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.
I agree that Blizzard, and many other gaming companies, have continued to dig deeper into shittiness. The thing is, these lay-offs were not surgical or even tactical. They were lines on a spreadsheet and numbers in a column. In the corporate world this is what’s called “Spreadsheeting”. Column B was adjusted until Column C was in the range that the C-Suite wanted. Toxic employees are probably still there, shitty managers are still there. The office politics are still there. The people that were let go where simply the ones that made the columns easier to balance out.