- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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Layoffs always lead to loss of tacit institutional knowledge. In other words, they end up firing the people who know how shit really works.
Games are creative projects, so this is even more of a problem. They fire people who made the first game and knew exactly why the game was made that way, and it comes as no surprise that the new hires end up making the sequel completely different way. The new people can see the big picture but not the reasoning behind the tiniest details.
MBA types have never experienced tacit instructional knowledge because they just sit in their offices all day misinterpreting numbers to make themselves look good.
spot on. these people’s salaries are chump change compared to rsu awards. They dont care about making their core product, they care about the stock spiking periodically so they can sell. It can creep down in between sells and it doesnt matter much. They really just need a yearly surge in price to sell based on something that looks like strategic competence. They arent paid to consistently uplevel the stock so much as they are paid to enable a pump and dump on their own companys stock.
Three Months Later
“Hmmm. I wonder why our KPI’s are in the toilet all of a sudden.”
Funny because it’s true. Painfully true.
Men, you’re lucky men. Soon you’ll all be fighting for your planet. Many of you will be dying for your planet. A few of you will be forced through a fine mesh screen for your planet. They will be the luckiest of all.
Got free time for making memes? Guess what…
That’s a paddlin’
Everywhere I look, problems are coming from rich assholes removed from actually doing work making decisions.
It’s called capitalism. This is the result
As long as we all lay them off constantly so their children are always near death from malnutrition they will always come back when we tell them to. Plan can not fail.
I mean, you joke. But this is just the definition of contract labor.
In theory, contractors earn sizably more than salaried workers. If you’re bringing in $200/hr, you can get away with working six months a year. Or working two years and then taking a year off.
But because so much of this contract work has been outsourced overseas or managed through networks of subcontractors, you end up with people actually earning a $30-60/hr salary for work that’s getting billed at $200/hr by some gatekeeping intermediary. And you end up with a steady stream of people in-between jobs whose skills atrophy and whose interests in the long-term function of the project don’t align.
Alternatively, you’ve got a bunch of these little indie pop-ups that churn out reskinned GACHA crap based on whatever happens to be popular at a given moment. And the name of the game is to get enough end-users to win yourself a corporate buyout, then dash out the back door with all the cash you can stuff in your pockets.
The idea of seasonal or boom-bust employment isn’t unworkable on its face. But without labor solidarity or a professional organization to prop up wages, you just end up with a bunch of middle-men and corporate suits draining the lay workers dry.
I had a job as a programmer consultant once making $50,000 a year and I was being billed out at $185 an hour so I was making like 1/7 of my bill rate. And my bill rate was only that high because I have an advanced degree in a field utterly unrelated to programming. I want to say the company I consulted at was getting screwed even worse than me, but I was actually good at programming and cleaned up a mess they had already thrown millions of dollars at in-house.
Only a single rule is needed. If mass layoffs need to happen, the top person responsible, the CEO, must also leave the company in the same fashion.
Without a golden parachute.
…B…b.ut the yacht can stay. Right??
Some bilionare
What about a trial by combat clause? CEO has to fight one representative of the workforce. In America this could be a whole new genre of reality tv! We could call it… Luigi’s Mansion.
Fun fact if you replace the word “layoffs” with “bonus for executives” the meme still works.
It’s usually both.
Because it isn’t. You recruit people when you need workforce, and you reduce employment when there’s no work to be done.
“We have the best game profits. Because of layoffs”
Don’t worry all the rage is outsourcing now, so they can lay an entire studio off and ideally that studio gets another contract somewhere else (most don’t).
computer + business = layoffs Don’t you know?
Business+Business = also layoffs.
B2BLO
Meanwhile Nintendo provides lifetime employment. It’s why they can pass down institutional knowledge to the next gen of employees. Hence why every entry in series like Mario and Zelda are almost consistently great.
On the other end of this, Pokemon is still being developed by guys who can’t develop in a modern engine and are just coasting on the popularity of the franchise. I have Scarlett and I got about an hour in before shelving it for other better games, and I was so into Pokemon I’ve played through about a dozen ROM hacks.
Pokemon is not developed by Nintendo though. They are only the publisher.
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Cool 😎
Leg end
somewhere along the way the csuite forgot about or devalued institutional knowledge. they think of people like expensive hardware theyre renting, that they can just fire and rehire at no cost. they ignore the fact that the majority of the knowledge and expertise they need is stored in peoples heads and nowhere else. when they do a huge layoff theyre throwing all of that away and essentially starting over from scratch the next time. i suspect this is a large part of why games take way longer to develop now. the teams have to build up the knowledge and working relationships basically from scratch on every game, which is a slow messy process in the best of times but is made waaay worse by delusional schedules and excessive hours. these corporate douchebags keep literally cutting off their nose to spite their face over and over again like its a functional business strategy.
Why do you think they like AI so much? The bought into the hype and now they think they can just own a data center and make more money that way. Everything can be their “creative vision” because they’re the smartest and most talented because they got themselves so rich and god/society reward the best
I think they ‘like’ AI because it’s the promise of how much what they see as ‘redundant’ being done. Unfortunately some people think that’s story boarding, artwork, anything that is creative, and forgetting that so much of the office could be enhanced and improved with ‘AI’.
What kills me with this ridiculous form of corporate thinking is the sequel does not have all the quality of life improvements of the original, i.e., they don’t build on lessons learned. A game may have patchs that add features that improve playability, or make settings easier to find, or just add some cool mechanic that everybody loves. Then the sequel comes out and all those features are missing for some reason. It’s fucking infuriating!
They think only in the high-level and then only the most self-aware of them even wonder why they don’t understand the low-level. “Throw man-hours at it” is always the solution. It’s fucking maddening.
Back when I supported HR at a hospital I built these ultra detailed employee turnover reports, which included average cost of turnover (metrics for what it costs to cover shifts until the position is filled, cost of recruiting/posting positions, cost associated with hiring, separation cost of the employee leaving, etc etc). And of course they would focus primarily on nursing roles. They spent about 5 years doing just about anything they could; hiring bonuses, incentives, referral bonuses, various outreach programs and tuition assistance for nurses. After those 5 years they found no noticeable reduction in nursing turnover. What they did eventually notice, however, is a steady increase in turnover for all other non-nursing positions.
After another year or 2 of bullshit excuses and throwing whatever paltry perks they attempted to throw at us the only thing they found actually lowering their turnover figures…reinstate annual 3% raises. Because they found out paying their employees was actually cheaper than the annual cost of turnover.
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That’s pretty much business 101 though. It’s almost always cheaper long term to retain employees (especially high performing employees) rather than getting rid of and re-hiring. But when you are at the edge of bankruptcy or can’t afford to keep people (sometimes simply for ‘profit’) then short term it’s a better idea.
Companies are not ethereal, so there are always going to be short term decisions made that hurt long term.
i see what youre saying, but i think youre missing some stuff here. companies being “on the edge of bankruptcy” is usually also the fault of csuite douchebags. where do you think all the money companies make goes? it goes to the obscene csuite salaries. those fuckers make these ridiculous short term decisions that only benefit them while taking credit for every success and claiming every failure was due to “market forces” completely outside their control. yeah companies are responding to the situation of the moment, but how the fuck do you think they got there in the first place?
the last place i worked had this problem constantly. management makes a dumbass decision that hurts the business for no benefit, then we get in a tight spot because of it, and management makes another decision that only really hurts the actual workers with the justification that they have to because the company is in a tough spot. rinse and repeat. no accountability, no repercussions, and nothing meaningfully changes except for things get worse for all the people doing the actual work.
dont just swallow their propaganda without thinking.
dont just swallow their propaganda without thinking.
You may want to take the same advice. ‘Usually full of C-Suite douchebags’ shows how out of touch you are with reality. The majority of companies in the US don’t even have a C-Suite and are mom and pop shops. Even those that do have a proper corporate structure, you can remove every ounce of salary and benefits from the C-Suite and still wouldn’t lower prices significantly.
Management makes bad decisions? So do workers. Everyone does, that’s humans, no one is perfect. Do workers more often get kicked to the curb over management? Sure, that’s reality. If you move yourself into management, and workers make errors that cost the company, who do you get rid of?
Perhaps it’s a giant combination of factors and not just some sucker with ‘C’ in their title.
Leadership makes the decisions and gets to keep the profits, so they should be held to a higher standard of accountability. Small businesses that don’t literally have “CEOs” still have leaders. These people took responsibility, and should be treated like it.
If you’re a ship captain, and your sailors make errors that cause the ship to sink, you’re still ultimately responsible because it’s your ship, and who hired those sailors?
Ahh, so realistically you want one person to take blame, but not have the reward. Makes sense.
Close a company because you have to keep everyone regardless, or get rid of people to ensure those who are left stay employed. The realistic decision made every day. When a government decision raises your costs overnight by 50% and customers don’t pay for it, tell us, who is at fault? Guess it’s the manager because they didn’t anticipate that right?
at least get their cock out of your mouth while youre talking to me jeez
Its like when tech-bros re-invent trains or taxes or something
Csuites of all industries are becoming like nobles from feudal eras. The only difference is the lack of in-breeding happening, but give it a decade or more and it’ll start.
They assume that they have right of rule despite having no actual commitments, then they throw a fit when they aren’t fed.
They already have apps for dating amongst themselves
Part of the issue is also scope and budget. Games are becoming needlessly massive and overly complicated, overshooting estimated budgets. It’s unrealistic for these games to make meaningful bottom line.
So why don’t we reduce scope and go back in making simpler and fun games? Cause layoffs is the easy short term solution.
no! every game must be hyper realistic and break graphical boundaries ! it’s the only way we can sell our game ! (seriously we’re out of ideas)
/s
