Broken Toys

@geldonyetich
don’t pick on the cognitively challenged

I come from a family of educators. Thus, in confronting one not particularly good at learning, I believe persistence may produce results.

But, to try to reroute things back to the topic at hand, corporate America is generally a muddled mess that needs to stop devaluing talent and instead putting it to work on something other than desperate flights of fancy.

Yeesh, lousy timing. For what it’s worth, we’re looking to fill a few positions, so if any of you are keeping an eye out for work as a result, say hello.

I don’t see how the recession is to blame for Warhammer being terrible. Barack Obama, nor George W Bush himself, did not cause Mythic to have to invent a new unit of time measurement to compensate for how unresponsive their game was to player input. How long is it going to be before people realize that Warhammer was fundamentally flawed to the core and that’s why it failed, and why Mythic has to be ‘restructured?’

The UI was less responsive than VB apps I wrote on my 486 back when I first learned to program.

It is fascinating that given the current economic times are are living in people are still wondering why big companies let go of a good chunk of their staff and concentrate on the areas where there is potentially a shitload of money to be earned and that everything gets reviewed for profitability down to the last job.

What should EA do? Keep all their staff and continue as they did before? As sad as it is, and I say this as a subbed and enthusiastic WAR player, but some of the studios that got the axe now pay for the unmet expectations of their product. Or for the overhyped product that was not what it should have been, call it what you want.

It is a time of consolidation we live in and to think that the computer entertainment sector is not affected by it is downright stupid thinking.

This is the best time to *not* fire all your employees.

If you have the cash or cash flow, you transfer them to longer term projects so when we come out of the recession you are ready to hit the ground running while all the companies who slashed their budgets are facing a crises of aging infrastructure.

Of course, the real politik of the economic world is that if you are a public company, this is an impossible move, since your stock price will crash due to the concerns of short sighted investors and you’ll be raided for your cash and put out of business.

Strangely, the pro-capitalists think a system which forces companies to act in such inhumane and inefficient manner to be working-as-intended.

As was pointed out upthread, only stock holders seem to buy the illusion that a $130 million restructuring fee to save $100 million a year is a good idea. The rest of us know that that supposed yearly saving will not show up on future balance books.

@Muckbeast: That’s amusing, because in some industries, being part of a big company give you *more* job security, not less. But on the other hand, big companies can percolate even greater asshats to their top positions.

It still exists, it’s just not as common…

What industries are those, Guy? I noticed in December every single big company took their turn to summarily fire 10% of their staff. Funny how all these organizations had the exact same amount of fat to trim, no? Certainly not a case that panicked stock holders were demanding CEOs prove that they were “cutting back” and 10% being a nice round number to pass onto underlings as the proper amount to fire.

Muckbeast has it right. You either work for a big company that won’t go out of business, but will fire you for no reason one day, or work for a small company that may go out of business for no reason some day, but at least won’t fire you on a whim.

“Unless there exists jobs where your employer is contractually obligated not to fire you, I remain skeptical.”

Or a job where demand for employees is vastly larger than supply due to government regulations mandating qualifications

You define job security as your employer not being *able* to fire you? I don’t think that’s what job security used to mean when it was common. It just meant you could reliably make a lifetime career at one company. Although, come to think of it, unions would make it hard to lay people off, and unions used to be stronger, so there is that.

Interesting fact, though: in Germany, there *are* laws that make it less desirable to lay off workers, and encourages them to keep them on as part-time workers if they really need to save money. Companies in France are also far less likely to lay off workers. This has benefits to international divisions of certain European companies located in the US.

Industries where you are less likely to be fired due to the size of the organizations are typically industries that depend on large government contracts, such as aerospace, defense, and infrastructure. Infrastructure should do well now, since stimulus funding is easiest to justify for large government-funded infrastructure contracts, which are always useful (especially considering the US’s infrastructure, of any kind, be it roads, bridges, or electrical grids, are long overdue for overhauls). These fields are all far less volatile than, say, the gaming industry.

Certainly people change jobs a lot more these days. Since there is less job security now, there’s less incentive to stick with a company if it’s not that great for you. I’m not arguing things aren’t worse, all I’m saying is there is still job security to be found in certain areas/companies/countries/whatever. It’s not nonexistent, but it’s not all like short-term software cycle development, which is what the gaming software industry is. Get into something more bureaucratic, and things move a lot slower.

And certainly luck plays a large part.

Guy – not sure about the situation in Germany, but certainly in France all the laws restricting firing of staff have had an effect: companies are reluctant to hire people in the first place on anything other than short term contracts (which are exempt from said laws). Net result is that while older French workers have great job security, an awful lot of young people cannot get any kind of decent job at all, and this was a major cause of rioting a couple of years back.

Anglo-saxon model = moderate insecurity and suckage for everybody.
(continental) European model = good news for some and a royal screwing over for others.

Matter of personal preference which system you think is worse.

@Tremayne: I do prefer a more flexible system, as long as there is credible opportunity for retraining should an entire industry’s labour pool suddenly become outdated.

Germany has managed to avoid the increasing unemployment that has hit the US, despite also being hit by the economic crisis, in part thanks to its pro-employment laws.

I’m well aware of the downsides in the French model, not just to those who get screwed by it, but also to the quality of the service provided by people who can’t be punished, or by the inflexibility of people who don’t want to cross lines at their employer that, being a life job, will screw them forever. (See, it’s even bad for those with lifetime jobs, and their customers… although less so than for those without good jobs.)

I actually did try to find some civil service work not too long ago.

You know how they used to have a civil service exam you take to determine placement?

They replaced it with a monster.com-like job board.

It’s a pretty handy method to ignore the majority of their applicants.