Salary of a game programmer (artist, designer, or producer)

22 thoughts on “Salary of a game programmer (artist, designer, or producer)”

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2. “Oh, actually, sorry to end on a bum note, but do remember that not every programmer is top talent and will command top dollar. Assuming a gaussian distribution (which seems reasonable), roughly half of all programmers are below average. Make sure you’re not one of them before you start demanding a higher salary based on this data!”

   Christer, you’re basing that statement on the ideal that talent is directly proportional to salary (as one would hope). I’ve seen this not be the case many times; too often it’s simply a function of time spent in the industry or even just at a specific company, and in that case simply represents survival skills and good politicking.

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3. I used to work for Papaya, and they actually put higher figures in the H-1B documentation so they wouldn’t have to pay prevailing wage (the minimum wage an employer has to pay an H-1B employee) – if you go through the past years on the H-1B disclosure site, you’ll see that the salaries are magically clamped at a certain value.

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5. Wow! I can name four of the top 20 from the location and description alone. Quite surprising how much a Frenchman can make if they have good connections. – Robin Green

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6. Well now I know how much my boss makes way up near the top and he’s probably still underpaid..

   I wonder how much of a fair representation using the H-1B stats is. Are programmers who need an H-1B visa getting paid about average of other programmers at their company? Do they get paid more to entice them to move to the US? Do they get paid less because they’re willing to take it in order to get over here and hopefully eventually wind up with a green card? Are the published stats total lies just to keep immigration happy? (I’ve heard of some immigration applications that could wind up on fiction best-seller lists. Mine however is total 100% truth in case any immigration officers stumble upon this…)

   Regardless, a very resourceful use of available information and a fascinating read.

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7. “BTW, speaking of jobs, I’m still looking for top graphics, tools, and online gameplay programmers. If you’re interested and you know you’re pretty good at what you do, shoot me an email or LinkedIn message, I’d like to talk to you!”

   but how can I contact you when linked keeps asking me to upgrade my account and I can’t find your email. :)

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8. Charles, it was more of a comment to remind people that they aren’t necessarily as good as they think they are, than an accurate statistical comment. Personally, I think Sturgeon’s law applies. Always.

   8Ball, your statement doesn’t seem to rhyme with the data from the database.

   Robin, yeah, cross referencing the data vs. e.g. LinkedIn or personal knowledge of people in the industry does make it possible to identify people. I knew this was possible, and I didn’t particularly want to expose individuals, but I still felt there was a value to the whole industry in reporting the data.

   Keith, based on my experience, having been on an H-1B myself as well as having had lots of coworkers and friends on H-1Bs, H-1B salaries (at least in the games industry) are definitely a fair representation. They’re certainly not a means of obtaining “cheap labor” like some clueless retards often accuse the system of, in that the salaries have to match (or exceed) prevailing wages, and theres a shitload of money spent on lawyers fees, relocation, etc. on top of the wages themselves.

   Ishaq, that’s the type of problem solving I’m expecting a good candidate to excel at!

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9. Lol, email finding FAIL… this reminds me of http://failblog.org/2008/07/17/trivia-fail/ (sorry to link to the fail blog).

   Christer, aren’t salaries a matter of negotiation? You’ve been looking for programmers for some time now quite openly and consistently so evidently there is demand without supply. I would expect unreasonable figures being mentioned in that situation even if the candidate is aware of the prevailing figures – in fact that would be a trivial problem solving on his part as you put it.

   Very useful post though.

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10. Yordan, I think you’re reading too much specificity into the generic statements I made at the opening and closing of the post. Simplified, I was making two points.

    First, what I was saying is that it happens that e.g. junior programmers ask for senior programmer salaries. If they can negotiate that, power to them, but odds are they’re just wasting their time and that of others unless they’re of truly exceptional skill and experience. Know thyself.

    Second, people should educate themselves about prevailing wages so they e.g. don’t go about accepting a game programmer position for $38K/year at Papaya Studio!

    My post was an attempt to provide solid information to help people with respect to both issues.

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11. I spared myself from mining the data when I went through similar steps two years ago. I have been using the excellent although quite slow at times http://www.mydanwei.com/ and the salary tab for over two years now :)

    I cross referenced your data and they seem to match for the engineering part.

    Enjoy :)

    fatlimey: Keep in mind that this database lacks all the O1s, J1s, L1s which have been used more and more the last few years.

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13. hello, I’m realistic about my capabilities. I’m student looking for more of a “junior programmer” position. I’m still not quite sure what the salary range is for such a position (I live in the Bay Area).

    What I’d like to know is: What is the ballpark salary range for a junior programmer? And what skills do you expect from a student/junior programmer coming in?

    jordan

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14. Jordan, my experience is in hiring strong senior programmers, not junior programmers, so I cannot really tell you. A junior programmer would fall into the “programmer” and “<3 years" category of the Game Industry Salary Survey, for which the table above lists $57,665 as the average salary, but I don't know what variance to expect on that average (it'll depend on lots of things, including location and your skill set).

    As for skills, I would expect them to know their computer science curriculum inside and out as they're likely to have just completed such a degree. And even if they didn't, I still expect them to have equivalent knowledge -- they will just have to learned it all on their own if they took EE, physics, or didn't go to university at all. It's a meritocracy: I'll hire you based on what you know, I don't care how you obtained the knowledge or what school you did or didn't go do; the only thing that matters is that you have the chops.

    As for CS-degree equivalent skills, I will expect you know everything that was presented in classes on data structures and algorithms, computer architecture, and linear algebra. You need to be proficient in C/C++ and at least one other language. Bonus points for everything above that. Brains, enthusiasm, and drive are very important too, of course, and can make up for deficiencies in knowledge areas.

    I’ve meant to write a post about what I think a programmer should know. If you stick around, I might actually even get around to it eventually!

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15. Thanks for posting the data Christer, they are very helpful. How do advanced degrees play in salary negotiation? For example, if one is a fresh PhD from top schools and say the position is R&D, are they considered as junior SW engineers because they lack of industry experiences?

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16. Hi Louis, as far as I’m concerned, degrees, whether advanced or not, are completely irrelevant. As I mentioned in my previous comment to Jordan it’s all a meritocracy. Pay is commensurable to what’s in your brain and how well you’re able to use what’s in your brain. How that information got into your brain, whether by obtaining a “PhD from top schools” or beaten into you in no-rule street fights, I don’t care. You either have the chops or you don’t, and a PhD is no indication either way.

    That said, you clearly stand a much better chance of having the chops by having completed a BSCS, MSCS, or CS PhD, because you have been studying in the area relevant to what I’m looking for in candidates. Nevertheless, I’ve interviewed people from so called “top schools” (MIT, etc.) who have been truly abysmal and I’ve interviewed people without degrees who have been brilliant. (And vice versa.)

    Basically, anyone who hires someone solely based on what school they went to, or what degree they have, is a moron. The only thing that can tell you whether someone is suited for the job is a thorough interview process, or references from people you trust. (A letter of recommendation from a professor is useless, btw.) The information on a resume is merely something that is used to sort the resumes in an estimated priority order as to who to call first.

    So, to finally answer your question: advanced degrees have no direct relevance on salary negotiation as far as I’m concerned. They may have an indirect relevance in that they might have provided you with the knowledge and skills that do affect your salary negotiation.

    Others may have a different view on this.

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17. I agree with you that a degree is not the absolute measure of skill or ability to do well.

    But I’d be interested to hear more insights on how you can accurately tell someone is brilliant within say a 20-30 min interview and able to decide their salary without seeing their actual performance. It would seem to me that you can get a general idea of whether someone is an idiot or not within that time, but to decide his/her salary, you’d still have to go back to their prior experience (on resume) or their education.

    I mean the things we do require more than knowing how to implement a data structure or fancy bit operations. I was amused when my friends told me when they were interviewing, they were asked to implement a linked list on paper, or how to use bit operations to divide a number by 2, and my friends are CS PhDs. A more challenging question would be asking how to solve a hair simulation problem when there are 500 characters interacting with each other in the scene and you want it all done in real time with shadow. Would you ask this kind of questions in an interview?

    I guess what I mean to say is a fresh PhD would lack industry experience and possibly some relevant knowledge (such as writing commercial grade software) required for a position comparing with someone who’s been in the industry for a while. But it doesn’t mean the new graduate doesn’t have the potential so do the job well. Their trainings in terms of problem solving and creating new technologies can be an asset to the company in the long term. So to me it’s a question of prior experience vs future potential and how they are valued in terms of $$$. Thanks.

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18. Louis, seriously, a degree alone is worth nothing, not a thing. A diploma says absolutely nothing about what the person knows or doesn’t know. It says they took some classes and passed them, and wrote a thesis and someone approved it. That’s all. It doesn’t say that they retained a single thing from any of the classes they took.

    The same goes for someone with 20 years of programming experience and a resume thick as a phone book. I’ve seen enough experienced people with impressive resumes have no appreciable skills whatsoever that I know you cannot take resumes at face value.

    Only an interview (or a trusted reference) can tell you that these people have the skills needed for the job!

    Now, there is a reason people ask questions about linked lists and other (seemingly trivial) fundamentals: a large number of people we interview in the industry have no clue! They didn’t retain a single thing from the classes they took. Often they cannot even list what classes were part of their curriculum! And even when they retained something, it is memorized facts and they cannot explain them, argue about them, or even apply them. PhD’s are no different in this aspect from BS or MS students. I see them flunk interviews as well as those with BS degrees or no degree at all; sometimes PhD’s flunk more spectacularly.

    You shouldn’t be amused that PhD’s are asked how to implement a linked list, you should be sad or disgusted. Because that’s how poor some candidates are that we see (PhD’s included). Trust me, we ask some very tricky questions (beyond your hair simulation problem) in interviews, but first we need to make sure they can actually implement simple data structures and describe basic algorithms.

    As for interviews, we don’t do a 20-30 minute interview. We do 60-90 minutes on the phone as a phone screen. If they pass the phone screen we have a whole day interview, consisting of 3-4 hours of in-depth technical questioning, and the remaining time is social screening. And we check references. (And, it goes without saying, I expect candidates to check us out equally thoroughly to make sure we are the right choice for them.)

    Not everyone is this bad of course, but there are sufficiently many who match this bleak picture I’m painting that this is a reality and not something I’m making up.

    I’m curious as to why you seem to think a PhD would be worth more money than a MS, a BS, or someone with no degree at all. Also, what makes you think a PhD has more “future potential” compared to the others? How would you justify your response?

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19. That’s awesome. See, I had no idea how the interview process is going to be like and I have one coming up next week. I better get started on reviewing all these stuff, haha. 3-4 hours of technical questioning sounds quite brutal.

    In response to your questions, I’m not saying every PhD should make more money than someone with a MS or BS, and that’s absolutely not true in reality. It’s just an observation when I compare my colleagues in grad school to my classmates in undergrads, the quality of people are much higher in grad school. Of course, I’m talking about averages in a large pool of samples. There are extremely sharp people in my undergraduate classes as well who never went to grad school and are very successful in what they do.

    Personally, when I decided to go to grad school, I wanted to stay in academia, so getting a PhD was really the only option. Besides I really like what I do, I think there’s also an expectation that when I graduate with an advanced degree, I should earn more money than when I just graduated from college, otherwise it doesn’t really make sense. Of course I don’t expect people to just pay me more because I have an advanced degree, but rather for what I have learned during my time in grad school. But you are right, having a PhD doesn’t really say anything, it’s really what you have to offer should be considered in a job interview.

    And interestingly, I learned much more outside classes than what I learned in classes. I think there’s a big gap between what the computer industry is looking for and the current CS curriculum being taught in schools. Parallel computing was rarely taught when I was an undergrad, and now all the hardware are expected to be used in parallel. Recently I read Stanford is offering an iPhone programming course, I was quite impressed. They have been doing a pretty good job to stay up to date. I want to make a game for iPhone myself, when I find the time to do it I’m sure the market will be flooded.

    Thank you so much for your insights, they are very valuable.

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20. Wow! That was very interesting.

    Talking about interview and such, can you tell me more about demo reels for programmers (not artists) ? From what i have seen, most programmers seems to show a few seconds of a selected set of projects they worked on.

    What should I put in and NOT put in ? What do you like to see personally ? How long should it last ? Should it have annoying music :-) ? What if we are coming out from school and have no experience on on real games, are school/personal projects worth showing in a reel ?

    Thanks!

    Mat

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