7 ms·

EA Lays Off over 200 Apex Legends Testers over Zoom Call

55 points by yogthos 4y ago

wilg 4y ago
It's interesting that "over Zoom call" is presented as a negative here. Like it's better to haul everyone into the office and do it? Normally sites like this complain that work should be remote!
- metadat 4y ago
  "Over a mass zoom" is not particularly humane. In a better world, laying someone off would be done in a more caring and sensitive manner, because it's a huge and often unexpected change for the recipient. Human beings deserve better than being forced to attend their own mass slaughter. However, no matter what, someone will always be unhappy about the method. Which is probably why the axe people throw up their hands and just try to get it over with efficiently. Edit: "Over zoom" -> "Over a mass zoom", since this was apparently poorly worded and distracting. I wasn't proposing the ridiculous move of forcing a remote worker to fly to an office to get fired.
  - tracerbulletx 4y ago
    You'd think so but apparently these days the bar is set at first insult your employees, blame them for all of the companies problems, then lock them out of their computers and lie about their severance package.
  - HelloMcFly 4y ago
    It's humane to enable remote work and employ people without regard for their physical proximity to your office, but it's inhumane to terminate that relationship in the same way? I cannot agree. If you have a regular in-person presence then I agree, but if your typical form of working is remote then it's not inhumane to have that conversation remotely.
    - whstl 4y ago
      I'd argue that it's even more inhumane to force WFH employees to fly to the office to fire them. You raise their expectations, waste their time, then destroys the possibility of having them enjoy the remainder of the trip.
  - paxys 4y ago
    What is this "more caring and sensitive manner"? Should employees have to fly across the country to get fired face-to-face? Or over a text message? Email? If you work over Zoom of course you are going to be laid off over Zoom. What people really want to get around saying is "no company should ever do layoffs", and well that's a whole different discussion.
  - thehoff 4y ago
    I’m not driving 6 hours or flying in to the office to get laid off. Personally I would find that more insulting and a huge waste of time. As impersonal as it is, virtual is what I’ve signed up for so wouldn’t expect anything different were I to get let go.
    - fbdab103 4y ago
      My company just had a round of layoffs. Preceding the actual announcement was an email strongly encouraging everyone to appear for that day (WFH still predominant norm). All I could think, "Am I going to wake-up early and deal with traffic just so they can fire me to my face?"
      - noirbot 4y ago
        Seriously. That's definitely more insulting. "You're going to dance for us in person one last time for no reason except that we want to see your face when we tell you you're fired" feels way more cruel than pulling me into a call and telling me I can immediately open my browser and start looking for another job.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    What if someone is a remote worker? You want them to fly across the country just so they can get laid off in person? Or do you expect their boss to fly across the country and visit them at their home to deliver the news? Either one sounds ridiculous at best, grossly insulting at worst. The way to 'humanely' lay people off is simple: give them a generous severance package. 6 months of pay/benefits should be plenty to find a new job without any disruption. The last time I was laid off as a mass lay-off (my group was laid off because the company decided to quit the product sector we were in), I got 4 months' severance and had a new (higher paying) job within a month, so I wasn't mad at all.
  - prewett 4y ago
    In 2001 and 2009 I remember hearing about layoffs where they had a big (in-person) meeting to announce the layoffs. I seem to recall there were two ways: either you have two simultaneous meetings, one for the survivors and one for the axed; or you had one large meeting to announce them, and then people went back to their desk to check their email to see if they were affected. I'm not sure that announcing it over a mass Zoom is any different than a mass in-person meeting.
  - TechBro8615 4y ago
    I would have a really hard time feeling guilty about firing someone after paying them a few hundred thousand dollars. It's not a day care, and it's not like I'm asking you for the money back. You can find another job. And if I'm the one being fired, I really don't care how it's done, but if I had to choose, I'd prefer the option that wastes as little of my time as possible and doesn't require me to wake up at 8am to hear you fire me.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    > In a better world, laying someone off would be done in a more caring and sensitive manner, because it's a huge and often unexpected change for the recipient. Human beings deserve better than being forced to attend their own mass slaughter. Layoffs are usually not “unexpected” if you can read the tea leaves. Besides, I go to work everyday to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. I never expect a company to “care about me or my feelings”. I’ve also ensured that I have had at least 3-6 months of living expenses in the bank for the last 25 years. Yes - this was from the time when I was making $11/hour as a computer operator and I was saving my overtime. There also has never been a point in my career that I didn’t “have my running shoes on” - an updated resume, a skillset that was inline with the market, a strong network, and an updated career documented.
- dieselgate 4y ago
  I’ve only been laid off over zoom. And fired over the phone
- TheDong 4y ago
  I think the supposed negative is "in a mass zoom call". It's not 100% clear, though the phrasing of the article ("an unscheduled mandatory Zoom meeting at 8 a.m. CT", one time) does make it sound like a single meeting with 200 people. The more "human" feeling thing is to have 1-1 zoom calls with each person being fired so you can talk to them about their situation and specifics.
  - supernova87a 4y ago
    > The more "human" feeling thing is to have 1-1 zoom calls with each person being fired so you can talk to them about their situation and specifics. I think they also do that. This is just to give people the initial news as soon as possible, and without ambiguity or speculation as it takes days to percolate through if you did it 1:1.
    - cbm-vic-20 4y ago
      "Hey, do you have time for a quick call on 9am on Monday morning?"
      - dylan604 4y ago
        That's pretty much how the email I received when I was let go from a company. "Hey, do you have time to drop by my office this morning?" What would have happened had I said, "sorry, I'm really busy this morning. Can we reschedule for next week?" =)
        smnrchrds 4y ago
        This? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc0bLIv0V1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc0bLIv0V1U
        dylan604 4y ago
        I still think fixing the glitch is better. Probably a generational thing though
- WheatMillington 4y ago
  I must live in a different universe to the usual crowd here (I don't work in tech) because mass firing over zoom seems impossibly cruel and callous to me.
  - dymk 4y ago
    How would you have done it?
  - noirbot 4y ago
    It really depends. I have barely had an in-person meeting with anyone superior to me in my company in 3-4 years. If I got called in to the office to meet with anyone superior to me and no one else from my team, and no agenda, I'm going to be in dread the whole way because that would be an insanely irregular thing. It's not any better if they randomly invited some, or even all of my team to the office for a meeting with no agenda. Sure, it's detached, but it's not like I'm expecting my upper management to be attached to me that way.
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    Spineless is the word that comes to my mind.
- iosono88 4y ago
  [dead]
- vichu 4y ago
  Funny you say that since from what I heard it was the worst of both worlds: the workers _were_ hauled into the office to get laid off.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Yes, remote work has made it massively easier to do these mass firings. Just treat workers like cloud resources. Mass hire and fire with minimal costs.
Waterluvian 4y ago
I felt like I knew the scale of game testing, but 200 still shocks me.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Depending on the game it would seem a small number. I’m not sure how you could test something on the WoW scale or even Hogwarts Legacy with only 200.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    Public test realms do the heavy lifting I think. But indeed, I lack context. I don’t know how many is correct for a game of a given type and size. 200 just feels like a lot.
    - gabythenerd 4y ago
      QA normally do everything manually, with 0 automation I can see some games taking more than 500 testers to go through all possible paths. Especially in live service games like Apex. I worked briefly on a AAA game and my team had 2 dedicated american QAs for the feature that knew everything there was to know and tested happy paths/made docs, and there also was a building of testers in Ukraine that tried to break the game in a myriad of ways and filled general bugs. At some point in alpha we had around 500 bugs filled in jira, and this was only one game mode.
      - eddsh1994 4y ago
        > to go through all possible paths This isn't even possible, I'd be amazed at 25% of paths!
    - clnq 4y ago
      Laying off 200 is definitely a lot. That’s many more than most AAA studios have internally and closer to what AAA publishers usually have. Although EA is known in the industry to have relatively many QA people and good QA. Their games stand head and shoulders above many other publishers’ in terms of polish at release. I’m not sure about the exact QA figures, but I expect maybe 500? It would be a shame to see EA ruin this well functioning component of their publishing business to chase short term profit with cheapest outsourcers. But it would not be beyond the “smarts” of some game industry executives.
abudabi123 4y ago
[flagged]
melbourne_mat 4y ago
"we are expanding the distribution of our Apex Legends testing team" Goodbye US employees, welcome Asian and Eastern European employees. It's definitely not about costs though (wink) "They will be provided 60 days severance, though that won’t cover the length of many people’s contracts, sources said." This I don't get: if you have a fixed term contract and they don't honour it surely you can get all your cash in court?
- downvoteme1 4y ago
  Almost all work contracts that I have signed have clauses to break the contract with a two week notice.
- mortenjorck 4y ago
  > if you have a fixed term contract and they don't honour it surely you can get all your cash in court? Two things: 1. The financial barrier to legal representation for people working in QA in the games industry is high to begin with; 2. There is a nonzero chance that people in these roles already signed an agreement with an arbitration clause, in which case they won't be going to court anyway.
  - Buttons840 4y ago
    And would arbitration not work for them? It seems like if the arbiter ignored clearly defined terms in the contract, you could seek some redress from the arbitration company itself. They are regulated I presume? But yes, cost of justice is a problem.
    - whythre 4y ago
      Most arbiters are paid by the corporations that participate in arbitrage, which ‘encourages’ them not to bite the hand that feeds.
      - GavinMcG 4y ago
        Arbitration, by the way, not arbitrage. Arbitrage is done by arbitrageurs.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
supernova87a 4y ago
Do you remember in the movie "Up in the Air" when some technology to lay off people en masse remotely was presented laughably as some dystopian craziness in the future?
- paxys 4y ago
  Well the alternative in that movie was a consultant who flew across the country and fired people face-to-face on behalf of companies. If you ask me, I'd rather take the Zoom call.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
d0mme 4y ago
General trend/en-vogue to fire people nowadays. And companies are complaining, that employees are getting more and more mercenaries. Funny world.
satisfice 4y ago
Please don’t call them “QA testers.” There are testers. Sometimes testers are called QA. But there is no such thing as a QA tester. A QA tester must be someone who finds problematic bugs and communicationally reports them into database storage for the developer programmers to fix resolve.
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  So then what did these people do? Just play games for money? No -- they found bugs and reported them, probably by putting them into some sort of tool that has a DB, for "developer programmers" to "fix resolve". They are QA. They're not programmers, but they sure are QA.

55 points by yogthos 4y ago

wilg 4y ago

It's interesting that "over Zoom call" is presented as a negative here. Like it's better to haul everyone into the office and do it? Normally sites like this complain that work should be remote!

metadat 4y ago
"Over a mass zoom" is not particularly humane. In a better world, laying someone off would be done in a more caring and sensitive manner, because it's a huge and often unexpected change for the recipient. Human beings deserve better than being forced to attend their own mass slaughter. However, no matter what, someone will always be unhappy about the method. Which is probably why the axe people throw up their hands and just try to get it over with efficiently. Edit: "Over zoom" -> "Over a mass zoom", since this was apparently poorly worded and distracting. I wasn't proposing the ridiculous move of forcing a remote worker to fly to an office to get fired.
- tracerbulletx 4y ago
  You'd think so but apparently these days the bar is set at first insult your employees, blame them for all of the companies problems, then lock them out of their computers and lie about their severance package.
- HelloMcFly 4y ago
  It's humane to enable remote work and employ people without regard for their physical proximity to your office, but it's inhumane to terminate that relationship in the same way? I cannot agree. If you have a regular in-person presence then I agree, but if your typical form of working is remote then it's not inhumane to have that conversation remotely.
  - whstl 4y ago
    I'd argue that it's even more inhumane to force WFH employees to fly to the office to fire them. You raise their expectations, waste their time, then destroys the possibility of having them enjoy the remainder of the trip.
- paxys 4y ago
  What is this "more caring and sensitive manner"? Should employees have to fly across the country to get fired face-to-face? Or over a text message? Email? If you work over Zoom of course you are going to be laid off over Zoom. What people really want to get around saying is "no company should ever do layoffs", and well that's a whole different discussion.
- thehoff 4y ago
  I’m not driving 6 hours or flying in to the office to get laid off. Personally I would find that more insulting and a huge waste of time. As impersonal as it is, virtual is what I’ve signed up for so wouldn’t expect anything different were I to get let go.
  - fbdab103 4y ago
    My company just had a round of layoffs. Preceding the actual announcement was an email strongly encouraging everyone to appear for that day (WFH still predominant norm). All I could think, "Am I going to wake-up early and deal with traffic just so they can fire me to my face?"
    - noirbot 4y ago
      Seriously. That's definitely more insulting. "You're going to dance for us in person one last time for no reason except that we want to see your face when we tell you you're fired" feels way more cruel than pulling me into a call and telling me I can immediately open my browser and start looking for another job.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  What if someone is a remote worker? You want them to fly across the country just so they can get laid off in person? Or do you expect their boss to fly across the country and visit them at their home to deliver the news? Either one sounds ridiculous at best, grossly insulting at worst. The way to 'humanely' lay people off is simple: give them a generous severance package. 6 months of pay/benefits should be plenty to find a new job without any disruption. The last time I was laid off as a mass lay-off (my group was laid off because the company decided to quit the product sector we were in), I got 4 months' severance and had a new (higher paying) job within a month, so I wasn't mad at all.
- prewett 4y ago
  In 2001 and 2009 I remember hearing about layoffs where they had a big (in-person) meeting to announce the layoffs. I seem to recall there were two ways: either you have two simultaneous meetings, one for the survivors and one for the axed; or you had one large meeting to announce them, and then people went back to their desk to check their email to see if they were affected. I'm not sure that announcing it over a mass Zoom is any different than a mass in-person meeting.
- TechBro8615 4y ago
  I would have a really hard time feeling guilty about firing someone after paying them a few hundred thousand dollars. It's not a day care, and it's not like I'm asking you for the money back. You can find another job. And if I'm the one being fired, I really don't care how it's done, but if I had to choose, I'd prefer the option that wastes as little of my time as possible and doesn't require me to wake up at 8am to hear you fire me.
- scarface74 4y ago
  > In a better world, laying someone off would be done in a more caring and sensitive manner, because it's a huge and often unexpected change for the recipient. Human beings deserve better than being forced to attend their own mass slaughter. Layoffs are usually not “unexpected” if you can read the tea leaves. Besides, I go to work everyday to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. I never expect a company to “care about me or my feelings”. I’ve also ensured that I have had at least 3-6 months of living expenses in the bank for the last 25 years. Yes - this was from the time when I was making $11/hour as a computer operator and I was saving my overtime. There also has never been a point in my career that I didn’t “have my running shoes on” - an updated resume, a skillset that was inline with the market, a strong network, and an updated career documented.
dieselgate 4y ago
I’ve only been laid off over zoom. And fired over the phone
TheDong 4y ago
I think the supposed negative is "in a mass zoom call". It's not 100% clear, though the phrasing of the article ("an unscheduled mandatory Zoom meeting at 8 a.m. CT", one time) does make it sound like a single meeting with 200 people. The more "human" feeling thing is to have 1-1 zoom calls with each person being fired so you can talk to them about their situation and specifics.
- supernova87a 4y ago
  > The more "human" feeling thing is to have 1-1 zoom calls with each person being fired so you can talk to them about their situation and specifics. I think they also do that. This is just to give people the initial news as soon as possible, and without ambiguity or speculation as it takes days to percolate through if you did it 1:1.
  - cbm-vic-20 4y ago
    "Hey, do you have time for a quick call on 9am on Monday morning?"
    - dylan604 4y ago
      That's pretty much how the email I received when I was let go from a company. "Hey, do you have time to drop by my office this morning?" What would have happened had I said, "sorry, I'm really busy this morning. Can we reschedule for next week?" =)
      - smnrchrds 4y ago
        This? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc0bLIv0V1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc0bLIv0V1U
        dylan604 4y ago
        I still think fixing the glitch is better. Probably a generational thing though
WheatMillington 4y ago
I must live in a different universe to the usual crowd here (I don't work in tech) because mass firing over zoom seems impossibly cruel and callous to me.
- dymk 4y ago
  How would you have done it?
- noirbot 4y ago
  It really depends. I have barely had an in-person meeting with anyone superior to me in my company in 3-4 years. If I got called in to the office to meet with anyone superior to me and no one else from my team, and no agenda, I'm going to be in dread the whole way because that would be an insanely irregular thing. It's not any better if they randomly invited some, or even all of my team to the office for a meeting with no agenda. Sure, it's detached, but it's not like I'm expecting my upper management to be attached to me that way.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Spineless is the word that comes to my mind.
iosono88 4y ago
[dead]
vichu 4y ago
Funny you say that since from what I heard it was the worst of both worlds: the workers _were_ hauled into the office to get laid off.
Gigachad 4y ago
Yes, remote work has made it massively easier to do these mass firings. Just treat workers like cloud resources. Mass hire and fire with minimal costs.

Waterluvian 4y ago

I felt like I knew the scale of game testing, but 200 still shocks me.

bombcar 4y ago
Depending on the game it would seem a small number. I’m not sure how you could test something on the WoW scale or even Hogwarts Legacy with only 200.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  Public test realms do the heavy lifting I think. But indeed, I lack context. I don’t know how many is correct for a game of a given type and size. 200 just feels like a lot.
  - gabythenerd 4y ago
    QA normally do everything manually, with 0 automation I can see some games taking more than 500 testers to go through all possible paths. Especially in live service games like Apex. I worked briefly on a AAA game and my team had 2 dedicated american QAs for the feature that knew everything there was to know and tested happy paths/made docs, and there also was a building of testers in Ukraine that tried to break the game in a myriad of ways and filled general bugs. At some point in alpha we had around 500 bugs filled in jira, and this was only one game mode.
    - eddsh1994 4y ago
      > to go through all possible paths This isn't even possible, I'd be amazed at 25% of paths!
  - clnq 4y ago
    Laying off 200 is definitely a lot. That’s many more than most AAA studios have internally and closer to what AAA publishers usually have. Although EA is known in the industry to have relatively many QA people and good QA. Their games stand head and shoulders above many other publishers’ in terms of polish at release. I’m not sure about the exact QA figures, but I expect maybe 500? It would be a shame to see EA ruin this well functioning component of their publishing business to chase short term profit with cheapest outsourcers. But it would not be beyond the “smarts” of some game industry executives.

abudabi123 4y ago

[flagged]

melbourne_mat 4y ago

"we are expanding the distribution of our Apex Legends testing team" Goodbye US employees, welcome Asian and Eastern European employees. It's definitely not about costs though (wink) "They will be provided 60 days severance, though that won’t cover the length of many people’s contracts, sources said." This I don't get: if you have a fixed term contract and they don't honour it surely you can get all your cash in court?

downvoteme1 4y ago
Almost all work contracts that I have signed have clauses to break the contract with a two week notice.
mortenjorck 4y ago
> if you have a fixed term contract and they don't honour it surely you can get all your cash in court? Two things: 1. The financial barrier to legal representation for people working in QA in the games industry is high to begin with; 2. There is a nonzero chance that people in these roles already signed an agreement with an arbitration clause, in which case they won't be going to court anyway.
- Buttons840 4y ago
  And would arbitration not work for them? It seems like if the arbiter ignored clearly defined terms in the contract, you could seek some redress from the arbitration company itself. They are regulated I presume? But yes, cost of justice is a problem.
  - whythre 4y ago
    Most arbiters are paid by the corporations that participate in arbitrage, which ‘encourages’ them not to bite the hand that feeds.
    - GavinMcG 4y ago
      Arbitration, by the way, not arbitrage. Arbitrage is done by arbitrageurs.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

supernova87a 4y ago

Do you remember in the movie "Up in the Air" when some technology to lay off people en masse remotely was presented laughably as some dystopian craziness in the future?

paxys 4y ago
Well the alternative in that movie was a consultant who flew across the country and fired people face-to-face on behalf of companies. If you ask me, I'd rather take the Zoom call.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

d0mme 4y ago

General trend/en-vogue to fire people nowadays. And companies are complaining, that employees are getting more and more mercenaries. Funny world.

satisfice 4y ago

Please don’t call them “QA testers.” There are testers. Sometimes testers are called QA. But there is no such thing as a QA tester. A QA tester must be someone who finds problematic bugs and communicationally reports them into database storage for the developer programmers to fix resolve.

red-iron-pine 4y ago
So then what did these people do? Just play games for money? No -- they found bugs and reported them, probably by putting them into some sort of tool that has a DB, for "developer programmers" to "fix resolve". They are QA. They're not programmers, but they sure are QA.