It’s a public secret that the game industry sucks. You get paid less than a developer, your work schedule is a nightmare, and your job security is in constant flux. The trade-off, of course, is that you’re working on cool projects. Fun stuff. Unfortunately, somebody decided that working on fun products meant you had to sacrifice quality of life, because in some twisted anarcho-capitalist form of parity management, income and suffering need to exist on some linear scale together.
This, of course, ignores people who work for the simple fact of needing a job. Paying bills. Eating food. If you suppose for a moment that there could be someone out there who doesn’t enjoy playing video games, the entire system comes crashing down around your ears.
I’ll be honest, though — I can’t speak for those at the higher end of game development. I’ve heard horror stories second and third-hand but my own experience is from a lower bracket. Down here in game test, it’s not looking good.
I know what people think when they see the phrase “Game Tester”. Picture it: you’re a wide-eyed baby neckbeard with big dreams about working for videogames, probably fresh out of some cheap tech school with a game design major, or working part time while you finish your degree.
You come in and have a laugh everyday, getting paid to romp around in your escapist sandbox of choice while you banter with like-minded chums. Your boss gives you a wink and a nudge at the end of your shift and you both share a little smirk over the scam you’re pulling on the game industry. Despite being a popular public conception, this saccharine fantasy is completely false.
Game testing is the worst kind of contract job. In addition to the normal pitfall of only working when you have work, in game test, each testing company generally only handles work from one studio.
So you’re a Nintendo tester or an Xbox tester but never more than that, which makes sense from the perspective of a company trying to keep secrets — but makes much less sense for employees. If your patron company doesn’t have any games rolling out soon, you’ve got no work, and since you’re hourly, you’re not getting paid.
The gaps between projects are completely random and absolutely unknowable from down at the bottom, and you’re not even guaranteed to get called in for every shift — these testing companies have incredible amounts of churn and they overstaff to compensate, so they end up having to space out the few shifts that exist between a wide array of people. For whatever reason we’re not made aware of the length of any project, either.
You have no idea when you’ll work, but it could be any day of the week! You don’t know how long your shift will be, but it could be 8 hours! You’re not sure how long the contract is, but it could be a whole 5 days worth! The icing on this cake is that the staffing for a day of test is often done the day before. You get an email at 7PM telling you the staffing order for the next day, so you’ve got a full 12 hours between when you find out your schedule and when you wake up for your shift. The end result is that you’re required to plan your life around 40 hours of full time work on the off chance that you get half that much (if you’re lucky). Oh, and you’re expected to work weekends. The management tries to meet employees halfway by allowing you to pick up shifts for the other folks that call out, which means that even on days when you think you’re off, you might be on — you just need to stay a step away from your phone at all times in case they call you in. A lifestyle arranged around this schedule is difficult, to say the least, and it weighs on you constantly.
This is, of course, assuming you even get put on the core testing team. When you’re hired, you go to an interview like anyone else, but your first day isn’t what you might expect. You show up at 7:30 AM and wait in a cafeteria, and if you’re lucky you get called up to work by the first test lead who has time to come down and collect you. In the meantime you wait at a lunch table with a group of other hopefuls, wondering if you came to the right building. This is your introductory period.
For a few weeks you show up in the morning and hope you’re chosen for a shift. If you prove that you’re reliable, you get a spot on the email list. If not, you can be a cafeteria monkey and wait for another chance. It’s okay though, the bar for that email list is pretty low — You just have to wait it out without any feedback for 14 to 21 days. They call this “the bullpen” and it’s their primary source for replacing sick leave or no-shows, so you’re free to hunker down there any day of the week. Just drive out to work at the asscrack of dawn and cross your fingers!
There are a myriad of other downsides I could mention — the “affordable healthcare” plan that revokes your eligibility for free government healthcare but is too expensive for any employee to reasonably afford, the insane cronyism, the management’s resultant lack of technical knowledge and cargo cult mentality towards anything they don’t understand. “Don’t touch that file, we don’t know what it does” is literally something I’ve been told before. Passwords and sensitive information being stored in plaintext in publicly accessible network drives? You bet. There’s PTO, but only if you work a certain number of hours per year — hours guaranteed for the full time management and lead staff but realistically impossible for any tester. Testers never get sick leave, naturally.
You’re free to call out when you’re feeling ill though, (there’s definitely someone willing to take that shift) but you’ve got no idea when your next shift will be or if you’ll go through some weeklong (or worse) drought, so it’s really in your best interest to just go to work regardless. If you’re lucky you might be contagious enough to get some poor sap sick, forcing him to stay home and giving you another day’s work! In this game of test, you play or you don’t make rent. Don’t even pretend you might become more efficient by scripting or automating parts of your job, either. Despite the fact that we work with tools specifically made to be used in scripts, anything that looks remotely like code on your screen will get you yelled at. Remember, your boss is just some guy who made friends with the right person 6 years ago, he doesn’t actually know what code is or have any kind of technical aptitude. You might be hacking their system or trying to steal data from their unsecured network servers, they’d rather have you drill test cases into your memory than try to make your job any easier.
Through all of this you’re also under a strict NDA that will leverage the full force of your patron company’s legal team to destroy you should you be caught discussing your work anywhere outside of the office. NDAs are understandable, of course, but the zeal with which game test NDAs are pursued is a little questionable. Internet access through your test PC is strictly prohibited at all times (despite not being filtered with any kind of security or firewall to speak of). Phones are not allowed in the office. Pieces of paper are not allowed to leave the office. Anything you create in the office (idle scribbles, doodles, etc) will be confiscated and destroyed at the end of the day. None of this goes for test leads or management, naturally, who will glibly remove an earbud to half listen to you as they peruse Youtube videos or surf Reddit during downtime. Security is understandable, but it’s infuriating to see it applied so heavily (and unevenly) in this regard and then be completely absent where it actually matters. Treating your employees like trash is easy, setting up effective security policy is hard. It’s not surprising which path was taken.
“So why do you still work there?” The fact of the matter is that I’ve got no better option. Neither do most of my coworkers. I’m publishing this anonymously for fear of losing my job, despite wishing I was rid of it. At our skill levels and pay grade, our alternative would most likely end up being stocking shelves or retail. There’s nothing wrong with that line of work, but given the option to sit down and be abused by management vs. walk around and be abused by the public, you might understand why some of us choose the former. I’ve also been told that it’s a reasonable foot in the door towards a real job in the tech sector, although I question this more and more as time goes on.
For those of us without the resources to get a degree or the connections to get an in somewhere comfy, this is the kind of job we need to take. So we self educate in our spare time, we scrape by on food stamps, we pray we don’t suffer some kind of injury or accident, and we pull up on those bootstraps. I’m looking for a way out, trust me. In the meantime, though, if you’re reading this and considering a job in game test — I implore you to consider something else.
(NB: There is a slight ray of hope with regards to the 12 hour staffing nightmare we have to deal with. This link describes a civil rights initiative here in WA designed to combat abusive staffing practices, detailing in particular that companies would be required to give two weeks (!!) notice of shifts to employees. It’s unknown, however, if this would apply to game test — and if it did, it is far more likely that we would just be laid off rather than see any improvement.)
