EA Lays Off over 200 Apex Legends Testers over Zoom Call

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

What’s there to talk about as far as specifics? Most companies would have a standard severance package based on time at the job and $x months of pay.

> 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.

After you get through about 10 people, the other 190 will know they are getting fired and are now sitting around dreading their one to one.

I think delivering the news en-masse is an absolute must, you can always follow up with one to ones, or leave it as an option for people.

How would you have done it?

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.

Spineless is the word that comes to my mind.

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.

Might be worth arbitrating! I remember some story about some people actually using arbitration and companies finding out "fuck, this actually costs a lot of money".

"We want remote work!"

"Wait, not that kind of remote work"

There are tradeoffs for everything. Companies are more profitable when they cut labor costs through hiring people from countries that will work for less. Why should the owners of these companies (including everyone who owns stock in EA) pay above market value for this labor?

There are consequences to this, of course. One big consequence that I can think of is that it evens out the inequalities among laborers across national labor markets. This has very serious consequences for lower skilled Americans/westerners who have relied on the wealth of their countries to trickle down to them.

There are many ways to address this, like reducing labor market competition in the American labor market from less wealthy countries, increasing wealth redistribution, investing in the education/training of lesser skilled workers in the American labor market, and so on. Both left and right parties have solutions to this problem, and I personally don't really care about the chosen solution, but I hope our political parties stop forgetting about poor Americans who have been left behind for a long, long time.

I hope we can all have a healthier discussion about this problem, too. We need less polarizing figures in politics and we should start treating each other in America respectfully, whether you're liberal, conservative, transgender, evangelical, poor, rich, whatever.

It's a global market. You just need to find a job where you being American and located in the US is an asset, not a liability.

I thought we all wanted WFH? Home can be anywhere in the world…

So many on HN thought “WFH just means I can live in rural <state> and make bank”.

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.

Perhaps the level of complexity in modern games is such that even 200 testers is not sufficient to spot all issues. Things have moved a long way beyond 2D platformer games