Hacker News Reader

Comment by pandaman | Hacker News Reader

It's an anonymous letter. And does not look genuine to me either - to somebody who worked at EA it's hard to imagine there is anybody there who seriously believes in the external PR stuff. Could be a contractor though.

Nevertheless, a lot of people at EARS will be laid off. A portion of EA's bonus depends on the Metacritic score so a lot of management types right now are missing a significant part of money they already had plans to spend. The only remedy for this is a massive layoff that boosts stock prices and increases other portions of the bonus. For recent example see what happened to MOH and EALA last quarter.

View on HN

Yeah, "this has to be a contractor" was my first impression.

Personally, since I work at a competitor, I hope that EA never gets it. But you should never, ever have "someone else continues to screw up" as part of your business strategy. :-)

Eg. look at what happened to AMD after Core 2 replaced NetBurst.

Why a contractor?

I'm a contractor for two reasons: (1) money and (2) because I don't buy into the corporate PR. People who work in these places have to buy into the corporate values system.

I look at corporate values with great skepticism; perhaps I'm just cynical but in big companies it always seems to end up (in performance reviews) as being a way for the company to come back and justify why your bonus, increase, etc. will fall short of expectations this year.

There are few high paid contractors in games, usually brought in to save a failing title. All these I know are engineers, not artists, high profile artists are usually commissioned (i.e. they sell their art without ever showing on site and probably don't even know what studio is buying their work).

Normally a contractor is a "employee -1" - same low pay but no benefits and even less job security. They don't get invited to meetings and are less privy of the internal politics. Most of them are working hard to become an FTE.

> People who work in these places have to buy into the corporate values system.

Nope, it doesn't really go beyond some lip service. For most guys who do the actual work it's not even that - not shouting that the emperor has no clothes is absolutely enough to get by.

Well, he doesn't have to really believe in that external PR stuff but he surely could pretend to believe in it in order to make a public statement. It's trick commonly used in politics.

I think hiring CEOs based on years of experience doing the same job is fundamentally flawed, as it creates a paradox. As I said before, I wish that CEOs like Marissa Mayer and David Marcus was more common.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com