I find it oddly ironic that I've been argueing about this back and forth with a number of people including John Funk, and then this gets posted.
So basically what we're looking at is an industry where we have the programmers/code monkeys at the near top of the chart making the better part of 100k a year. Then we've got Game Designers who seem to be ones who don't program and mostly come up with ideas which they pass to the monkeys to make work still pulling down an average of 67k a year. Heck, we've got what amount to on-staff beta testers making 32k a year.
My typical point of course being that of course this Ferrari driving lifestyle (to use the article's term, and referring to game designers who are on one of the lower tiers on the chart) is passed on to us the consumers due to the rising cost of game development as they demand this money which of course requires the prices of games to be raised/stay high, and things like DLC to help support it.
I'm all for capitolism, but as I said, there is a point where I think the consumers need to say "hey, wait a second here" when it comes to some of these high priced products.
I remember another article a while back (which I think I linked to at one point, though maybe it was on another forum) which kind of talked about things from the producer/financers perspective in the Development Team/Money Provider relationship. This article (and others like it) were responsible for a lot of my ideas about how much these guys on the development side get paid, as well as the other perks they collect. It was intended as a rebuttal of sorts to articles on "how the industry works" from a developer perspective which lead a lot of people to tend to blame the evil producers for picking on the developers and being responsible for the prices of games. Specific numbers were not given, but it did talk about pretty high rates of pay for what they were doing (which were always increasing) combined with the use of the dev budget for things like food and board. Basically a development team ordering out on the dev budget for 3 meals a day while they work, or charging the dev budget if they decide they want to take up semi-residence at a motel close to the offices so they don't have to drive, or whatever.
All arguements aside, it all comes down to the fact that with budgets in the tens of millions of dollars, the actual expenses like computers and office space are minimal in proportion to the budget. Most of that money goes towards the human resources, either directly in terms of pay, or in the form of benefits. I seem to vaguely remember the percentage being like less than 5% on materials, but even if you say 10% what this means is that with a 70 million dollar game, 63 million dollars wound up going towards the people
they hired one way or another. What they demand to do this work is of course why game development is so expensive and why us the consumers pay a high price for games and get nickel and dimed.
I see your name attached to arguments like this all the time.
As noted in my post above yours, I found conflicting figures:
http://www.develop-online.net/features/429/The-2009-UK-Games-Development-Salary-Survey
Of course, it's important to note that this is a different country.
On the other hand, £18,000 ($27,000 US) ( a year for a programming job is quite honestly, pathetic
1.5 times minimum wage; If anyone thinks that's going to buy a ferrari, or anything even close to it, they're dreaming.
And that is the reality I face, in persuing this in England.
Average wage: £30,442 ($46,442 US)- By comparison, the average wage of the working population of the whole country is £25,000 or so.
So yeah. Above average wages. Just barely.
A few highly paid leads and senior staff, Highly paid executives (As usual), and a lot of people earning something around the national average...
Sounds so... wrong doesn't it? XD
Then again, maybe the UK industry is a bad example?
I find it oddly ironic that I've been argueing about this back and forth with a number of people including John Funk, and then this gets posted.
So basically what we're looking at is an industry where we have the programmers/code monkeys at the near top of the chart making the better part of 100k a year. Then we've got Game Designers who seem to be ones who don't program and mostly come up with ideas which they pass to the monkeys to make work still pulling down an average of 67k a year. Heck, we've got what amount to on-staff beta testers making 32k a year.
My typical point of course being that of course this Ferrari driving lifestyle (to use the article's term, and referring to game designers who are on one of the lower tiers on the chart) is passed on to us the consumers due to the rising cost of game development as they demand this money which of course requires the prices of games to be raised/stay high, and things like DLC to help support it.
I'm all for capitolism, but as I said, there is a point where I think the consumers need to say "hey, wait a second here" when it comes to some of these high priced products.
I remember another article a while back (which I think I linked to at one point, though maybe it was on another forum) which kind of talked about things from the producer/financers perspective in the Development Team/Money Provider relationship. This article (and others like it) were responsible for a lot of my ideas about how much these guys on the development side get paid, as well as the other perks they collect. It was intended as a rebuttal of sorts to articles on "how the industry works" from a developer perspective which lead a lot of people to tend to blame the evil producers for picking on the developers and being responsible for the prices of games. Specific numbers were not given, but it did talk about pretty high rates of pay for what they were doing (which were always increasing) combined with the use of the dev budget for things like food and board. Basically a development team ordering out on the dev budget for 3 meals a day while they work, or charging the dev budget if they decide they want to take up semi-residence at a motel close to the offices so they don't have to drive, or whatever.
All arguements aside, it all comes down to the fact that with budgets in the tens of millions of dollars, the actual expenses like computers and office space are minimal in proportion to the budget. Most of that money goes towards the human resources, either directly in terms of pay, or in the form of benefits. I seem to vaguely remember the percentage being like less than 5% on materials, but even if you say 10% what this means is that with a 70 million dollar game, 63 million dollars wound up going towards the people
they hired one way or another. What they demand to do this work is of course why game development is so expensive and why us the consumers pay a high price for games and get nickel and dimed.
I see your name attached to arguments like this all the time.
As noted in my post above yours, I found conflicting figures:
http://www.develop-online.net/features/429/The-2009-UK-Games-Development-Salary-Survey
Of course, it's important to note that this is a different country.
On the other hand, £18,000 ($27,000 US) ( a year for a programming job is quite honestly, pathetic
1.5 times minimum wage; If anyone thinks that's going to buy a ferrari, or anything even close to it, they're dreaming.
And that is the reality I face, in persuing this in England.
Average wage: £30,442 ($46,442 US)- By comparison, the average wage of the working population of the whole country is £25,000 or so.
So yeah. Above average wages. Just barely.
A few highly paid leads and senior staff, Highly paid executives (As usual), and a lot of people earning something around the national average...
Sounds so... wrong doesn't it? XD
Then again, maybe the UK industry is a bad example?
But then again you have to consider the article I responded to disagreed with the average wages you quoted, as did another article posted here about a game studio requesting tax breaks and claiming it was going to be employing people for $85k yearly.
The problem with those that argue against me, whether they "know people in the industry" or not, is that you have to account for these massive budgets that are the reason for games being so expensive and the "need" for DLC being done the way it is, and so on. I mean once you have a budget in the tens of millions the physical costs become fairly trivial. I mean office space and a bunch of computers aren't all that expensive on that scale.
The thing is that nobody who decides to debate this with me, can explain where that money is going. One way or another it's going to the employees.
To put things frankly I suppose it might be possible that some guy is taking home only $27k a year, but might very well be getting 3x that value through the perks of his job. Insurance programs, free food, lodging, and other things. Heck, some people find ways of writing off the gas they use travelling back and forth to work to a company budget.
The bottom line is that there are plenty of people claiming exactly the opposite of the "poor destitute game code monkey" in various places. Those people claiming that people in the industry are not that highly paid, have so far been incapable of explaining where all of this money is going to. That's important to me as a consumer because the industry is telling me that the product has to be expensive because of those huge budgets...
The fact that game writers are completely excluded from this just goes to show the general attitude the gaming industry has towards them. And it makes me a sad panda. =(
I find it oddly ironic that I've been argueing about this back and forth with a number of people including John Funk, and then this gets posted.
So basically what we're looking at is an industry where we have the programmers/code monkeys at the near top of the chart making the better part of 100k a year. Then we've got Game Designers who seem to be ones who don't program and mostly come up with ideas which they pass to the monkeys to make work still pulling down an average of 67k a year. Heck, we've got what amount to on-staff beta testers making 32k a year.
My typical point of course being that of course this Ferrari driving lifestyle (to use the article's term, and referring to game designers who are on one of the lower tiers on the chart) is passed on to us the consumers due to the rising cost of game development as they demand this money which of course requires the prices of games to be raised/stay high, and things like DLC to help support it.
I'm all for capitolism, but as I said, there is a point where I think the consumers need to say "hey, wait a second here" when it comes to some of these high priced products.
I remember another article a while back (which I think I linked to at one point, though maybe it was on another forum) which kind of talked about things from the producer/financers perspective in the Development Team/Money Provider relationship. This article (and others like it) were responsible for a lot of my ideas about how much these guys on the development side get paid, as well as the other perks they collect. It was intended as a rebuttal of sorts to articles on "how the industry works" from a developer perspective which lead a lot of people to tend to blame the evil producers for picking on the developers and being responsible for the prices of games. Specific numbers were not given, but it did talk about pretty high rates of pay for what they were doing (which were always increasing) combined with the use of the dev budget for things like food and board. Basically a development team ordering out on the dev budget for 3 meals a day while they work, or charging the dev budget if they decide they want to take up semi-residence at a motel close to the offices so they don't have to drive, or whatever.
All arguements aside, it all comes down to the fact that with budgets in the tens of millions of dollars, the actual expenses like computers and office space are minimal in proportion to the budget. Most of that money goes towards the human resources, either directly in terms of pay, or in the form of benefits. I seem to vaguely remember the percentage being like less than 5% on materials, but even if you say 10% what this means is that with a 70 million dollar game, 63 million dollars wound up going towards the people
they hired one way or another. What they demand to do this work is of course why game development is so expensive and why us the consumers pay a high price for games and get nickel and dimed.
I see your name attached to arguments like this all the time.
As noted in my post above yours, I found conflicting figures:
http://www.develop-online.net/features/429/The-2009-UK-Games-Development-Salary-Survey
Of course, it's important to note that this is a different country.
On the other hand, £18,000 ($27,000 US) ( a year for a programming job is quite honestly, pathetic
1.5 times minimum wage; If anyone thinks that's going to buy a ferrari, or anything even close to it, they're dreaming.
And that is the reality I face, in persuing this in England.
Average wage: £30,442 ($46,442 US)- By comparison, the average wage of the working population of the whole country is £25,000 or so.
So yeah. Above average wages. Just barely.
A few highly paid leads and senior staff, Highly paid executives (As usual), and a lot of people earning something around the national average...
Sounds so... wrong doesn't it? XD
Then again, maybe the UK industry is a bad example?
But then again you have to consider the article I responded to disagreed with the average wages you quoted, as did another article posted here about a game studio requesting tax breaks and claiming it was going to be employing people for $85k yearly.
The problem with those that argue against me, whether they "know people in the industry" or not, is that you have to account for these massive budgets that are the reason for games being so expensive and the "need" for DLC being done the way it is, and so on. I mean once you have a budget in the tens of millions the physical costs become fairly trivial. I mean office space and a bunch of computers aren't all that expensive on that scale.
The thing is that nobody who decides to debate this with me, can explain where that money is going. One way or another it's going to the employees.
To put things frankly I suppose it might be possible that some guy is taking home only $27k a year, but might very well be getting 3x that value through the perks of his job. Insurance programs, free food, lodging, and other things. Heck, some people find ways of writing off the gas they use travelling back and forth to work to a company budget.
The bottom line is that there are plenty of people claiming exactly the opposite of the "poor destitute game code monkey" in various places. Those people claiming that people in the industry are not that highly paid, have so far been incapable of explaining where all of this money is going to. That's important to me as a consumer because the industry is telling me that the product has to be expensive because of those huge budgets...
Even if we take the low end figures of say, $30,000 a year or so...
If a game takes 2 years to make, and has 150 people working on it... (not an uncommon figure these days), that still means 2 x 30,000 x 150 ...
Work that one out yourself, and it's $9,000,000 in wages.
Now, sure there are games like Modern Warfare 2, and Grand Theft Auto 4, that have had budgets in the region of 10 times that, but on the whole, $9,000,000
claims the average budget for a single-platform release is around $10,000,000
Now, here's the dilemma:
With the above figures being the case even with rather low wages, it raises a few problems:
Is it reasonable to be concerned about someone earning $90,000 + bonuses?
Of course it is.
But look at the math, and you notice the problem doesn't exactly vanish if the wages are a lot lower than that.
So... Wages are a huge part of a game development budget.
That shouldn't be a surprise, because the end product is almost 100% intellectual property, meaning no real physical resources are involved.
But wages are proportional to the amount of work required;
The question is, are game developers overpaid?
And that's a hard one to answer, when you see such conflicting reports;
One side claims they get paid huge salaries, and get expensive perks on top of it, then spend a lot of time goofing off rather than actually working.
The other side says they are underpaid (if not in absolute terms, definitely in comparison to their skillset), and practically get worked to death. (I don't know about you, but 120 hours a week isn't long hours, it's rediculous. sleep+work is all you're doing, and there isn't even much sleep going on.).
This is the group that claims 60 hour weeks are 'normal', and crunch mode happens far too often, and involves working 90-120 hours a week for weeks on end.
Which side do you believe? And is it perhaps possible that both are true, but apply to different workplaces?
Not a simple problem in the slightest...
But I've always gone on a worst-case scenario, because I'm looking at being a game programmer.
And if you're going to do that, it helps to avoid illusions about how wonderful it is...
Quite honestly, most stories I hear sound like absolute hell, and not something I would wish upon anyone.
But... I live in hope that it's not as bad as it sounds.
If you ask me, that salary tier should be flipped upside down...couldn't believe the animators and designers were practically at rock bottom when their roles are undeniably the most essential to a game's success.
...QA testers are in about the right place though...
No shit. Have you tried working on a commercial game engine, let alone develop one from scratch? Of course we'll be paid more than the guys with ideas and pretty pictures.
According to this, people with writing experience become "Creative Directors" which makes the second lowest amount of money on the chart. But you see them the most often at press conferences.
So do I. Haha. But I'm surprised at how high these numbers are - I'd love to ask Maxim for their sources. Not that I'm surprised that manhours are the most expensive single part of game development, but it's definitely insanity if you have a team of 30 programmers and they're all on 90k each. Code monkeys shouldn't earn that much - it should be the guys who decide what to make the monkeys code. Unless the "programmers" in that chart include those people.
Either way, it's still just as easy to argue for small development, with this.
geldonyetich said:
No wonder we've got so many boring derivatives if game designers are that far down on the food chain.
For those out there who are curious about QA as a career, trust me: a professional QAer can do much better than $32,000. And if the career-minded QAer becomes a senior member of the team, or an assistant lead, or a lead -- then the numbers can easily double. QA can be a lucrative and rewarding field in game development. And that's without going into the manager of the department salary expectations -- which are... large.
Yes, a kid off the street, fresh out of high school, looking to "test" a game for 3 months (and by test I mean play the game and hopefully be able to at least articulate that the game is "good") -- even pro-rated out to 12 months, they're not getting near $32,000. But those *are* the entry level situations. But again, QA in and of itself is not entry level.
I find it oddly ironic that I've been argueing about this back and forth with a number of people including John Funk, and then this gets posted.
So basically what we're looking at is an industry where we have the programmers/code monkeys at the near top of the chart making the better part of 100k a year. Then we've got Game Designers who seem to be ones who don't program and mostly come up with ideas which they pass to the monkeys to make work still pulling down an average of 67k a year. Heck, we've got what amount to on-staff beta testers making 32k a year.
My typical point of course being that of course this Ferrari driving lifestyle (to use the article's term, and referring to game designers who are on one of the lower tiers on the chart) is passed on to us the consumers due to the rising cost of game development as they demand this money which of course requires the prices of games to be raised/stay high, and things like DLC to help support it.
I'm all for capitolism, but as I said, there is a point where I think the consumers need to say "hey, wait a second here" when it comes to some of these high priced products.
I remember another article a while back (which I think I linked to at one point, though maybe it was on another forum) which kind of talked about things from the producer/financers perspective in the Development Team/Money Provider relationship. This article (and others like it) were responsible for a lot of my ideas about how much these guys on the development side get paid, as well as the other perks they collect. It was intended as a rebuttal of sorts to articles on "how the industry works" from a developer perspective which lead a lot of people to tend to blame the evil producers for picking on the developers and being responsible for the prices of games. Specific numbers were not given, but it did talk about pretty high rates of pay for what they were doing (which were always increasing) combined with the use of the dev budget for things like food and board. Basically a development team ordering out on the dev budget for 3 meals a day while they work, or charging the dev budget if they decide they want to take up semi-residence at a motel close to the offices so they don't have to drive, or whatever.
All arguements aside, it all comes down to the fact that with budgets in the tens of millions of dollars, the actual expenses like computers and office space are minimal in proportion to the budget. Most of that money goes towards the human resources, either directly in terms of pay, or in the form of benefits. I seem to vaguely remember the percentage being like less than 5% on materials, but even if you say 10% what this means is that with a 70 million dollar game, 63 million dollars wound up going towards the people
they hired one way or another. What they demand to do this work is of course why game development is so expensive and why us the consumers pay a high price for games and get nickel and dimed.
Dude, $90k really isn't unreasonable at all for someone who's presumably a college graduate and skilled enough to make it into a very, very competitive industry. That's actually a pretty fair wage, depending on where you live. Hell, if you live in an expensive area (like, say, LA or San Fransisco), that might not be that much at all. Nor is that all that much compared to most successful industries. (And of course most of any budget is going to paying HR, that's the same in almost every company)
It's really a horrible thing for people to want to make a decent salary and make their games, huh. That's so awful. How can any company want to pay its employees a good wage for good work? I can't believe them, they should cut all their salaries in half.
Hold on to your change if you want. Don't buy games if it offends your sensibilities that companies are trying to pay their employees what their talent is worth on the marketplace. The rest of us will feel good about supporting an industry we're enthusiastic about and those in it.
but it's definitely insanity if you have a team of 30 programmers and they're all on 90k each. Code monkeys shouldn't earn that much - it should be the guys who decide what to make the monkeys code. Unless the "programmers" in that chart include those people.
Either way, it's still just as easy to argue for small development, with this.
geldonyetich said:
No wonder we've got so many boring derivatives if game designers are that far down on the food chain.
Lol. Do you have any idea of the skill disparity between a programmer and a game designer?
Code monkeys? Honestly, it sickens me how insulting someone can be about such a complex and difficult task...
It takes years upon years to become a good programmer, and games programmers are of nessesity among the highest skilled of any kind of programmer, on average; while a game designer is essentially anyone that can come up with a half-decent idea...
Wages are based on supply and demand, and I can tell you from personal experience; People with the skills to program games are outnumbered at least 3 to 1 by people that think they can design games, and worse yet, a typical project needs more programmers than it does designers.
Aside from which, if you don't pay them enough, a programmer is more than capable of getting a job in a non-gaming capacity, while a game designer often has few skills that are in particularly high demand anywhere else.
A good idea is worthless if you can't get it implemented, after all.
End result? The demand for programmers far outstrips that for game designers, and it probably always will.
On that basis, the relative wages should be no surprise whatsoever.
Wow. $90K / year? I'm shocked. I've bounced back and forth between business/government programming and game programming for years. While I've mostly worked with small game projects, I've never come anywhere near $90K/year. I'd actually be pretty surprised if these numbers were accurate. Maybe their survey was done in New York and San Francisco (two the the highest cost of living cities in the US), but even there, I'm even skeptical that programmers there are earning that much on average. In general, game programmers get paid less than programmers in other fields. It's just simple economics: lots of programmers want to be game programmers, so companies can over-work and under-pay them. Working as a game-programmer is a "perk" that gets offset with lower pay. I've seem lots of people get burned out on the game industry and leave to get better programming jobs in business. Heck, in once case (a small company), I've seen programmers work for months without pay (although, that was an unusual "save the company" situation).
Lol. Do you have any idea of the skill disparity between a programmer and a game designer? Code monkeys? Honestly, it sickens me how insulting someone can be about such a complex and difficult task...
It takes years upon years to become a good programmer, and games programmers are of nessesity among the highest skilled of any kind of programmer, on average; while a game designer is essentially anyone that can come up with a half-decent idea...
Wages are based on supply and demand, and I can tell you from personal experience; People with the skills to program games are outnumbered at least 3 to 1 by people that think they can design games, and worse yet, a typical project needs more programmers than it does designers.
Aside from which, if you don't pay them enough, a programmer is more than capable of getting a job in a non-gaming capacity, while a game designer often has few skills that are in particularly high demand anywhere else.
A good idea is worthless if you can't get it implemented, after all.
End result? The demand for programmers far outstrips that for game designers, and it probably always will.
On that basis, the relative wages should be no surprise whatsoever.
I do understand, very very well, how difficult it is to be a good programmer, and I do understand how much more difficult than almost any other kind of programming the art of coding games is. There's a wide range of skill and expertise within "programming". It's a very broad term. It surprises me that the AVERAGE, not the top, but the AVERAGE pay would be almost $100k USD.
The people who engineer the program are the ones who should be paid the most, within the programming area. It depends on the execution of the job, and how much freedom the coder gets, but in the worst case, they're handed pseudocode and told to make it real. That's not worth $90,000/pa, it's worth maybe half of that. Of course, flipside, you tell them to code, say, a new weapon, or something, and if they do it well with only design specs, then they deserve their salaries as above without question.
What I was trying to point out is that game designers have much greater an effect on the direction of the games, the mechanics included, etc, whereas a programmer will likely have an effect on the technical problems, not the mechanical ones. I find that if a game exhibits technical problems with excellent mechanics, I'll bear with it, but if it's technically excellent with poor gameplay, I'll drop it and leave. Or I'll refuse to buy after playing the demo. Gaming is by no means the result of one person, at least anymore, but I find that I care a lot more about the results of the designer's work than the programmer's.
With regards to numbers, I bet you that while programmers are indeed outnumbered by people who think they can design games by a large margin, the same is true for people who can design good, cohesive games and people who think they can code.
That one requires less training and expertise to be a game designer is known to me. To do it well requires a lot of work, testing, knowledge, and so on, but probably not a degree in computer science. To be a programmer also requires a lot of time, experience, testing, and hard work, for sure. But to have less than half the salary with a much greater responsibility for final product quality, in my opinion, is disproportionate.
Lol. Do you have any idea of the skill disparity between a programmer and a game designer? Code monkeys? Honestly, it sickens me how insulting someone can be about such a complex and difficult task...
It takes years upon years to become a good programmer, and games programmers are of nessesity among the highest skilled of any kind of programmer, on average; while a game designer is essentially anyone that can come up with a half-decent idea...
Wages are based on supply and demand, and I can tell you from personal experience; People with the skills to program games are outnumbered at least 3 to 1 by people that think they can design games, and worse yet, a typical project needs more programmers than it does designers.
Aside from which, if you don't pay them enough, a programmer is more than capable of getting a job in a non-gaming capacity, while a game designer often has few skills that are in particularly high demand anywhere else.
A good idea is worthless if you can't get it implemented, after all.
End result? The demand for programmers far outstrips that for game designers, and it probably always will.
On that basis, the relative wages should be no surprise whatsoever.
I do understand, very very well, how difficult it is to be a good programmer, and I do understand how much more difficult than almost any other kind of programming the art of coding games is. There's a wide range of skill and expertise within "programming". It's a very broad term. It surprises me that the AVERAGE, not the top, but the AVERAGE pay would be almost $100k USD.
The people who engineer the program are the ones who should be paid the most, within the programming area. It depends on the execution of the job, and how much freedom the coder gets, but in the worst case, they're handed pseudocode and told to make it real. That's not worth $90,000/pa, it's worth maybe half of that. Of course, flipside, you tell them to code, say, a new weapon, or something, and if they do it well with only design specs, then they deserve their salaries as above without question.
What I was trying to point out is that game designers have much greater an effect on the direction of the games, the mechanics included, etc, whereas a programmer will likely have an effect on the technical problems, not the mechanical ones. I find that if a game exhibits technical problems with excellent mechanics, I'll bear with it, but if it's technically excellent with poor gameplay, I'll drop it and leave. Or I'll refuse to buy after playing the demo. Gaming is by no means the result of one person, at least anymore, but I find that I care a lot more about the results of the designer's work than the programmer's.
With regards to numbers, I bet you that while programmers are indeed outnumbered by people who think they can design games by a large margin, the same is true for people who can design good, cohesive games and people who think they can code.
That one requires less training and expertise to be a game designer is known to me. To do it well requires a lot of work, testing, knowledge, and so on, but probably not a degree in computer science. To be a programmer also requires a lot of time, experience, testing, and hard work, for sure. But to have less than half the salary with a much greater responsibility for final product quality, in my opinion, is disproportionate.
As I pointed out earlier, those figures are in dispute anyway.
I think they're using a very dodgy definition of 'average', to be honest.
I live in the UK:
Here's the quoted figures from a different article about the UK (as opposed to US) situation:
CODING
Average Yearly Salaries:
Lead Programmer ? £41,250
Programmer ? £25,810 Junior Programmer ? £18,928
ART
Average Yearly Salaries:
Lead Artist ? £35,833
Artist ? £29,285
DESIGN
Average Yearly Salaries:
Lead Designer ? £33,330
Designer ? £22,352 Junior Designer ? £20,000
Take note of the above:
The lead programmer is getting more than the lead designer by a large margin, and programmers in general get more than designers.
But... A junior designer gets more than a junior programmer...
Also, how does the article linked to in the OP get an average of $90,000 exactly?
The exchange rate is about 1.5 to 1, meaning the UK figures are about $60,000 for a lead programmer...
If a lead programmer isn't even getting that much, how can the average be that high?
Either UK devs are seriously underpaid, or that average is very messed up.
As for coding...
I highly doubt anyone would get pseudocode handed to them in a professional environment.
The lead programmer wouldn't have the time, because honestly, writing pseudocode that meaningfully describes a problem is only marginally less time consuming than writing the code itself.
What's more likely, is the lead programmer will try to design the high-level architecture and systems, and then the other programmers will be handed a set of requirements to implement a certain sub-system, like say, the sound system, or the camera system, battle system, etc... and then they'd have to create said system, then try and integrate it with the rest of the code.
You can't get away with having to hand another programmer pseudocode... If they need that to solve a problem, they're not good enough to have a job.
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