[angrycoder]

The key is the last line of the press release.

      The accounting charges associated with Blizzard's reduction in workforce are not anticipated to be material to Activision Blizzard, Inc. and were included in the 2012 financial outlook that was provided on February 9, 2012.

I worked at 2 BigCo's while they went through layoff periods. What people don't know unless they've worked at a BigCo is that a significant number of its employees are interchangable or in some cases just dead weight. For every department of 10-20 people, there are 2 or 3 that have the bulk of the knowledge and do the majority of the work.

There is a lot of hassle with firing a single employee at a BigCo, even if that person contributes very little, is a detriment to the team, or is abusing corporate policy. There is however an upside to getting rid of a bunch of people at once, especially when it is around the time of the anual report, and it mitigates a lot of the downsides you have when firing just one person.

Except in the cases where an entire department was eliminated, I would say about 85% of the people who were let go during a large layoff were not really a surprise.

[alanfalcon]

I personally worked with two of the people who were layed off today, and am friends of friends with others. This isn't a 85% unsurprising day by any means, it's a serious cut back of the support department (worldwide) because management built up too much capacity while the GMs built tools that allowed serious increases in productivity, the biggest of which was essentially automating the process of recovering hacked accounts (I can't begin to describe how many people have their WoW accounts hacked, and recovery used to take hours in the early days).

[mbenjaminsmith]

Not to say people aren't upset. I'm sure they are. But what you're saying is people are surprised to be laid off when it's clear they were no longer necessary? If how things were done changed significantly (needing far fewer people) isn't that going to obviously lead to layoffs? Maybe I misunderstand what you're saying.

[alanfalcon]

I was saying that these weren't people that were just convenient to let go in one batch. It isn't that they were fire-able material, as angrycoder suggests is often the case, in this case the people who I worked with were great team members, knowledgeable and passionate about working for Blizzard. Absolute assets. That there were too many people in the department isn't surprising, or that layoffs were used to correct the overstaffing. I just suggested that from what and who I know, the "Blizzard 600" wasn't the situation angrycoder described, except for some aspects like the timing.

[kapowaz]

Are you saying these people voluntarily built tools that effectively made themselves obsolete?

[alanfalcon]

I'm not saying they did it alone, or quickly, but at some point you become good enough at reading WoW logs that you realize you can build programs that could interpret them for you and do a lot of the difficult work of finding out what happened to items the player started with (and which items were actually gained during the hack, as when a character is used for farming until locked out) and so you write a simple script. You show your manager, it gets approved, and now all top tier support staff is able to be more efficient at the job that takes them the most time. Iterate through this process with different GMs writing different tools, some help from the WoW dev team and other teams so that different log files are created which are easier to interpret. I can't give specific inside information, but I'll say it used to take hours to restore a hacked account but last week my wife's account was somehow compromised (we think when we used an Internet cafe to play, or possibly due to a shared password—either way, it took a former account investigator seeing his wife hacked before finally adding Phone Secure to protect himself) and she had an in-game mail with her lost stuff within an hour of reporting the hack.

So yes, the tool building was voluntary (eventually sanctioned and encouraged, even of it was unofficial at first) and that directly led to an increase in productivity (supply) which has come to a head with demand decreasing simultaneously (referring both to drops in subscription levels and, more importantly, even the long tail of WoW players being incentivized and easily able to add forms of multi-factor authentication to protect their accounts and prevent the compromises in the first place). It would be cynical to see any of these advancements (except the lower subscription numbers, of course) as bad things, but also naïve to ignore that they're a large reason why the department finds themselves in a position where they're starving for work (mostly a guess on my part, based on response times to in-game support requests, coupled with interpretations of the layoff and Blizzard's official statement about it, as well as knowledge of who I knew that was affected and who I knew that wasn't).

[bh42222]

Happens all the time. If you are either very good or a bit naive, or both.

[groby_b]

If you're good, you're only on the receiving end of layoffs if times are really bad.

Best piece of advice I ever got:"If you don't make yourself replaceable, you can never be promoted, either".

[foobarbazic]

You seem to be missing the point - Blizzard is running out of steam, and the layoffs reflect this fact. Google has an insane number of people who are more or less building castles in the sky, and it essentially never occurs to anyone that there will be mass layoffs. It is hard to get fired. Google does this because they have the $$$ and are wildly imperialistic.

This means Blizzard management is thinking that they're running out of ideas for developing new areas.

This is the beginning of the end for Blizzard, which is fine with me - WoW is basically electronic crack as far as I'm concerned. I know that's narrow, but they're public enemy #1 in terms of habit-forming online behavior.