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United Wizards of the Coast

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Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#141

Post by happyopossum »

drob518 wrote: post #102
margalabargala wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most? No. Many, sure. > have a clause that says that the employer owns everything you do while you’re working for them Good companies will have a clause that says the employer owns everything you do in the relevant field of the company while working for them, explicitly naming that field. If you work for a logistics company, you would be able to write your own video editor without any worry. If you work for a not-shi…

I’ve worked at 12 companies in Silicon Valley and they all had variations of such language, whether huge Fortune 50 corporations or 4-person startups with the ink still wet on their incorporation filing. Yes, the better ones have a clause that restricts the claim to competitive work, but not all do. Smaller companies will be more flexible with you, particularly if you’re a key hire. At larger companies, it’s typicall…

> HR has forms that must be signed and they sure aren’t going to involve the legal department for you.

Three times in my career I've returned hiring agreements with redlines and never once had them questioned or countered.

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#142

Post by northern-lights »

bwestergard wrote: post #83

I'm glad to see this. I don't work in games, but I am a software developer and a member of the Communications Workers of America. I've also taken leave to help workers in games organize. I'm seeing a lot of ideological takes that are disconnected from the reality of unions with software developer members today. If anyone has questions about the CWA or game worker organizing campaigns, I'll do my best to answer.

This thread is filled with so many anti-union takes that you have to wonder if they are paid bots.

If you assume that most of the crowd that visits this website works in tech or tech-adjacent fields, how can you be against an entity whose main objective is to safeguard and work for your interests over your employers? Unfathomable that people are willing to do so much against their own best interests. Or...they are bots.

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#143

Post by DonaldPShimoda »

charcircuit wrote: post #136

This is a cancer that needs to be addressed as quickly as possible by firing them all. It is a toxic ideologically that should not be allowed to permeate. >Layoff Protections Businesses need the ability to layoff employees when markets change and projects are no longer viable. >Remote Work Protections Data has shown proven benefits of in person time and in a competitive environment such as gaming every advantage matt…

> Layoff Protections

Companies often expect employees to give advance notice of termination of employment, but employers do not feel beholden to their employees to reciprocate. This is unreasonable.

> Remote Work Protections

Many companies showed improved productivity when people were given flexibility. Claims to the contrary are often not backed up by actual data outside of cherry-picked results chosen by those in managerial positions.

> Generative AI Protections

MTG is a creative endeavor, and its output is protected by copyright. Copyright is, so far (thankfully), only enforceable when the media is produced by humans. Protections against the use of generative AI are not only good for workers' long-term productivity, but also for legal purposes.

---

I think maybe you should stop licking boots and start understanding why any of our society works today at all. As a hint, every protection you have ever enjoyed (40-hour work weeks, pensions or retirement funds, health insurance guarantees, mandatory paid time off, health and safety regulations, and so on) was paid for in blood by someone a company decided was not more important than profit. Unions are a fundamental capability by workers to ensure their own safety. Shockingly, I think it more reasonable to rely on the interpretations of those working in these jobs who want to unionize than some random person online who thinks "no wait, but think of the poor endangered company! :("

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#144

Post by JRandomHacker42 »

tanjtanjtanj wrote: post #134
JRandomHacker42 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Arena card engine is based on CLIPS [1] and not modern LLM-based tools. Magic cards are written in a very constrained language (usually called "card templating") that lends itself very well to machine-parseability. [1]: https://www.clipsrules.net/

There was an era about 10-15 years long where that was true but modern cards often fall back on very loose language that they tighten up with rulings prior or sometimes after release. See the language behind the "Prepared" key word in the newest set for a striking example.

I don't think Prepared is ambiguous at all. It has its meaning defined in the CR (722) and every card that uses it has either a clear trigger condition or the "enters prepared" replacement effect. It's just a new designation and there are plenty of those already, including ones that are 10+ years old (Renowned, Monstrous, Level Up).

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#145

Post by mjr00 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #123
mjr00 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tech workers are fungible while actors or athletes are not though Strongly disagree with this, and I'm in 'tech management' now so I'm not saying this out of self-preservation. Tech workers are similar to athletes in skill disparity IMO. A handful of superstars makes a massive difference. Look at those superstar AI developers who are allegedly getting 8 or 9 figure compensation from Meta etc. They're still technica…

Those 8 and 9 figure employees are the exception that proves the rule, as I am talking about the vast majority of tech employees who largely fall within the middle of the normal curve. Athletes as well are far fewer in number and simply cost less overall (less than 2000 in the entire NFL).

> Those 8 and 9 figure employees are the exception that proves the rule

??? This doesn't make any sense. There's a hell of a lot more background actors, which you can call fungible, than there are Tom Cruises, but they're all covered by SAG-AFTRA. "Tech workers are fungible except for the ones that aren't" is tautological and doesn't support your argument.

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#146

Post by northern-lights »

nonethewiser wrote: post #95
bluefirebrand wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think on the contrary somewhat If everyone at a game developer goes on strike, there is basically no amount of outsourcing or scab labour that can replace them. This is actually probably true of basically all software Just refusing to share passwords into key systems would be enough to significantly halt any attempt to bring on an entirely new development team

Yes but what happens? The video game is not maintained or released. Society doesnt care that much. It's not critical and there are millions of alternatives.

What has unionizing and society caring have got to do with each other?

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#147

Post by satvikpendem »

mjr00 wrote: post #145
satvikpendem wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those 8 and 9 figure employees are the exception that proves the rule, as I am talking about the vast majority of tech employees who largely fall within the middle of the normal curve. Athletes as well are far fewer in number and simply cost less overall (less than 2000 in the entire NFL).

> Those 8 and 9 figure employees are the exception that proves the rule ??? This doesn't make any sense. There's a hell of a lot more background actors, which you can call fungible, than there are Tom Cruises, but they're all covered by SAG-AFTRA. "Tech workers are fungible except for the ones that aren't" is tautological and doesn't support your argument.

Sure it does. I'm talking about the majority of tech employees who are fungible while you for some reason are talking about the few that aren't, I'm not sure why they're relevant to this debate. I'm sure there are some very rich tradespeople but they have unions too for the regular worker. And as I said, it's more appropriate to treat tech unions like blue collar unions over specialized unions like actor or athlete ones. And if we do so, wages will be depressed.

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#148

Post by northern-lights »

perrohunter wrote: post #44

I think there are some professions where Unions make sense, like for Pilots and Teachers, as a 30 years of experience teacher can be replaced with a 2 years of experience teacher, so we need unions to protect the experienced Teacher or Pilot, but when it comes to what MTG Arena does, I dont see much value on the union existing, perhaps someone can provide some valuable insight

A union's objective is to protect and safeguard the interest of its members. As long as it does that, it adds value, regardless of what anyone else (especially those not in the union) thinks whether it has value.

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#149

Post by ryandrake »

michaelt wrote: post #128
ryandrake wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of HN repliers think that they , out of thousands of other employees, are that One Captain Of Industry that has sufficient bargaining and negotiating power to stand toe to toe with a huge employer. And therefore, a union could never help tech employees as a class.

A lot of the salary figures I see thrown around for tech employees in the US are pretty wild [1] - $200k, $400k total compensation without even getting 'Senior' in the job title. That's in a country with a median household income of $84k [2] I think it's understandable why someone would feel they were doing well at bargaining and negotiating if they were taking home 4.7x as much as their neighbours and loved ones. Fo…

Salary is only one of many workplace issues that organizing can help with. Those US tech people who make $400k, that's great for them! But how is their mental health / burnout? How good is their health insurance? Are they getting enough vacation time or time with their families? Are they regularly expected to work 12+ hour days? Do they have their weekends? Do they want to Work From Home but can't get it? What about permission to moonlight or work on side projects? Do they have satisfying autonomy at work or are they just churning through JIRA tickets?

Collective negotiation power can help with all of these, if we let it. It doesn't just stop at compensation.

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#150

Post by baconsunday »

lovich wrote: post #125
baconsunday wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that actually the case for the tech unions that actually exist, though? Historically, the people pushing for tech unionization were doing it for ideological reasons, not in response to the relatively recent layoffs, etc. and you can see this in their leadership. I have a pretty simple litmus test for them: are they opposed to H1B hiring, and would they have defended James Damore when he got ousted from Google for…

It sounds like you’re just as ideologically in your opposition if you’re bringing up James Damore. On opposing H1B as they are implemented now I agree with you, but in a hypothetical world with tech unions James Damore would still be advocating for large swathes of fellow union members to be removed. He was being misogynistic not “basically being autistic”.

I think that Damore was stupid for writing and posting it internally and disagree with portions of it, but almost all of the reactions I saw to his manifesto were to third-hand misrepresentations of it or willful misreadings of it. (e.g. him referring to population statistics on neuroticism being interpreted as him saying that his female coworkers were neurotic). I think your reply is the perfect example: he wasn't advocating for women to be 'removed', he was arguing that DEI efforts to try to get a 50/50 male/female balance are fundamentally misguided because not as many women want to work in tech as men.

But whether or not you agree with him, you should agree with the idea that one of the primary jobs of a union would have been to give him a fair defense regardless of whether the union leadership likes him or not. I don't think any of the tech unions would do that.

edit: Let me put it this way. Suppose you make an post in an internal politics discussion forum saying that you oppose the H1B program as it is, and then get fired because people claim that you hate immigrants and want your fellow coworkers to be deported. Do you think these unions would defend you?

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