Comment by spaceseaman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spaceseaman | Hacker News Reader

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Did you read the enclosing paragraph?

"Their income pales in comparison to what’s offered in other fields with reputations for brutal hours, like banking and law. The average American game developer earned $83,060 in 2013, according to a Gamasutra survey, or less than half the pay of a first-year associate at a New York law firm."

Your answer is right there for goodness sake! The author compares game developers to a first-year associate because both are "fields with reputations for brutal hours."

The author is also Jason Schreier, an editor at Kotaku which has frequently covered these topics. I would argue he's quite aware of the issues developers face, many journalists are close friends with developers in the industry.

To echo your demeaning tone: did you do any research at all?

The author had the universe of salaries to choose from and chose ... lawyers. And not nationwide, but lawyers in literally the highest (or very close) paid market in the world. A comparison to Hollywood union rates would have been much more logical and probably still supported the writer's thesis.

So, yes, I think it fair to call it a lazy comparison and criticize the author for that point. Even if it doesn't really undermine any of the other well known issues with the field.

The other reason the comparison is so flawed is the education requirements for lawyers in that market and the enormous debt usually incurred in getting there. (These characteristics are not unique to lawyers, but are not totally shared with game devs.) Large NYC firms will only hire from a dozen or so law schools and those schools accept students from relatively small pool of mostly pricey undergrads. Without scholarships or aid, you're looking at $2-350,000 in student loans over the 7 years of school. Then you generally don't work for 6 months after graduation in order to study for the bar exam because you didn't expect $300k to teach you that stuff did you?

Does the reputation match reality? The brutal hours in law firms are mostly for junior associates on partner track. Lawyers working in government, corporate, or non-profit jobs tend to work about the same hours as developers in those organizations.

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