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.
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.
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.