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Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

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Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#191

Post by martin_drapeau »

eek2121 wrote: post #164
seydor wrote: post #87

Last time the stock market was surging, everyone was hiring. This time it's different

I'm pretty old, and I've NEVER had issues finding a job. I've been unemployed for 6 months now. Thinking about getting out of software development TBH. It isn't that I'm a bad developer, I've almost always gotten good to great performance reviews, but nobody is hiring. The positions that do open up are swamped with tons of people. The culture also is pretty toxic, especially in the startup world, and with AI now ente…

Downturns is the best time to build a startup. When things turn around, you hopefully have found product market fit and can ride the up wave.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#192

Post by maerF0x0 »

eek2121 wrote: post #175
e40 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interest rates and fear of recession. Big tech fuels R&D via very low-interest loans. This is what everyone in the financial community has been saying for a long time.

It blows my mind that people aren't hiring like mad with high interest rates. It seems like just parking a bunch of money somewhere and letting it accumulate interest would pay for salaries. Shoot, for 10 million dollars you could pay the entire salary of 2 developers without touching a dime of the actual money. Of course I know the economy doesn't work that way, but it is fun to think about.

the cost of borrowing that $10M has gone from 0.25 to 5.5 a 2100% increase. If inflation is above 4-5% then sitting on the money will lose purchasing power.

Fear of depr/rec-ession means the products you build might see 0 traction as the economy contracts and the funding to survive dries up.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#193

Post by hipadev23 »

eek2121 wrote: post #164
seydor wrote: post #87

Last time the stock market was surging, everyone was hiring. This time it's different

I'm pretty old, and I've NEVER had issues finding a job. I've been unemployed for 6 months now. Thinking about getting out of software development TBH. It isn't that I'm a bad developer, I've almost always gotten good to great performance reviews, but nobody is hiring. The positions that do open up are swamped with tons of people. The culture also is pretty toxic, especially in the startup world, and with AI now ente…

Skimming your comments: You deeply detest everything related to AI, cloud, and startups.

It’s not age discrimination per-se, but it’s because you're actively dragging your heels on the technologies that companies are hiring for. You can probably find a job doing maintenance on some PHP or Rails app that hasn't been updated since Obama’s first term, but the pay is likely also going to come from that era.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#194

Post by maerF0x0 »

fourside wrote: post #153
WhackyIdeas wrote: post #134

I keep hearing of huge lay-offs. I wonder, is this the result of LLM’s making everything just so much quicker to code develop? I mean as soon as ChatGPT 3.5 came out, it was the first question on people’s minds so I am guessing that it’s all related and with each advancement in AI there will be more layoffs. Maybe the future consists of multibillion-pound companies which only have 1 staff member (the cleaner) to get…

I would not blame LLMs for the current wave of layoffs. Maybe in the future, but these are more likely corrections from all the hiring and growth we saw during the pandemic.

i agree. I think LLMs may more likely be responsible for these jobs never coming back. ie, in the past jobs would come and go with the cycle, but now some fraction (maybe 1/1, 1/2, 1/3) of them will not come back ever because they simply wont need as many people to support the next record revenue.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#195

Post by rsanek »

fsckboy wrote: post #189
tyree731 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Shouldn't these companies be able to issue stock to get some cheap capital to continue growth/hiring? Yes, but then the stock price would go down, which obviously isn't allowed.

issuing stock and selling it into the market doesn't make the stock price go down. Raising money for this activity on a large scale is why the stock market exists. The value of the existing company "before" remains the same, and the sale of the new shares brings cash into the company at the selling price, so those new cash assets exactly balance out the dilution of ownership. If anything it might increase the value o…

this doesn't require any advanced analysis, it's simple supply and demand. offer up more shares to a market without changing demand and the price per share must go down.

think about it the other way -- why would a company ever do a stock buyback if changing the amount of issued stock didn't change the price? there's a reason buybacks are considered essentially the same as dividends.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#196

Post by nebula8804 »

solardev wrote: post #187
eek2121 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty old, and I've NEVER had issues finding a job. I've been unemployed for 6 months now. Thinking about getting out of software development TBH. It isn't that I'm a bad developer, I've almost always gotten good to great performance reviews, but nobody is hiring. The positions that do open up are swamped with tons of people. The culture also is pretty toxic, especially in the startup world, and with AI now ente…

Same, in 20+ years doing this, I've never seen it this bad.

Were you around for the dot com crash? You said 20 years so it sounds like you started when the wave began right after the crash.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#197

Post by maerF0x0 »

gruez wrote: post #105
oldpersonintx wrote: post #5

1900 salaried workers with good benefits laid off from Activision 19000 to be hired by Chipotle to make burritos for minimum wage By the labor stats, this is a net gain of 17100 jobs

Do you have any data that shows this is actually what's happening? For the economy as a whole, inflation adjusted wages have been slowly creeping up since the end of the pandemic, which seems contradictory to what you think is happening. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

i believe their point was about the statistic, but its also roughly the case that the salary/value of jobs created > While the headlines have been filled with news of layoffs in tech, the vast majority of jobs in the last six months have been created in health care and social assistance, the government, and leisure and hospitality.

https://archive.is/1vizJ#selection-561.0-568.0

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#198

Post by pfdietz »

picadores wrote: post #95
pfdietz wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the bad decisions there were driven from the top, then the acquisition could cause a large change in behavior. No guarantees, of course.

Like mcdonnell douglas made Boeing a great aircraft company..

Are you suggesting Blizzard is going to take over the C suite at Microsoft?

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#199

Post by FirmwareBurner »

graphe wrote: post #122
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, I'm not impressed at all. It looks and feels like a cartoonish bootleg of SC with AI generated Fortnite-looking artwork. What made SC interesting, like most Blizzard IP of the time, was also the well written story lines with amazing character arcs, that kept people invested, and not that it was a strategy game of space marines versus organic aliens versus energy aliens. They even made sure to give stor…

So did the homeworld series. Story isn't enough. AoE2 had online and so did StarCraft so they stayed. Homeworld never got that, without the story, multiplayer and mods it's not quite up there. I remember CoH2 was popular, but you're right it's hard for me to want to try something other than AoE2 or SC, when they're pretty perfect.

> Story isn't enough.

Characters and stories is everything. It keeps consumers invested and loyal to the franchise, even when the gameplay is boring and repetative, instead of jumping ship to a game with equal mechanics. It's why so many still cosplay as Kerrigan, Mario, Link, etc.

It's how so many people remember Ezio and Altair instead of the other forgettable characters that followed.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#200

Post by pfdietz »

solardev wrote: post #93
pfdietz wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the bad decisions there were driven from the top, then the acquisition could cause a large change in behavior. No guarantees, of course.

Microsoft hasn't made any remarkable games in a long time, either. They just play it safe and release filler msterial, like most of Gamepass.

Blizzard has been stuck in a failure state for years now, so there's little downside for them to shaking things up. At worst, Microsoft sells its parts off to vulture companies to turn things into gatcha games.
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