Video Game Union Workers Rally Against $55b Private Acquisition of Ea

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

End of 0 interest rates is the more likely reason.

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.

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.

I know I post Star Trek analogies a lot, but if Chief O'brien got laid off from Deep Space Nine because of cost cutting, he would be fine. (actually, he'd probably be much better off). We don't live in this world. We live in a world where losing your job can kill you.

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

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

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

What evidence is there to support this? Kids are expensive, and entry level jobs do not produce enough value to generate an income that can support several people.

> Anything else is morally wrong

Why?

Why is this the case? I hear this come up time to time, but the only case in which the American working class actually is having their wages lowered by foreign competition is through global trade, which does not need to go through immigration control. In fact, if anything, making it harder for poor workers to move to rich countries guarantees that poor countries will always have a supply of underpriced manufacturing labor to do arbitrage on, and that's what actually happened since America switched from the pre-1970s "high tariffs and whites-only immigration" regime to the post-CRA, post-Reagan regime of "low tariffs and restrictive immigration unless you have family that can sponsor you".

You're entirely correct that the elites see us as cattle, but the whole point of immigration control is to keep your cattle in fences. The elites can always buy their way into a country - in fact, most countries have "immigrant investor programs" that make this an official, on the books thing that anyone with enough capital can do. So if you want to oppose the power of the elites, you need an immigration policy that benefits the people - i.e. one loose enough that the average person can move to another country as easily as one moves to another state.

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.

Back in my PM days, I tried this with a couple old timer SWEs at my company. All except 2 blew it off and when pushed back they tried to play politics via the "old boys club" of buddies in Engineering Leadership (in PM vs Director or VP Eng, the Director or VP Eng always wins).

Retraining only works if the people who need to be retrained want to take the effort to retrain.

In an industry like tech where self-learning is so normalized and to a certain extent expected, the kind of person who needs to be forced to retrain just isn't the kind of person who actually wants to retrain.

Also, ime, age does not correlate to this. Being lazy is a personality defect orthogonal to being a gray beard or someone in your 20s.

> these costs are all too often hidden deep in the balance sheets, which makes just dumping off entire departments while hiring up other departments appear much more financially attractive than it is in reality, all costs considered.

Not really.

The process of hiring a new employee in aggregate costs at most around $10k on top of salary.

The cost of keeping a low effort employee is the salary along with the additional 30-40% paid in benefits, insurance, and taxes of retaining that employee.

As such, it's basically a wash at the individual level.

> executives get paid sometimes a hundred million dollars a year because of the "responsibility" they hold

Most don't though.

The person who ends up deciding to increase hiring is almost always an Engineering Manager or Director (depending on size of company).

VP and above only have visibility on top-line numbers, but the actual business case to hire is made by EMs or Directors.

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.

There’s no reason to think that you need to evaluate individuals to have a reason to let them go. I might be the best iOS developer in the world but if I’m working for a company that doesn’t need a custom iOS app, they should lay me off.

Jobs are a byproduct, not a hard requirement for a company to function, because the point of a company is to offer a service to customers, not to act as a jobs program for a town, state, country, or region.

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.

If you sleep 8 hours/night, this means you're spending 75 hours/week with your co-workers. That seems... a bit excessive?

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy