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?
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.
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.
Arbitrage is done by arbitrageurs.
To any companies planning to save big bucks through outsourcing: forget it. It looks good on paper, but in practice you will regret picking your engineering talent based on how cheap you can get them.
It's taken years for my company's management to truly understand that if your motivation for hiring overseas is that you can get engineers for 1/6 the price, you're going to get correspondingly poor results. Good engineers don't stay long at that price point, no matter where they live.
"Wait, not that kind of remote work"
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.
For 20 years I've been "against" WFH (as an employer). Employees see commute time and cost. I see ancillary benefits like team-work, informal conversations, ability to read the room and so on. [1]
Most of all I've been warning people that once you've proved the job can be done remotely, it can be done very remotely. With respect, there are smarter people than you in the world, willing to work for a lot less.
In other words WFH is about proving that your US location is Not an asset at all.
Covid has mellowed my views. We all got to WFH for years, and it mostly worked. We are now seeing issues though. Lots of misinformation, mental health issues, rumours, conflicts and so on. I don't think we can go back to 5 days a week in the office for everyone - that ship has sailed - but folk are needing more face-time with each other on a regular basis, and zoom isn't cutting it.
[1] in our context, we have nice offices, everyone had their own space with a door etc. I get that the quality of your office space has an impact on this question as well, but I'm talking about "nice offices" here.
I disagree with that perspective. I've been remote since 2014. "Life happened" and I had to move.
When I moved in 2014, I kept my job but became remote. It worked out great for the company, too. We hired overseas. The office was West Coast and I was East Coast. I had overlap with the overseas timezones, the office didn't. I bridged a lot of communication gaps and cultural issues.
(It also helped that I had a lot of domain knowledge that was hard to replace.)
Ultimately the product finished its market window. It's becoming obsolete. I could blame "outsourcing" for why I lost my job, but that's a cop-out. I saw what our competitors were doing, and where they were beating us. I don't think the owners wanted to "keep fighting." I'm glad I got out when I did.
--
In my new role, we meet on camera everyday and have live communication. Our sales are in the US. It wouldn't work if we were outside the US.
We need to set a wide net for talent, but we also need some on-site work because we have physical things that we need to be in a place in order to manipulate. Tech isn't just in cyberspace.
So we have a mix of on-site and remote.
It's great for me, because "life happened" and I'm married, have a family, and can't move whenever my employer changes. It's great for my employer because they can cast a wide net. And because we need to "have things" and "touch stuff," our jobs aren't about to be outsourced overnight.
I also suspect that "life will happen" with everyone I work with, and our flexibility allows everyone to keep working together.
> Most of all I've been warning people that once you've proved the job can be done remotely, it can be done very remotely.
A lot of tech involves automating yourself out of a job. It's just frustrating when people don't understand that. It's hard to collect rent in technology development because someone will make you obsolete or undercut you.
So many on HN thought “WFH just means I can live in rural <state> and make bank”.