blizzard

So. Many. Layoffs.

~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been looking at getting back into the ring of software engineering, but it doesn’t seem like a great time to do it.

When Google was laying off workers, I shook my head a bit. It ends up that Google spent 800 million dollars in layoffs just this month. Just this month!

By comparison, Google spent $2.1 billion dollars on layoff expenses for more than 12,000 employees over the course of 2023. Other Google employees only knew about people being dismissed when people’s emails got bounced back last year in February.

With so many layoffs, hopefully they’re getting better at it. Well, maybe not. Google employees have been told more layoffs are coming this year.

I imagine that there are some pretty high quality resumes floating around. As far as the tech field goes, Google is probably considered top tier, and landing a position against someone with Google on their resume is going to be tough.

There’s a problem with that, though. More than 25,000 tech workers from 100 companies got the axe in first few weeks of 2024. Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, TikTok and Salesforce are included in that… and Microsoft numbers may account for the Blizzard/Activision layoffs that happened this past week, sadly.

Blizzard was one of those dream jobs I had as a significantly younger developer way back when. They were often late on delivery for a new game, but it was pretty much worth it. I still play Starcraft II.

It’s become an employer’s job market – maybe it was before, but definitely more so now, and in an era when artificial intelligence may be becoming more attractive for companies and software development, as well as other things. For all we know, they may have consulted artificial intelligence for some of the layoffs, though. It wouldn’t be the first time that happened, though that was in Russia.

I can’t imagine that Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon aren’t using big data and AI for this, at least behind the scenes, but it’s probably not being explained because of the blowback that might cause. ‘Fired by AI’ is not something that people would like to see.

When tech companies axe companies, Wall Street rewards them, so stock prices go up – and there are more unemployed technology folk in a period when AI tools are making so many types of productivity easier. Maybe too much easier.

This reminds me so much of the 1990s. The good news is that tech survived the 1990s despite the post-merger layoffs.

Of course, the correction on the NPR article (at the bottom) is something I wish I had caught earlier. “Nearly 25,000 tech workers were laid in the first weeks of 2024. Why is that?” would definitely be an article worth reading.

On Quality In Production Code (2012)

~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

So I’ve been playing StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm

Once upon a time in a universe resembling this one at a younger stage, I dreamt of game programming. I don’t think that there’s any coder of my generation that didn’t have similar aspirations – perhaps getting published in Compute! magazine, perhaps getting one’s name on the box, or maybe even just writing a really cool game. I stand with the majority of developers who have never done that sort of thing. Times changed.

Consider what the person who wrote Galactic Adventures and Galactic Gladiators had written on the Well (apparently before they thought of putting a name to it):

To me, the most amazing thing about doing these games (and I’m about to date myself) is that I did virtually everything myself. I designed the games, programmed them, drew the graphics (quite primitive), wrote the rule book I did get help from friends and people at SSI in testing and making suggestions. Compare that with today where new games are developed with a million dollar budget and use teams of 30 or more people, programmers, artists, tests, story consultants, etc, etc. And you know what — the games of today are better (Gee, why is that a surprise?)

With that in mind and considering that I knew about Blizzard when the original Warcraft was a freeware game where you paid a bit more to get a full version – no, not the MMORPG you kids play now, but the Warcraft that started a new genre that Starcraft continues – Blizzard has come a long way. Since then, Battle.Net has come online. Since then, numerous titles have come through Blizzard and, while I haven’t played Diablo or messed with World of Warcraft, not one title hasn’t been popular. Blizzard has a kind of magic that works for them. I just like a particular genre and have found MMORPGs to be disappointments when it comes to content; I dislike leveling a character by what is properly termed grinding.

All of that said, I’m sure the budget for the Heart of the Swarm expansion was over a million dollars. I’d wager that it was at least 10 times that amount. The detail is great, the storyline is good (though how a prisoner in a high security prison has a pistol escapes me) and it’s playworthy – though I keep mixing up Q and A on the keyboard. But here’s the thing: I played through the game that took so long to develop in about 8 hours of game time. Hard difficulty, much the same. Brutal – well, that’s still in progress. There’s always the PvP maps and the challenge maps. I figure that, all things considered, the game will last me well over 1,000 hours of playtime.

It sold 1.1 million copies in 48 hours. At $40 per expansion, that’s $40.4 million in 48 hours.

Yeah, we’ve come a long way from typing in games from magazines. We’ve come a long way from a single developer writing a game. There was a magic to that era, though – we didn’t yet expect a great game. We expected a game and hoped it would be good. Now people get their sodden underwear twisted when they start talking about game balance and other things on the forums. As a fuddy-duddy, I see that as an odd form of entitlement – people expect a lot more for $40 and have the privilege of time to gripe about it in poor writing.

Game development has come a long way. Humanity? Not so much.

Thank you, Blizzard, for what I consider to be another great game. As a developer, I wish I had a hand in it. I’ll wait for the Protoss section. Take your time.