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Malcolm XML posted:Game company employees are like pre unionized Hollywood employees. They get hosed at very opportunity except the programmer types think theyre too good to unionize There used to be a thread about programmer unionization on these very forums many years ago and I remember the majority of people here were like "eh, I'm paid enough and I don't see myself becoming redundant so why bother?" Wonder how many people still think that...
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Jul 22, 2019 13:04
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A big part of unionisation is forcing corporations to view their workforce as an investment.
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Jul 22, 2019 13:06
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Ghost Leviathan posted:And most tend to pay for it in the long run given how many examples there are of a new company forming out of all the laid off devs to make their own thinly veiled sequel to a beloved IP, see Bloodstained. Can't wait for Outer Worlds AKA Actual Fallout.
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Jul 22, 2019 14:21
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Original_Z posted:There used to be a thread about programmer unionization on these very forums many years ago and I remember the majority of people here were like "eh, I'm paid enough and I don't see myself becoming redundant so why bother?" Wonder how many people still think that... That's a common issue with dev talent universally, unfortunately. There's been buzz about unionizing tech nerds in general. The biggest push is the games industry because of how horridly it treats people in general. One of the snags with dev talent is that they can leave. It's the artists who are stuck. Even then the demand for dev talent is way beyond the supply so at the moment a dev union doesn't look necessary.
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Jul 22, 2019 17:22
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ToxicSlurpee posted:That's a common issue with dev talent universally, unfortunately. There's been buzz about unionizing tech nerds in general. The biggest push is the games industry because of how horridly it treats people in general. One of the snags with dev talent is that they can leave. It's the artists who are stuck. Also most software is SaaS/subscriptions now so you don’t have wild revenue swings with cycling layoffs like game devs still get.
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Jul 22, 2019 21:43
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I still remember an old thread where people were amazed that most of the people in the credits of Super Mario 64 still work at Nintendo, and the rest have mostly retired or died. Scattering talent to the winds has become routine to the industry, which shouldn't be surprising given all the babies it keeps throwing out with the bathwater in every other imaginable sense.
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Jul 23, 2019 05:17
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Nintendo has a lot of faults to be sure, but right now they do seem to be the only big-league developer capable of consistently designing games that actually build on what has come before in innovative ways, regardless of what you happen to think of those games or if you enjoy them or not. There's no way to know for certain, but retaining and growing talent has to be the core of that.
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Jul 23, 2019 10:08
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A lot of Japan still works on the concept that you only work at one company your whole life. It's how the really alien thing of Konami taking programmers it didn't like and reassigning them to be staff at a health club works. Just changing jobs to a different company is unthinkable enough people just actually do it instead of changing companies.
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Jul 23, 2019 21:56
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:A lot of Japan still works on the concept that you only work at one company your whole life. It's how the really alien thing of Konami taking programmers it didn't like and reassigning them to be staff at a health club works. Just changing jobs to a different company is unthinkable enough people just actually do it instead of changing companies. Correction: companies in Japan don't want to fire you because it looks terrible on them. Hence Konami shuffling people to BS positions and hoping they would just quit.
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Jul 23, 2019 21:58
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Pembroke Fuse posted:Correction: companies in Japan don't want to fire you because it looks terrible on them. Hence Konami shuffling people to BS positions and hoping they would just quit. It's the same thing on both sides. They shuffle you off to a bad job because the idea of just firing someone is too abnormal and you as a worker actually do the reassignment instead of quitting on the spot because quitting is so bad. The idea is that a job at a major company is for life.
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Jul 23, 2019 22:03
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Pembroke Fuse posted:Correction: companies in Japan don't want to fire you because it looks terrible on them. Hence Konami shuffling people to BS positions and hoping they would just quit. Is this not also a Japan labor law issue? If the company can force employees to "quit on their own" the company is no longer liable for many payments and such, but a straightforward firing without a crime to justify it can mean hefty one-time payout.
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Jul 23, 2019 22:18
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nepetaMisekiryoiki posted:Is this not also a Japan labor law issue? If the company can force employees to "quit on their own" the company is no longer liable for many payments and such, but a straightforward firing without a crime to justify it can mean hefty one-time payout. Even in America where most places you can just put "felt like it lol" as the reason to fire somebody it's usually better to drive them to quit.
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Jul 23, 2019 23:16
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I've worked in a lot of jobs (all but one was non-union) and the only thing I've ever seen someone get fired over is theft.
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Jul 23, 2019 23:29
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Even in America where most places you can just put "felt like it lol" as the reason to fire somebody it's usually better to drive them to quit. I’ve usually seen the company offer those people to resign instead of being canned. The people can’t later sue then, but in trade they get to control the narrative of why they left. Never seen anyone not take the trade.
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Jul 23, 2019 23:30
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Sometimes going out with a good reference is what you need to move on.
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Jul 23, 2019 23:43
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You want to know what retails problem is, they have hosed their supply chain. I can buy a snow suit in July but finding a bathing suit was a lot of work.
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Jul 24, 2019 00:09
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That literally was one of the factors that led to HH Gregg’s bankruptcy and ceasing of operations. They outsourced their logistics about 6 months before they closed instead of having it all in house like it had been since the beginning. The third party hosed up the software integration with HHG’s ERP system so badly that after two months they literally had no idea how much inventory they had and where it was. Not a great place to be! Glad I got out of that shitshow of a corporate office before things really went downhill.
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Jul 24, 2019 00:38
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HH Greg was a tirefire of bad business decisions for several years in a row from the top right down to paying an ungodly loving sum of money to license the Beatles Help! for their TV ads.
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Jul 24, 2019 00:51
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Even in America where most places you can just put "felt like it lol" as the reason to fire somebody it's usually better to drive them to quit. My buddy's boss recently got "fired" for what was apparently just massive, gross mismanagement and an endless array of deathly serious safety violations and... the company still decided to demote him so he'd quit rather than firing him.
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Jul 24, 2019 02:50
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:A lot of Japan still works on the concept that you only work at one company your whole life. It's how the really alien thing of Konami taking programmers it didn't like and reassigning them to be staff at a health club works. Just changing jobs to a different company is unthinkable enough people just actually do it instead of changing companies. Average employee tenure in Japan is marginally longer than in France, virtually the same as Germany. And this is in 1990 per the source below, all of them have likely decreased a lot since then. This is one of the set of factoids about Japan that has been circulating on message boards and clickbait articles since the late 80s that are mostly or completely wrong, and driven by the insistence that Asian Brains Work Different. There is a phrase in Japanese "permanent employment" but it doesn't literally mean that, it's a euphemism for what is basically a normal, non-Anglo-neoliberal system of full-time job security See https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/work-and-pay-in-japan/AFBC991C4198E8452960540B406D25A7 Chapter 1 pdf https://docdro.id/MYSlyaI  nepetaMisekiryoiki posted:Is this not also a Japan labor law issue? If the company can force employees to "quit on their own" the company is no longer liable for many payments and such, but a straightforward firing without a crime to justify it can mean hefty one-time payout. A lot of the regulatory state in postwar Japan did not operate on a 'normal' statutory basis but instead on either administrative/regulatory fiat by the executive ministries, or by customary agreements between sectors of society. I don't actually think it was ever written out in statue law that you can't fire people without some onerous just cause or severance pay like say in France, but that was the informal agreement arrived at between labor and capital by the 1960s basically, probably backed up by executive regulations that had no real basis in legislation. Japan's courts are basically non-functional and just rule whatever the executive does legal no matter what, which means the laws (or constitution!) per se don't actually matter all that much. As of like the last 30 years I think the regulation stuff has been mostly gotten rid of/deregulated behind the scenes, so at this point to the extent it is still a thing it's mostly managerial inertia/that's how they've always done it. There's no law of any kind preventing them from doing otherwise icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Jul 24, 2019 |
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Jul 24, 2019 02:52
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I'm America they want you to quit do they don't have to pay unemployment.
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Jul 24, 2019 02:56
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icantfindaname posted:Average employee tenure in Japan is marginally longer than in France, virtually the same as Germany. And this is in 1990 per the source below, all of them have likely decreased a lot since then. This is one of the set of factoids about Japan that has been circulating on message boards and clickbait articles since the late 80s that are mostly or completely wrong, and driven by the insistence that Asian Brains Work Different. There is a phrase in Japanese "permanent employment" but it doesn't literally mean that, it's a euphemism for what is basically a normal, non-Anglo-neoliberal system of full-time job security Do you think there is any french or german companies where you could take a videogame developer, reassign them as cleaning staff at a health club and have them actually do it?
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Jul 24, 2019 03:03
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Do you think there is any french or german companies where you could take a videogame developer, reassign them as cleaning staff at a health club and have them actually do it? Harz-4 Minijobs in Germany are basically that, they've been around for 15 years now. You have to do menial, minimum-wage work in order to access unemployment insurance basically
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Jul 24, 2019 03:12
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icantfindaname posted:Harz-4 Minijobs in Germany are basically that, they've been around for 15 years now. You have to do menial, minimum-wage work in order to access unemployment insurance basically Honestly, germany could have the same sort of corporate culture. Everyone just knows about it in the context of japan because of video game companies and it not working that way in the US.
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Jul 24, 2019 03:22
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Honestly, germany could have the same sort of corporate culture. Everyone just knows about it in the context of japan because of video game companies and it not working that way in the US. What I'm saying is that getting your complete knowledge of international politics and economics from Games Journalism and Neogaf posts about Japan, and your own personal lived experience as an American, is really dumb and misleading
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Jul 24, 2019 03:29
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icantfindaname posted:What I'm saying is that getting your complete knowledge of international politics and economics from Games Journalism and Neogaf posts about Japan, and your own personal lived experience as an American, is really dumb and misleading I mean, it's also how it was in the US for a long time in certain industries, it's not that weird except how much we don't do it now.
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Jul 24, 2019 03:45
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We don't do it now because of the eighties and that corporate raiding thing.
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Jul 24, 2019 03:55
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BrandorKP posted:We don't do it now because of the eighties and that corporate raiding thing. Yes, a lot of this stuff is just a reflection of neoliberalism not really happening in Japan, at least not in the same way or to the same degree. Institutions and norms transplanted from America to Japan by nice centrist liberals in the 1960s are looked at from the other side of the 1980s as bizarre and unexplainable
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Jul 24, 2019 04:03
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Do you think there is any french or german companies where you could take a videogame developer, reassign them as cleaning staff at a health club and have them actually do it? German labour law basically requires the employer to find another position within the business for the employee if one business unit gets closed down. And labour courts, unions and regulatory agencies are still functional enough that big companies don't easily dodge this. Realistically, though, for restructuring such as Konami, you would try to get mutual contracts dissolving the work relationship in exchange for severance packages instead of going through the hassle of forcing through a unilateral termination. Also, with in the current labour market, the technical staff would probably find other work quick enough that they'd easily take those severance packages. icantfindaname posted:Harz-4 Minijobs in Germany are basically that, they've been around for 15 years now. You have to do menial, minimum-wage work in order to access unemployment insurance basically It's adorable you thing that, because it's actually below minimum-wage work. Thanks, SPD!  (And technically it's the for the benefits/welfare scheme. Unemployment insurance pays out way more and without any additional requirements but is time-limited (mostly 1 year)).
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Jul 24, 2019 07:14
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So based on some quick looks at job posting while on vacation Walmart is outsourcing it's electronic department. How bad is retail when Walmart won't hire its own staff
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Jul 28, 2019 15:34
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Its cheaper to contract it out, then you don't have to pay for benefits.
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Jul 28, 2019 16:30
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Well I see you worked 97 hours this week. Great! Reminder: as a contract employee you're a not eligible for benefits or overtime!!
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Jul 28, 2019 20:07
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And I see as a contracted worker I really don’t have to do poo poo but stand here and pretend I’m a customer.
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Jul 28, 2019 20:09
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Sure it wasn't TROC and the wireless side? They've been outsourcing that half for a few years now.
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Jul 28, 2019 20:22
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Oooooooh, sorry sport but it looks like you fell under your MoTiVate metrics your 5th hour last week. We're gonna dock 3 hours and place you on an improvement plan to make sure you're upholding the standards that Global Worker Solutions expects from its Workplace Social Entities. Enjoy your 15 minute lunch while you fill out this 10 minute improvement survey!
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Jul 28, 2019 20:24
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As a person who worked in Walmart electronics, back in the early '10s, it had even by that time become 95% walking people through phone purchases (in the most wallyworld way possible: written contracts and ancient point-of-sale computers that still had a cuneiform language option), or helping olds add minutes to their tracfones because they're too stubborn to spend overall less money on a way better experience. I can only imagine the tracfone market has worsened in every sense of the word since then. A lot of retail places now just plant a third-party phone dealer in the middle of the store, because it meets their business model while providing better customer service/experience. You don't want to go to Walmart and get a totally different thing going on than you would get at a phone store. Anyway, about a month after I quit to move somewhere else, they laid off the entire department.
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Jul 28, 2019 20:32
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Sodomy Hussein posted:As a person who worked in Walmart electronics, back in the early '10s, it had even by that time become 95% walking people through phone purchases (in the most wallyworld way possible: written contracts and ancient point-of-sale computers that still had a cuneiform language option), or helping olds add minutes to their tracfones because they're too stubborn to spend overall less money on a way better experience. The department clearly fell apart without you
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Jul 28, 2019 20:51
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FilthyImp posted:Well I see you worked 97 hours this week. Great! Reminder: as a contract employee you're a not eligible for benefits or overtime!! Nonono, as a contract employee, its up to the company that contracted you to provide benefits so please sue Delaware #94821 for not providing.. oh wait it's already declared bankruptcy and has dissolved, good news though Delaware #95201 is hiring for your old position.
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Jul 29, 2019 14:09
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QuarkJets posted:The department clearly fell apart without you Well I can see how I came across that way, but that really wasn't the point. The point is that Walmart et al have already dilapidated the phone shopping experience down to nothing because of their model, so they "need" contractors.
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Jul 29, 2019 18:52
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I really have to ask what you mean by " dilapidated the phone shopping experience". It's hardly ever been glamorous or anything.
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Jul 29, 2019 19:28
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