This is an incredibly misleading way to summarize the email in the picture. No reasonable person could read the quote in context and think Blizzard is threatening employees. I really think we need a moratorium on direct Twitter links, because I can’t remember the last one I saw here that wasn’t misinformation.
You should generally not believe uncorroborated accusations by random people on Twitter leveled immediately after their target is in the news. This could be true, but there are also clear incentives to make it up or exaggerate it for clicks; if you don't know this person, how can you evaluate their/his credibility?
This tweet in particular seems very vulnerable to the same kind of distortion as in the original submission, where innocuous things from people you've resolved not to trust start being casted as threats.
I didn't see anyone say anything about threats. The email said "consider the consequences". The tweet repeated the phrase "consider the consequences". That is about as factual of a representation as one could make.
It's a factual representation with the clear effect of misleading people. I won't claim to know what the tweeter or submitter intended, but it's impossible to believe that this submission is sitting at the top of HN just because people think "consider" is a neat word. We're all here because we read the title and thought it meant the Blizzard executive was threatening employees.
This is today's "news" and "journalism" - take something reasonable and distill it to hyperbole in 140 characters or less. Doesn't matter if it's true or false, so long as it evokes an emotional reaction and gets clicks. Truly sad to see how many minds have been dimmed by Twitter and other social media outlets.
I'd suggest that Blizzard employees consider the consequences of working in computer games, rather than almost any other branch of software engineering, where conditions are better.
Game companies take advantage of the fact that there is a large population of software engineers who want to meld their work and their hobbies by offering worse working conditions, lower pay, and less stable employment than they could get elsewhere.
Just... play games. And work in a field that treats its employees well.
The only time I'd be a game developer is if I did an indie game solo or with an artist friend. I mean look at the wealth of indie games that exist. It's honestly the only place where original ideas come from now.
"Don't try to make the world better" is a pretty shitty attitude to have.
No, try to make it better! Fight like hell to make it better! That is how we progress. That is how we got the worker's protections we have now. They weren't given magnanimously. We fought long and hard for every single one, and it made everyone's life better.
"Voting with your feet" might work if it was hard to find people to replace you, but it's not. And it means giving up on what you want to do because of oppression.
You should not need to give up on what you want to do because of shitty bosses.
If what you want most is to work on games, you don’t have to give up on that. You just have to realize that the supply of people who also want that exceeds the demand by some amount large enough to give employers a lot of relative bargaining power.
Unionizing may be a sensible response to that. I’d expect the company to make a sensible response as well.
>"Voting with your feet" might work if it was hard to find people to replace you, but it's not.
If that's true, how would "Fight like hell to make it better" (presumably by threatening to withhold labor) work? They'll just replace you with the next batch of starry eyed graduates.
Working in games isn't courageous. As GP said, there's a glut of people who want to do it. It's oversupplied, and the lower wages reflect the lower marginal utility to society for engineers to work in games over other kinds of software.
It's why more people should quit. Then the supply will go down until management offers better working conditions.
Choosing to work there despite poor working conditions and the availability of work you're qualified to do with better working conditions is the thing that causes the poor working conditions.
Why should supply go down for this particular field? Just make more games then demand will go up?
Wtf is wrong with people here asking thousands of people to quit their job? Would you quit your beloved job to improve other peoples working conditions?
> Why should supply go down for this particular field?
Because it's too high, enabling employers to offer poor working conditions. The poor working conditions then drive away prospective employees, lowering supply until working conditions improve.
Unless you for some reason volunteer to suffer the poor working conditions unnecessarily.
> Just make more games then demand will go up?
Making more games doesn't cause demand for games to go up. It causes the price of games to go down. Then each game maker has less to pay workers with.
What you need is for the industry to make fewer games, so they cost more (or at least have higher sales volumes at the same price), allowing workers to be paid more. But fewer games means fewer employees and some of them have to go do something else.
> Would you quit your beloved job to improve other peoples working conditions?
You can't have it both ways. Either your working conditions are bad, in which case quit, or your working conditions are "beloved," in which case what are you complaining about?
Jobs are trade offs. You get to choose which one you take.
If you love making video games and one video game company has worse working conditions than all the others, quit that one and go work for one of the other ones.
If you love making video games and all the video game companies have poor working conditions because too many people love making video games and therefore the market is saturated, this a thing that only you can do anything about. The company you work for is already trying to maximize profits in a competitive market. To improve your working conditions they'd have to make more money, but if they could do that so easily they'd have done it already.
You, by contrast, have an actual choice. Do you love this job, working conditions and all, better than your other available alternatives? If the answer is yes, you've made your choice. But for some people the answer is going to be no, and it's those people, choosing something else, that establish the floor for working conditions. They can only go as low as you're willing to put up with. So don't put up with less than you find reasonable.
It's the thing that creates change. Less people are willing to do the job, so less video games get made, competition is less aggressive so each company makes more revenue which allows working conditions to improve. Other solutions will have results no better than this and most of them are just roundabout ways to achieve the equivalent result with higher transaction costs or some kind of perfidious rent seeking or gatekeeping.
The real "problem" is that people want fun and interesting jobs that everybody wants to pay as much as dull and dirty jobs that nobody wants, but that's not how it works. At the same skill level, the shittier job pays better. Because if it doesn't, you quit.
> You can't have it both ways. Either your working conditions are bad, in which case quit, or your working conditions are "beloved," in which case what are you complaining about?
This makes zero sense. You can be doing a job you love while your boss is a piece of shit. You can be doing a job you love but not getting paid enough for it. You can be doing a job you love but being put at risk while doing it. And a million other things.
Start your own company if you think you can do better / be fairer / be a better employer etc etc
workers fighting their employers never ends how you think it will. They won’t raise conditions, they’ll just get rid of the jobs, outsource, use AI, etc etc etc
Has it ever occurred to you that improving working conditions doesn’t necessarily always result in “making the world better”? And that measurement is completely arbitrary. eg The west has very little manufacturing left because we chose to raise working conditions instead of remaining competitive - thus all the manufacturing jobs disappeared anyways. Is that “making the world better”?
It’s simple supply and demand - a large number of programmers want to work on games. Therefore the pay and conditions aren’t great compared to other less ‘cool+trendy’ options.
hehe I have. You should try it.
I suggest watching something like ‘Newsies’. It’s a great musical, and all the kids selling newspapers today have fantastic working conditions /s
> and the lower wages reflect the lower marginal utility to society for engineers to work in games over other kinds of software.
That's not what it reflects. It reflects the monetary value that it takes to get someome to do work for you. In games, it takes less money because people want to work on games. To get me to work on your advertising plaform you would have to pay me a ridiculous sum, because I don't want to work on an advertising platform. Companies pay people as much as it costs to get them to work, not an amount reflecting the value they provided to the company. Sometimes those values line up, but usually when profits go up salaries don't linearly follow along, so it's clearly not the latter.
I take less money to work in games. I love it. I've worked in different fields. I prefer game development. I am an artist and I love playing the games I've made with friends and strangers.
I suspect in this case he was quoting the other person directly, rather than trying to diminish the title as it applies to asset artists. This is an increasingly common way to use quotes in textual conversations, as a way to clarify which noun is being discussed. I'm not sure if its "correct" but it's increasingly common.
Rephrased (accurately for intent) I thought it would be:
> Just to clarify, when you say "I am an artist and I love playing the games I've made with friends and strangers", do you mean artist as in the game-asset creator type of artist, or artist as in a romanticized version of a software engineer?
I could be wrong. Maybe he is just being a dick. But I primarily saw a somewhat more charitable interpretation.
if you are disscussing a word (or phrase) rather than using it, placing it in quotation marks is the correct way to do that.
The usage of quotation marks in journalism to say things using other people's words or to imply doubt on if those words are correct has been growing looser and looser. I generally take such usage as an indicator of bad and lazy writing.
Edit: I have a thought but I’ve articulated it in an incomplete and very poor, likely offensive way. The responses are sensible for what I’ve written, which isn’t what I intended to say. But I’m leaving it here because I don’t think the internet should have a delete button.
It's great. Most game companies are very comfortable. Nice offices with free food, good pay, flexible hours, remote friendly, full benefits. Crunch is rare these days. This is all true of Blizzard, btw.
The vocal minority on twitter are trading in outrage; the currency of social media. And there's a distinct lack of perspective. Have they ever worked on a farm? A restaurant kitchen? A construction site? A warehouse? Or anywhere outside of an Aeron chair? Mostly no. This doesn't mean it's perfect or can't be improved, but it's really nice compared to most and this gets lost in the noise. I often visit poor neighborhoods and poor countries and read history and thank my lucky stars.
And yes, you can get even better pay in the financial services industry. If that's what you want, please, go work there. No one's stopping you.
If the answer is to quit the game industry and just become a consumer, its very likely that the outcome will just be worse games and equally bad working conditions.
I worked in games for a few years. For a good company, whose games sold well. With good leaders in charge.
It still sucked compared to industry positions I took later. There’s a lot more pressure to ship for Christmas, to demo for E3, etc. New consoles invariably have terrible documentation (“it can never not be forgotten to fail to initialize the blah”), and in general the game (and entertainment broadly) industry is less linear/more hit-driven than others.
I also hated that it broke my enjoyment of playing games if I got distracted wondering how they did some effect or why their renderer had a certain glitch.
It entirely depends on what type of game you enjoy. Triple AAA MMOs and movie tie ins? They'd likely become worse, or just boilerplate drop-in graphics to WoW into Star Wars or Star Trek or whatever.
Or some of the extremely high quality indie games?
I'd take many of the indie games over WoW or CoD any day of the week. I don't need MMOs to enjoy a well written game.
The bad conditions are caused in part due to excess supply, so companies have their pick of desperate/abuse-tolerant employees. Having less workers would force companies to compete on working conditions.
Leetcode tests screen out several different kinds of people. Similar to government dev positions, there are irritating barriers to entry that a developer with experience simply doesn't have to deal with.
They do. I personally know at least a dozen extremely talented software engineers who have left Blizzard alone for FAANG in the last 3 years. Could bump that up to a solid 2 dozen if we included Riot, and go back 5-7 years.
edit/ These game companies themselves are also quite incestual, for want of a better word. Once a developer moves from one team in one company to another team in another company they typically try to heavily recruit the solid folks that they "left behind," as it were.
And I get that, but, anecdotally, it's never been something that I did when I moved around in my non-games industry. It's never even really crossed my mind.
FAANG recruiters seem to be under the same impression that majority of HN members are: they think programmers in games are so abused and desperate that they can be picked up for peanuts and free snacks after having jumped through every hoop. Could be just me though as I know many engineers who jumped from games to FAANG so they might have had better recruiters. Out of those about half come back after couple of years and the other half seems to stick for a while.
There is something so dirty about hiring based somewhat on “do we think this person can take the abuse of our organization”. I am sorry for anyone that has to go through that!
Is that really any different than admissions to an elite college? "Do we think this person can handle the abuses of other students and and still go on to donate mondo bucks to our school some 20 years hence?" All top companies are looking not just for intelligence, but for resilience.
My point is that any top institution - not just limited to the top among private companies - determines who may be admitted to a particular post on the basis of being able to handle the institution's worst elements while still being sufficiently skilled to meet said institution's standards. You'll see this in top schools, top law firms, the higher echelons of certain government agencies, top non-profits and think-tanks, and other such organizations.
I never said anything about top private companies. Abuse happens at every level of organizations. There is a difference between admitting someone on the basis of how well that person can compete in a high performing environment and admitting someone based on how willing that person is to take sexual abuse and all the other nefarious practices that some organizations develop during their culture building phase.
100% anecdotal, but I left games a little less than 2 years ago (after being in them for 12 years or so) to work on cloud computing for accounting solutions. While I'll admit the jokes are a little different, but the people are nice and the working conditions are great. They believe in the clock, dude. They live by that thing. OT has to be accounted for and approved, and they don't really care for it when estimates aren't met. It's a little pressure, but it's nice. And they pay better.
It's great. I'm really enjoying it. I snipe people from my old work (who are willing to leave games) whenever I see an opening.
No. The problem is: there are too many people willing to work in game development in bad conditions. If supply dwindled, the game companies will have to improve working conditions or face huge delays in delivering their next cash cow.
I think the likely outcome from attrition of good employees is that eventually the company just goes out of business or gets acquired. Of course industry standards would have upward pressure to improve conditions, but a lot of that would come from greenfield endeavors.
Unless you think these transformations happen overnight, supply dwindling and working conditions being reevaluated would most definitely decrease quality of games in the short term.
After working couple of years in gaming, it would be extremely hard to convince me to work in it again.
Not only management is probably the worst kind I have seen but you know that the best can happen that the result of your work is going to make people spend time on video games instead of doing something better.
> you know that the best can happen that the result of your work is going to make people spend time on video games instead of doing something better.
You could say the same thing about any hobby activity. Playing games isn't inherently bad just like drinking alcohol isn't inherently bad, its how much you let it consume your life (and in my personal opinion and experience, if you binge something its usually to fill some hole in your life, eg loneliness, and removing the thing to binge doesn't solve it and will simply get replaced with something else. The underlying issue needs to be addressed)
Playing for a limited time vs. excessive time, playing in your free time instead of playing during times when you should be learning or working, etc. I think there are some potentially negative outcomes associated with video games exclusively, as opposed to other game types (table games, etc.).
Anecdotal evidence time: I have personally met with several players who got severely addicted to video games and had to go through therapy. Not to mention professional players. Of course, the waste majority of players still might be ok. Also, just because some people get addicted it does not mean that the rest of the gamers experience any negative impact.
The kind of problem I see with video games is that it takes away time from children that could have been spent outside doing something more important to their development. I am not sure if this subject is studied, the studies I have seen are inconclusive (some claim positive impact, some claim negative).
> if you binge something its usually to fill some hole in your life, eg loneliness, and removing the thing to binge doesn't solve it and will simply get replaced with something else. The underlying issue needs to be addressed
Absolutely. I just think that playing video games is probably the least healthy option.
> You can't go to the theatre for 12 hours a day, can you?
Fair point!
I guess it’s the mixture of a relatively passive entertainment, sitting still and being able to do it for long periods at a time (there’s no natural break like the theatre has, nor do your muscles tire like with physical activity).
>rather than almost any other branch of software engineering, where conditions are better
I doubt a large percentage of the people requesting this are engineers. Activision/Blizzard has 9500 employees and only 1800 signed the request for the CEO to step down. They apparently need at least 30% of employees to sign up for the union but haven't released any numbers as far as I can tell.
There is an argument to be made that the majority of people working on video games are not engineers, but content producers. And for them the other field might be 3d modeling* kitchens.
*I managed to confuse myself about how you spell this word...
Yeah I have to say working on character or environment design is much more fulfilling than working on designing store-brand K-Cup packaging. (Where the packaging has to match the shitty branding of all the other products so there's no creativity allowed whatsoever).
I had a game where an artist and I grinded for 1.5 months, I feel I made the vision come to life yet the art stands alone too. I look back fondly in ways I could shape the artistic vision with relatively simple but creative programming. The more you have technical challenges (vs creative) the more you have overworked purely systems programmers. Some people love that, but undoubtedly it's more competitive than similar systems fields
Gamers themselves do not understand the dichotomy of game development. All changes good or bad are at the behest of the "game devs". Everyone gets lumped into a single category. If you're making a game engine like Sony did for GOW, I don't think you're a content producer, you're a hardcore engineer milking every bit of the playstation so that artists and content producers can make there visions a reality. I guess what I'm really trying to say is that devs get a bad rep in gaming based on decisions they're likely not making themselves or may even be against making.
...and pay the associated costs for it. Alternatively, I'm happy that people churning out enterprise CRUD apps are well rewarded for working in a boring field.
It's as same as advertisement industry: one can be hanging billboards or one can be a SWE at Google/FB yet being in the same industry. Games industry is just as different.
i have not considered this work-hobby aspect before. the gaming industry is not that different from other artistic fields. music and anime comes to mind because that's the other two i know about.
the work conditions inside anime studios is awful. nothing you would want for anybody. and despite that fact, people kept choosing to do that kind of work. people with responsibilities too, families, kids, etc.
they deliberately choose these awful work conditions.
I don't necessarily agree with calling this a "choice" because that implies accountability that isn't really there, and more importantly, removes said accountability from the people running these hellhole work environments.
It's the responsibility of management to provide a healthy working environment. This isn't just a moral obligation, but a creative one as well - businesses that operate like large-scale game developers or Japanese[0] animation studios will ultimately produce uninspired work that people will stop buying.
On the worker's end, there doesn't necessarily have to be a choice to work in the same industry forever, either. Most of these companies have dangerously high employee churn. The company doesn't have to convince people to stay forever, they just need to replace people faster then they burn them out. For the past few decades, they've been able to do that by managing their image and hiding public awareness of their working conditions.
In other words, management can choose to operate their company like a KyoAni or like an A-1 Pictures. They can choose to be a Valve[1] or an Ubisoft[2].
[0] Technically speaking a lot of tween work gets outsourced to lower-COL countries in east Asia, but those studios are often run just as bad as domestic animation studios in Japan.
[1] Hedging my bets: if a bunch of shit comes out of Valve about horrible working conditions please note that this comment was written before that came to light.
[2] A lot of stuff has come out about Activision-Blizzard-King, but let's not forget that Ubisoft is still worse - they actively shuffled sexual predators around their organization, Vatican-style, to keep them on their payroll. The only reason why we're talking about ABK is that the dueling EEOC/CFEH investigations have basically exposed everything.
While this may be true, if they manage to unionize they might lessen some of those negatives in the future, and I really hope for them that they'll pull through!
Unlike large immovable factories, or big supply chain companies - game companies rise and fall in a market that is kill or be-killed.
Any game company that unionizes will, in my opinion, have those studios shut down, and new ones open up in non-union environments.
To be honest, even if Blizzard doesn't unionize, I imagine that the parent company is going to wind down the employees in the studio and move content elsewhere.
On the other hand, players are incredibly attatched to existing IP and franchises, and very very fickle on "new" studios taking on their beloved franchises. I.e. when Halo moved from Bungie to 343 Industries etc.
You can't tell them to just play games. If they all did (at least the good ones) they would have any. We need people to work for better game companies or start their own.
Or, alternatively, just don't work for companies that treat their employees like shit.
There are plenty of game dev companies where employees are treated well (I work for one of them) but "game company treats employees like human beings" is not an interesting enough headline, so you don't tend to hear about it.
But in spite of working for a really good studio right now, I recognize that many people are not (I've also worked with ones that were middling at best), and unionization is a great step towards getting better conditions, especially for artists and content people. Engineers tend to get the best treatment since toxic management know they are more expensive, harder to replace and have more opportunities across a variety of industries. Conversely, if you are a 3d artist (just as an example), there are only so many places you can work, and unfortunately you are often considered more disposable.
I know that you are being sarcastic, but there is an honest answer - most people I have met in the industry who are treated like shit are either:
a) Too young or inexperienced or fearful of reprisal to understand how to advocate for themselves and others; and/or
b) Just unaware that better places to work do exist, and are convinced (much like the thread parent here) that "this is just how gamedev is"
Unfortunately because gamedev is a dream job for a lot of folks they are unwilling to rock the boat because they want to live their dream. That is why unions are a great opportunity for people like this, it gives them some agency to make a positive change.
> Too young or inexperienced or fearful of reprisal to understand how to advocate for themselves and others; and/or
Reprisal is real, especially for the young and inexperienced in places where employees are treated like shit.
> Just unaware that better places to work do exist, and are convinced (much like the thread parent here) that "this is just how gamedev is"
I find it hard to believe that you really think people getting treated like shit at work are "unaware that better places to work do exist". They are absolutely aware that better places to work exist, the problem is knowing which places those are, and then getting a job there.
The negative statements being made about gamedev in this thread are generalizations, of course there are some excellent gamedev studios out there, but on average you're going to do a lot more work for a lot less pay with a lot less respect and a lot more drama than pretty much anywhere else in the software industry.
The same can be said of any arts & humanities -related industry IMO. I believe working conditions at an ad agency are generally worse than in an industrial complex because in the latter everyone's sure they're there for the money, while in the former there are some artists trying to win industry awards and other subjective stuff. But hey maybe I'm wrong and biased and good and bad companies are there in any sector because that's human nature.
I read the email on that Twitter page. This headline makes it sound as if Blizzard threatened their employees. That’s actually not the case.
It says if you sign the document, you’re handing certain rights over to an outside organization. It’s legally binding.
Regardless of your thoughts about Blizzard, unions, or whatever views you have — the headline is misleading clickbait trying to manufacture outrage. They know most people will look at this headline and not read the lengthy email.
You have to understand that it's as close to a threat as they can legally write, likely after significant consultation with an anti-union consultant. And much of it is an outright lie: If folks fail to pass a unionization vote now, they probably can't just go and vote for it later, it doesn't work that way.
I don’t see how it’s a “threat” or anywhere near a threat. Many people will sign a document because someone else says, “it’s good for you”. It’s good to know that you’re signing a legally binding document.
>If folks fail to pass a unionization vote now, they probably can't just go and vote for it later, it doesn't work that way.
That’s besides the point. Should people sign a document without knowing it’s legally binding or understanding what it entails, simply because the union vote might not happen again later?
Btw your post makes it sound as if the company is inherently evil or trying to screw its workers. Many capitalist businesses don’t want a union. And many unions are actually not effective.
I’m not in favor nor against this unionization, but there’s a clear bias here and attempt to manufacture outrage.
Every decision a company makes is about maximizing profit. that necessarily means saving on labor costs, which means firing people, paying as little as possible, extracting unpaid overtime (e.g. "crunch"), etc. That being the case, most every decision made by a company is about screwing its workers. You can argue about whether that's "evil", but it's an economic fact.
How amazing is it that I have served on the ELT for multiple companies and not once in a single meeting was it ever discussed how we could screw over the folks that worked for us?
It's not in the same universe as a threat! The only negative thing the letter says is that unionizing will mean the CWA has exclusive representation rights. They don't suggest that there will be any negative effects on wages or employment practices or retention.
I'm not sure what the "it" you're referring to is, but I'm pretty confident it's possible to continue a unionization drive indefinitely or drop it and restart it later. Restrictions come into play only at later steps in the process; until the CWA gets enough union authorization cards to petition for an election or ask for voluntary recognition, there's no deadlines or cooldown periods involved.
Hopefully everyone hesitates and reads legal contracts. Why is "hesitation" a bad thing here? Even if you fully agree with the sentiments of the goal, it's still obligatory to read the legalese in the damn thing and understand what it means for your life. I find all sorts of things in contracts I don't agree with, and they require careful reading and sometimes outside legal opinion. Had I not, I would have been barred from the niche industry I work in for 5 years after completing a contract job.
Many people will read it and hesitate, which is the purpose of the email.
Which still doesn't make it a threat. They're warning about something the piece of paper does, not something Blizzard might do (and employees actually signing up for the right reason - a belief that the CWA will negotiate much better terms than they've been able to negotiate themselves - should be able to dismiss that warning with the same eyeroll they dismiss all the fluff at the beginning about the things Blizzard does for its staff without a union).
It's "We think X wont help you in the way you think it might [although we're obviously biased here] but it's your decision and we couldn't stop you even if we wanted to" not "If X, the consequences will be punishment"
Blizzard is running the typical anti union playbook. IF a certain threshold of cards are signed, a vote can be held. The best way to prevent a union is prevent the vote
If I was a top value/productivity employee, I damn sure wouldn’t want my ability to walk in my boss’s office and negotiate a raise taken from me. Union organization drives are good at communicating all the “possible” positives that the union can provide…there tends to be some daylight between the possible and the probable.
It’s not the 1880s and it’s not like Blizzard employees are pouring hot metal in cramped factories 16 hours a day with zero safety considerations.
Well yes, it is FUD, fear uncertainty and doubt. The title here, meanwhile, is entirely factual. I flagged this post because you went from a pure projection of yours to "misleading clickbait trying to manufacture outrage".
A union is not some "outside organization". Union locals are led by people that come out of the workforce and are democratically elected. Bargaining committees are elected by the workers, contracts are subject to ratification to workers, strikes can only be called with a strike authorization votes.
Union nationals do have problems (e.g. UAW only just voted to move to a true one-person-one-vote system), but the nationals aren't really that important in the important areas.
A union binds you to working together with your colleagues, not to some outside entity.
The key difference though is that statistically, unionized employees are paid more than non-unionized employees... so much so that the union dues are significantly less than the increased pay from collective bargaining.
On average. Top performers often see compensation fall. For industries where “top performer” isn’t a thing because the labor is commoditised, that doesn’t matter. But for some domains it does.
The problem is, far too many programmers think they're "top performers" who deserve to be paid way more than the guy in the next cubicle over—far, far more than can possibly be the case, mathematically speaking.
Personally, even if I believed myself to be the mythical 10x developer, I would still advocate for unions, because
a) Unions help with more than just pay; they make working conditions and benefits vastly better
b) I care about the people around me being paid fairly, too
c) If I'm genuinely good enough to be at the top of whatever pay scale there ends up being, I'm confident that a union will make sure that's enough money to live comfortably, and that's all I need.
I have negative interest in ever having a lifestyle in which the difference between $150k/yr and $200k/yr actually affects what I can do for myself or how I can live.
I think a lot of the reasons unions in tech fail to materialize is that every employee sees themself as in the "top performer" group and therefore imagines his or her compensation decreasing in a union. Do a survey of a company's software engineers and ask them if they believe they are among the top 1% of performers in their company. I bet more than 15% say YES.
There are many more below-average comps in tech than above average, because the high end skews really high. So the majority of tech workers should actually see more compensation when negotiating collectively.
Absolutely not true. I have only anecdotal evidence: I live and work in a nation where unions are everywhere and I see rockstars and specialists getting paid way more than their team mates, everywhere I look.
Can you supply any evidence to support your claim that top performers often see compensation fall?
Sounds like a Blizzard talking point. Unions have done a great job, on average, of improving wages and conditions for their workers. Better healthcare benefits through an employer typically more than makes up for the cost of the union dues.
Which country is this? Also your comment is a common/untrue talking point when it comes to anti-union rhetoric and union busting. The reality is people working union jobs in the US tend to have better benefits, get paid more, and have a lot more job security.
That goes against basic union dogma. No employee should be given worse (better) treatment or incentives than another employee of comparable standing. And luckily, once the union comes in, none of them will be, which is what the email at issue kind of says.
I struggle to imagine where I would enjoy working less: an engineering company with culture so wrong, or at a company where my colleagues and I were represented by a union.
What _would_ joining the union mean for employees?
Most people in tech are used to differences in pay from person to person, with raises and bonuses allocated yearly (or some other time period) based on a review of the last year’s performance.
Only if that's what their union local decides to negotiate into a new contract with ActiBlizzard.
Unions are made up of the workers within them, and especially new ones are there to represent their members' interests. If their members want flat pay, then they'll push for flat pay. If they want pay based on performance and other metrics, they'll push for that.
There's no rulebook for unions that says "Everyone must be paid the same, and terrible workers must be unfireable." This is a negative stereotype of unions—based on some real-world examples, to be sure, but a stereotype all the same—that has been aggressively pushed as anti-union propaganda for decades.
> This is a negative stereotype of unions—based on some real-world examples, to be sure, but a stereotype all the same—that has been aggressively pushed as anti-union propaganda for decades.
It would be interesting to see examples of unions that aggressively promote performance based pay -- this is a genuine question. I think an objective view would show that the stereotype is broadly accurate, if not 100% accurate.
The reason for this is that we live in a world in which 20% of the people do 80% of the work, but only have 20% of the votes. That is why there is an inherent tension between democracy and fair pay. It's true that this has nothing to do with unions per se, except that unions are the ones to be in a position to vote on pay.
One could imagine a different situation, say where the number of votes you have is weighted by your salary when the union first forms, and have negotiations be for total labor expenditure rather than individual worker salaries. Then you can still have a union but it would resist the type of equalization forces by which the best people exit for higher pay outside the union, which ends up being a drag on both the union and the company and causes a lot of firms to oppose unions more than they otherwise would.
This is known as the "pareto principle" but it was observed long before then. In terms of scientific sources, what sources do you have that everyone makes the same contribution? Of course 80/20 is a rule of thumb, but a small group of people do the bulk of the work in most organizations.
The exec knows perfectly well that employees negotiating as a group have a lot more leverage and consequently will get better outcomes than ones that negotiate individually. The letter does its best to imply agreeing to pool your leverage with other employees is a bad thing when, in fact, it's usually a good thing.
Also, do a lot of people really not see the implied threat of a phrase like "consider the consequences"? Of course there isn't a direct threat -- implied works just fine and leaves you on a much nicer legal footing. I'm pretty sure most Bliz employees get it.
I especially like the bolded part. Of course the leadership of Bliz does not like the workers' rights under the NLRA. Emphasizing it really makes the point that a lot of double-speak is going to happen in the letter, for legal reasons.
Bliz management has a rather direct and huge conflict of interest when it comes to giving their employees advice (legal advice, no less!) on how best to negotiate with them. It shows how little they respect the intelligence of their employees that they would release a letter like this.
It's not fundamentally dishonest. Perhaps it's situationally dishonest.
Unions are a bad idea when management treats employees well. They introduce costs and inefficiencies. The need for a union are a signal that something else has failed or been done unfairly. Amazon workers should unionize. Google and Facebook? Probably not.
The market dynamics work out well too if this is handled on a case-by-case basis. Treat employees badly? You risk having them unionize.
I work at a company with no union. I wouldn't want a union. I don't think many people there would. It's like a family. The CEO makes 5x as much as I do, and probably 2x what I'd earn at Google. People are treated fairly, and spend entire careers there.
In a perfectly efficient market, companies would operate treating employees at a level /slightly/ better than they would with a union, and there would be no unions. In an inefficient market, you'll have some companies with, and some without.
First, size matters. Google and Facebook probably do not have a "family" feeling because they're huge. Growing a company to that size almost always means losing that feeling, as well as adding a host of inefficiencies.
Second, society has this strange idea that unions are for blue collar jobs. People think that, if you have a university degree, you don't need a union to represent you. White collar salaries have remained stagnant as a result, and white collar employees may lack avenues to address abuses, such as what occurred at Blizzard, that blue collar workers represented by a union may have.
It seems as though people are abandoning this prejudice. Perhaps, once a company is big enough and has a track record of not treating employees well, unionization should be the natural course for its workers, no matter what colour their collars may be.
Unions do have a bad reputation for inefficiency, but with remuneration falling behind the pace of inflation while productivity soars ever upwards, is it surprising that workers are starting to feel unions are worth embracing?
If Blizzard's employees unionize, you're going to see serious push back against some of the basic facts of game developer life. e.g. Crunch-time. I don't blame Blizzard's execs for being scared right now. They screwed up bad and now they're facing epic consequences.
I don't think I suggested unions are for blue-collar jobs. Amazon workers -- including SWEs -- absolutely should unionize. Amazon pays SWEs well, but doesn't treat them well. Conversely, there are plenty of blue collar places which do treat employees well, even without unions.
Size, likewise, isn't it. Historically, IBM, HP, and other big companies in the sixties treated employees well. Similar companies still exist today.
It's all about the relationship between employer and employee. The guideline here shouldn't be size, income, or much of anything else except for having a "track record of not treating employees well." If employees would be treated better with a union, they should unionize. If not, they shouldn't.
Watching HN debate unions is always a good time. Blizzard is right, being in a union generally means you can't negotiate for yourself but seeing as the workers are in this position to begin with, negotiating for themselves clearly wasn't working out.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/catoncoals/status/1469365235475791872
This tweet in particular seems very vulnerable to the same kind of distortion as in the original submission, where innocuous things from people you've resolved not to trust start being casted as threats.
Sir, I have some things to explain to you about the internet...
Game companies take advantage of the fact that there is a large population of software engineers who want to meld their work and their hobbies by offering worse working conditions, lower pay, and less stable employment than they could get elsewhere.
Just... play games. And work in a field that treats its employees well.
No, try to make it better! Fight like hell to make it better! That is how we progress. That is how we got the worker's protections we have now. They weren't given magnanimously. We fought long and hard for every single one, and it made everyone's life better.
Demand better. Always demand better.
You should not need to give up on what you want to do because of shitty bosses.
Unionizing may be a sensible response to that. I’d expect the company to make a sensible response as well.
If that's true, how would "Fight like hell to make it better" (presumably by threatening to withhold labor) work? They'll just replace you with the next batch of starry eyed graduates.
Choosing to work there despite poor working conditions and the availability of work you're qualified to do with better working conditions is the thing that causes the poor working conditions.
Wtf is wrong with people here asking thousands of people to quit their job? Would you quit your beloved job to improve other peoples working conditions?
Because it's too high, enabling employers to offer poor working conditions. The poor working conditions then drive away prospective employees, lowering supply until working conditions improve.
Unless you for some reason volunteer to suffer the poor working conditions unnecessarily.
> Just make more games then demand will go up?
Making more games doesn't cause demand for games to go up. It causes the price of games to go down. Then each game maker has less to pay workers with.
What you need is for the industry to make fewer games, so they cost more (or at least have higher sales volumes at the same price), allowing workers to be paid more. But fewer games means fewer employees and some of them have to go do something else.
> Would you quit your beloved job to improve other peoples working conditions?
You can't have it both ways. Either your working conditions are bad, in which case quit, or your working conditions are "beloved," in which case what are you complaining about?
This is an absurd argument.
If you love making video games and one video game company has worse working conditions than all the others, quit that one and go work for one of the other ones.
If you love making video games and all the video game companies have poor working conditions because too many people love making video games and therefore the market is saturated, this a thing that only you can do anything about. The company you work for is already trying to maximize profits in a competitive market. To improve your working conditions they'd have to make more money, but if they could do that so easily they'd have done it already.
You, by contrast, have an actual choice. Do you love this job, working conditions and all, better than your other available alternatives? If the answer is yes, you've made your choice. But for some people the answer is going to be no, and it's those people, choosing something else, that establish the floor for working conditions. They can only go as low as you're willing to put up with. So don't put up with less than you find reasonable.
It's the thing that creates change. Less people are willing to do the job, so less video games get made, competition is less aggressive so each company makes more revenue which allows working conditions to improve. Other solutions will have results no better than this and most of them are just roundabout ways to achieve the equivalent result with higher transaction costs or some kind of perfidious rent seeking or gatekeeping.
The real "problem" is that people want fun and interesting jobs that everybody wants to pay as much as dull and dirty jobs that nobody wants, but that's not how it works. At the same skill level, the shittier job pays better. Because if it doesn't, you quit.
This makes zero sense. You can be doing a job you love while your boss is a piece of shit. You can be doing a job you love but not getting paid enough for it. You can be doing a job you love but being put at risk while doing it. And a million other things.
Come on, man, you are not this dense.
workers fighting their employers never ends how you think it will. They won’t raise conditions, they’ll just get rid of the jobs, outsource, use AI, etc etc etc
Has it ever occurred to you that improving working conditions doesn’t necessarily always result in “making the world better”? And that measurement is completely arbitrary. eg The west has very little manufacturing left because we chose to raise working conditions instead of remaining competitive - thus all the manufacturing jobs disappeared anyways. Is that “making the world better”?
It’s simple supply and demand - a large number of programmers want to work on games. Therefore the pay and conditions aren’t great compared to other less ‘cool+trendy’ options.
Absolute factually untrue. Learn from history.
That's not what it reflects. It reflects the monetary value that it takes to get someome to do work for you. In games, it takes less money because people want to work on games. To get me to work on your advertising plaform you would have to pay me a ridiculous sum, because I don't want to work on an advertising platform. Companies pay people as much as it costs to get them to work, not an amount reflecting the value they provided to the company. Sometimes those values line up, but usually when profits go up salaries don't linearly follow along, so it's clearly not the latter.
I think therein may lie the difference.
Rephrased (accurately for intent) I thought it would be:
> Just to clarify, when you say "I am an artist and I love playing the games I've made with friends and strangers", do you mean artist as in the game-asset creator type of artist, or artist as in a romanticized version of a software engineer?
I could be wrong. Maybe he is just being a dick. But I primarily saw a somewhat more charitable interpretation.
The usage of quotation marks in journalism to say things using other people's words or to imply doubt on if those words are correct has been growing looser and looser. I generally take such usage as an indicator of bad and lazy writing.
It's great. Most game companies are very comfortable. Nice offices with free food, good pay, flexible hours, remote friendly, full benefits. Crunch is rare these days. This is all true of Blizzard, btw.
The vocal minority on twitter are trading in outrage; the currency of social media. And there's a distinct lack of perspective. Have they ever worked on a farm? A restaurant kitchen? A construction site? A warehouse? Or anywhere outside of an Aeron chair? Mostly no. This doesn't mean it's perfect or can't be improved, but it's really nice compared to most and this gets lost in the noise. I often visit poor neighborhoods and poor countries and read history and thank my lucky stars.
And yes, you can get even better pay in the financial services industry. If that's what you want, please, go work there. No one's stopping you.
It still sucked compared to industry positions I took later. There’s a lot more pressure to ship for Christmas, to demo for E3, etc. New consoles invariably have terrible documentation (“it can never not be forgotten to fail to initialize the blah”), and in general the game (and entertainment broadly) industry is less linear/more hit-driven than others.
I also hated that it broke my enjoyment of playing games if I got distracted wondering how they did some effect or why their renderer had a certain glitch.
Or some of the extremely high quality indie games?
I'd take many of the indie games over WoW or CoD any day of the week. I don't need MMOs to enjoy a well written game.
edit/ These game companies themselves are also quite incestual, for want of a better word. Once a developer moves from one team in one company to another team in another company they typically try to heavily recruit the solid folks that they "left behind," as it were.
And I get that, but, anecdotally, it's never been something that I did when I moved around in my non-games industry. It's never even really crossed my mind.
It's great. I'm really enjoying it. I snipe people from my old work (who are willing to leave games) whenever I see an opening.
And it's a solution that doesn't involve asking people to quit the job they love so they can get their soul sucked at an advertising company.
Also offering a theoretical that so far isn't happening isn't an interesting argument.
Unless you think these transformations happen overnight, supply dwindling and working conditions being reevaluated would most definitely decrease quality of games in the short term.
Not only management is probably the worst kind I have seen but you know that the best can happen that the result of your work is going to make people spend time on video games instead of doing something better.
You could say the same thing about any hobby activity. Playing games isn't inherently bad just like drinking alcohol isn't inherently bad, its how much you let it consume your life (and in my personal opinion and experience, if you binge something its usually to fill some hole in your life, eg loneliness, and removing the thing to binge doesn't solve it and will simply get replaced with something else. The underlying issue needs to be addressed)
Agree. Playing _video_ games is, _sometimes_.
Playing for a limited time vs. excessive time, playing in your free time instead of playing during times when you should be learning or working, etc. I think there are some potentially negative outcomes associated with video games exclusively, as opposed to other game types (table games, etc.).
Anecdotal evidence time: I have personally met with several players who got severely addicted to video games and had to go through therapy. Not to mention professional players. Of course, the waste majority of players still might be ok. Also, just because some people get addicted it does not mean that the rest of the gamers experience any negative impact.
The kind of problem I see with video games is that it takes away time from children that could have been spent outside doing something more important to their development. I am not sure if this subject is studied, the studies I have seen are inconclusive (some claim positive impact, some claim negative).
> if you binge something its usually to fill some hole in your life, eg loneliness, and removing the thing to binge doesn't solve it and will simply get replaced with something else. The underlying issue needs to be addressed
Absolutely. I just think that playing video games is probably the least healthy option.
https://www.scmp.com/abacus/tech/article/3087444/chinese-esp...
https://www.healthygamer.gg/blog/video-games-and-mental-heal...
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.0026...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6676913/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3905489/
What about movies and TV shows? Theatre? At least video games are less passive than those activities.
I think games can be more addictive (citation needed).
> Theatre?
You can't go to the theatre for 12 hours a day, can you?
Fair point!
I guess it’s the mixture of a relatively passive entertainment, sitting still and being able to do it for long periods at a time (there’s no natural break like the theatre has, nor do your muscles tire like with physical activity).
I doubt a large percentage of the people requesting this are engineers. Activision/Blizzard has 9500 employees and only 1800 signed the request for the CEO to step down. They apparently need at least 30% of employees to sign up for the union but haven't released any numbers as far as I can tell.
*I managed to confuse myself about how you spell this word...
...and pay the associated costs for it. Alternatively, I'm happy that people churning out enterprise CRUD apps are well rewarded for working in a boring field.
i have not considered this work-hobby aspect before. the gaming industry is not that different from other artistic fields. music and anime comes to mind because that's the other two i know about.
the work conditions inside anime studios is awful. nothing you would want for anybody. and despite that fact, people kept choosing to do that kind of work. people with responsibilities too, families, kids, etc.
they deliberately choose these awful work conditions.
It's the responsibility of management to provide a healthy working environment. This isn't just a moral obligation, but a creative one as well - businesses that operate like large-scale game developers or Japanese[0] animation studios will ultimately produce uninspired work that people will stop buying.
On the worker's end, there doesn't necessarily have to be a choice to work in the same industry forever, either. Most of these companies have dangerously high employee churn. The company doesn't have to convince people to stay forever, they just need to replace people faster then they burn them out. For the past few decades, they've been able to do that by managing their image and hiding public awareness of their working conditions.
In other words, management can choose to operate their company like a KyoAni or like an A-1 Pictures. They can choose to be a Valve[1] or an Ubisoft[2].
[0] Technically speaking a lot of tween work gets outsourced to lower-COL countries in east Asia, but those studios are often run just as bad as domestic animation studios in Japan.
[1] Hedging my bets: if a bunch of shit comes out of Valve about horrible working conditions please note that this comment was written before that came to light.
[2] A lot of stuff has come out about Activision-Blizzard-King, but let's not forget that Ubisoft is still worse - they actively shuffled sexual predators around their organization, Vatican-style, to keep them on their payroll. The only reason why we're talking about ABK is that the dueling EEOC/CFEH investigations have basically exposed everything.
I am planning to get back into game dev after I make enough money to start my own studio.
Any game company that unionizes will, in my opinion, have those studios shut down, and new ones open up in non-union environments.
To be honest, even if Blizzard doesn't unionize, I imagine that the parent company is going to wind down the employees in the studio and move content elsewhere.
There are plenty of game dev companies where employees are treated well (I work for one of them) but "game company treats employees like human beings" is not an interesting enough headline, so you don't tend to hear about it.
But in spite of working for a really good studio right now, I recognize that many people are not (I've also worked with ones that were middling at best), and unionization is a great step towards getting better conditions, especially for artists and content people. Engineers tend to get the best treatment since toxic management know they are more expensive, harder to replace and have more opportunities across a variety of industries. Conversely, if you are a 3d artist (just as an example), there are only so many places you can work, and unfortunately you are often considered more disposable.
Hmm... interesting advice, I wonder why people getting treated like shit by their employers never thought of that.
a) Too young or inexperienced or fearful of reprisal to understand how to advocate for themselves and others; and/or
b) Just unaware that better places to work do exist, and are convinced (much like the thread parent here) that "this is just how gamedev is"
Unfortunately because gamedev is a dream job for a lot of folks they are unwilling to rock the boat because they want to live their dream. That is why unions are a great opportunity for people like this, it gives them some agency to make a positive change.
Reprisal is real, especially for the young and inexperienced in places where employees are treated like shit.
> Just unaware that better places to work do exist, and are convinced (much like the thread parent here) that "this is just how gamedev is"
I find it hard to believe that you really think people getting treated like shit at work are "unaware that better places to work do exist". They are absolutely aware that better places to work exist, the problem is knowing which places those are, and then getting a job there.
The negative statements being made about gamedev in this thread are generalizations, of course there are some excellent gamedev studios out there, but on average you're going to do a lot more work for a lot less pay with a lot less respect and a lot more drama than pretty much anywhere else in the software industry.
0% of Blizzard SWE are forced to work there and do so voluntarily - they obviously like it there
It says if you sign the document, you’re handing certain rights over to an outside organization. It’s legally binding.
Regardless of your thoughts about Blizzard, unions, or whatever views you have — the headline is misleading clickbait trying to manufacture outrage. They know most people will look at this headline and not read the lengthy email.
>If folks fail to pass a unionization vote now, they probably can't just go and vote for it later, it doesn't work that way.
That’s besides the point. Should people sign a document without knowing it’s legally binding or understanding what it entails, simply because the union vote might not happen again later?
Btw your post makes it sound as if the company is inherently evil or trying to screw its workers. Many capitalist businesses don’t want a union. And many unions are actually not effective.
I’m not in favor nor against this unionization, but there’s a clear bias here and attempt to manufacture outrage.
understatement of the year
I'm not sure what the "it" you're referring to is, but I'm pretty confident it's possible to continue a unionization drive indefinitely or drop it and restart it later. Restrictions come into play only at later steps in the process; until the CWA gets enough union authorization cards to petition for an election or ask for voluntary recognition, there's no deadlines or cooldown periods involved.
And you don't find it odd that Blizzard is only concerned about their employees' welfare when they're trying to unionize?
"Hey employees, this isn't some petition.org type thing, you sign that paper and there are legal ramifications."
How many people do you think will read that and hesitate?
Which still doesn't make it a threat. They're warning about something the piece of paper does, not something Blizzard might do (and employees actually signing up for the right reason - a belief that the CWA will negotiate much better terms than they've been able to negotiate themselves - should be able to dismiss that warning with the same eyeroll they dismiss all the fluff at the beginning about the things Blizzard does for its staff without a union).
It's "We think X wont help you in the way you think it might [although we're obviously biased here] but it's your decision and we couldn't stop you even if we wanted to" not "If X, the consequences will be punishment"
It’s not the 1880s and it’s not like Blizzard employees are pouring hot metal in cramped factories 16 hours a day with zero safety considerations.
Union nationals do have problems (e.g. UAW only just voted to move to a true one-person-one-vote system), but the nationals aren't really that important in the important areas.
A union binds you to working together with your colleagues, not to some outside entity.
I think a few commenters read the headline and not the actual letter.
Personally, even if I believed myself to be the mythical 10x developer, I would still advocate for unions, because
a) Unions help with more than just pay; they make working conditions and benefits vastly better
b) I care about the people around me being paid fairly, too
c) If I'm genuinely good enough to be at the top of whatever pay scale there ends up being, I'm confident that a union will make sure that's enough money to live comfortably, and that's all I need.
I have negative interest in ever having a lifestyle in which the difference between $150k/yr and $200k/yr actually affects what I can do for myself or how I can live.
There are many more below-average comps in tech than above average, because the high end skews really high. So the majority of tech workers should actually see more compensation when negotiating collectively.
Absolutely not true. I have only anecdotal evidence: I live and work in a nation where unions are everywhere and I see rockstars and specialists getting paid way more than their team mates, everywhere I look.
Can you supply any evidence to support your claim that top performers often see compensation fall?
Most people in tech are used to differences in pay from person to person, with raises and bonuses allocated yearly (or some other time period) based on a review of the last year’s performance.
Would this end, with pay flat across the board?
They usually do mean structured pay brackets so that there's a floor. This prevents exploitation.
Unions are made up of the workers within them, and especially new ones are there to represent their members' interests. If their members want flat pay, then they'll push for flat pay. If they want pay based on performance and other metrics, they'll push for that.
There's no rulebook for unions that says "Everyone must be paid the same, and terrible workers must be unfireable." This is a negative stereotype of unions—based on some real-world examples, to be sure, but a stereotype all the same—that has been aggressively pushed as anti-union propaganda for decades.
It would be interesting to see examples of unions that aggressively promote performance based pay -- this is a genuine question. I think an objective view would show that the stereotype is broadly accurate, if not 100% accurate.
The reason for this is that we live in a world in which 20% of the people do 80% of the work, but only have 20% of the votes. That is why there is an inherent tension between democracy and fair pay. It's true that this has nothing to do with unions per se, except that unions are the ones to be in a position to vote on pay.
One could imagine a different situation, say where the number of votes you have is weighted by your salary when the union first forms, and have negotiations be for total labor expenditure rather than individual worker salaries. Then you can still have a union but it would resist the type of equalization forces by which the best people exit for higher pay outside the union, which ends up being a drag on both the union and the company and causes a lot of firms to oppose unions more than they otherwise would.
They have pay based (mostly) on seniority, specialization, job title, etc.
The exec knows perfectly well that employees negotiating as a group have a lot more leverage and consequently will get better outcomes than ones that negotiate individually. The letter does its best to imply agreeing to pool your leverage with other employees is a bad thing when, in fact, it's usually a good thing.
Also, do a lot of people really not see the implied threat of a phrase like "consider the consequences"? Of course there isn't a direct threat -- implied works just fine and leaves you on a much nicer legal footing. I'm pretty sure most Bliz employees get it.
I especially like the bolded part. Of course the leadership of Bliz does not like the workers' rights under the NLRA. Emphasizing it really makes the point that a lot of double-speak is going to happen in the letter, for legal reasons.
Bliz management has a rather direct and huge conflict of interest when it comes to giving their employees advice (legal advice, no less!) on how best to negotiate with them. It shows how little they respect the intelligence of their employees that they would release a letter like this.
Unions are a bad idea when management treats employees well. They introduce costs and inefficiencies. The need for a union are a signal that something else has failed or been done unfairly. Amazon workers should unionize. Google and Facebook? Probably not.
The market dynamics work out well too if this is handled on a case-by-case basis. Treat employees badly? You risk having them unionize.
I work at a company with no union. I wouldn't want a union. I don't think many people there would. It's like a family. The CEO makes 5x as much as I do, and probably 2x what I'd earn at Google. People are treated fairly, and spend entire careers there.
In a perfectly efficient market, companies would operate treating employees at a level /slightly/ better than they would with a union, and there would be no unions. In an inefficient market, you'll have some companies with, and some without.
Second, society has this strange idea that unions are for blue collar jobs. People think that, if you have a university degree, you don't need a union to represent you. White collar salaries have remained stagnant as a result, and white collar employees may lack avenues to address abuses, such as what occurred at Blizzard, that blue collar workers represented by a union may have.
It seems as though people are abandoning this prejudice. Perhaps, once a company is big enough and has a track record of not treating employees well, unionization should be the natural course for its workers, no matter what colour their collars may be.
Unions do have a bad reputation for inefficiency, but with remuneration falling behind the pace of inflation while productivity soars ever upwards, is it surprising that workers are starting to feel unions are worth embracing?
If Blizzard's employees unionize, you're going to see serious push back against some of the basic facts of game developer life. e.g. Crunch-time. I don't blame Blizzard's execs for being scared right now. They screwed up bad and now they're facing epic consequences.
Size, likewise, isn't it. Historically, IBM, HP, and other big companies in the sixties treated employees well. Similar companies still exist today.
It's all about the relationship between employer and employee. The guideline here shouldn't be size, income, or much of anything else except for having a "track record of not treating employees well." If employees would be treated better with a union, they should unionize. If not, they shouldn't.
Think that ship sailed.