I think the supposed negative is "in a mass zoom call".
It's not 100% clear, though the phrasing of the article ("an unscheduled mandatory Zoom meeting at 8 a.m. CT", one time) does make it sound like a single meeting with 200 people.
The more "human" feeling thing is to have 1-1 zoom calls with each person being fired so you can talk to them about their situation and specifics.
> The more "human" feeling thing is to have 1-1 zoom calls with each person being fired so you can talk to them about their situation and specifics.
I think they also do that. This is just to give people the initial news as soon as possible, and without ambiguity or speculation as it takes days to percolate through if you did it 1:1.
I worked for a company that laid off roughly ~10% of their employees. The company was steadily becoming less profitable, and as a young company they'd been too nice and kept on and gave more chances to underperforming employees than most other companies would. Finally, they had to make the make the hard call.
They did it one by one, and it took roughly a full day to get through everyone. The whole company was on pins and needles- even those who were doing well couldn't think about anything other than wonder whose names and faces they wouldn't be seeing around the office anymore.
As an individual, I empathize with the emotional difficulty of an impersonal mass layoff. However, having seen the flip side, it's a whole lot worse to spend 8 hours wondering when the hammer is going to drop on you. Ultimately, it's better to get it over with quickly, imho.
I once worked for a company that would set a box on your chair during lunch with a letter from HR in it for firings and layoffs. Being fired there was referred to as being "boxed".
That's pretty much how the email I received when I was let go from a company. "Hey, do you have time to drop by my office this morning?" What would have happened had I said, "sorry, I'm really busy this morning. Can we reschedule for next week?" =)
I must live in a different universe to the usual crowd here (I don't work in tech) because mass firing over zoom seems impossibly cruel and callous to me.
It really depends. I have barely had an in-person meeting with anyone superior to me in my company in 3-4 years. If I got called in to the office to meet with anyone superior to me and no one else from my team, and no agenda, I'm going to be in dread the whole way because that would be an insanely irregular thing. It's not any better if they randomly invited some, or even all of my team to the office for a meeting with no agenda.
Sure, it's detached, but it's not like I'm expecting my upper management to be attached to me that way.
Yes, remote work has made it massively easier to do these mass firings. Just treat workers like cloud resources. Mass hire and fire with minimal costs.
"Over a mass zoom" is not particularly humane. In a better world, laying someone off would be done in a more caring and sensitive manner, because it's a huge and often unexpected change for the recipient. Human beings deserve better than being forced to attend their own mass slaughter.
However, no matter what, someone will always be unhappy about the method. Which is probably why the axe people throw up their hands and just try to get it over with efficiently.
Edit: "Over zoom" -> "Over a mass zoom", since this was apparently poorly worded and distracting. I wasn't proposing the ridiculous move of forcing a remote worker to fly to an office to get fired.
It's humane to enable remote work and employ people without regard for their physical proximity to your office, but it's inhumane to terminate that relationship in the same way?
I cannot agree. If you have a regular in-person presence then I agree, but if your typical form of working is remote then it's not inhumane to have that conversation remotely.
My company just had a round of layoffs. Preceding the actual announcement was an email strongly encouraging everyone to appear for that day (WFH still predominant norm).
All I could think, "Am I going to wake-up early and deal with traffic just so they can fire me to my face?"
Seriously. That's definitely more insulting. "You're going to dance for us in person one last time for no reason except that we want to see your face when we tell you you're fired" feels way more cruel than pulling me into a call and telling me I can immediately open my browser and start looking for another job.
What if someone is a remote worker? You want them to fly across the country just so they can get laid off in person? Or do you expect their boss to fly across the country and visit them at their home to deliver the news? Either one sounds ridiculous at best, grossly insulting at worst.
The way to 'humanely' lay people off is simple: give them a generous severance package. 6 months of pay/benefits should be plenty to find a new job without any disruption. The last time I was laid off as a mass lay-off (my group was laid off because the company decided to quit the product sector we were in), I got 4 months' severance and had a new (higher paying) job within a month, so I wasn't mad at all.
You'd think so but apparently these days the bar is set at first insult your employees, blame them for all of the companies problems, then lock them out of their computers and lie about their severance package.
In 2001 and 2009 I remember hearing about layoffs where they had a big (in-person) meeting to announce the layoffs. I seem to recall there were two ways: either you have two simultaneous meetings, one for the survivors and one for the axed; or you had one large meeting to announce them, and then people went back to their desk to check their email to see if they were affected. I'm not sure that announcing it over a mass Zoom is any different than a mass in-person meeting.
I would have a really hard time feeling guilty about firing someone after paying them a few hundred thousand dollars. It's not a day care, and it's not like I'm asking you for the money back. You can find another job.
And if I'm the one being fired, I really don't care how it's done, but if I had to choose, I'd prefer the option that wastes as little of my time as possible and doesn't require me to wake up at 8am to hear you fire me.
What is this "more caring and sensitive manner"? Should employees have to fly across the country to get fired face-to-face? Or over a text message? Email? If you work over Zoom of course you are going to be laid off over Zoom.
What people really want to get around saying is "no company should ever do layoffs", and well that's a whole different discussion.
> In a better world, laying someone off would be done in a more caring and sensitive manner, because it's a huge and often unexpected change for the recipient. Human beings deserve better than being forced to attend their own mass slaughter.
Layoffs are usually not “unexpected” if you can read the tea leaves.
Besides, I go to work everyday to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. I never expect a company to “care about me or my feelings”.
I’ve also ensured that I have had at least 3-6 months of living expenses in the bank for the last 25 years. Yes - this was from the time when I was making $11/hour as a computer operator and I was saving my overtime.
There also has never been a point in my career that I didn’t “have my running shoes on” - an updated resume, a skillset that was inline with the market, a strong network, and an updated career documented.
> if you have a fixed term contract and they don't honour it surely you can get all your cash in court?
Two things: 1. The financial barrier to legal representation for people working in QA in the games industry is high to begin with; 2. There is a nonzero chance that people in these roles already signed an agreement with an arbitration clause, in which case they won't be going to court anyway.
Might be worth arbitrating! I remember some story about some people actually using arbitration and companies finding out "fuck, this actually costs a lot of money".
It seems like if the arbiter ignored clearly defined terms in the contract, you could seek some redress from the arbitration company itself. They are regulated I presume?
> Goodbye US employees, welcome Asian and Eastern European employees. It's definitely not about costs though (wink)
To any companies planning to save big bucks through outsourcing: forget it. It looks good on paper, but in practice you will regret picking your engineering talent based on how cheap you can get them.
It's taken years for my company's management to truly understand that if your motivation for hiring overseas is that you can get engineers for 1/6 the price, you're going to get correspondingly poor results. Good engineers don't stay long at that price point, no matter where they live.
There are tradeoffs for everything. Companies are more profitable when they cut labor costs through hiring people from countries that will work for less. Why should the owners of these companies (including everyone who owns stock in EA) pay above market value for this labor?
There are consequences to this, of course. One big consequence that I can think of is that it evens out the inequalities among laborers across national labor markets. This has very serious consequences for lower skilled Americans/westerners who have relied on the wealth of their countries to trickle down to them.
There are many ways to address this, like reducing labor market competition in the American labor market from less wealthy countries, increasing wealth redistribution, investing in the education/training of lesser skilled workers in the American labor market, and so on. Both left and right parties have solutions to this problem, and I personally don't really care about the chosen solution, but I hope our political parties stop forgetting about poor Americans who have been left behind for a long, long time.
I hope we can all have a healthier discussion about this problem, too. We need less polarizing figures in politics and we should start treating each other in America respectfully, whether you're liberal, conservative, transgender, evangelical, poor, rich, whatever.
Not to be snarky, but minimum-wage, service level jobs, fit that bill perfectly.
For 20 years I've been "against" WFH (as an employer). Employees see commute time and cost. I see ancillary benefits like team-work, informal conversations, ability to read the room and so on. [1]
Most of all I've been warning people that once you've proved the job can be done remotely, it can be done very remotely. With respect, there are smarter people than you in the world, willing to work for a lot less.
In other words WFH is about proving that your US location is Not an asset at all.
Covid has mellowed my views. We all got to WFH for years, and it mostly worked. We are now seeing issues though. Lots of misinformation, mental health issues, rumours, conflicts and so on. I don't think we can go back to 5 days a week in the office for everyone - that ship has sailed - but folk are needing more face-time with each other on a regular basis, and zoom isn't cutting it.
[1] in our context, we have nice offices, everyone had their own space with a door etc. I get that the quality of your office space has an impact on this question as well, but I'm talking about "nice offices" here.
> Most of all I've been warning people that once you've proved the job can be done remotely, it can be done very remotely.
I disagree with that perspective. I've been remote since 2014. "Life happened" and I had to move.
When I moved in 2014, I kept my job but became remote. It worked out great for the company, too. We hired overseas. The office was West Coast and I was East Coast. I had overlap with the overseas timezones, the office didn't. I bridged a lot of communication gaps and cultural issues.
(It also helped that I had a lot of domain knowledge that was hard to replace.)
Ultimately the product finished its market window. It's becoming obsolete. I could blame "outsourcing" for why I lost my job, but that's a cop-out. I saw what our competitors were doing, and where they were beating us. I don't think the owners wanted to "keep fighting." I'm glad I got out when I did.
--
In my new role, we meet on camera everyday and have live communication. Our sales are in the US. It wouldn't work if we were outside the US.
We need to set a wide net for talent, but we also need some on-site work because we have physical things that we need to be in a place in order to manipulate. Tech isn't just in cyberspace.
So we have a mix of on-site and remote.
It's great for me, because "life happened" and I'm married, have a family, and can't move whenever my employer changes. It's great for my employer because they can cast a wide net. And because we need to "have things" and "touch stuff," our jobs aren't about to be outsourced overnight.
I also suspect that "life will happen" with everyone I work with, and our flexibility allows everyone to keep working together.
> Most of all I've been warning people that once you've proved the job can be done remotely, it can be done very remotely.
A lot of tech involves automating yourself out of a job. It's just frustrating when people don't understand that. It's hard to collect rent in technology development because someone will make you obsolete or undercut you.
If you resign during a fixed term contract can they force you to work til the end? No because that's indentured servitude. The idea of the asymmetry you propose is equally untenable.
Given the quality of today's software, 200 shocks me too: I'm surprised it's more than a handful of people, let alone 200. I thought the normal way of doing game QA was to simply release the game full of obvious bugs, and then wait for users to complain.
Perhaps the level of complexity in modern games is such that even 200 testers is not sufficient to spot all issues. Things have moved a long way beyond 2D platformer games
QA normally do everything manually, with 0 automation I can see some games taking more than 500 testers to go through all possible paths. Especially in live service games like Apex.
I worked briefly on a AAA game and my team had 2 dedicated american QAs for the feature that knew everything there was to know and tested happy paths/made docs, and there also was a building of testers in Ukraine that tried to break the game in a myriad of ways and filled general bugs.
At some point in alpha we had around 500 bugs filled in jira, and this was only one game mode.
Laying off 200 is definitely a lot. That’s many more than most AAA studios have internally and closer to what AAA publishers usually have.
Although EA is known in the industry to have relatively many QA people and good QA. Their games stand head and shoulders above many other publishers’ in terms of polish at release. I’m not sure about the exact QA figures, but I expect maybe 500?
It would be a shame to see EA ruin this well functioning component of their publishing business to chase short term profit with cheapest outsourcers. But it would not be beyond the “smarts” of some game industry executives.
Do you remember in the movie "Up in the Air" when some technology to lay off people en masse remotely was presented laughably as some dystopian craziness in the future?
Well the alternative in that movie was a consultant who flew across the country and fired people face-to-face on behalf of companies. If you ask me, I'd rather take the Zoom call.
There are testers. Sometimes testers are called QA. But there is no such thing as a QA tester.
A QA tester must be someone who finds problematic bugs and communicationally reports them into database storage for the developer programmers to fix resolve.
Normally sites like this complain that work should be remote!