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Comment by softfalcon | Hacker News Reader

I haven't been laid off, but a good chunk of my team was.

Anecdotally, I'm hearing lots of stories of companies laying people off and then there are new openings very similar to the position that was let go, but with lower salaries or where one person would be expected to do the work of 2-5 previously laid off folks.

In particular, a person I know from EA Games saw half their department let go, and then replacements appeared a couple months later. All of them had lower pay and were less skilled. This all reads like quarterly profit optimizations by a bean counter up top looking to make the shares look good.

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> In particular, a person I know from EA Games saw half their department let go, and then replacements appeared a couple months later. All of them had lower pay and were less skilled. This all reads like quarterly profit optimizations by a bean counter up top looking to make the shares look good.

This is just the regular course of business in the games industry. They like to scale up and down according to need (games in development) and would largely prefer to employ contractors, but laws prevent them working contractors like dogs and studios go where the tax credits are & tax credits require having employees typically.

It’s weird how that happens. I bet a lot of people would choose a pay cut over being let go entirely.

"lower salaries or where one person would be expected to do the work of 2-5 previously laid off folks"

so only $300k total comp and 20 hrs of work per week?

In this specific case, closer to $40,000 USD and 40-80 hours per week. These were QA roles at a game development studio in Europe.

QA roles have been decimated. I get the impression that increased adoption and trust of automated testing techniques have enabled companies to justify cutting their QA budgets. I've seen similar layoffs of entire QA teams even before the recent tech layoffs. And in those cases the QAs were never rehired.

> I'm hearing lots of stories of companies laying people off and then there are new openings very similar to the position that was let go

I haven’t seen much of this, but I’m constantly getting notifications about jobs I was reject for months ago being reposted. I’m not sure if it’s resume fishing or if company’s have delusional standards. And I’m not talking about too their tech companies either.

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