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Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting?
241–250 of 508 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting?
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what makes a company poach like this vs do an aquihire
Cost, surely. Paying for 10 engineers is much cheaper than paying for them and the IP they helped produce over the years, especially if you're not interested in that IP.
Aquihires can be very destructive.
You end up with either the whole company, or you piss off the people that you wanted when you fire their co-workers. It also pulls in an almost complete graph of employees who are isolated from the new parent company.
Its much better to pull off the people that you want, and get them to join willingly, as they tend to adopt the culture/learn better when in isolation.
Re: Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting?
#243Honeywell after GE acquisition. They basically bought empty buildings at insane values given how fast the talent clears out
Re: Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting?
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Their CEO Ray Kassar famously said, "You’re no more important to those projects than the person on the assembly line who put them together. You’re a dime a dozen. You’re not unique. Anybody can do a cartridge.". Imagine any software company CEO nowadays saying that out loud, no matter what they privately thought.
today they have their scrum masters whisper it in our ears at the daily stand up
I feel like software developers have either the biggest or the smallest egos; the majority is in the last category and will keep their head down. But in companies, all the managerial staff - including these days scrum masters, which is now a dedicated role by a non-developer - will strut around like they own the place and everything would fall apart if it wasn't for them.
Re: Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting?
#245Atari in 1983 went from the leader in video game production to completely imploding. In 1979, four of their best programmers left after demanding equity in the sales and were refused. Their CEO Ray Kassar famously said, "You’re no more important to those projects than the person on the assembly line who put them together. You’re a dime a dozen. You’re not unique. Anybody can do a cartridge.". They left and formed A…
Gaming abounds with stories like this. A friend of mine went to work for a small game studio in Oklahoma that'd gotten some acclaim for their quake mod pack. They took that momentum and started on their own novel IP as a quake licensee. They made a ahem mildly successful game named Medal of Honor. Some time down the road, the owner of the studio didn't want to share the wealth. As a result the top programmers, design…
Funny thing is that the owners did the same thing a second time, going back to the EA, forming Respawn Environment.
Re: Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting?
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's particularly ironic that you mention CoD as an example of how you can treat gamedevs as replaceable cogs. Here's the history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32833895
Call of Duty then and now are very different. Back then, it was more like an indie movie. Now, it's Disney size. Their animators are cogs.
Well for what it's worth my friend is still with them, or at least what you could call the main descendant of that team. They don't treat him as a cog. In fact he was their first full time remote employee as I understand it, as he got sick of living in Tulsa. No offense Tulsans, but when you've lived in the PNW for a while it's kinda hard to give up all the trees, mountains, etc. I do miss thunderstorms though.
Re: Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting?
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Video game studios taking advantage of young, naive people who will burn themselves out working unpaid overtime for the privilege of working for a game studio? I'm absolutely shocked, shocked I tell you! Some of them probably get 50 applicants for every position they advertise. It's a meat grinder.
Video game developers (and working class in general) desperately needs to unionize, young folks are too naive to realize they're working towards chronic health conditions.
In a sense, some do - by quitting and/or going indie. There's some good studios out there; Team Cherry (hollow knight) famously doesn't do crunch. They also don't (need to) make any announcements about games until they're ready.
Re: Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting?
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's how Anders Hejlsberg (creator of C# and Typescript) joined Microsoft?
You know someone works in programming if their name is Anders or Tobias
A quick search in Norway's bureau of statistics shows that Anders had a big bump between about 1975 and 2000, peaking about 1985, when about 1.5% of boys were named Anders. I believe it was a top ten name that entire period. I don't have stats for Denmark where Hejlsberg is from, but I don't think the name is any rarer there.
There are a lot of developers in that generation.
Tobias is a less popular name overall, but had a much sharper spike around 2000. 1.5% of Norwegian boys born in 2003, the peak year, were named Tobias.
Those guys should be the just entering the workforce about now.
Re: Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting?
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironically however modern day Activision has the exact same attitude of Atari that caused their founding.
Clearly the situation is very different. Activision is much much bigger than Atari was. 4 of the top developers leaving wouldn't cause the company to implode.
A top developer leaving also functions as a signal to others in the company.
I once left a company quickly after a senior leader had left. That proved to be a good move since the company was going under and sold a few months after.
Re: Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting?
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironically however modern day Activision has the exact same attitude of Atari that caused their founding.
But they might be right this time. Many game devs are fungible cogs, implementing a well-defined blueprint. Especially Activision games like Call of Duty. It doesn’t help that there’s just so many devs these days that they can seemingly abuse them for decades and nothing has collapsed.
Big games will have a small core team - engine programmers, creative leads, etc - and a large section of 'grunt work' - modeling, texturing, animation, etc. The kind of thing someone puts on a very long todo list to be picked up. That's likely more work where individual contributions become less important.
It's also an area where there's more and more outsourcing happening these days.