"[...] he made around $400/month when he started as a tester in 2015. In 2018, as a junior programmer, he said he was making ~$700/month"
Take this in context. $400 for a starting tester (aka zero qualifications) is standard for eastern europe. As a career, it's on par with call center operator.
2-3 years later, he switched to "junior developer" in the same company. I'm reading this to mean there was a conversation with the management that went like this: "You seem like a smart guy and you did a couple of javascript online classes. We'll switch you to dev and teach you how to program properly - oh, and you get 10% raise along with it. When you can do useful work we can renegotiate".
One may teach himself useful programming in a couple of years while working full time as a tester - it's definitely possible. But the baseline probability is that at that stage he wasn't yet productive, and still required what's basically paid training for 3 to 6 months.
I'd like to live in a world where a noob developer can advance their skills by familiarizing themselves with a company's codebase, and get paid a living wage to do so. The call center operator deserves the same.
This is ideally how QA should be run at most organizations. Help familiarize juniors with tooling like git, the command line, deploying things, writing tickets, communicating with the team-- have them see different parts of the engineering organization and then let them choose where they think they have the most interest.
I know because I've done this with wild success and everywhere that doesn't do this has had by comparison awful QA.
In general $800 after taxes is the bare minimum for juniors in Warsaw. But yeah, gamedev...
Experienced devs can get up to $5000-$6000 after taxes but I know of a few making even more. The thing is you can rent a studio for $300-$400 and food is dirt cheap compared to western countries (another $300 or so, but $200 will do). All in all I’m Warsaw you’re saving much more money than you’d in Berlin or Prague at the same position. So $700 might look really bad but that’s actually enough to get by.
Game Dev. is not a lucrative SWE career in Europe, unfortunately. Pays less than most SE jobs. (and SWE salaries are lower in Europe to begin with, compared to the US)
In creative industries, some people will accept almost any salary, because the alternative is not working as a creative. Video game development is notorious for this, but it's even worse in other areas. Try becoming a professional painter, sculptor, or writer.
I always advise people against going down that route, unless they are literally ready to sacrifice half of a lifetime of earnings for it. Unfortunately, choosing wisely requires a level of maturity that you do not possess when it is time to make the choice.
It's a low salary even by Polish standards. Moreover, there are huge differences between salaries in different Eastern European countries. Poland is on the higher end.
I've been doing software development for the past ~21 years and have been doing game dev for the past 6 of those, and I've experienced a lot of what the traditional software industry and game dev have to offer, from massive corporate FAANG or AAA behemoths to small startup like indies.
Like most industries there is bad and good, but the nightmare stories are the ones you tend hear about, there's not a lot of juicy material in "game dev studio provides satisfactory work environment". There are definitely exploitative horrible studios out there, but there are also plenty with satisfied workers.
Just my anecdata as a software dev who happily moved into game dev and has no regrets about the decision.
Why do people never consider Purchasing Power Parity when posting about the supposedly "low" wages of another area of the world? Other commentors here have said that 700 USD in Poland is about standard, if a little on the low side, but it's comparable to how game developers are paid less than other software engineers here in the US.
Nobody knows the real average salary in Poland. The government's statistics office is calculating average only based on reports from businesses with >10 employees (IIRC). This excludes a couple millions of microbusinesses and of course the biggest employer in the country, aka the state itself (millions of teachers, policemen, soldiers, all the paper-pushers in various parts of bureaucracy etc. etc. are not included). The computed national averages are good for comparing year-to-year salary growths, but they're not informative w.r.t. absolute salary levels.
Mmm, another one of those what went wrong with the fastest selling game of all time pieces. Author goes on comparing it to BioWare's Anthem :o. $700/month is a starting salary in this poor part of Europe, especially for a game tester turned first time coder.
The claims of Cyberpunk being the fastest selling game were baed entirely on pre-orders which tells you basically nothing about the quality of the game. Sony followed up by removing the game from their store and Microsoft added a quality warning to their store in an almost unprecedented move. Microsoft, Sony and Gamestop all offered refunds. It's a nice claim, but it's pretty irrelevant to what actually happened.
They had 8m preorders. 13m in 10 days takes into account refunds and returns. They are sitting at >10 million copies on Steam alone right now. Its quite possible they made their 2021 goal of selling 20 million copies at this point, less than a month after release.
Where was Sony and Microsoft when Remedy released Control running at 10fps on PS4 and Xbox One?
Shouldn't a reporter know better than to just drop that number without saying anything about the cost of living in Poland?
So now I have to go look it up if I want to gain any actual information from this tweet. Then as I'm looking up what city their office is in, I realize the only reason I'm checking at all isn't because he told me CD Projekt is based in Poland, I just had a recollection they were based in a formerly-communist state.
So now I've been able to fully determine this Schreier guy is a scumbag faster that I can determine just how scummy $400/mo or $700/mo is.
The misleading nature of the Tweet to avoid putting the numbers in context. It's a drawdroppingly low number for those of us in cities that even the rest of the U.S. considers overpriced. That's what he's playing to, the people who will be shocked by the number using their own hometown as a frame of reference.
He's not Tweeting any context like that it's X% below median SWE wage in Warsaw. If it's still an insultingly low wage even by the standards of the area, it doesn't hurt to put it in context.
He did compare fastest selling game of all time to Anthem, game EA planned to sell 6 million copies in first 3 months, but ended up selling ~2 million in two years, a total flop.
He's not a scumbag but he is part of that "left coast" subset of people that find it agregious people work for lower wages than people do in SF. The kind where the "the hand that feeds" is all low income people who willingly move to high cost of living cities and demand californianism to dominate policy.
I wish games and tech press didn't have to even acknowledge this stuff. It's just ridiculous I already know all political affiliations of people in tech journalism just by reading one page of their twitter. I just want the days of independent and intelligent journalism again.
Take this in context. $400 for a starting tester (aka zero qualifications) is standard for eastern europe. As a career, it's on par with call center operator.
2-3 years later, he switched to "junior developer" in the same company. I'm reading this to mean there was a conversation with the management that went like this: "You seem like a smart guy and you did a couple of javascript online classes. We'll switch you to dev and teach you how to program properly - oh, and you get 10% raise along with it. When you can do useful work we can renegotiate".
One may teach himself useful programming in a couple of years while working full time as a tester - it's definitely possible. But the baseline probability is that at that stage he wasn't yet productive, and still required what's basically paid training for 3 to 6 months.