Does CD Projekt underpay and abuse its developers?

Where I live if you make your money by exporting goods or services and get paid in US dollars you are obligated to exchange your earnings for the local coin in no later than a week at most. Here's the catch; you gotta use the goverment's price for US dollars, not what people are actually paying for it (through illegal sources), the price of which you can just google and check the first result. Right now there's a 50% gap between the official price and the actual price.
So right off the bat you have a 50% income tax, just because of how you get paid. This is not counting any other taxes at all. I work independently and even though I'm in the lowest possible "tier" of income, and I don't have to pay any additional taxes for goods (I trade in virtual services, and I don't have a thing to my name), were I to do everything legally I would still need to pay at least 55% of my total income.

They've passed a new law a couple of days ago that dictates that anyone who wants to sell goods to other countries has to first get them through the goverment so they can put a price tag on it. The seller doesn't get a say on the price for his work.

Someone get me out of this hellhole, please.

 

Thanks for details from people living in various countries - that's informative.

I agree that the trick is to add all the actual costs for people. I have friends who live in places with where they get 50% income tax, and if you add VAT-equivalents etc, a hefty chunk goes away indeed.

I've also had American friends who got taxed like half of that, but then after the healthcare costs, in some cases they were paying more, sometimes less, than the above.

And then there are things which are much harder to compare. If you pay $5 in tax and you get subsidised public transport, it's hard to know how that compares in dollar terms to someone in a different country. All this is before we even talk about people who count as self-employed for tax purposes, or are fairly rich and declare their income through different means, etc, etc.

 

...where is that?

 

socialist utopia where game developers get equal pay to everyone else

 

Argentina. Tierra de los boludos.

 

Socialism really did a number on it, was 7th wealthiest nation at one point.

 

They just need to try it harder and over and over again.

 

So I'm seeing a lot of arguments over autistic minutae here. Let me put something I'm seeing into perspective. I'm seeing a couple people talk about how "high paid professionals" can easily find work. This is completely correct. And from experience I can tell you the games industry worked that out in the early noughties. Which is why there was a slow drive to replace high paid professionals with multiple low skilled workers. It is much cheaper to hire a uni sprog with a game development degree from the Games design schools and train them on the job the than it is to hire say a fully trained programmer who knows their worth and knows when to walk across the street to the software dev who pays more.

People often ask "why do game devs never demand more rights" we did. As a matter of course that all software devs did in the 90's. We liked games. But none of us were starstruck like today's devs are. We demanded what was expected of a software dev during the dot com bubble. And we walked when we didn't get that.

So CEOs said "these tweens will suck our cock for pennies and be greatful for the opportunity plus their lack of skill diversity means they can't leave the industry so we can fuck with them more" and that was that. The majority of software devs work in software because game devs are braindead youngsters who have no self respect and allowed the shecklesteins to walk all over them.

That's before we get into references. Do you want no job for the rest of your life because no one will refer you because you walked from one dev job? You can piss and moan about work conditions all you want but if a potential employer calls up a previous place of work. I garentee they'll call you an annoying, lazy arsehole who doesn't deserve work in the industry. And word travels fast. Goodbye games industry. So shut up. Keep your head down and let the arseholes exploit you, young one. Because game devs let it happen by being star struck fuckwits.

 

Maybe we'll be lucky after we enter our sixth default in a couple of months!

 

Seriously though, what the fuck is wrong with south america?

 

Spanish people

 

Makes more sense when you realize it's actually West Africa.

 

I feel like ive stumbled into a thread on somethingawful

 

I couldn't say about other countries here but as far as I'm aware decades upon decades of coups, debt, and goverments that thought the wealth that came from being one of the few countries able to produce and sell raw materials in a post WW2 world would last forever have done their fair share of destruction for the local economy. I'm no history buff tho so there's probably other reasons as well.

 

Income tax in Poland is 18% under +- 20 000 USD a year and 32% for anything over that. Notice that it means most Poles earn below 20 000 USD a year.

There are also a few other taxes (healthcare, retirement fund, etc) but they aren't that big and scale less-than-linearly with earnings for dumb technical reasons. So - developers in CD Projekt will comfortably get 70 000 USD net from 100 000 USD gross income. Also for that they have health insurance, 26 days of paid leave each year, a year-long paid combined maternity/paternity leave for each kid, free education till university for their kids, etc.

With 70 000 USD a year you can live like a king in Poland. Or save for 5 years, buy 2 small flats in the center of Warsaw for rent, rent them out, and you can retire and live out of that rent money forever if you want. The property tax in Poland is absurdly small compared to the west. I pay like 100 USD of tax a year for my flat in Lublin

Of course these developers could probably earn slightly more (without crunch) outside gamedev, but that's true everywhere - it's called "passion tax". People want to make games so earnings in gamedev are lower than in the rest of the industry. People knew that when they have choosen careers. It's the reason I don't work in gamedev for one example. And it doesn't really work in CD Projekt becasue they pay (almost) international gamdev money which is more than regular IT pays in Poland.

So these "abused" people earn on average more than the president of Poland, brain surgeons or top scientists. I find it very funny that people in the west worry about them so much.

TL; DR: if these people are abused then 99.5% of the whole country of Poland is abused much more And I would argue a big chunk of USA works more than them and earns less (am I correct that you have no paid leave and no maternity leave in USA?).

 

What odrzut said is something people from abroad comfortably ignore when discussing wages - context and cost of life.
What he didn't mention is that when an employee in Poland gets sick, he gets paid at least 80% of the salary for up to 33 days, no questions asked.
To add some more of it, see here for the average monthly wages in PL in 2018 (newest data available).
This is gross (before taxes) in PLN. To convert to USD, divide roughly by 4.
70K USD/year is just shy of 25K PLN/month.

 

I wonder how many of these fierce arguers actually work in software development... I don't even know if this thread is worth reaction

 

Ahem

"Socialist utopia" not going to work until local yurop commies get their shit together, throw away this cancerous euroleftard/sjw agenda and actually start working in the interests of their constituents (not just the working class, everybody who lives off their own labor). To this day, socialists and communists are acting like retards and people are smart enough to not trust them. They are just not smart enough to understand that the golden age of consumerism and comfy life is over, en masse.

still would

 

Perhaps only the most trusting, gullible, and naive promote socialist/communist values? Everyone else, i.e the socially conservative and pragmatic, know better. Socialism/communism is a societal consequence of the desire to drag down those who you feel are above you. it's a symptom really, kinda like penis envy.

 

In the same sense that denmark's minimum wage is $0/hr, yes.

 

Socialism is about creating equal opportunities and access to services in spite of one's economical background. Because usually it's hard for people who have issues to sustain their existence to pay extra for good education that can translates into getting a better job. Same goes for the healthcare when the healthcare is private. Communism is more about changing the direction of production to fulfill human needs directly, rather than serving as means to print money for the few who own the means of production.

Does it mean that socialism/communism is all good/cure for all problems? No, it has its own problems. But it is certainly less petty ideology than you're willing to give it credit.

 

This is one of the most naive and idiotic things I read today, thanks

 

This only proves you are an idiot, nothing more.

 

Ok, so here's how it goes. CDPR works their employees(worker is the dude with a wrench) the way potato companies tend to work their employees. However, with the Witcher 3 the wave of foreigners entering the company has started(nowadays CDPR team is in quite sizable chunk, Mass Effect Andromeda team, magic) and they weren't prepared for what was coming. Of course, potato CDPR employees work there to get nice, big software company on their resume and the fuck off where the grass is greener and work is easier, but that's beyond the point.