Rituals Of The Betrayed

How would you do it differently if you were the suit that screwed up?

Letting people go is never fun, or pleasurable.

And some of that cheer leading has to be done. If things are bad enough you have to make cuts then you damned sure have to shore up your employee base that you have left to keep them from jumping ship. There is a trend these days to blame executives and management for everything, without the acknowledgment that making the decision and the execution of layoff isn’t exactly fucking easy either.

It’s probably no consolation, but the customers and stockholders aren’t exactly fooled by the lies. At some point, it actually does become a problem for the company if its PR statements are viewed with the seriousness of the latest dispatch from Comical Ali.

You’re looking at the company trying to decide whether it’s worth the continued investment (make no mistake, players in persistent worlds are making decisions about investing time and monthly fees in their characters, even if they don’t think of it that way), and all you’ve got to go on are the latest press releases. When a company chooses to abuse its credibility like this, they’re degrading the value of the only information that people have to go on.

The one thing that stood out to me with the Mythic “press release” from MJ was:

You hired a bunch of employees whose only supposed purpose was to get you through the launch period, and so you laying them off isn’t really a sign of anything being wrong.

Okay, then let me ask you this: Did those people know, when they were hired, that their positions were likely temporary? I don’t mean in the abstract sense that most employment is “at will” and temporary, I mean in the sense that some one actually told them before they were offered and accepted the position, that it was a temporary position with the potential to be permanent.

“The hilarity is that the purchasing company axed most of the executives, with the exception of the one guy who many here feel is most responsible for our downfall. Him, they promoted. Maybe it’s just coincidence that he happened to work at the purchasing company several years before coming here.”

Actually that sounds a lot like conspiracy. Get a mole into a competitor, undermine them from within, and then pick the carcass when they die. Buy up their assets and clientele cheaply and reward your agent for a job well done.

There’s more to it, too. I mean the survivors of layoffs feel really bad about what happened… at first… but thanks to the way the whole thing is spun, they quickly come to believe the hype and the good people that got laid off become the bad people that were the problem in the first place, right? It’s a coping mechanism, I think.

I wrote about it, last time I was involved in major layoffs (http://dopass.com/cursethedead)

Umm welcome to life.

Often the “good” chart has nothing to do with it. Often it is the salary chart that is looked at before anything, so senior employees are the first to get shot because they help out the bottom line more by taking out a bigger salary. Often they have families and kids, which helps reduce the benefits costs.

Often I have seen the good senior people (and have also been one of them) be let go due to “strategic restructuring” and “job elimination” and the morons and the inexperienced remain because they are cheaper on a fully loaded salary basis. Not a sound long term practice, but it gets the quarterly results up.

I wonder how many layoffs are being committed not due to business need but just because such mercenary tactics can be blamed on the current economy. We’ll see how many companies have “surprisingly good” Q1 results after committing employment mass-murder.

oh man I can’t spell today.

I work for a consulting company of about 300. Last week we laid off seven people. The President and CEO was present at every one of the layoff and he personally apologized to the people as they left the building. I saw him later that day and he was DEVASTATED. Seriously, the man looked like he had just been forced to kill a family member.

He sent out a company wide email that told us all why those people were let go. We weren’t making as much money as we had hoped and something had to give. No one claimed that we were “trimming fat” or getting rid of under-performing people. It wasn’t even implied. And several of those let go WEREN’T underperformers – but they weren’t critical in critical positions either. The decision was based on who we could afford to lose, not on who was least needed. When you _have_ to lose a pound of flesh, wouldn’t you rather lose part of your foot instead of half or your heart?

It’s still sad.

Delmania :
I had been considering re-uping my subscription, but this is the final nail in the coffin for me. Mythic has so mishandled Warhammer it’s not even funny.

I agree. The Lead Designer should go first.

Everyone agrees that layoffs are horrible things and creates very deep and negative emotions in everyone. But I disagree with the principle that this is automatically the “fault” of the suit in the plush corner office.

Company A makes an improved widget that they expect to sell 1000 units during the year. Unfortunately they only sell 500 units. Clearly they are cheaters and liars if they do not choose to pile up their losses and go bankrupt instead of cutting their costs to match their revenue. Clearly there was some guy sitting in his ivory tower that screwed up and spit on the honest workers to save his own hide.

Does that even make sense? This is capitalism. Companies succeed and companies fail. There is real money involved. Companies cannot just print more if their revenue drops. No one wants to lay people off and it is usually the last resort to cut costs, but the government cannot just take tax dollars and bail out every company that fails…. oh wait

Corporate loyalty is almost invariably one way–employee to employer. When it goes both ways, you usually don’t see any official statements about layoffs.

There’s really nothing you can say to soothe or comfort anyone going through a layoff. I’ve been though the layoff twice, and everything said to comfort me sounded hollow and empty. And I’ve tried to comfort friends going through it, and felt shallow and trifling.

It sucks, and it makes you feel like shit. The simple truth is that it will be a very bad experience.

But another truth that is difficult express is that it will pass. There will be a new day. And, one way or another, things work themselves out.

So, as trite as it sounds, if you are facing this, hang in there. Try an keep faith. Know that life will go on. And, maybe, it will take you in a totally unexpected, new, and good place.

Matt Mihaly :
Do you know what it’s like to have an employee break down into incoherent tears while you sit there and try to explain it’s not his/her fault but it has to happen anyway?

Yes.

My issue is less with layoffs than with (a) the apparent trivialization of them in the corporate world as a way to pad the latest earnings report and (b) the apparent need lately, especially in our industry, to minimize their contribution publically on the day they’re let go.

@Matt Mihaly
Taking responsibility would be to check where it went wrong and try to fix it. If something went wrong in a company, you can be pretty sure it’s not gonna come from the bottom yet EVERY SINGLE TIME, you crop bottom first, and once in a while, at the top…

The big issue here is that there is no apparent “rethinking” of the whole shee-bang. It’s just “ok let’s keep on doing the same, but with less people!”. That alone is stupid because you’re not solving anything, you’re just ignoring the problem!

And that’s not just in the gaming industry but everywhere.

Companies exist to make money. That’s it. They don’t exist to create great products, and they don’t exist to benefit mankind. They are part of the free market and money is at the root of the free market.

Honestly, to expect anything more altruistic than the most efficient accumulation of money is folly.

@Swader: I’d argue that’s incorrect and part of the issue here. Corporations exist for shareholder value. Although that’s often linked to making money, it’s a short-term emphasis.

In several of the cases of layoffs referred to here it has not been about profitability, but current economic trends. In other words, they’re making cuts because they’re expected to, and many of us would argue with the particular cuts that it’s more likely to hurt them financially in the future. But they don’t give one whit about the future, they’re looking at quarter by quarter.

Rog wrote:

But they don’t give one whit about the future, they’re looking at quarter by quarter.

Well, they care about what investors (which includes your average American via mutual funds and pension funds) care about, and investors have shown they care more about short-term results. Makes me glad I’m not running a public company, but corporate management is, at least theoretically, doing what the shareholders tell them to do.

(Incidentally, if you own even a single share of stock, when was the last time you attended a shareholder’s meeting to voice your opinion about the direction of the company? Most people don’t, but are happy to complain about how company’s are being run anyway.)

–matt

Loredena wrote:

I can’t speak to the games industry in particular, but I can speak about large companies (of which EA at least is one) versus smaller ones. Large companies first few layoffs tend to target the bottom of the pyramid. It’s only after they’ve cut to the bone it seems that it occurs to them to target the middle layers. You’re right — you can’t really function without a CEO, CFO, CIO. But it’s a bit much when the worker bees are getting chopped while the 5-7 layers of middle management stick around

I don’t have any idea what the composition of cuts at EA was recently, but I know it impacted lots of middle management because I’m getting a lot of their resumes across my desk these days (people 3 or 4 steps from Riccitello on the org chart).

Especially when many (most?) of the problems can be blamed on decisions made by that management – -worker bees don’t tend to make the decisions that sink ships. We do tend to be the first off the boat when it starts taking on water though.

Yep, that is true. Worker bees do not typically sink companies. On the other hand, management of an organization the size of EA is incredibly complicated and hard, and although the buck absolutely stops with management a lot of times what management “did wrong” is only apparent in hindsight, in which case it’s debatable whether any “moral” blame should accrue to them.

–matt

You speak of ‘years of loyal service,’ Scott. That’s the first mistake, and one I see time after time after time.

Corporations have no requirement and no need to be loyal to you. You are a tool, a cog and nothing more. Always look out for your own interests, because you’re the only one doing so.

Time and again over the last two years I, too, have watched people who worked for their builders for 5, 10, 15 years get laid-off. Different industries, same story. The sense of betrayal that always follows still baffles me. “What about my loyal years of service?” ‘Well, thanks for that but we need to move on and you aren’t necessary.’

Loyalty is a fool’s game. Work for the check and keep an eye on the want-ads at all times. The best quote for the modern work force I’ve seen is, “We’re all independent contractors, even those who have ‘one employer.’ What that really means is your little business has one client, and if they decide to go elsewhere you’re in trouble.”

But, Sanya, part of being the problem is being unable to tell that you’re the problem. If the person in authority is the problem, it’s highly unlikely that he can recognize it, and even more unlikely that he’d resign because of it.

This is one of the things that sucks about being human. There’s no reasonable hope that this will change.

A thought on the ridiculous press releases:

Sometimes that comes from the boys in Legal. It doesn’t matter if a press release is laughed at by all who see it if it doesn’t say anything that’s damaging to a potential future legal defense. As a former federal court law clerk, I can say that when preparing a draft decision in wrongful termination/employment discrimination cases, public statements that undermine the company’s current (or desired) theory of the case are very damaging.

Nothing anyone here i can say will make you or any of the other who find themselves out of work feel any better.
All i can say is as a team you really did produce a good game and you should be proud of what you achieved.
Ive been on the end of this sort of thing myself both in the past and recently and it never gets any easier.

Ever notice how one company will announce layoffs and another company will raise their hand and echo the same? Is this collusion on the golf course, or mere coincidence? And why are they always nice, round numbers? Like 600, or 1,100, or 50? Wouldn’t it make more sense to prune for efficiency in areas that absolutely require it, to use a recently overpoliticized term and “use a scalpel instead of a hatchet”?

Why do these announcements never follow a committed pledge by management, upper and middle, to accept a 10%-30% reduction in pay in order to continue work without slicing personnel too deeply? Wouldn’t a transition to part-time/contract or a phasing out period for the laid-off-to-be be less traumatizing to the whole company?

When Disney’s VMK was closing, and I was forced to let go of 30 or so of my moderators, those dedicated souls that kept the game clean and safe for the kids, I resolved to get involved. Every day until the final curtain call, I set aside an hour after closing to work on finding my loyal moderators jobs. With a lot of luck and a few right words, most of them were picked up for contract moderation, and I’m proud to say that two of them went on to become Community Managers in their own right.

Most of the woes in the the Rituals of the Betrayed could be avoided if management acted a bit more human and put themselves in the same shoes as the laid off. I did what I did because if I were in the shoes of my mods, I sure as freaking hell would want someone to help me out. Many of these peeps were paycheck to paycheck, struggling to make rent, an income meant to fund a stint in college or to offset medical bills. And not a one of them ditched me or a scheduled shift before the end.

Management, both middle and upper, really need to bring dignity back to the way things are done. Everything is not the bottom line, no matter how capitalistic your bent. There IS a price in morality. If you end up a bad human being because you laid off a hundred, maybe a thousand people when you didn’t have to, you are absolutely going to have to pay the piper in karma. And if I am ever in the position to take a pay cut, or to cut back on bonuses or to trim the dividend or invest a little energy and save some people from the guillotine, god damn it, I will.

Because that is what I would want someone to do for me.