If you want to keep your job, hide your humanity.

Don’t open your eyes — you won’t like what you see.
The devils of Truth steal the souls of the Free.
Don’t open your eyes, take it from me:
I have found,
You can find,
Happiness in Slavery.

Slave screams!
He spends his life learning conformity.
Slave screams!
He claims he has his own identity.
Slave screams!
He’s going to cause the system to fall.
Slave screams!
But he’s glad to be chained to that wall.

Don’t open your eyes — you won’t like what you see.
The Blind have been blessed with security.
Don’t open your eyes, take it from me:
I have found,
You can find,
Happiness in Slavery.

Employment is a collective action problem: That’s why unions rule.

EA fired most of the rest of Blackbox today, possibly over two hundred of my former friends and coworkers. They’d just finished Skate 2, according to the article.

Without going into legally-actionable specifics, game development generally ends with a period of “crunch” — overtime. Extreme cases of crunch are called “death marches”. What happens at the end of a real-life death march? Everyone gets terminated.

I won’t be playing the game. I’m sure the quality of Skate 2 reflects the quality of the work put in. Again without going into actionable specifics, I’m angry as a developer that they’d lay off a studio a week after shipping a game. That screams “expendable” too loudly at me, and is now added to the list of reasons we need industry-wide unions as exist in film.

The best point in the threads I’m reading so far: since studio management controls the budget and the studio was unprofitable, why didn’t they fire management? Answer: Capitalism.

Microsoft is letting people go as well so let’s look at them. They, at least, are still a profitable company — they just missed an estimate.

Now, I have no direct knowledge of the reality of Microsoft’s internals. Arguing by analogy and my background in business I’m assuming this is what happened:

1. Several analysts make worse than random growth-biased estimates of Microsoft’s performance.
2. Microsoft management, which has been promoted to the level of its incompetence, assumes the analysts know their business better than they do.
3. Since firing people is, as taught in business school, the easiest and fastest way to cut expenses management fires five thousand employees.
4. This improves the number the analysts (and, in theory, stockholders) judge management by — revenues less expenses.
5. With fewer employees the company’s revenues drop, but sales occur more or less randomly so the boss can blame variance (or lower IT spending). Management’s mistakes vanish in a puff of self-serving platitudes about belt-tightening. “We’re made some painful cuts, but now we’re leaner and meaner — ready for the estimates of a new day.”

Yes, that strategy is straight out of a bad South Park Internet meme:

1) Fire employees.
2) ????
3) Profit!

I also suspect it’s true. Thanks, capitalism.