Cultural Perspective On The Activision/Blizzard News
2,326 words.
I’ve been trying to think about how to approach this particular story, and whether I should address it at all. It doesn’t really affect me personally, and it’s dangerously close to Expressing A Political Opinion On The Internet. Which is basically an invitation for the world to come over here and yell angrily because there is only one correct opinion on everything and conformity must be enforced at all costs. Because yelling at people is historically proven to be the best way to change their views. And thus Reddit was born. Ahem. Anyway.
The Blizzard Incident Du Jour has made me think a bit about how views on employment highlight major differences in culture around the world. And who doesn’t love jumping right into the middle of a Culture War, amirite?
Most of the time, I think of everyone on the Internet as equals, with generally similar lives and routines. That was the Great Hope Of The Internet when it first started. It showed us that those people way over there in that foreign place are basically just like us. (Then the 90s ended and Utopia died, but that’s another subject.)
In the 80s, my generation started to learn from our music that the Soviets were real people with real lives, not just the faceless, godless communists portrayed by politicians and movies. Then in the 90s, Usenet and the Internet proved the reality of the Soviet people and the entire rest of the world by letting us talk directly with each other right from our homes. We learned that as people, most humans aren’t that different from one another.
But occasionally the Internet reveals to us that people in different countries and cultures, raised in different ways, are *very* different. It turns out that people tend to live in different countries for good reasons. People around the world have different ideas about how to live and work and structure their existences, and sometimes they aren’t compatible with others.
That brings me to the Activision/Blizzard news that 800 employees were laid off, almost 10% of the workforce, if we’re to believe the size of the company on their “About Us” web site page. The reactions I’ve seen to this news around the world have generally made me feel like other countries or even states within the U.S. contain alien species with no common ancestors to mine whatsoever.
I’m not saying I’m glad Blizzard laid off 800 employees. I hope they find new work quickly. I’m just a very pragmatic person, and from my cultural background, I don’t see firing people as a personal attack on basic civic freedoms.
I have no understanding of why people might think it’s immoral or even illegal for employers to fire employees. I’ve never been taught at any age that I have a basic human right to work where I want and get paid. I was taught that you only get an allowance from your parents when you’re a kid, if you’re lucky. I’ve always had an understanding that I need to be reasonably good at some skill or another to get paid in the adult world, and it’s my responsibility to “git gud” at those skills before I have any value to an employer. Otherwise the employer will probably find someone else to do the job. It seems as normal to me as driving on the right side of the road or reading the temperature in Fahrenheit.
I’m also an older member of Gen-X, which I believe is the first generation that has no expectation of working their whole career at one place and then retiring to live off of a pension, like our parents did at the factory after the war or whatever. I’ve always understood that even if I *did* get a job somewhere, there’s no guarantee that I’d be working there next year or next month or even next week. Decades of adult working experience has only verified this. My own life experience and observations of the world around me (watching business after business in my local areas close down, move, or get replaced) have taught me that, every day, one should be planning for losing their job, or else they’re living at risk of disaster. This is just part of “being an adult” for me.
I’m not saying it’s easy. It’s hard. Really, really hard. Especially for people like me who aren’t exactly extroverts who can schmooze their way into any job at any time.
Now admittedly my trajectory into the adult workforce was very unusual. I started out doing contract Amiga programming work. The first thing I made money from was writing a program, putting it on floppy disks, printing a manual, and carrying it to a local user group meeting to sell for $10 each or something. Later I formed a company with two others to write and sell Amiga software. I worked from home for most of my 20s. We started with a publisher, then took over publishing ourselves, then everything fell apart. I was let’s say dismissed from my own company, for reasons that still don’t make a whole lot of sense to me. I got a “real job” doing something I hated in my 30s, because I was broke and couldn’t pay my mortgage and was running out of audio gear to sell. I was laid off because that little company didn’t have enough money to pay me anymore. I was kind of glad. I got another job as a Visual Basic developer at a small company. It was lucky, because I mostly fudged my way through the Visual Basic programming test, never having used VB before, but I hated that place. Everyone there did, actually. A headhunter found me a “contract-to-hire” sort of job doing C# development at a federal contractor, when .NET was new. That was lucky, too. Their hiring standards weren’t that strict, because they had money to burn. But I demonstrated my worth and stayed in federal contracting into my 40s, switching companies and titles repeatedly. It was a good gig. Contractors are usually paid well. But I stayed too long, unfortunately, because my programming skills got rusty. It’s easy to get complacent in government work. “Innovation” is not the motto there, it’s “mediocrity for stability.”
That was sort of a rambling sidetrack. The point is, I never felt like I was “owed” a job. I never felt like anyone else besides me was responsible for filling up my bank account.
Now don’t get me wrong, I would *love* to just sit in my house doing whatever I wanted while free money poured in so I could buy stuff and have fun. I would snap that up in a heartbeat. Normally people dream of that life in “retirement years.” But I can’t even imagine *planning* and *expecting* that to happen anywhere in the U.S. before old age (now I can’t imagine planning on a retirement at all). Yet for reasons I can’t comprehend, that seems to be exactly what a growing number of people expect. They expect to be taken care of. There’s even a term for it: “Basic income.” I’d never even heard of such a concept until about a year ago. Before that, I think it was called, “marrying a rich person.” (*rimshot!*)
This is why I’m utterly baffled at all of this outrage over Activision/Blizzard firing 800 employees. It sucks for those people who lost their jobs, and I really hope they get new jobs quickly, but it doesn’t sound “out-of-the-ordinary” to me at all. It doesn’t sound vindictive, or immoral. It sounds like a normal part of everyday adult life.
Reactions around the Internet seem to indicate it sounds otherwise to people from other countries. To put it mildly. Around the world it seems like it’s viewed as a human rights crisis, as if the people who were fired are helpless penguins rolling around in an oil slick, unable to feed themselves anymore. Those poor defenseless innocent employees, little more than toddlers really, who apparently can’t survive without the safety and comfort of a mighty Big Brother to watch over them. I just can’t wrap my mind around that attitude. (There *are* people who need to be taken care of, don’t get me wrong… but I don’t understand why anyone thinks they work at Activision/Blizzard.)
I was particularly baffled and actually a bit alarmed when I saw some talk on Twitter drawing a moral and legal comparison between Activision/Blizzard firing employees and turn-of-the-last-century child labor laws. I don’t get how anyone thinks getting fired from a cubicle job at Blizzard has any equivalence to kids being exploited in coal mines. In one case there’s a moral imperative for government intervention and/or unionization, in the other, there isn’t.
I can understand government stepping in to regulate hiring and firing practices based on socioeconomic factors like class, race, and gender. That makes sense to me. It has a clear societal benefit, particularly in a democratic country allegedly built on protecting the rights of the weak. But regulating how a business does or doesn’t spend its money in salaries rubs the wrong way. That sounds pretty intrusive.
Now the other collective outrage here seems to center around how much the CEO of Activision/Blizzard makes compared to the salaries of those 800 employees who lost their jobs. I agree it’s pretty obscene how much of a disparity there is between the salaries of CEOs and workers. I don’t particularly care for it. I’d happily take some of that money. But it doesn’t trouble me as I go about my daily life, because how much any CEO makes in any company anywhere has no effect on my own personal earning power or daily life. The money that goes to pay CEOs is a different pile from the money that goes to pay salaries, due to budgets and departments and all manner of economic and accounting chicanery that is far beyond my understanding.
I feel like there’s a worldwide collective misunderstanding of how money works in the year 2019. There seems to be a general belief that governments and businesses operate their finances the same way that we operate our wallets or checkbooks. It’s a common refrain in politics. “I can balance my checkbook, why can’t the government balance the budget?!?” But those two things are entirely different. One is keeping track of one number in one account, the other is keeping track of a billion numbers in a billion accounts.
In Blizzard’s case, the refrain is, “Why can’t they just deduct money from the CEO’s paycheck to pay the salaries of those 800 employees?!? There can’t be any other reason except they’re monsters, and that CEO is a monster!”
Well, maybe. Maybe they are, and maybe he or she is. I have no idea. I don’t even know who the CEO of Activision/Blizzard is. But as I said, I’m a fairly pragmatic person. What I *do* know is that the pool of money that pays CEOs is probably different from the pool of money that pays salaries. And the CEO might be paid in stocks or gold bullion or jets or god-knows-what-else. And there are probably a thousand strategic business decisions behind the scenes that we don’t even know about. Not to mention all the stock implications that are way beyond my meager comprehension. You might think that Blizzard’s main job is is to make Warcraft-based games for you, the gamer, to enjoy. But the reality is their primary objective is to make money for investors and shareholders. If they don’t do that, they go out of business, and they probably break some laws, too, because there are a lot of laws regulating public companies.
Pragmatically speaking, I would think those 800 fired people would have little trouble getting new jobs, because putting Activision/Blizzard on their resume is probably a huge boon in the games industry. Not to mention the job placement help Activision/Blizzard is offering, something that very few other games companies would be large enough to do.
I would hope those 800 people learn from this and get jobs outside the games industry though. I’ve said this before, since the 1990s in fact, but nobody should ever work in the games industry for job security. The games industry is for people who enjoy risk (aka. entrepreneurs), people who have savings, or people who have secondary household incomes. Balancing risk and reward is also a concept that is taught us here in the U.S., not necessarily by schools, but by our parents and our culture, through simple observation of everyday life.
There *is* something consumers can do to influence these game companies, by the way: If it’s agreed that the problem is U.S. employment laws which allow companies to fire employees, then stop buying games made by U.S. companies with U.S. employees. Games are made in other countries. There are a lot of international gamers. Only buy games made in countries with employment laws that you agree with. People always seem to think they are powerless in the face of these big, evil corporations, forcing them to buy these completely unnecessary luxury items by telling us how cool they are. But stop buying from them and see what happens. Ask Best Buy or Sears or Barnes and Noble. It won’t be a slow demise, either, because companies tend to live on a bubble that could burst any time creditors get nervous. Trion disappeared pretty fast. Ask Daybreak how much they are enjoying everyone spending their money on Fortnite instead of H1Z1.
Incidentally, there *is* a place one can work in the U.S. if one wants to be completely protected from getting fired: It’s called “the government.” Government employees at the state and federal level enjoy unbelievable (to me) amounts of protections and benefits. Assuming, you know, nobody decides to shut down the government. But that only happens now, ahem, you know, maybe once or twice a year, tops.
Archived Comments
Asmiroth 2019-02-14T16:19:00Z
I am reminded of Plato’s allegory of the cave. For those not familiar:
Imagine a bunch of people chained inside a cave, and they are all facing a wall. There’s a fire that casts shadows on that wall, but the people chained cannot see what is causing it, only the shadows. They spend their entire life looking at that wall. One day, one person escapes the chains and turns around to see the source. They are amazed and want to share that amazement with the other chained people. But there’s no way for them to communicate what they saw, as there’s no frame of reference that they can possibly share, and they are mostly content with shadows.
It is extremely difficult for people with wildly different social (and national) views to find common ground. In this case, it isn’t about having a right to a job, it’s having a right to be treated as a human being and the impacts of losing a job. People would still be laid off, but it’s would be a decision made with the employees (union) so that a) less people need to go b) the company can still operate with efficiency, and c) the packages for job loss don’t make people destitute.
In this case, there are certainly people upset that with record profits it still needs to cut 800 people. But people can certainly agree that Blizz needs to put more effort into development rather than PR work. The question then becomes where does Blizz need to make changes specifically, and for those impacted, what options are there to ensure that they can continue to function as members of society.
I read a recent note on this that the general lack of labor laws in the US allowed for the IT burst in silicon valley. Startups everywhere. While in the EU, this just doesn’t happen, because the labor laws to hire/fire people are much more strict. The tradeoff is that in the US some people can become ultra rich with minimal effort (e.g. facebook, twitter, etc…) but others are left taking crumbs. In the EU the disparity in incomes is much smaller, and the average quality of life is much higher. People are certainly allowed to pick the model they want.
Wilhelm Arcturus 2019-02-14T16:23:39Z
Context matters. If Activision had come out and said that they had done poorly in 2018 and that they needed to cut jobs to keep the ship afloat, that would be regrettable but understandable. I don’t think anybody is saying you shouldn’t lay people off. It happens all the time.
The collective outrage was sparked by the fact that Activision announced that 2018 was their most profitable year EVER. And, by the way, we have to lay off 8% of our workforce. It was a very naked display of the rich getting richer… the stock grants that exec staff get got more valuable as the stock price went up… while the people who do the day to day work took the hit.
It paints the picture that the real product of Activision, the one the executive staff and board of directors cares about, is the stock price. It is a classic fixation on a measurement or metric that does not really say much about the company or what it is about. They’ll spend more on stock buy backs than they will save on salaries in 2019.
And fine, we see again what the company is about. Blizzard was somewhat immune over the years, so long as they were increasing revenue every year. But now they’re not, and they’re going to get trimmed back and brought into line until they do, in the same way that EA deals with the studios it owns. Reality sucks. But don’t expect people to like it, especially when a company is so brazen in displaying it.
UltrViolet 2019-02-14T18:33:40Z I’ll grant it’s a huge PR mistake, I probably forgot to mention that, but what I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around is the perception that it’s a legal or even a moral/ethical mistake. (Barring future information of course.)
UltrViolet 2019-02-14T18:37:49Z By the way I didn’t mean to imply the big business rich-get-richer system is fantastic, just that it’s what I’m used to, and I’ve developed a lifetime of strategies to protect myself from being exploited too much by it.
UltrViolet 2019-02-14T18:47:25Z This is a great example of a viewpoint being both fascinating and baffling at the same time. “People would still be laid off, but it’s would be a decision made with the employees (union) so that a) less people need to go b) the company can still operate with efficiency, and c) the packages for job loss don’t make people destitute.” I’m trying to figure out how that system is mutually beneficial, but it looks to me like it’s only beneficial for the employee side of the equation. Where’s the incentive to become an employer?
bhagpuss 2019-02-14T19:09:24Z
The Plato’s cave analogy (also used by C.S. Lewis in a religious context towards the end of The last Battle) is apposite. The system you are familiar with is not inherently “right” or “natural”. It’s just a system, one that you’re inside. None of the ways that money or capital work are physical laws. They are agreed constructs or the corallaries thereof. Economists of different persuasions like to talk about economics as though it was physics but it’s not.
A more interesting way of looking at it might be how would you prefer things to be? In living memory, in many parts of the world including parts of your own country, it was reasonable to expect a job to last you all your life if you wanted it to and it was reasonable to expect that you would only be dismissed from it if you committed some wilful act contrary to commitments you had made to do otherwise. That’s not fantasy - it’s history.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, people who remember what that was like and people for whom it’s still like that now see it as something to be desired - and fought for if necessary. That those options are no longer standard is not, by and large, due to an informed and intentional change of opinion by those who used to or would have received them. Those options have been systematically removed by a different group of people in whose direct interest that removal acts.
If you’re part of that latter group, fine. If not, then espousing those changes is like the traditional turkey voting for Christmas - except no-one’s offering these turkeys a vote.
Also, just as an aside, you were flirting dangerously close to quoting Sting above, weren’t you? There’s never any excuse for doing that!
Asmiroth 2019-02-14T20:04:35Z
I’m equally baffled that you would think that only 1 side of any decision should actually have a voice. That is not how any relationship works.
In terms of benefits, the #1 is loyalty, which is an insanely large factor when it comes to overall productivity of not only the individual but the group (as you don’t need to hire/train replacements and they motivate others). Blizz was a company that was viewed as being a fun/great place to work, with a lot of creative freedom. That has eroded over the years, and with this action, shown that it has no interest in that model. It is going to be a challenge for them to hire people wil drive, as they will have zero loyalty shown to a company that doesn’t return it.
Second is accurate cuts. Management is notoriously under-equipped to find the right spots to make changes as unless they are directly in that service line, they don’t see the repercussions. They will simply look at the budget, find those with a bad ROI, and cut away. Cuts like that hobble productivity for a very long time. I’ve also seen targeted cuts, where select roles are cut, and the system either improves (as they were not providing value), stays the same (as the workload can be mostly transferred), or the loss of productivity is minimized. The goal here is not the number of cuts, the goal is to reduce waste which therefore increases returns.
Shintar 2019-02-14T22:33:11Z “Normal” in the sense of common doesn’t equal desirable or ethical. The reason this has caused a bigger public outcry than usual is that a) it affects gamers, and these are the same people who voted EA worst company in America several years in a row just because they weren’t happy with their games, and b) it’s a particularly egregious example of just how bad capitalism can get. If making record profits is somehow disappointing and a reason to cut costs, just because the shareholders wanted even more money, where does it ever end? If even being wildly successful at what you do isn’t enough to earn you a stable income, what are you supposed to do? It’s not inevitable that a small number of super rich people mess with the lives of the less fortunate, and I think people are right to question that.
Wilhelm Arcturus 2019-02-14T23:09:11Z
It is iffy to make blanket statements about these sorts of things. It is great to look at Germany, where management, unions, and the government cooperate. The unemployment rate is a mere 3.4% currently, lower than ever the 4.0% number in the US. German companies literally have to build factories in Poland and the Czech Republic (and the US) just to find enough workers. But when it comes to income disparity, Germany is not far behind the US. Sweden and the UK are up there too. In fact, there seems to be something of a correlation between income disparity and low unemployment at the moment. Do you want equity or a job? I don’t like that choice, but it seems to be the case.
Other parts of the EU are less enticing. At the height of the 2008 recession both France and the US had unemployment rates around 10%. Now the US is at 4% and France is still up above 9%, while Spain, Italy, and Greece are even worse. An unemployment rate that high would be viewed as a national crisis in the US. In France it is just the norm. It has been that high for most of the last 20 years. That situation happens to line up with places where it is legally onerous to fire people. Employers are reluctant to hire in those situations. That’s the trade off you get.
I’m angry about the general state of affairs in the US, where the two alleged parties are just opposite sides of the same coin that together conspire to keep out anybody who doesn’t sell themselves to one or the other and the monied interests which they represent. The system is always rigged to maintain the status quo. But I read the news from the EU and I am not sure I’d trade systems either. Given how I understand power to work, I am not sure the systems are all that different in any case.
UltrViolet 2019-02-15T13:07:29Z Ha! Yeah I was thinking of Sting and also I think I remember a Billy Joel song or two. I think I saw a Billy Joel concert in Russia on HBO, one of the first people who did that maybe? Also there was an Elton John song as I recall. Probably a lot more.
UltrViolet 2019-02-15T13:19:59Z I agree it’s pretty obscene, but as to “where does it end” the pragmatic answer is usually the standard cliche of “the market will correct.” There’s often a tipping point when business goes too far and public outcry gets too loud to ignore. The outrage will drive customers and investors away from Blizzard, their stock will plummet, and the greedy CEOs will probably lose their jobs. (And yeah admittedly probably just move to another CEO position at a smaller company to continue their safe, comfortable lives.)
UltrViolet 2019-02-15T13:21:08Z Hrm I see my comment thread depth isn’t high enough. Oh well. Good comments everyone. :)
Telwyn 2019-02-19T13:45:38Z
As a Brit who has spent most of the last 20 years working with Europeans from all over, I have always found the US job market/mindset baffling. Why anyone would work so many hours with so few benefits and not hit the streets with pitchforks is beyond me (no offence intended). The disparity in paid leave alone is enough to have postponed indefinitely earlier plans to move to North America. I follow the Sys Admin Reddit a lot and there are frequently posts there that starkly highlight the differences in viewpoints - read the comments on any thread about being fired or giving notice and the US vs EU differences will be apparent (it’s the norm here to give or be given 1 month or even 3 months written notice).
That said I think the UK is now creeping rapidly towards the US model of things. Having 28 days paid-leave a year is only good if the company culture lets you take that leave without expecting you to be available for phone calls/emails, for example. In London the norm outside the public sector is to work long hours and be ‘always available’, I have strenuously avoided working anywhere like that but that decision has no-doubt cut off numerous opportunities to earn more. This also explains why I didn’t even try to go into the games industry when I moved to London, I even knew a few friends of friends working in it at the time, but stories of the lengthy crunches and mandatory overtime were enough of a turn-off. I love playing games enough that if I have no free time to actually play them then I’d rather stay outside of the industry looking in than be employed within it.
UltrViolet 2019-02-19T22:33:39Z Not everyone in the US works crazy long hours. Speaking in generalities of course but I’d argue it’s a choice made by naive employees under peer pressure, which many employers will happily take advantage of.
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