Today Electronic Arts announced another round of layoffs: 16% of its global workforce, or 1,500 jobs. My industry contacts obliquely mentioned that layoffs were happening when I visited last month, but I figured that industry gossip is for beers at lunch, not public blogs

The figures are a little deceptive: EA likes to fire while hiring for some reason, and there’s a saying that the best way to get a raise at EA is to quit and then re-apply for your own job, so I’m wondering if that’s 1,500 jobs net or gross.

I’m taking a guess here: First, EA Canada is going to be hit pretty harshly because our strong dollar makes outsourcing cost the same as hiring Americans, and employment law in America is far more favorable towards companies (they’re allowed to randomly drug test the meat in their cubefarms, to take one example). Given the diminishing financial incentive to keep Canadians at work they’ll probably revert to standard American international provincialism.

If that turns out to be true, I wonder if EA thinks the change will be long-term enough to move Burnaby to a structurally-lower level of employment? I’ve heard rumors they’re begging for tax concessions from the government, but then they always do that — who knows if this time it’s critical?

Second, I’m guessing that relatively few of the people who are the root cause of EA’s cultural inefficiency and psychotically-high performance expectations — management — will actually get fired. They will probably use the “belt tightening” to tout a campaign of “corporate efficiency”, asking still fewer people to work still harder. It won’t take much pushing: Just drop hints that the hardest workers might not get fired and watch workaholic Darwinism do its thing.

EA is run with a kind of alchemic parasitism. Management puts the best artists and programmers they can find in a tightly-scheduled crucible and slowly ratchets up competitive heat and deadline pressure, attempting to burn out impurities like emotions, camaraderie, and a desire for sleep. They’re trying to create a game developer golem. They want one chrysaloid superdev dancing frenetically at the heart of the managerial cocoon around the desiccated husks of digested studios; a multi-limbed, multi-headed avatar of Brahma’s generative force consuming raw caffeine and regurgitating it silken to spin more and more games faster and faster; a hypermanic, hypercreative, autistic point-entity that violates the thermodynamic laws of Human Resources.

“If we could just run this business without the dirty friction of actual people,” they say, “we could show Wall Street some real shareholder efficiencies…”