Cost of living in your area is a bit high but I could totally get behind the 90% motorcycle weather. (I have rain gear and don’t mind riding in it.)
Joe – c’mon. Somebody is paying for the Hawaii trip. Somebody is paying for the “please never work anywhere” perks. I’m sure VALVe is a fine company run by great people, but that doesn’t change a thing Sanya is saying. If a company has a gym on-site, why then, you never have to leave to go to the gym, you can just….stay at work. If you get your food onsite, you never have to leave to get lunch (and instead, you can spend that time working!).
People who work all the time because they like it… eh. On one hand, I say live and let live. (I personally like to check on “my” community channels from wake up to bedtime.) On the other hand, that is an unreasonable expectation of most people, and video games have an insane burnout rate. If there’s one guy who works 24/7 and he gets all the approval and rewards, everyone else is compelled to do the same no matter what policies are in place regarding time off.
I have worked at several companies and consulted for several more where everyone took their vacation… in the form of a check for the value of that time when the company shut down/laid people off.
Joe, I’d work for Valve in two seconds if I could relocate and you were hiring. I know you work for a great company that makes great games. I’m married to a video game artist – you could say games ARE our lives, so a hefty blur between work and life is no problem.
With that said, my post applies to you in full color. You are on vacation in Hawaii with your family… with your coworkers. And without knowing your company from the inside, I’d guess the reason they took everyone at once is because no one would go on a weeklong vacation unless everyone did it at once. (See above about vacation time.)
Nothing in my post said the goodies weren’t fun to have – I even specifically said “fun” and “great people” and the the “job is still awesome.” I hope I didn’t imply that Hotel California wasn’t a great place to live if you love your job and your coworkers are your friends/family.
But some people don’t want to live at work. For them, H.C. is a special kind of hell, and they feel bad about it because gee, kickball.
We have effectively unlimited vacation time, and lots of people take vacations away from the annual trip. (I have one scheduled with my family in a month and a half, for instance.) The trip is a combination of a thank you for a years worth of hard work to the employee and their family,and a celebration of a successful year.everything about it is optional. Nobody will bat an eye if you go off and do your own thing.
People who are working insane hours often get significant peer pressure to go home. We don’t want people to burn out. That causes people to quit and employee retention is incredibly important.
At least at VALVe these perks aren’t there to distract you from badness as your post suggests. They are there to layer on more awesomeness on top of the regular day to day awesomeness.
If Valve is the exception that proves the rule, that’s terrific and I am totally glad for you and your coworkers – no caveat, full stop.
Decent pay, Decent toys, Life beyond your job. Pick two.
Can I pick one? I’d love to be able to pick just one.
I know many developers (especially non-independent ones) for which salary and benefits come from two very distinct pools of budget. At first you naturally think that if you have a lot of benefits and quite low salaries and very high benefits, then you’d prefer to lower your benefits and have more money in the bank. But in practice, for these companies, it’s just not possible: different accounting outlets within the same group are handling different things, and their budgets don’t communicate with each other, and lowering one wouldn’t make the other higher.
I’d expect it to be the case for most large game groups.
Besides that, I agree on the high burn rate and the problem of work/life balance in the industry in general, but I came to learn that is was also very much related to work culture in general.
When I was working in Ireland, which is, along with the UK, the USA’s beachhead into Europe when it comes to games, it was all very “startup spirit” : work hard, work harder, and be happy to work in a field you’re passionate about.
In Sweden, where I live and work for a few month now, the work culture is extremely different. The focus on quality of life is visible from government laws to company policies. Of course, there is still heavy crunch, and sometimes holidays canceled, but that doesn’t go without discussions with the staff, important compensations, etc. So the story is very different.
Julien, you are correct – the two pools are different. But that’s a reflection of a core principle of the company. Someone made a decision to pay for lots of goodies and short people on salary, and they made it with an eye on the bottom line.
For the sort of young idealistic person often attracted to the game industry, the toys will retain them (for a few years) even if they know their salaries are low. They only know it in the abstract sense because most of them aren’t trying to raise families. And if they’re always at work, who cares about a nice place to live?
The toys don’t cost as much money as salary and top notch health care, so the bottom line looks gooooooood.
The older workers who know better either make an effort to get into management or they leave before they start asking for more cake and less frosting. Unfortunately, they take with them all the experience that makes great games, and the studio’s slide begins. Management remembers when a group of young and inexperienced people launched a hit, and they refuse to believe it was luck and timing. They think success was from their awesome management and 70 hour weeks. So they keep churning through their young and inexperienced people, they buy new foosball tables instead hiring enough people to execute the project with normal working hours (with minimal crunch at the end), and eventually they faceplant.
I know people who’ve interviewed at studios who say they are “family friendly” because the crunch is SCHEDULED. Meaning one week out of the month everyone puts in a sixty hour week. Crunch… is scheduled… every month. But that’s family friendly because you can… see it coming? My head exploded. That is not family friendly. That’s terrible management that has become entrenched in the culture, and I feel confident it’s only the tip of the iceberg of idiocy.
I’ve never known a job in a culture like Sweden’s, but I would give up every toy I’ve ever been offered in exchange for the experience
This reminds me of when my friend and I were eating at our company’s great cafeteria and I was complaining about paying $5 for lunch. “At Google, the food is all free! That would be amazing!!!” I whined.
My friend thought about it and said “Yeah, but you know, if they told you they were giving you a $5 / day raise, you probably wouldn’t get too excited about it.”
It was a great point – FREE MEALS sounds amazing and life-changing, but a $1200/year raise seems ok. Perks often appear way more amazing than they are.
Exactly. Someone, somewhere realized that free meals made people think they were really getting a major bonus. I consulted for one place with free food, but the starting salaries were typically 5K under the industry standard.
The numbers start to add up pretty fast…
The google example from Sammy kind of amused me because Google pays obscenely well (we’ve lost a few folks to them). But… his point is very well taken and I hadn’t considered it quite like that.
I worked for a private company that paid “ok” and had mediocre benefits, but we got taken out to a lot of really nice meals and had a huge educational budget and a pretty good amount of holidays.
But… we had to work pretty crazy hours at times, had pretty unrealistic expectations and a massive turn over.
Now, at my new company we have less vacation, mediocre benefits, very few perks but great pay and great “work/life balance”. The PM here said overtime is a failure in planning and he doesn’t believe in it and that’s when I knew this is where I wanted to be.
Course, having said that, I still put in the time when needed, but it’s rare and they always give me the time back.
I find the first scenario was great when I was younger, but now that I’m older and my priorities have changed I’m way less interested in spending time at work and having fun with my co-workers, I’d much rather be home with my family.
It was a really interesting read, Sanya, thanks – and the comments were interesting too!
“The PM here said overtime is a failure in planning”
YES. THAT.
Sounds a bit like my own version, which is “If someone’s doing overtime, then someone’s got something wrong.” It could be a failure in planning – on the other hand, I’ve worked with at least one guy who regularly worked overtime because he couldn’t get a regular person’s work done in regular hours. The annoying thing was, this was paid overtime and he STILL wasn’t getting the job done.
Situations like that lead to him getting more money, me having to clean up his messes, frustration, a vivid explanation of said frustration to the offender, mild counselling from management for me and a rapid transfer off-team for him.
So yeah, overtime. Happy to do it when Murphy’s Law strikes and a project needs rescuing, happier still to get paid for it, wouldn’t ever want to see it become a lifestyle.
Great Post Sanya!
I’m a Computer Science student with a year left before graduation, and I’ve been doing a lot of research into different companies. I appreciate the advice to beware of Hotel California.
This post is certainly open to a wider interpretation now that Dominus has officially shut down.
On Valve: they earn over a billion dollars a year without having to release any games of their own, so all the perks on offer should be considered with that in mind.