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Why is everyone doing layoffs at once? Is it just in the news now or are they taking advantage of everyone else doing it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sales does not belong on that list, since their impact is the easiest of all to measure ($$$). Also, top-down layoffs tend to target expensive staff with large paychecks, without accounting for institutional knowledge or intangible value delivered.
Is it though? Without products there are no sales at all. A compelling enough product will sell with no marketing/sales effort, so sales is really only whatever that baseline is + (extra units sold from sales and marketing efforts - cost of sales of marketing). I would think this is actually quite hard to measure, you also have to normalize against many external market factors and behavior of competitors.
would it? maybe you are talking about video games and a good enough game would sell itself. But for other businesses sales / marketing / ads do matter. Imagine you provide a 50% better service than your competitors, but you target audience never reaches your page because they are bombarded with google ads of your competitors
Why is everyone doing layoffs at once? Is it just in the news now or are they taking advantage of everyone else doing it?
Minimum six months severance pay + healthcare + cash bonus. That is incredibly generous all things considered.
Not a fan of any of their games, but I'm so glad this didn't affect Arcane.
It's absolutely wild how good Arcane is, especially considering League imo has the absolute worst aesthetic quality of any popular game. I'm glad they didn't let any of the art directors for the game (does the game even have art directors?) meddle with the show.
We know it has somebody with a foot fetish. Look at the footwear of all the female characters (at least the ones made before 2016, I haven't played it since then).
I did try to watch some recent games and while it looks like the gameplay itself has improved since then, the effect visuals have somehow managed to get even more blended and difficult to read. How do they manage to fail this badly at it for so long?
Why is everyone doing layoffs at once? Is it just in the news now or are they taking advantage of everyone else doing it?
Then there is the higher interest rates, which in themselves are an issue for the economy. Not so much because companies “need” to borrow money as such, but because the ridiculously low interest rates made it easier to make more money since you could fund things with money you didn’t have, since it was basically free to do so. A lot of places even sort of dropped the ball on this, not locking in the rates on their loans because, well, because we’re collectively rather stupid, so many organisations are looking at making deals with banks to find some reasonable place to land these loans in a way that doesn’t hurt anyone too bad.
There is more to it than that, but the over all result is that a long with the inflation (which may have stopped but it’s not like prices are dropping just because they paused increasing) wage stagnation and so on, is that there is a lot less purchasing power and willingness both in the investment and in the consumer markets.
You can say that companies over hires during the COVID lock downs, which isn’t really wrong, but we’re also sort of in a recession that we have collective agree not to talk about. Partly because it’s a weird recession considering the job market is hot.
In the last year Riot also started to sell severely overpriced skins, despite a lot of outrage from the community. With their lootbox system you basically only guaranteed certain skins if you spent like $200, which many players complained was inaccessible for them. Maybe this was a sign that financials were not in a great place for the company.
A seemingly common theme through all these layoffs is that engineers are less impacted than other orgs.
> This isn’t to appease shareholders or to hit a quarterly earnings number—it’s a necessity. I smell BS
Everyone overhired the last 3 years thinking the good times were forever. They’re probably overloaded with roles they don’t need anymore and have needs in other places so it really doesn’t make sense to keep folks.
It's very convenient that this isn't measurable and if you asked anyone in the industry at the time they most likely would have said "We don't have nearly enough" people.