AFAIR CA State is $41/hour for engineers. Of course a company is free to pay overtime to people exempt from overtime laws.
There are also ways around that by not classifying your coders legally as "engineers" and using things like the total cost when including benefits and such. Various states have other little things about their laws. Having worked in Texas before moving to the Bay Area, that's one area that has virtually no worker protection laws at all. Most all of what it does have are all retroactive.
Working for the creature, the main reason I had long nights was because those were the only hours I could ever get anything done (you can imagine that not much gets done when the creature is there). So it was mainly by choice that I had my 60-hour work weeks all the time and came in on many weekends. Granted, I also had time to do my own stuff, and since work was a 5-minute walk away from my apt., I had no qualms about leaving and coming back at will. Of course, I was on a far more extreme sort of position than this article suggests as my pay was $24k a year to start, and about $32k towards the end. Some artists were getting paid as low as $11k (just a hair above minimum wage). And as you might expect, no overtime, no benefits (up until the last 8 months, and even then it was flaky as the creature would do weird things like cancel your health insurance while you were on sick leave).
Later jobs I've had in Texas were pretty much long hours for months for about half that national median salary figure, and the only real differences were that I actually did have benefits at some of those other jobs and long hours were typically not by choice. That said, it was something of an artifact of being at these small studios which were very dependent on individual lower budget rushed projects to survive, so there end up being so many cases where everybody ends up being somebody who blocks somebody else's ability to do something.
Nowadays, I average around 50-ish hours a week, and I tend to put in that level of hours because that's what I feel comfortable at. And what I make is relatively close to that median, and I'm generally fine at that level for now. That's not a livable salary if you're trying to support a family out here on a single income, but that's not a concern for me right now. Yeah, I know it's easy to think otherwise, but it is a part of the country where a home that might cost $200,000 in the Midwest costs anywhere from $650,000 to $2,100,000 depending on where you look, and the housing communities charge fees on the order of $800 a month. This is about the only place in the US, where I've seen ads for 120-year interest only mortgages. It's a part of the country where a 300 sq. ft. studio has $1100 a month rent alone. It's just a fine example of capitalism having a brain fart.
You know, being paid for overtime is all well and good, but I think ultimately, what people get paid isn't really a result of companies trying to cheat people or treat them as cannon fodder (at least not all the time -- I can't speak for everybody's experiences). It's pretty much a balancing point between what a person's experience is worth outside the industry and how much they want to stay in the industry. I'm sure if all these same people at this studio were living and working in a cheaper part of the country where salaries are just generally lower to reflect that cost-of-living difference, they'd probably still be willing to work here for much less than $73k.
A lot of people like to take things to the extreme and talk about unionization and that's just really not a reasonable idea when you're talking about an industry that, for all its billions of dollars, doesn't exactly have a Gaussian distribution of wealth.
Most people understand it's not productive, but some feel they need to be seen (by higher ups or external people) to be doing anything they can to ship a product before it ends up slipping, and there aren't a lot of knobs they have control over.
In many of the smaller studios I've worked at (creature-land aside), the crunches were usually explained away with that last bit. Everybody, including the managers would tend to say "Yeah, we'd prefer it if there was never a major crunch, but there's nothing we can do about it." In some cases, at least, I could very much believe that because they'd be cases where publishers strike deals with deliberately accelerated schedules in the hopes that you either achieve it, or that you can be lorded over with the threat of "breach of contract" suits. In other cases, it was just plain bad management and niggling bureaucracy. I was at one point put into a position where I alone had to crunch for 2 months straight putting in a good 120 hours a week occasionally going as long as 3 day stretches without food, and was never actually told why until it was right down to the last half hour and they said "we're thinking of licensing this out, and we're meeting with people about it today, so uh... you think you could clean yourself up? They'll be here in about a half hour."
In the end, it's not as though I had any intention of getting out of the industry... Getting out of certain companies, yeah, but I never saw it as unbearable, maybe because I've just been raised that way or maybe I'm just generally unfeeling.
. Im friends with a couple of RN's and if theyre needed, they'll have to do 48hr shifts (thats 2 days nonstop, not 8x6
