So we have seen a lot of companies that were gung-ho on remote work suddenly deciding they needed to see their staff toiling in the data mines in person and not at home, and Activision Blizzard is on that list. I won’t say I was laid off a year back because there was no office for me to return to… I was laid off because I was old, as explicitly noted in my severance package, which required me to sign away any right to sue or be a witness against the company if I want to collect that package… but being far from the corporate flag pole certainly didn’t help my situation. However, no panacea lasts forever and we all know some managers who feel they have to keep a close eye on their team lest they slack off on the company time (the joke is on them as “looking busy” in a tech job is remarkably easy), and these types seemed to be ascendant in recent months.
(Due to Covid worries we were all assigned days and times to show up, and the people immediately after my time slot were told to stay home due to the fires. I worked in a satellite office for a mid-western company that had its lease due in September of 2020 and the company opted not to renew it, forcing all of us to convoy through the falling ash of the uncontrolled forest fire just a few miles from our building to collect our stuff and cart it home so they didn’t have to pay one more day’s rent than they had to. (Literally the case for my boss in 2020.) A lot of companies thought they had found a magic bullet for facility costs there is no need to rent all that office space if you can make people do the job from their kitchen table.
This immediately leaked to the press and I woke up Friday morning to find Game Developer spilling the tea on the failed pep talk where leadership, despite having pre-screened and prepared for the questions they would be asked… they learned from the Diablo Immortal 2018 BlizzCon affair I guess… managed to simply sow more discord.Ĭhief among the issues being discussed was the return to the office plan.Īh, remember the heady days of mid-2020 when Covid sent us all home and companies discovered that not only did this not kill employee productivity, it increased it in many cases. One time Co-Leader of Blizzard and now President of the organization, Mike Ybarra, held a company-wide Q&A to address issues and employee satisfaction problems and came away having made everything worse. Slip off the top of the charts and people start noticing the blemishes.Īnyway, back to Blizzard’s dirty laundry being aired once again.
Earning about a billion dollars a year buys a lot of looking the other way. Actual footage of Mike Ybarra practicing for this Q&AĪnd, of course, we know now that Blizzard was just very good at hiding its internal issues behind the facade of World of Warcraft for a long time.
0 kommentar(er)
