2 ms·

Riot is offering a minumum of six months of severance. I agree, layoffs are disruptive, but this view that somehow if you get hired the company can't ever decid

Riot is offering a minumum of six months of severance. I agree, layoffs are disruptive, but this view that somehow if you get hired the company can't ever decide to let you go is totally bizarre to me. Plus, what you would be essentially arguing is that it would have been better to never have hired these people in the first place, which I strongly disagree with in the vast majority of cases. People need to stop acting like layoffs are the worst, evilest thing that can happen. It's important that people are treated with dignity and a financial cushion, and at least according to this blog post that seems to be the case.

Apocryphon 3y ago
Maybe those people would have been otherwise hired by employers who prudently didn’t overhire and need to cut afterwards.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  I think that's a fair point when you hear stories about people who are hired and then laid off within a couple months (or sooner). Nobody can predict the far future with accuracy, but those kinds of stories usually just point to corporate incompetence and the company usually could have planned better. But when it comes to cases where economic and business conditions have drastically changed, I don't think it's reasonable that we expect business leaders to have crystal balls for years in the future.
acdha 3y ago
> Plus, what you would be essentially arguing is that it would have been better to never have hired these people in the first place If you reread my comment, that’s not there and I acknowledged that it’s sometimes necessary (many of the current layoffs are not but I also remember 2000 when a lot of places which had been unable to fill customer demand were abruptly without business). My point was simply rejecting the idea that people are somehow not harmed by this - it’s usually legal, something people should expect, etc. but it still has a big impact. I respect business leaders who are cognizant of that and treat people with dignity - for example, Riot doesn’t appear to be claiming this is performance based like a certain company recently in the news.
deleted 3y ago
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eganist 3y ago
> Riot is offering a minumum of six months of severance. [...] It's important that people are treated with dignity and a financial cushion, and at least according to this blog post that seems to be the case. It wouldn't surprise me if part of this is because of how much harder it (anecdotally) seems to be for game developers/designers to find new jobs relative to their non-gaming peers. I'm having a hard time finding data to distinguish the two (game devs v. devs, game designers v. e.g UX designers), but going at least from my own network, those in gaming were more profoundly affected. If that's true on any broader scale, then putting people out with two months pay in an industry that could take four to eight months to find new work could be a bad look for the RIFing company.

Apocryphon 3y ago

Maybe those people would have been otherwise hired by employers who prudently didn’t overhire and need to cut afterwards.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
I think that's a fair point when you hear stories about people who are hired and then laid off within a couple months (or sooner). Nobody can predict the far future with accuracy, but those kinds of stories usually just point to corporate incompetence and the company usually could have planned better. But when it comes to cases where economic and business conditions have drastically changed, I don't think it's reasonable that we expect business leaders to have crystal balls for years in the future.

acdha 3y ago

> Plus, what you would be essentially arguing is that it would have been better to never have hired these people in the first place If you reread my comment, that’s not there and I acknowledged that it’s sometimes necessary (many of the current layoffs are not but I also remember 2000 when a lot of places which had been unable to fill customer demand were abruptly without business). My point was simply rejecting the idea that people are somehow not harmed by this - it’s usually legal, something people should expect, etc. but it still has a big impact. I respect business leaders who are cognizant of that and treat people with dignity - for example, Riot doesn’t appear to be claiming this is performance based like a certain company recently in the news.

deleted 3y ago

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eganist 3y ago

> Riot is offering a minumum of six months of severance. [...] It's important that people are treated with dignity and a financial cushion, and at least according to this blog post that seems to be the case. It wouldn't surprise me if part of this is because of how much harder it (anecdotally) seems to be for game developers/designers to find new jobs relative to their non-gaming peers. I'm having a hard time finding data to distinguish the two (game devs v. devs, game designers v. e.g UX designers), but going at least from my own network, those in gaming were more profoundly affected. If that's true on any broader scale, then putting people out with two months pay in an industry that could take four to eight months to find new work could be a bad look for the RIFing company.