What the Hell Happened at Activision Blizzard?
This is a well-written article, much more even-handed than the usual garbage takes that touch on the tension between the different factors in the employer-employee relationship. I feel like the author couldn&#x27;t make up his mind though:<p>&gt; Kotick could have cut his own salary (a small piece of his overall compensation package) or waved off some of the stock incentives he earned, but it would have been performative. It wouldn’t have saved jobs. The gesture would have been symbolic, as 800 people likely still would have found themselves out of work.<p>And<p>&gt; All of this amounts to more people on hand than work to give them. Activision Blizzard has been building staff for years. The company suddenly finds itself without the product to back up that need<p>vs<p>&gt; It’s nigh impossible to rationalize or justify 800 people being shown the door as a company reports record sales.<p>And<p>&gt; executive pay is broken and now hundreds of people are out of work.<p>He makes the case that the layoffs were due to not having any work for those employees, not a financial resources squeeze, but then falls back onto seemingly-contradictory platitudes when he needs to sum up the article.<p>As he says, activison is bad at planning, but the decisions that led to the labor&#x2F;tasks mismatch were made earlier. Obviously they should do better there (particularly as he claims they have a pattern of doing this), but what should they have done differently in this case?<p>This is actually a serious question, and one I&#x27;m open-minded about: people like to imply things about labor markers without seeing them through. Are there proponents of paying people to not work, keeping them on your books like zombie employees until your headcount needs catch up over several years? Is this an arrangement that an employee would even want, given how his skills would atrophy in the meanwhile? (Bear in mind that I&#x27;m taking for granted, as the author does, the idea that Activison doesn&#x27;t have the ability to just conjure up productive work&#x2F;projects based solely on having extra headcount).<p>None of this is rhetorical, as I&#x27;m actually genuinely curious what people think about this.