Video game union workers rally against $55B private acquisition of EA

> It's a unique trait of tech companies to encourage cold but polite relations with your coworkers.

I don't know how you can assert this, among any other "stuck in a cubicle" office environment. Opportunities to be social are brief anyway. I'm on the side of 'give people time off enough to develop relationships outside of work'. 4 day work weeks would go a long way to helping people get the socializing we need.

Agreed wholeheartedly. I'm not certain it's the company encouraging it, though. IMHO it's far more the economic realities we find ourselves in, where holding onto the same job for an extended period of time is basically, according to all casual career advice, fucking yourself over in terms of compensation.

My generation has been encouraged by this reality since we entered the workforce to change jobs every few years, because companies are so stingy with raises. If you're planning to do that, you naturally keep distance with your coworkers; they're probably leaving before you are, and even if not, you are planning to.

Companies see no value in their existing workforce and it's honestly quite self-defeating and stupid. "Losing" any worker be it to their choice, or layoffs, or whatever it might be is a genuine LOSS to your team. It's however many months or years of experience not just with code, but with your code-base, your business, and your products going out the door. The fact that so many companies lose so many good people because they simply refuse to let an employee have a bit more money is honestly mind-bending; and once they're gone, they'll happily list their job online, often with a salary range even higher than the employee they just fired wanted.

Absolute corporate idiocy.

There's a difference between professional warmth and "we're a family". The latter usually comes top-down, from management and is fundamentally disingenuous. It's often a self-serving way of trying to get you to treat the company as your family, while company leadership still won't hesitate to lay you off in a mass zoom meeting. It's fine to be friends with co-workers or managers, but don't let companies obscure the fundamental nature of the relationship.

>These layoffs occur at such scale that it's unreasonable to assume any individual employee being "let go" has even been evaluated as an individual.

Isn't that most layoffs? Think of the layoffs post GFC. Did the subprime mortgage crisis suddenly make everyone incompetent, or are companies simply trying to trim budgets and need to hit some number? If it's actually due to poor performance, it would be through a PIP or similar.

If I no longer want to pay for your services, I should be able to stop for any reason, or no reason at all.

> However the best work I ever did was done when I didn't have a pressure of being fired for offending the wrong person, and that I had the psychological safety to think longer term- since a short term "time-waste" often converted to better long term outcomes for everybody.

I felt the same way until I worked at a company where almost nobody ever got fired or laid off. Anyone who was hired was basically guaranteed their job until the end of time because the leadership didn't like letting anyone go.

It only took a couple years until every time you needed to do something you'd run into some employee somewhere who wasn't doing their job. Even many people who seemed capable and appropriately skilled started slacking off when they realized there were never any consequences at all.

It was like a broken windows theory for the workplace. As people looked around and saw that others were doing almost no work, it started to spread. The people who liked actually shipping things started leaving, turning it into a snowball effect.

So there's a balance. Always working under threat of layoff and seeing good coworkers let go when you're already overburdened isn't good. Working in a company where there is no pressure at all to perform isn't good either.

Guess it's their loss then. If companies are more productive by being more relaxed then we should see more of those companies survive and thrive.

In my experience, companies that are focused on being a well-run company rather than a politically/personality/emotionally driven shitshow also are the ones that have long-term perspective and avoid making kneejerk reactions to almost everything.

Been there - done that. Worked at a company with no employee pressure, and it was absolutely infuriating that I could work my tail end off, while another employee was provably committing borderline wage fraud, but it always got written off as "personal issues" rather than take the risk of intervening... ever.

To the point I even had a boss say that part of this happens because nobody is there to spank adults when they need it (seriously), rather than intervene too strongly and have to find a replacement or hurt feelings or something. Or another contract worker, I got an apology from said boss... but he insisted she's better now than she used to be, the latest incident is mild compared to incidents before I arrived. As though that fixes it.

Much happier now at a company which cuts dead weight; and accepts we can't afford it.

To be fair, a handful of large companies have explicitly said[1][2] that their layoffs were largely about individual performance. All my experience as a manager in a large tech company says that that's almost certainly not the whole story, and unfair to many of the folks getting let go, but official word from the companies say otherwise.

1. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/14/meta-targeting-lowest-perfor...

2. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/08/microsoft-confirms-performan...

Productivity and performance are not the same thing. You can be a top performer on a project that flops and you're a net negative. Ideally you'd get transferred to a more productive role but there are a lot of variables involved.

Are you sure?

So getting rid of 20% of the workforce and selecting “the bottom 20%” is not a layoff?

> Companies rarely offer than consideration for employees

In almost all layoff situations, employees get severance even in the US no?

At least for the big tech layoffs that seemed to be the case.

Those who overhired should have been fired, I agree. It's incredible (or not) that the CEOs weren't eliminated.

Can't speak for every company, but most companies I've worked for with detailed hiring practices would evaluate the long-term outcomes of people that hiring managers chose.

If someone hired a lot of people who had to be laid off later, they would get more supervision and review of future hires.

The people who hired them may be long gone by now.

I'm not the poster you were responding to, but I have some experience in this. I am an engineering manager at medium size US company. If I want to fire a poor performer it requires a couple months of detailed documentation on their poor performance, and that's just so I can get them on a PIP (performance improvement plan). That's another 30-90 days. The PIP takes time to prepare and performance during the PIP also has to be rigorously documented.

This has been my experience at two different companies in multiple cases with egregious underperformance. I suppose if an employee assaulted/harassed someone or was doing something else outright illegal like theft or embezzlement, they would be shown the door immediately. But if someone is half-assing their work and dragging the team down, everyone has to put up with it for months as they get second chances, micromanagement, and other special attention before they can actually be let go.

I think it's due to the litigiousness of the US culture. Yes, US companies can fire people at will, but they can also file lawsuits at will, which are costly (time+money) no matter the outcome.

I worked for an agency company (mostly T&M contracts) that went through a round of layoffs almost entirely because they wanted to be "like a family" and the managers didn't let poor performers go. I think they ended up cutting something like 10% of their workforce, including underperformers and all new hires, in an effort to get cash flow moving in the right direction again.

It was incredibly rough- a lot of people who weren't being told they needed to shape up or ship out were instead simply told they're being shipped out. The only upside is managers got better about supporting employees later on who weren't performing, including putting people on PIPs rather than letting them coast.

There are internal reasons as well. Letting go of people can be highly disruptive and create uncertainty in your team. It’s a very unpleasant job that can also go wrong, especially if you have to fire loads.

Then there’s the perverse incentive that bigger teams usually equals a promotion. So if you’re the honest manager who manages a tight team and fires people, you won’t get promoted as often.

Top management knows this, of course. To sidestep these misaligned incentives a company-wide one-time layoff is really effective.

It depends on the size of the company as to what needs to be documented to let someone go. SMBs can let people go much easier, and the smaller, the easier.

But what you cannot do in any circumstance is let people go "for any reason". There are laws against that at any size, and you are looking for a lawsuit if you give a reason.

It's best to just tell them their position has been eliminated due to restructuring (has to be provable if you're a big company), and give them no reason beyond that. If you don't give a reason, they have nothing to bring a lawsuit for.

In summary, reasons are not always required, but are always a liability.

And the company can be sued at any time, for any reason or no reason at all. That does not mean the plaintiff will win, but against deep enough pockets, it can be worth a try. PIPs take time, and HR isn’t about to let you skip them, and bad employees know they’ve got six months to spend their workday looking for a new job while not doing their current job. I’ve worked at those companies, and sometimes managed at same, and when OP says they have stories, I believe them.

Post-covid layoffs happened before ChatGPT, so it's certainly not because of AI.

End of 0 interest rates is the more likely reason.

The goal of most companies is to maximize returns to shareholders, not society or employees. If it wasn't that I wouldn't have invested.

Like I said, that's the engineering context of the word.

In business managerial side of operations, "stakeholder" is definitely a weasel word.

The word "stakeholder" in "stakeholder capitalism" as used by the World Economic Forum literally means "every single person on Earth". Unless you think Klaus Schwab also considers the possibility of life in the Andromeda Galaxy, it doesn't get anymore nebulous than that. The word describes something cloudy and ginormous- like a nebula.

It's almost always a weasel word because if you meant customer you would just say customer. Saying "stakeholder" permits a level of ambiguity about whose interests are being represented.

>which is not well received by the customers (but makes them money),

stated preference vs revealed preference, or alternately, the people commenting about games on HN or reddit aren't reflective of the average EA customer.