It sends a message, but I wouldn't say it's _that_ drastic considering the demand for developers and difficulty hiring in the Orange County area.
However, I work in the industry, and I think you'd be shocked by how replaceable American developers are. Huge amounts of artistic labour _is_ done cheaply, and in relatively decent quality, oversees in countries like South Korea, China, Japan, and to a lesser extent, Thailand.
Here in Canada, we have a thriving industry that includes both primary developers and developers who focus on outsourced work. Most of my career has been involved with shops that were sub-contracted labour from American studios.
Not that American developers are necessarily more skilled, just that the lack of a culture and sometimes language barrier is pretty evident in the resulting work product, in my experience.
How many roles do you think to be outsourced by the polish or japanese? not a lot, which keeps them efficient.
especially in creative endeavours, its best to keep things colocated.
The much-repeated "it'll slow down collaboration" is only a factor of how terrible your company's communication strategy was at the outset. If your company worked entirely verbally and contained little to no digital communication or memory, then you'll have a terrible time.
100% remote work makes intercontinental collaboration almost seamless. My current employer has teams on every continent, except Africa (so far), and we've been at it for over half a decade.
Maybe you've cracked a nut here, and we'd all benefit from your wisdom, experience, and stories, but that is not the experience most folks have working across continents or cultures.
We did crack the nut: we stopped being ameri-centric, and we rejected the notion that productivity must be directly observed during the process to be measured. We rejected "core hours" and we rejected ephemeral vocal communication. If it's not on record it has no value to us.
We have people working at all hours of the day. We have teams split across continents. We have team meetings, but we schedule them a week or more in advance, and even then they're optional. We make prodigious use of Miro, Basecamp, and other collaboration tools. We don't consider any collaboration "finished" so much as "in progress" and often a "meeting" could take course over days, as team members from around the world chime in. There has never been, and will never be, an office.
It works great.
the video game company had a outsource good shop, with competent developers on the other side--the first big hurdle if I'm frank. they weren't cheap. sure, cheaper than local talent, but not gangbusters savings. If you don't want a mes in your codebase, paying for quality contractors is a must because you need to let them work independently.
even then, they were only ever given work that would be very discrete, so that they could work on it independently without getting blocked.
that is not collaborative, which is the point I'm trying to make. Is it constructive? sure. but is it collaborative? no. and it can't be--there was a 12h difference between the two zones. they were trying to go to bed while we were having coffee.
at my last gig (non-gaming), we also had people in: shanghai, sf, nyc, sheffield, and tel aviv. want to try and do collaboration like that? even as a digital-first company that has good hygiene around remote work? it doesn't work: just look at a timezone calendar. So then you're stuck partitioning work so that everyone can be constructive in their office hours, and don't need to worry about what is going on, on the other side of the globe. but again, that's not collaboration. that's six teams all doing their work independently and having routine touchpoints to try and synchronize the independent threads. synchronization takes time, effort, focus.
I'm not saying you can't get work done remotely, which is what I think you think I'm saying. I'm saying that if your work is partitioned to be collaborative, timezones more than anything are going to make a mess of your plans, and then add in cultural, langauge, etc barriers on top of that.
Game engines and pipelines are savage beasts, and often heavily customized and under-documented (everybody using them "just knows how they work;" internal cultural knowledge and on-the-job training are the standard operating procedure). You'll need a particular type of developer or artist to come up to speed quickly on the pipelines and toolchains studios in-house develop, even given the relative standardization of the Activision space.
We usually ended up ripping out much of the original development code because it was too brittle/broken/undocumented to bother continuing forward with. Rewriting from scratch was often faster and had more predictable results.
However, this is moot in gamedev. We throw everything away before starting the next project because we don't "own" the IP from the last project.
Unless all the small processes are designed with a very firm pattern underpinning them that happens to be the correct pattern to maximize efficiency, you'll inevitably find a situation where two subsystems need intimate knowledge of how each other work to maximize performance.
The situation in Canada is interesting: their own government heavily pitched the country as an outsourcing destination, boasting Canadians devs are worth 50k less than American ones. [0]
Is that a popular measure?
[0] https://globalnews.ca/news/4178326/amazon-vancouver-tech-wor...
What's more, here in BC the NDP (left-leaning labour party) stripped Tech Workers of the majority of their labour rights. Not even meal breaks were saved.
https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/employment-standards-a...
It makes sense they would pitch offshoring and low cost for programming since they saw it working for their country.
> Bains was born in Toronto, Ontario on June 16, 1977
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_nationality_law#Citizen...
Though technically you are correct on both counts. By dint of being born after 1950 but before 1992 to Indian fathers, they may be considered Indian citizens. And based on the ancestral comment in this subthread, it does seem like being an outsource destination is working out for Canada. But only technically correct.
That said, British Columbia has had a sizeable, and growing, Indian population since roughly around the time of joining Canada. The Komagata Maru incident[0] was the precursor to an influx of immigration from the punjab.
After English, the three most spoken languages in BC are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Punjabi[1]. The ethnic chinese population arrived in basically two waves: as early settlers during the western expansion, they were pivotal in the creation of the railways and as foundational members of small towns[2]. And then the transfer of HK to CN brought an influx.
0: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/komagata-m...
1: https://www.welcomebc.ca/Choose-B-C/Explore-British-Columbia...
2: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/chinese-ca...
Of course the institutional knowledge lost will be drastic.
It's also difficult to understand how a billion-dollar business gets to this point, with what seems like zero adult oversight, but it is what it is.
Walkouts of this sort are considered protected activity under the NLRA, regardless of whether or not the people involved belong to a union.
The video game industry has a real problem retaining talent because so many people glorify how "fun" working on video games must be. There are always replacements, but they aren't always good.
There is daylight between unions and anarchy. In that daylight are California’s general labor laws and the NLRA.
I gotta give the state props for that trick, made the word dirty with a flawed definition, a bit like how the CIA made the term "conspiracy theory" mean nutjob, and not "criminal conspiracy by those in power"
Everyone knew what they meant, when they were talking about "Anarchy". And we dont care about the irrelevant political movement.
And for an irrelevant political movement, it sure takes up a lot of FBI resources.
Everyone knew what this person meant, and then you came in and started talking about something that was not what anyone was talking about.
Entry level devs typically suck. Source: A former entry level dev.
The game industry is overflowing with college educated, computer science degree wielding, software developers eager to work on a big game project. Few will ever touch Engine code - the rest are easily replaceable.
This is part of the reason companies like this are able to get away with things that other industries aren't able to. Everyone wants to work on the next AAA title - few want to toil away making ads more clickable...
So yes, they'll replace the walk-outs with "scabs" in short time, and move on.
Not to mention - this is a tiny percentage of Blizzard employees - and seems to have morphed into a beef with the binding arbitration agreement - not better employment treatment. "As of Tuesday, signatures surpassed 2,600 current and former employees" - and later on the article states "A group of roughly 300 employees across Activision Blizzard". That's out of 9,500 employees at Activision - you can find 3% of any workplace that's outraged by anything. My guess... wait it out a couple months and everyone forgets this ever happened.
It was difficult to hire new grades or less experienced developers because the cost to train them in the custom frameworks, infrastructure, and other technologies was exceptionally high.
It was terrible and there weren't a lot of excuses for it. My only point is that there are a lot of nuances to hiring from the talent pool.
You might want to get an outsider to take a look at your custom frameworks, infrastructure, and other technologies to see what can be done to straighten that out.
However, When the leadership is not aligned with this goal of approachability or maintainability of the software then it is not possible for new engineers or people to bring change. The old guard needs to be influenced or removed, which is a challenge when they are the ones who created (and continue to promote) the crap that causes this.
I was under the impression that junior devs aren't that hard to come by in any development category (a specific type of junior will be more likely to join a AAA team for sure). I suspect senior staff is harder to get just like any other industry - but I have no insight into this industry.
Last year, or was it the year before? COVID messes with my perception of time, they had another big walkout over the events in Hong Kong and a big name gamer in one of Blizzard's tournaments refusing to tow the party line in regards to the CCP. I'm curious how many of the employees who walked out then are still around today and how many that are will also be walking out now.
I think it would be very telling about a good many things. Did Blizzard sack them all for contributing to bad PR? Did they retain them but threaten them if they stepped out of line again? Or do they feel empowered and walk out both times?