I have a friend who was part of their 1900 layoff shortly after acquiring Blizzard in 2024. Basically, brought into a meeting and then no more job.
She learned last week that every single person who remained in her former group except one had been laid off in this last round. We’re talking about people who had been with Blizzard for years and years and had been happy with their jobs and loved even playing the games that they were making. Just poof! Gone.
The layoffs have been asinine enough, but the completely tone-deaf response from one of their leaders saying “use AI to help with the trauma of job loss” has just been the icing on the cake.
- one of their leaders saying “use AI to help with the trauma of job loss”
  no way
  
  https://aftermath.site/xbox-microsoft-layoffs-ai-prompt-chatgpt-matt
  
  The message was probably in poor taste but i fell like people though he meant use it as a therapist, but he just said use it to improve resume, or reach out to network. so basically a proofreader to reduce the amount of work you have to do.
The morale there must be awful.
- My current company recently had a huge round of layoffs. When I asked what leadership planned to do about the hit to morale, we were told we need to ask ourselves whether we really want to be here. I just tendered my two weeks' notice.
  
  I swear, such stories seem as if all these bosses really expected to become some sort of Soviet directors. There's no way they can expect this shit to work in a market economy.
  Maybe they really believe into that "replace everyone with AI" thing.
  Then we'll see evolution at work.
  I don't know why I feel that urge to compare what happens with western societies today to USSR. Probably has similarities with the moment when Soviet space dream found its' model's ceiling of capability.
  
  How will you address the hit to morale?
  "By making it worse!"
In the early 2000s I had a manager who hardly ever gave me anything to do. Like in 6 months I did maybe 3 weeks work. And it's not like I never asked. I was already fairly disgruntled and had other reasons, but it led to me leaving the company for a job at a cancer research center. The problem with not doing anything at MS is that unless you can hide it somehow your review comes up and you have nothing to show for the year, you're kind of screwed. So after a relaxing 6 months it was a good time to jump ship. Anyway, a couple years later I read MS was laying off like 600 people - which might have been their first layoffs ever, I dunno. It was supposed to clear out "deadwood" - so I checked after another couple months and found out my old manager was still there! So much for "clearing out deadwood" lol.
Capitalism fanatics will say with great conviction that business has to be efficient because of competition, while government is inherently inefficient because it has no competition. There's a little truth there, but the complete truth is that business is as inefficient as it can afford to be. The more money a company has, the more inefficiency they can absorb. In my mind that's one good reason not to allow these gigantic mergers of mega-billion-dollar corporations. Huge entities with tons of money can be inefficient and sloppy as hell for a long, long time before they fail.
- Incredibly well said. And couldn't agree more!
  Especially after working as a game dev for Apple Arcade. We spent months proving to them their saving architecture was faulty and would lead to people losing their save file for each Apple Arcade game they play.
  We were ignored, and then told it was a dev problem.
  Cut to the launch of Arcade: every single game has several 1 star reviews about players losing their save files.
  This cannot be fixed by devs as it's an Apple problem, so devs have to figure out novel ways to prevent the issue from happening using their own time and resources.
  1.5 years later, Apple finishes restructuring the entire backend of Arcade, fixing the problem. They tell all their devs to reimplement the saving architecture of their games to be compliant with Apples new backend or get booted from Arcade. This costs devs months of time to complete for literally zero return (Apple Arcade deals are upfront - little to no revenue is seen after launch).
  Apple used their trillions of dollars to ignore a massive backend issue that affected every player and developer on Apple Arcade. They then forced every dev to make an update to their game at their own expense just to keep it listed on Arcade. All while directing user frustration over the issue towards developers instead of taking accountability for launching a faulty product.
  Literally, these companies are run by sociopaths that have egos bigger than their paychecks. Issues like this are ignored as it's easier to place the blame on someone down the line. People like your manager end up getting promoted to the top of an office heirachy of bullshit, and everything the company makes just gets worse until whatever corpse is left is sold for parts to whatever bigger dumb company hasn't collapsed yet.
  It's really painful to watch, and even more painful to work with these idiots.
You know what the hilarious part is? They are ending support for Win 10 in October which essentially means that the OS will no longer receive security updates. But judging by this blind adoption of AI and the extreme loss of talent at Microsoft, I'm not sure their security will really be worth anything in a couple of years.
I think it may be for the best that I'm using this impetus to migrate to Linux.
MSFT is about as evil and shitty as a corpo can get. Helps that their products are terrible and anti-user. Anyway I hope everyone who gets laid off repents and uses their knowledge to harm the corpo.
Article about how MSFT is increasingly turning to fascism
- I don't think it's reasonable to work for them in day and age and claim you know nothing of their wrong-doing.
  Even if you're working a menial job you're still turning a profit for one of the most evil corporations in the world. "Just following orders." or "Just paying bills." doesn't cut it.
  
  i totally agree and i know a lot of people working for terrible companies whom i should give a lot more shit

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