Massive layoffs at Activision-Blizzard

[abija]

If half of that is true and he didn't sue them he is one of the biggest morons on the planet.

But then there's:

"the new role was
- all of my existing responsibilities and workload as a senior
- becoming a line manager of 3 people immediately
- managing our entire outsourced vfx pipeline in china
- plus additional Lead things (planning, much more meetings lol)
"
and
"im now doing my senior role, my lead role and now all the work that this great vfx artist was doing"

HR being evil cunts is a given. ActiBlizz working young idealistic people to the bone very likely since that's the bread and butter in this industry. But that being the case AND him able to do all he claims, I don't buy.

And sidenote as an overwatch player, wtf were they actually doing if there's also a VFX pipeline in China. This game had one of the biggest content draughts ever, followed by an update with less contend than random DLCs and then we find out there were apparently a lot of "incredibly hard working people" that did ??? ??? ??? and now are fired.

 

[Hellraiser]

If half of that is true and he didn't sue them he is one of the biggest morons on the planet.

He took the position of a team lead/lowest level of management (and management in name only usually), in most cases that's a trap targeting the clueless, where the poor fool who takes it becomes the management's punching bag when things go wrong, while also taking all the flak from his team when management decides something stupid. You need to have a really decent supportive manager above you and ideally reasonable customers/stakeholders/management/whoever the fuck it is that can complain about your team's work for it not to be hell. Or be a sociopath and not care about the team at all, becoming a cog in the management machine.

Where as for working 2 roles in addition to being a lead, I've seen such things myself which is one of the origins of my above mentioned opinion on "going lead/management", besides being between the hammer and the anvil. The other is that I never saw someone great at what they do become leads, you usually can just go somewhere else for the same job/responsibilities and more pay at least, without having to deal with management, or more rarely go solo/self-employed/start-up (depends on field, 3D art VFX I guess you could start a small studio doing VFX/CGI for video ads or something).

Although to be fair to him he probably didn't sue because he had fuck all savings considering his 3 months of no pay comments.

 

[AfterVirtue]

If half of that is true and he didn't sue them he is one of the biggest morons on the planet.

He took the position of a team lead/lowest level of management (and management in name only usually), in most cases that's a trap targeting the clueless, where the poor fool who takes it becomes the management's punching bag when things go wrong, while also taking all the flak from his team when management decides something stupid. You need to have a really decent supportive manager above you and ideally reasonable customers/stakeholders/management/whoever the fuck it is that can complain about your teams work for it not to be hell. Or be a sociopath and not care about the team at all, becoming a cog in the management machine.

[...]

Although to be fair to him he probably didn't sue because he had fuck all savings considering his 3 months of no pay comments.

This is very likely. I saw similar things in other lines of work, recently in bookstores management, same tier; exactly the same dynamics at work.

I don't buy.

So yeah, pronouns aside, i do buy this.

 

[Saark]

Although to be fair to him he probably didn't sue because he had fuck all savings considering his 3 months of no pay comments.

This is what really bothers me about the story. Non-competes are basically non enforceable in Cali. There's been some new legislation on that fairly recently too, so how the fuck would this dumbass not know about that? Even if its post merger and jurisdiction for his new contract would be in WA, he'd still have to make >$120k for a non-compete to even be enforceable. And if he's a contractor, than the non-compete is moot pretty much anywhere in the US, as well as all of Europe. Not sure about the UK, which seems to be where he's at, but Blizzard doesn't have UK offices so jurisdiction would very likely still be in either CA or WA.

If it's the latter, why the fuck would he sign one in the first place. His entire statement reeks of incompetence/lack of understanding what the fuck he's doing as an employee. Don't become a "lead" or "manager" if you can't handle the most basic responsibility -- the responsibility to not provide your employer the lube before they bend you over to screw you.

I regularly get the feeling that the people working at Blizzard are the absolute bottom of the barrel trash that couldn't hack it anywhere else, or are so delusional about the company that they really should've seen it coming but think they are completely unexpendable, like that entire dev-team that worked on a project for 6 years and somehow didn't see it coming that the MS acquisition *might* lead to them getting canned, because why the fuck would MS pay for a few dozen people who have produced nothing of value in years? Absolutely braindead.

Also, how the fuck do you agree to a promotion without researching your new pay before negotiating/taking it? Fucking retarded.

 

[Saark]

Reading through his incessant whining, what really strikes me is the

but before accepting i was adamant, that we were all on the same page about the full role, what it meant, what i would be doing, and also, what the "promotion" would come with. (pay increase, title change) and confirmed all of those details before going further

and

these conversations included other Lead VFX, Art Directors, Associate Art Directors, Production Directions and also HR. and as we were *all* happy, i started the job effective immediately, with the details to come at the end of the week, in writing.

First, don't fucking start working a new job unless the contract is fucking signed. Holy fuck.

Second... The way he described it, it sounds like none of this shit was put into a contract in the first place, just some rancid verbal agreement. So why the fuck would he do anything other than his agreed upon tasks (as in, contractually agreed upon deliverables). I swear, so many contractors these days working for these software companies are just too high on their ADHD meds to understand how the fuck basic business works. Imagine contacting a lawyer to check on your new contract, or actually putting anything in writing. 95% of these "Management is so bad" stories are manchildren (sorry, mxnchildren, its 2024) in their 20s and 30s who seemingly have no clue how the real world works and despite ALL the stories in the last few years, somehow STILL trusted management to not fuck them the first chance they get. While I hate corporate business as much as the next guy, you can see this shit coming waaaay ahead of time.

 

[AfterVirtue]

Don't become a "lead" or "manager" if you can't handle the most basic responsibility -- the responsibility to not provide your employer the lube before they bend you over to screw you.

manchildren (sorry, mxnchildren, its 2024) in their 20s and 30s who seemingly have no clue how the real world works and despite ALL the stories in the last few years, somehow STILL trusted management to not fuck them the first chance they get.

I see no contradiction.

 

[Hellraiser]

This is what really bothers me about the story. Non-competes are basically non enforceable in Cali.

He was based in the UK though so he would need to take it through (labor?) courts there. I did lazy googling and apparently they are legal there "within reason".

https://www.peninsulagrouplimited.com/resource-hub/employment-contract/non-compete-agreement/

Could be a long shot, not sure if 3 months of pay would be worth going to court, depends what initial legal advice on his odds he could get from a lawyer.

 

[Saark]

He was based in the UK though so he would need to take it through (labor?) courts there.

You're right, I forgot that Blizzard had offices in the UK, I didn't remember that they shut down their Paris offices and moved everything to their London ones after, so yeah, he's likely under UK law. In which case he's fucked, as the UK allows for non-competes lasting no longer than 3-months, unless there's a reasonable explanation for a longer lasting one.

Imagine quitting when that's the case, then going to twitter to whine about it when you should've known that before you hand in your resignation. What a dumbfuck, and somehow that's Blizzards fault?


Unrelated: How the fuck was he hired as a Senior VFX artist in the first place. Blud has 5 months of QA experience and then worked at Mediatonic (creators of Fall Guys, among other things) for a bit over 2 years, after 18 months of junior VFX "work". Once "promoted" he worked on some unannounced title with 2 other guys, the team then got scaled down leaving him as the sole VFX artist, and eventually he was moved to Fall Guys after the title was canned. Then joined Blizzard only a few months after.

Now, riddle me this: How does someone with not even 4 years of experience, who worked on a cancelled project for about 2 years and not much else, become a Senior VFX artist for OW2?

I also love how he described a bunch of his work as "brainstorming" "collaborating" "responsible for". Like, are these people really that incapable of describing their actual work? Or did they simply not do that much work? Either way, these are the kinds of fat that get trimmed every time there's some actual oversight on projects, i.e. with a merger, and if he didn't quit, I can bet you he would've gotten fired not short after anyway.

Either way... I find it hard to imagine that these kinds of people are fully functioning adults. I barely am, and even I know how to not get fucked over by the people contracting me to work for them.

 

[Hellraiser]

Now, riddle me this: How does someone with not even 4 years of experience, who worked on a cancelled project for about 2 years and not much else, become a Senior VFX artist for OW2?

Not sure if this was rhetorical but I would go with what I already said or implied earlier, the turnover must have been high. People getting promoted fast, unless the company is rapidly expanding operations, is a clear sign that there are too many vacancies and low average seniority in the teams, meaning there was nobody better to promote. And unlike leads, senior positions are usually a good career choice, unless you see that it means being strangled with some bullshit responsibilities or extra work that's just plain not worth the money, so competition normally should be fairly high for these spots. A sign of scraping the barrel in a dysfunctional organization.

 

[Saark]

A sign of scraping the barrel in a dysfunctional organization.

I think this, more than anything, described Blizzard perfectly. From my personal experiences and stories/anecdotes I've heard from some of the people working on the WoW teams, it's an utterly mismanaged company with abysmal documentation for their design and code. Keep in mind, this is a company where the lead designers and developers said shit like this, publicly, as if to brag about how fucking dogshit they are at their jobs:

"The game becomes the living document". Fuck me.

This is the crux of a lot of the issues at Blizzard, and why most devs and designers worth their salt don't wanna work there and leave again at their earliest convenience: Working with Blizzard code and their hierarchy is the most atrocious experience you can imagine, where a bunch of people design shit without actually writing any code themselves, forwarding their ideas to the actual programmers, who then have to write the code for it. Oftentimes these people don't actually understand the intricacies of what they're supposed to be doing, messing things up in the process, and fully lacking any kind of documentation on what and how things work the way they do. Or they just decide "nah, not gonna do that" after the designer waited a month or more for the things they wanted to put into the game.

Anecdotally, this includes bugs, like a certain ability or talent not actually working the way it's described, or simply not working at all. Fixing that shit takes weeks, if not months, once the designer outlined how it's supposed to work to the devs. Keep in mind we're talking about games with millions of players here, where tens if not hundreds of thousands of people will be affected by individual parts of a hero in OW, faction in SC or class in WoW not working. And even if a fix for that is waiting to be pushed to prod, a higher-up might simply say "this is gonna throw off the balance, we'll wait with this". Despite the community doing a lot of troubleshooting and bug-finding, including keeping detailed lists of bugs pertaining to certain parts of the game and how to recreate them (and even fix them), some of these have not been touched for years. It's that bad.

This setup not only severely bottlenecks improvements to their games (because they have far more people designing stuff than people writing the code for it), but also means that actual talent moves on to greener pastures very quickly. The good devs are overworked with tasks and can barely fix the shoddy code of their predecessors since there's virtually no documentation, and the good designers leave because they might have to wait weeks, if not months, for some of their stuff to finally be put into the game, and there's still the chance that after waiting for that long, one of the higher-ups devs or designers simply says "nah, i dont like it".

The people that are left are, like you said, the bottom of the barrel. People who couldn't hack it anywhere else, or who are so disillusioned with Blizzard as a "high quality" company that the sticks push themselves further up their asses as they genuinely believe that because they work at Blizzard, they MUST be good at what they do.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Reading through his incessant whining, what really strikes me is the

but before accepting i was adamant, that we were all on the same page about the full role, what it meant, what i would be doing, and also, what the "promotion" would come with. (pay increase, title change) and confirmed all of those details before going further

and

these conversations included other Lead VFX, Art Directors, Associate Art Directors, Production Directions and also HR. and as we were *all* happy, i started the job effective immediately, with the details to come at the end of the week, in writing.

First, don't fucking start working a new job unless the contract is fucking signed. Holy fuck.

Second... The way he described it, it sounds like none of this shit was put into a contract in the first place, just some rancid verbal agreement. So why the fuck would he do anything other than his agreed upon tasks (as in, contractually agreed upon deliverables). I swear, so many contractors these days working for these software companies are just too high on their ADHD meds to understand how the fuck basic business works. Imagine contacting a lawyer to check on your new contract, or actually putting anything in writing. 95% of these "Management is so bad" stories are manchildren (sorry, mxnchildren, its 2024) in their 20s and 30s who seemingly have no clue how the real world works and despite ALL the stories in the last few years, somehow STILL trusted management to not fuck them the first chance they get. While I hate corporate business as much as the next guy, you can see this shit coming waaaay ahead of time.

If he didn't take the offer eagerly, they'd just sack him and it'd be some other dude posting the exact same story. It's not like there's a shortage of people eager to work at a place like Blizzard and get their big shot at making their own AAA video game some day.

Regarding the non-compete clause not being enforceable... it doesn't need to be if the companies are colluding to suppress employee wages by limiting their options to hop ship to a competitor to get a raise. That's how it was over here not long ago.

 

[Saark]

If he didn't take the offer eagerly, they'd just sack him and it'd be some other dude posting the exact same story.

Being located in the UK, he couldn't just get fired just for not wanting to take on more responsibilities. They'd give the job to someone else, but he could've continued doing his job as is. Of course companies consistently find ways to lay off people anyway, but compared to the US, labor laws are a lot stronger and more employee-favored in the UK. While people are typically replaceable, companies would still prefer keeping the worker-drone that's already familiar with the proprietary systems than having to train someone new. If they had hired someone new to take on this position as a Senior Artist and Team Lead, it would've cost a heck of a lot more than this shmuck did.

I dislike Blizzard with a passion, but this entire situation really isn't on Blizzard. The dude either didn't even get it in writing or decided that he was fine with "trusting" management on what his responsibilities and deliverables were -- and when they came knocking, he didn't like it what they demanded of him. That's on him. Is it shitty behavior from his superiors? Absolutely, but it's not like you work at a corporate entity like Blizzard expecting to be treated nicely. It's a job, not a happy family, and the amount of crocodile tears I've seen from ex-employees is ridiculous. I feel for them on a personal level, but on a professional one, it was their fault. Just because you're the sole provider for your family or have medical bills, doesn't exempt you from being canned if your project didn't provide any value to the company in years.

If you can't afford to not work for 3 months due to not having any savings or your bills being too high, maybe you should consider not quitting your job in a country where non-competes are enforceable for up to 3 months. Just one man's opinion. It sucks, but people gotta live in reality, not the bubbly dreamworld they concocted for themselves where their co-workers and superiors are their friends, where HR is there to protect you instead of the company, where Blizzard still develops quality games, or where you think that working remotely forever is somehow a possibility for a low-level employee. Many canned Blizz devs expressed that they believed in one or multiple of these points, and that's just being fucking retarded, nothing else.

 

[abija]

This is very likely. I saw similar things in other lines of work, recently in bookstores management, same tier; exactly the same dynamics at work.

He is implying he literally did his old 8 hour job, a leadership role, and another intern's job. That was my issue with it. Increased responsability for no or minimal raise yes it's a common abuse. I've even taken the deal a bunch of times but I wouldn't say I did 2 jobs/the work of 2 people and nobody ever asked me why I output considerably less code than before. The abuse is also very relative. I took those deals because the jobs had low workload and overall it was still a much better deal than in other places. From whatever he posts and the output volume of the OW team I'd say he had it even better.

Since it's clear the "work" part is embelished heavily, him taking over the taks of the intern is ... a normal thing? It's not even a new role. Intern with low output gets fired, team gets his workload and a lot of times they don't rush to rehire because it's not clear it's worth it. So that part of the story is what... drivel to pad the qq metters?

Regarding the salary... I first thought he is from UK and just moved to US on work visa. But if he is working in UK offices and comparing his salary to Cali... just lol.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Being located in the UK, he couldn't just get fired just for not wanting to take on more responsibilities. They'd give the job to someone else, but he could've continued doing his job as is.

Or this happens:

 

[Damned Registrations]

Increased responsability for no or minimal raise yes it's a common abuse. I've even taken the deal a bunch of times but I wouldn't say I did 2 jobs/the work of 2 people and nobody ever asked me why I output considerably less code than before.

In my experience they don't actually expect you to do all the work you've now been assigned, it's just an excuse to shit on you for not doing getting 'your' work done. Honestly I'm surprised they even offered him a 'better' position. Not like they can't just assign the work instead. I doubt his initial contract had some stipulation about expected lines of code per hour or whatever. If your job description is 'shovel shit' and the boss shows up one day and says you need to start shovelling twice as much as before for no extra pay... that's still within your job description and at best you can just keep going at the former pace while they chew you out for poor performance.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Blizzard is a 1990s creature. They never learned how to transition the company into the 21st century, only the WOW money did that for them.

 

[Saark]

Regarding the salary... I first thought he is from UK and just moved to US on work visa. But if he is working in UK offices and comparing his salary to Cali... just lol.

It kinda has to be the latter, because non-competes are 100% unenforceable in cali, while UK law sets a 3-month period, which sorta confirms that he's living in the UK while working remotely for the US offices of Blizzard.

I suppose he somehow thought that working remotely for an american company entitles him to the same pay of those who work in an area that has thrice the cost of living. Absolutely delusional.

 

[Storyfag]

And sidenote as an overwatch player, wtf were they actually doing if there's also a VFX pipeline in China. This game had one of the biggest content draughts ever, followed by an update with less contend than random DLCs and then we find out there were apparently a lot of "incredibly hard working people" that did ??? ??? ??? and now are fired.

I think this:

I regularly get the feeling that the people working at Blizzard are the absolute bottom of the barrel trash that couldn't hack it anywhere else

is your anwser.

 

[abija]

I don't think it's that, I'd guess is more due to inside rot and nepotism that they get shit hires. While for programmers game dev is low pay relative to other options, I don't think that's the case for artists and any AAA studios should be more than decent jobs.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

"The game becomes the living document". Fuck me.

First Bethesda now Blizzard.

What the fuck is going on with AAA. They just straight up stopped doing GDDs. That basically tells us that chances are there aren't any actual qualified Game Designers nor Project Management because in both cases they would adhere to GDD, its been industry practice ever since its origins, hell Chris Crawford wrote the book on it and I own that book.

Game design is straight up dead folks. Effectively they're just cloning ideas not even designing shit anymore, they see something cool and shiny, they implement it. Freaking magpie ass game dev.

My process is, you start with feasibility testing, those feasibility tests become the evidence you put in the GDD, the GDD becomes the plan for the game to lock in the scope and prevent feature creep, from the GDD you develop the manifest - ie. the conditions that need to be met in order to successfully launch (I learned this from THQ of all places, this is what they made us do so I've gotten stuck doing it this way), once the manifest has been 100%ed you QA and polish the shit out of the game, take it to conventions to get user feedback, release a demo to also get user feedback and generate hype, do a final QA polish phase and then release it hoping to god you didn't miss anything (spoilers: you did - you always do because no game ever launches perfect). The whole idea of a GDD is to focus the development team on the overall goal and make sure that there is a consistent plan in order to hit milestones. Without the document the game is just a mess of features with no scope for release and no metric for success.

Further more GDDs are an excellent way to postmortem your game and catalogue experience so that you'll be even better the next game.

The fuck are modern developers doing?! lol

 

[Hobknobling]

"The game becomes the living document". Fuck me.

First Bethesda now Blizzard.

What the fuck is going on with AAA. They just straight up stopped doing GDDs. That basically tells us that chances are there aren't any actual qualified Game Designers nor Project Management because in both cases they would adhere to GDD, its been industry practice ever since its origins, hell Chris Crawford wrote the book on it and I own that book.

Game design is straight up dead folks. Effectively they're just cloning ideas not even designing shit anymore, they see something cool and shiny, they implement it. Freaking magpie ass game dev.

My process is, you start with feasibility testing, those feasibility tests become the evidence you put in the GDD, the GDD becomes the plan for the game to lock in the scope and prevent feature creep, from the GDD you develop the manifest - ie. the conditions that need to be met in order to successfully launch (I learned this from THQ of all places, this is what they made us do so I've gotten stuck doing it this way), once the manifest has been 100%ed you QA and polish the shit out of the game, take it to conventions to get user feedback, release a demo to also get user feedback and generate hype, do a final QA polish phase and then release it hoping to god you didn't miss anything (spoilers: you did - you always do because no game ever launches perfect). The whole idea of a GDD is to focus the development team on the overall goal and make sure that there is a consistent plan in order to hit milestones. Without the document the game is just a mess of features with no scope for release and no metric for success.

Further more GDDs are an excellent way to postmortem your game and catalogue experience so that you'll be even better the next game.

The fuck are modern developers doing?! lol

It must partially be the "agile mindset" mutating and creeping into new areas. Proper planning is effectively dead in the modern MBA-driven IT industry and it is a big reason why everything is shit and I get paid ridiculous amounts to do almost nothing.

Agile manifesto and it's consequences have been a disaster to the human race.

 

[Saark]

The whole idea of a GDD is to focus the development team on the overall goal and make sure that there is a consistent plan in order to hit milestones. Without the document the game is just a mess of features with no scope for release and no metric for success.

And this is why Blizzard had to fully scrap D4 3 times before they landed on what it ultimately became now, changing directors 3 times in the process. Initially it was supposed to be a Dark Souls clone, then an MMO, then they went back to making it just an aRPG. They scrapped Titan and turned it into OW, and scrapped their unannounced survival game FOUR times before Microsoft finally pulled the plug now. Most of these games started development anywhere from 6-9 years before publication, going through a full redesign process multiple times every ~2 years or so.

It's their hubris and ego that makes them think they are above any and all of these original concepts and procedures that allowed companies to produce the games that we all grew up with and loved, and it's a growing cancer that is affecting more and more companies.

 

[Arbiter]

New Blizzard customer service dropped:

He forgot to ask about bank account number and password. And the shoe size.

 

[Space Satan]

>Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees (mostly Acti-Blizz)
>Cancels in-development Blizzard survival game
>Blizzard president Mike Ybarra resigns
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24049050/microsoft-activision-blizzard-layoffs


This month Riot Games, Google, Discord, Twitch, Ebay, Unity and a bunch of other tech companies also announced personnel cuts. All tech companies firing people at the same time is very bad for the people being fired, maybe they won't be able to find jobs.
Microsoft themselves fired 10000 people last year.

 

[Riddler]

Now, riddle me this: How does someone with not even 4 years of experience, who worked on a cancelled project for about 2 years and not much else, become a Senior VFX artist for OW2?

Becoming a senior after two years is a fairly common pace for a lot of roles for the non-lazy. Junior is year 0-2.

Senior (without additional qualifiers) usually isn't a very advanced role.