There's a lot of discourse going on right now about layoffs (what with the state of the game industry), and a lot of assumptions are being made. So as someone who has been laid off, survived layoffs, and been in on discussions planning layoffs, I figured I may as well chime in and put some things in perspective.

The most common assumption I hear thrown around is that management is incompetent, made bad decisions, and are now trying to save their own skins by getting rid of poor innocent employees who were cranking out masterpieces despite management interference. And while yes, that DOES happen, it's actually not really all that common. Partially because the employees capable of making masterpieces don't stick around in workplaces like this long enough to be laid off in the first place, but I digress. Let's talk about the many types of layoffs.

First is exactly the type of layoff described above. Management forces bad decisions on their employees against their better judgement, destroys the company, and then starts getting rid of the most expensive (non-management of course) employees they have left to save their own skins as long as possible. This is the textbook case of the bloat cutting everything else to save itself. Often times leadership knows the company is doomed regardless, so they pivot to protecting their own paychecks as long as possible. That's why they don't particularly care about getting rid of their best (most expensive) employees. They don't care about the long term cause they know there won't be a long term for this company. By this point their best employees already abandoned ship anyway, so not like it really matters.

Next we have post-merger layoffs, which I'll be getting into more detail on specifically because they're a common one in the game industry right now. Whenever one company buys or merges with another, that creates a lot of redundancies. Do you really need 2 teams of middle managers, 2 HR departments, etc.? Of course the answer is no. But what about getting rid of the frontline workers? Well, what if the only reason for the buyout/merger was to acquire IP rights? Do you really NEED the original team anymore? Maybe keep 1-2 people around for maintenance and to train your existing team(s) up, the rest can go. There are infinite possibilities here, but the point is these types of layoffs aren't due to bad management (though they MIGHT be depending on how things go in the future). Management considers their reason for buying/merging with the other company and uses that to decide who they need to keep and who they don't. Nothing nefarious here, they're just doing what they were always planning on doing.

And honestly I could be here all day describing other types of layoffs. The famous "we had a temporary boost in sales and grew too big under the assumption it would last forever and now have to downsize" layoffs. The "we spun up another team to compete for this specific contract that we were not awarded, so we don't need them anymore" layoffs. The "we told our audience to get lost, appealed to a phantom 'wider audience', and ended up with nobody" layoffs. The "changing audience tastes has left our entire industry undesirable and going bankrupt" layoffs. The "our project got canceled and this team is no longer needed" layoffs. I can keep going, but I won't, because I want to get to the ONE type of that many people never seem to consider anymore....

Have you considered that management might actually be competent and are trying to correct a mistake they made before it tanks the company? What if the people getting laid off DESERVE to be laid off? Not everyone who loses their job is some poor innocent victim of management decisions. Some of them deserve it. Be it for poor performance, hostility towards customers and/or coworkers, putting activism above their job duties, you name it. So why weren't they just fired individually and instead all dumped in a mass layoff?

Well, there's the obvious reason of problem departments (like DEI) getting shuttered and dumped all at once, but there is more to it. I often hear ignorant foreigners talk about at-will employment laws and how that means anyone can be fired for any reason. And while yes that's TECHNICALLY true, you shouldn't ignore the government's role in getting in the way of everything. There is a laundry list of "protected" groups/characteristics that it's illegal to fire someone for, even under at-will laws. And while those laws may have had good intentions, most people find themselves belonging to one or more of the many protected characteristics. But that shouldn't matter if they didn't get fired because of said characteristics, right?

Well... if there's one thing I can say about the US, it's that it is the country of excessive lawfare. Especially when dealing with woke activists (the #1 group of toxic employees that should be purged ASAP if you want to keep your company healthy), as they are extremely prone to weaponizing the legal system. If one of them gets fired, they immediately initiate a lawsuit claiming they were fired for one of their protected characteristics as opposed to the real reason. Bob may have been fired for failing to meet goals 7 months in a row by a wide margin, but he'll claim they targeted him because he was gay. Even if the company can eventually prevail in court, it'll be after throwing away hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in legal costs. Costs that they can never realistically get reimbursed from the broke activist that caused them. So what can a company do to avoid this?

Turns out the easiest way is to do a mass layoff of all their bad employees at once. It's much harder for Bob to claim he got fired for being gay when he was part of a 200 person layoff and the only gay guy among them. So instead of firing problem employees immediately companies will simply maintain a layoff list. And once that list meets the legal threshold to qualify as a mass layoff, they'll dump all their problem employees at once. Keep this in mind next time you hear some journalist or influencer trying to claim that all the hard working people doing good work are being let go because of management's poor decisions.

The reason I bring this up is to simply tell you to wait and see before passing judgement. If a game company undergoes massive layoffs and their future releases are progressively worse and worse, then maybe the journalists/influencers were right. However, what if their future releases get BETTER after layoffs? I'm sure all of you have had coworkers you looked at and thought "this guy is so dumb I don't even understand how he has the presence of mind to breathe, why is he still here? We could get much more work done without him getting in our way." How would you react if management at your employer did the right thing and got rid of all employees like that guy, allowed you to FINALLY do your best work unimpeded, and you saw the media spinning it as "incompetent management gets rid of great employees because of their bad decisions."

Obviously I'm not saying ALL layoffs are like that, just that you should at least think about it for a moment before passing judgement. You'll know their next release what the truth is!