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> Why it matters: Walkouts are a drastic measure for developers in a largely non-unionized field, a testament to just how angry employees currently are. It sen

> Why it matters: Walkouts are a drastic measure for developers in a largely non-unionized field, a testament to just how angry employees currently are. It sends a message, but I wouldn't say it's _that_ drastic considering the demand for developers and difficulty hiring in the Orange County area.

bagacrap 5y ago
Yeah I don't think Blizzard is going to be able to bring in scabs to replace software devs. This comment reveals how poorly the industry is understood by outsiders, or at least this one journo.
- dleslie 5y ago
  I don't think they'll introduce "scabs" simply because it would be a marketing _disaster_. However, I work in the industry, and I think you'd be shocked by how replaceable American developers are. Huge amounts of artistic labour _is_ done cheaply, and in relatively decent quality, oversees in countries like South Korea, China, Japan, and to a lesser extent, Thailand. Here in Canada, we have a thriving industry that includes both primary developers and developers who focus on outsourced work. Most of my career has been involved with shops that were sub-contracted labour from American studios.
  - void_mint 5y ago
    Also work in the industry (but in the US as an employee, not a subcontractor), totally opposite opinion. Outsourced labor is similar to Associate-level responsibilities. The reasons assholes don't get fired in the games industry is because experience and skill is so difficult to find.
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    Having worked with overseas contractors on a number of projects, I can say my personal experience is that the work product varies wildly in quality, shop to shop. I wouldn't say it's "relatively decent quality" in any universal or guaranteed sense. Not that American developers are necessarily more skilled, just that the lack of a culture and sometimes language barrier is pretty evident in the resulting work product, in my experience.
    - dleslie 5y ago
      Considering the popularity of Japanese-developed, Polish-developed, German-developed, and other foreign-developed games... I don't think sharing American culture matters much.
      - MAGZine 5y ago
        You've missed the point. The point is, cultural (and time differences, language differences, etc) differences slow down collaboration. it has nothing to do with specifically american (or german, or polish) culture. How many roles do you think to be outsourced by the polish or japanese? not a lot, which keeps them efficient. especially in creative endeavours, its best to keep things colocated.
        dleslie 5y ago
        Like I said, I work in the industry. I've worked on several projects with teams on more than one continent. The much-repeated "it'll slow down collaboration" is only a factor of how terrible your company's communication strategy was at the outset. If your company worked entirely verbally and contained little to no digital communication or memory, then you'll have a terrible time. 100% remote work makes intercontinental collaboration almost seamless. My current employer has teams on every continent, except Africa (so far), and we've been at it for over half a decade.
        TameAntelope 5y ago
        I cannot be more direct about this, it is not seamless, or even close to seamless, in general, to work across continents such as you describe. Maybe you've cracked a nut here, and we'd all benefit from your wisdom, experience, and stories, but that is not the experience most folks have working across continents or cultures.
        dleslie 5y ago
        It's been seamless for us for 5y. We did crack the nut: we stopped being ameri-centric, and we rejected the notion that productivity must be directly observed during the process to be measured. We rejected "core hours" and we rejected ephemeral vocal communication. If it's not on record it has no value to us. We have people working at all hours of the day. We have teams split across continents. We have team meetings, but we schedule them a week or more in advance, and even then they're optional. We make prodigious use of Miro, Basecamp, and other collaboration tools. We don't consider any collaboration "finished" so much as "in progress" and often a "meeting" could take course over days, as team members from around the world chime in. There has never been, and will never be, an office. It works great.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    To my mind, the hardest part of scabbing a game studio is picking up where dev teams left off. Game engines and pipelines are savage beasts, and often heavily customized and under-documented (everybody using them "just knows how they work;" internal cultural knowledge and on-the-job training are the standard operating procedure). You'll need a particular type of developer or artist to come up to speed quickly on the pipelines and toolchains studios in-house develop, even given the relative standardization of the Activision space.
    - dleslie 5y ago
      I've been a part of teams that were hired to "finish" certain major products, and I definitely agree with your perspective. We usually ended up ripping out much of the original development code because it was too brittle/broken/undocumented to bother continuing forward with. Rewriting from scratch was often faster and had more predictable results.
    - planet-and-halo 5y ago
      Someone on HN recently posted a Jonathan Blow talk, "How to Save Civilization," that argues the normal evolution of technology is not a linear progression upwards, but actually slow degradation due to loss of knowledge and maintenance. I think this is a perfect example of why.
      - dleslie 5y ago
        This is part of the advantage of the "Unix Philosophy": many small, easily understood processes that work in tandem to produce a complex outcome. Each individual process is less prone to knowledge decay. However, this is moot in gamedev. We throw everything away before starting the next project because we don't "own" the IP from the last project.
        shadowgovt 5y ago
        I also strongly suspect that game development slightly favors a monolithic approach because performance is key, and it's extremely hard to maintain maximum performance with thick abstractions. Inevitably, you find out you can do something faster if you stop making a function call or treat a binary representation in two different ways in two different places in the code and abstractions leak and break. Unless all the small processes are designed with a very firm pattern underpinning them that happens to be the correct pattern to maximize efficiency, you'll inevitably find a situation where two subsystems need intimate knowledge of how each other work to maximize performance.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    > Here in Canada, we have a thriving industry that includes both primary developers and developers who focus on outsourced work. Most of my career has been involved with shops that were sub-contracted labour from American studios. The situation in Canada is interesting: their own government heavily pitched the country as an outsourcing destination, boasting Canadians devs are worth 50k less than American ones. [0] Is that a popular measure? [0] https://globalnews.ca/news/4178326/amazon-vancouver-tech-workers-pay/ https://globalnews.ca/news/4178326/amazon-vancouver-tech-wor...
    - dleslie 5y ago
      I think most folks are unaware, really. What's more, here in BC the NDP (left-leaning labour party) stripped Tech Workers of the majority of their labour rights. Not even meal breaks were saved. https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/employment-standards-altered-for-high-tech-professionals/27938 https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/employment-standards-a...
      - 908B64B197 5y ago
        Interestingly, that party and the people in charge of the "tech policy" are all Indians aren't they? [0][1] It makes sense they would pitch offshoring and low cost for programming since they saw it working for their country. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagmeet_Singh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagmeet_Singh [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navdeep_Bains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navdeep_Bains
        Apocryphon 5y ago
        > Singh was born on January 2, 1979, in Scarborough district of Toronto, Ontario > Bains was born in Toronto, Ontario on June 16, 1977
        908B64B197 5y ago
        Not sure what's the point being made https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_nationality_law#Citizenship_by_Descent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_nationality_law#Citizen...
- wayne-li2 5y ago
  If devs aren’t unionized, there’s no such thing as scabs right? Blizzard can just terminate all the disgruntled employees and hire other devs, perhaps more desperate or entry level or morally ambiguous, whatever. Of course the institutional knowledge lost will be drastic.
  - vkou 5y ago
    It's difficult to understand how bloody stupid mass-firing of employees is, in order to protect a culture where a small minority harass and abuse others. It's also difficult to understand how a billion-dollar business gets to this point, with what seems like zero adult oversight, but it is what it is.
  - chimeracoder 5y ago
    > If devs aren’t unionized, there’s no such thing as scabs right? Blizzard can just terminate all the disgruntled employees and hire other devs, perhaps more desperate or entry level or morally ambiguous, whatever. Walkouts of this sort are considered protected activity under the NLRA, regardless of whether or not the people involved belong to a union.
  - MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
    What person in their right mind would go work for a company that just fired all it's staff for demanding better conditions?
    - edoceo 5y ago
      It may be a step up for many. What's a shit-job for you might be a step-upping stone for someone else, who's opportunity selection is more limited than your own.
    - munk-a 5y ago
      People in the QA department that are enduring the terrible conditions just for a shot at a game designer/programmer role. The video game industry has a real problem retaining talent because so many people glorify how "fun" working on video games must be. There are always replacements, but they aren't always good.
- Alupis 5y ago
  > Yeah I don't think Blizzard is going to be able to bring in scabs to replace software devs The game industry is overflowing with college educated, computer science degree wielding, software developers eager to work on a big game project. Few will ever touch Engine code - the rest are easily replaceable. This is part of the reason companies like this are able to get away with things that other industries aren't able to. Everyone wants to work on the next AAA title - few want to toil away making ads more clickable... So yes, they'll replace the walk-outs with "scabs" in short time, and move on. Not to mention - this is a tiny percentage of Blizzard employees - and seems to have morphed into a beef with the binding arbitration agreement - not better employment treatment. "As of Tuesday, signatures surpassed 2,600 current and former employees" - and later on the article states "A group of roughly 300 employees across Activision Blizzard". That's out of 9,500 employees at Activision - you can find 3% of any workplace that's outraged by anything. My guess... wait it out a couple months and everyone forgets this ever happened.
  - 0x500x79 5y ago
    The video game company I worked at was a disaster of spaghetti code that was written by engine developers/jack-of-all-trade developers with no semblance of caring about maintainability. Every milestone was a new disaster of tech debt that was built upon the foundation of previous tech debt. It was difficult to hire new grades or less experienced developers because the cost to train them in the custom frameworks, infrastructure, and other technologies was exceptionally high. It was terrible and there weren't a lot of excuses for it. My only point is that there are a lot of nuances to hiring from the talent pool.
    - postalrat 5y ago
      If it's so had to train in new people it sounds like you already have a spaghetti code problem. You might want to get an outsider to take a look at your custom frameworks, infrastructure, and other technologies to see what can be done to straighten that out.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- thereddaikon 5y ago
  I don't think any dev would have a hard time finding fresh out of school devs who are willing to be abused at the chance for a job at a big name in an over saturated industry. That's the sad truth about it. Too many people want to develop games for game developers to have much if any bargaining power. Dispelling notions of how cool or glamorous working in the industry is may help with that. Last year, or was it the year before? COVID messes with my perception of time, they had another big walkout over the events in Hong Kong and a big name gamer in one of Blizzard's tournaments refusing to tow the party line in regards to the CCP. I'm curious how many of the employees who walked out then are still around today and how many that are will also be walking out now. I think it would be very telling about a good many things. Did Blizzard sack them all for contributing to bad PR? Did they retain them but threaten them if they stepped out of line again? Or do they feel empowered and walk out both times?
MattGaiser 5y ago
Isn’t game dev overflowing with people? I’ve heard salaries for places like EA and people seem to make a lot less there than in comparable non game jobs.
- runlevel1 5y ago
  Good point. I hadn't considered that, and my experience hiring in the OC area was for a non-game SaaS company.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

bagacrap 5y ago

Yeah I don't think Blizzard is going to be able to bring in scabs to replace software devs. This comment reveals how poorly the industry is understood by outsiders, or at least this one journo.

dleslie 5y ago
I don't think they'll introduce "scabs" simply because it would be a marketing _disaster_. However, I work in the industry, and I think you'd be shocked by how replaceable American developers are. Huge amounts of artistic labour _is_ done cheaply, and in relatively decent quality, oversees in countries like South Korea, China, Japan, and to a lesser extent, Thailand. Here in Canada, we have a thriving industry that includes both primary developers and developers who focus on outsourced work. Most of my career has been involved with shops that were sub-contracted labour from American studios.
- void_mint 5y ago
  Also work in the industry (but in the US as an employee, not a subcontractor), totally opposite opinion. Outsourced labor is similar to Associate-level responsibilities. The reasons assholes don't get fired in the games industry is because experience and skill is so difficult to find.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  Having worked with overseas contractors on a number of projects, I can say my personal experience is that the work product varies wildly in quality, shop to shop. I wouldn't say it's "relatively decent quality" in any universal or guaranteed sense. Not that American developers are necessarily more skilled, just that the lack of a culture and sometimes language barrier is pretty evident in the resulting work product, in my experience.
  - dleslie 5y ago
    Considering the popularity of Japanese-developed, Polish-developed, German-developed, and other foreign-developed games... I don't think sharing American culture matters much.
    - MAGZine 5y ago
      You've missed the point. The point is, cultural (and time differences, language differences, etc) differences slow down collaboration. it has nothing to do with specifically american (or german, or polish) culture. How many roles do you think to be outsourced by the polish or japanese? not a lot, which keeps them efficient. especially in creative endeavours, its best to keep things colocated.
      - dleslie 5y ago
        Like I said, I work in the industry. I've worked on several projects with teams on more than one continent. The much-repeated "it'll slow down collaboration" is only a factor of how terrible your company's communication strategy was at the outset. If your company worked entirely verbally and contained little to no digital communication or memory, then you'll have a terrible time. 100% remote work makes intercontinental collaboration almost seamless. My current employer has teams on every continent, except Africa (so far), and we've been at it for over half a decade.
        TameAntelope 5y ago
        I cannot be more direct about this, it is not seamless, or even close to seamless, in general, to work across continents such as you describe. Maybe you've cracked a nut here, and we'd all benefit from your wisdom, experience, and stories, but that is not the experience most folks have working across continents or cultures.
        dleslie 5y ago
        It's been seamless for us for 5y. We did crack the nut: we stopped being ameri-centric, and we rejected the notion that productivity must be directly observed during the process to be measured. We rejected "core hours" and we rejected ephemeral vocal communication. If it's not on record it has no value to us. We have people working at all hours of the day. We have teams split across continents. We have team meetings, but we schedule them a week or more in advance, and even then they're optional. We make prodigious use of Miro, Basecamp, and other collaboration tools. We don't consider any collaboration "finished" so much as "in progress" and often a "meeting" could take course over days, as team members from around the world chime in. There has never been, and will never be, an office. It works great.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  To my mind, the hardest part of scabbing a game studio is picking up where dev teams left off. Game engines and pipelines are savage beasts, and often heavily customized and under-documented (everybody using them "just knows how they work;" internal cultural knowledge and on-the-job training are the standard operating procedure). You'll need a particular type of developer or artist to come up to speed quickly on the pipelines and toolchains studios in-house develop, even given the relative standardization of the Activision space.
  - dleslie 5y ago
    I've been a part of teams that were hired to "finish" certain major products, and I definitely agree with your perspective. We usually ended up ripping out much of the original development code because it was too brittle/broken/undocumented to bother continuing forward with. Rewriting from scratch was often faster and had more predictable results.
  - planet-and-halo 5y ago
    Someone on HN recently posted a Jonathan Blow talk, "How to Save Civilization," that argues the normal evolution of technology is not a linear progression upwards, but actually slow degradation due to loss of knowledge and maintenance. I think this is a perfect example of why.
    - dleslie 5y ago
      This is part of the advantage of the "Unix Philosophy": many small, easily understood processes that work in tandem to produce a complex outcome. Each individual process is less prone to knowledge decay. However, this is moot in gamedev. We throw everything away before starting the next project because we don't "own" the IP from the last project.
      - shadowgovt 5y ago
        I also strongly suspect that game development slightly favors a monolithic approach because performance is key, and it's extremely hard to maintain maximum performance with thick abstractions. Inevitably, you find out you can do something faster if you stop making a function call or treat a binary representation in two different ways in two different places in the code and abstractions leak and break. Unless all the small processes are designed with a very firm pattern underpinning them that happens to be the correct pattern to maximize efficiency, you'll inevitably find a situation where two subsystems need intimate knowledge of how each other work to maximize performance.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > Here in Canada, we have a thriving industry that includes both primary developers and developers who focus on outsourced work. Most of my career has been involved with shops that were sub-contracted labour from American studios. The situation in Canada is interesting: their own government heavily pitched the country as an outsourcing destination, boasting Canadians devs are worth 50k less than American ones. [0] Is that a popular measure? [0] https://globalnews.ca/news/4178326/amazon-vancouver-tech-workers-pay/ https://globalnews.ca/news/4178326/amazon-vancouver-tech-wor...
  - dleslie 5y ago
    I think most folks are unaware, really. What's more, here in BC the NDP (left-leaning labour party) stripped Tech Workers of the majority of their labour rights. Not even meal breaks were saved. https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/employment-standards-altered-for-high-tech-professionals/27938 https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/employment-standards-a...
    - 908B64B197 5y ago
      Interestingly, that party and the people in charge of the "tech policy" are all Indians aren't they? [0][1] It makes sense they would pitch offshoring and low cost for programming since they saw it working for their country. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagmeet_Singh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagmeet_Singh [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navdeep_Bains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navdeep_Bains
      - Apocryphon 5y ago
        > Singh was born on January 2, 1979, in Scarborough district of Toronto, Ontario > Bains was born in Toronto, Ontario on June 16, 1977
        908B64B197 5y ago
        Not sure what's the point being made https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_nationality_law#Citizenship_by_Descent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_nationality_law#Citizen...
wayne-li2 5y ago
If devs aren’t unionized, there’s no such thing as scabs right? Blizzard can just terminate all the disgruntled employees and hire other devs, perhaps more desperate or entry level or morally ambiguous, whatever. Of course the institutional knowledge lost will be drastic.
- vkou 5y ago
  It's difficult to understand how bloody stupid mass-firing of employees is, in order to protect a culture where a small minority harass and abuse others. It's also difficult to understand how a billion-dollar business gets to this point, with what seems like zero adult oversight, but it is what it is.
- chimeracoder 5y ago
  > If devs aren’t unionized, there’s no such thing as scabs right? Blizzard can just terminate all the disgruntled employees and hire other devs, perhaps more desperate or entry level or morally ambiguous, whatever. Walkouts of this sort are considered protected activity under the NLRA, regardless of whether or not the people involved belong to a union.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  What person in their right mind would go work for a company that just fired all it's staff for demanding better conditions?
  - edoceo 5y ago
    It may be a step up for many. What's a shit-job for you might be a step-upping stone for someone else, who's opportunity selection is more limited than your own.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    People in the QA department that are enduring the terrible conditions just for a shot at a game designer/programmer role. The video game industry has a real problem retaining talent because so many people glorify how "fun" working on video games must be. There are always replacements, but they aren't always good.
Alupis 5y ago
> Yeah I don't think Blizzard is going to be able to bring in scabs to replace software devs The game industry is overflowing with college educated, computer science degree wielding, software developers eager to work on a big game project. Few will ever touch Engine code - the rest are easily replaceable. This is part of the reason companies like this are able to get away with things that other industries aren't able to. Everyone wants to work on the next AAA title - few want to toil away making ads more clickable... So yes, they'll replace the walk-outs with "scabs" in short time, and move on. Not to mention - this is a tiny percentage of Blizzard employees - and seems to have morphed into a beef with the binding arbitration agreement - not better employment treatment. "As of Tuesday, signatures surpassed 2,600 current and former employees" - and later on the article states "A group of roughly 300 employees across Activision Blizzard". That's out of 9,500 employees at Activision - you can find 3% of any workplace that's outraged by anything. My guess... wait it out a couple months and everyone forgets this ever happened.
- 0x500x79 5y ago
  The video game company I worked at was a disaster of spaghetti code that was written by engine developers/jack-of-all-trade developers with no semblance of caring about maintainability. Every milestone was a new disaster of tech debt that was built upon the foundation of previous tech debt. It was difficult to hire new grades or less experienced developers because the cost to train them in the custom frameworks, infrastructure, and other technologies was exceptionally high. It was terrible and there weren't a lot of excuses for it. My only point is that there are a lot of nuances to hiring from the talent pool.
  - postalrat 5y ago
    If it's so had to train in new people it sounds like you already have a spaghetti code problem. You might want to get an outsider to take a look at your custom frameworks, infrastructure, and other technologies to see what can be done to straighten that out.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
thereddaikon 5y ago
I don't think any dev would have a hard time finding fresh out of school devs who are willing to be abused at the chance for a job at a big name in an over saturated industry. That's the sad truth about it. Too many people want to develop games for game developers to have much if any bargaining power. Dispelling notions of how cool or glamorous working in the industry is may help with that. Last year, or was it the year before? COVID messes with my perception of time, they had another big walkout over the events in Hong Kong and a big name gamer in one of Blizzard's tournaments refusing to tow the party line in regards to the CCP. I'm curious how many of the employees who walked out then are still around today and how many that are will also be walking out now. I think it would be very telling about a good many things. Did Blizzard sack them all for contributing to bad PR? Did they retain them but threaten them if they stepped out of line again? Or do they feel empowered and walk out both times?

MattGaiser 5y ago

Isn’t game dev overflowing with people? I’ve heard salaries for places like EA and people seem to make a lot less there than in comparable non game jobs.

runlevel1 5y ago
Good point. I hadn't considered that, and my experience hiring in the OC area was for a non-game SaaS company.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]