this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024

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Unpopular Opinion

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Microsoft's layoffs of 1900 people in Blizzard/Activision isnt corporate greed, its a much needed purge and a kick in the butt (lemmy.world)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

8 comments fedilink hide all child comments

We get articles like this

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24049050/microsoft-activision-blizzard-layoffs

Microsoft is laying off 1,900 employees at Activision Blizzard and Xbox this week. While Microsoft is primarily laying off roles at Activision Blizzard, some Xbox and ZeniMax employees will also be impacted by the cuts.

It's always sad to hear someone lose their job. My unpopular opinion is that it needed to happen.

I work in corporate where the culture is so bad that you need a purge. Managers protecting bad employees. Toxic people getting promotions by playing office politics. Good employees fail to get recognition.

I'm not saying all 1900 people "got what's coming to them". Many may be very excellent humans, and losing your job sucks.

My extremely unpopular view from where I sit is that Blizzard Activision has for the past decade, continued to fall deeper and deeper into shitty-ness. And this shake up should have been done years ago.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I guarantee you they didn't take the time to carefully prune the dead branches, yo.

These mass layoff like this are purely for corporate greed so they can report better numbers to shareholders before end of their fiscal year sometime around Q2.

They're not to cut inefficiencies or streamline anything, that's just corporate doublespeak. I'm sorry you worked in a shitty office, and I'm sure at times it felt like razing the Earth was the only way to move forward, but your projecting that onto a different situation.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I would be the first to ask:

But who do you think survived the purge?

The politicians, the protected. Some may have been collateral, especially in the case of entire department wipes but you can bet they weren’t the first to go.

The quality of the employee is neither here nor there really. It’s all about the money now saved, and converted into C-suite bonuses.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

But who do you think survived the purge?

The politicians, the protected.

Mindless conjecture. Put up some evidence for this, or else admit you're just spouting nonsense.

Cynicism might make you seem cool to other 14-year-olds, but it is not an excuse for a total lack of intellectual honesty. I can conjecture, too, and my conjecturing leads me to believe that most of the people getting purged are EXACTLY the kind of waste-of-space, parasitic motherfuckers that everyone loves to hate. Marketing drones, legal department functionaries, middle managers, etc.

The point is, Microsoft has been buying all these gaming-sphere companies for two main reasons:

To gain access to intellectual properties that are held by the companies they're buying.
To gain developer staff and/or entire studios, so they can make more games and gain market share.

Point number one doesn't help my case. Companies buy each other all the time, just to gain access to IP. You can easily find situations where a smaller (or struggling) company just got acquired in order for the more money-rich company to gain a coveted trademark or brand, and then they literally proceed to lay of 100 percent of the new acquisition's employees, and liquidate all the assets.

Point number two, however, is where my conjecture comes in. Microsoft isn't done buying up companies that actually do video game development. The people least likely to be fired are the creative types that everyone in the outside community seems to value so highly. Microsoft has enough lawyers and generic project managers. No matter how "protected" you think you are by your savvy navigation of office politics, you can't change that fact.

Now, I don't actually dehumanize random white-collar, non-developer office workers to the degree that some people do. I don't like to see anyone lose their livelihood. But just screeching "OOOH, BIG COMPANY BAD. BIG COMPANY FIRE CREATIVE GAME DEV, BECAUSE BIG COMPANY LOVE EVIL" is stupid, and I can't just let it slide.

You're talking out of your ass. So am I, but at least I'm applying logic, rather than pure emotionalism and "look how cool I am" cynicism.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If I might make a play on your username, Chill, Dude,(nice) we aren’t on Reddit. We can do better here.

All we have is conjecture, really, unless somebody has published details of their layoff plans, so I’m cool with that if you are.

It would be rather ideal for you and OP to be right, I agree. Don’t get me wrong we’d all love it to just be about trimming the fat, especially rancid fat. But there’s fat even in the developer section so let’s not pretend any of this is along any lines at all really.

My point being that when it comes to these things, as others are mentioning, it’s not about personality or the honestly of your achievements or anything like that. It’s about money. Maybe to widen a profit margin, maybe to squeeze through an expected lean period(like between releases.). But it’s still heartless numbers.

And those who play the game are often the ones who look best on paper, best performance reviews and KPIs and word of mouth that makes them look like the ones worth continuing to invest in. The people who work with or under them might not agree how they got those numbers, but they look good nonetheless, better than the average performing on paper but non-toxic guy. That doesn’t even get into those who might be undesirable for other reasons but still crank out results and value to their company.

Again I would love to believe that the…how did the old political saying go? Ah, that the “swamp is being drained”, but I feel that there will still be a lot of muck left, fixing nothing of the company personality, and that the decision is still about money not environment.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I was the first one to point out that all we have is speculation/conjecture. You were the one to anoint your own conjecture as some kind of ultra-obvious fact. I could absolutely be wrong. I'll admit that now, just like I admitted it inside my own comment.

Basically, neither of us should really be trying to make any calls about the situation, until (as you point out) there is some kind of real data about the whole layoff situation.

My appeal to logic is flawed because it assumes corporations will behave rationally. That's not really a given. Your appeal to cynicism is flawed because it's just based on everyone nodding along and saying "yesssss, corporations bad. Office politics bad."

That's really all I'm saying.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

One big problem is when you think the shittiness is going to be fixed now. Those employees weren't the root of the problem, which is still down there and growing. It's not Jews or "Illuminati" either. It's harder than that.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

I agree that Blizzard, and many other gaming companies, have continued to dig deeper into shittiness. The thing is, these lay-offs were not surgical or even tactical. They were lines on a spreadsheet and numbers in a column. In the corporate world this is what's called "Spreadsheeting". Column B was adjusted until Column C was in the range that the C-Suite wanted. Toxic employees are probably still there, shitty managers are still there. The office politics are still there. The people that were let go where simply the ones that made the columns easier to balance out.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Is the manager who passed you over for promotion in the room with us now ?