The shareholders demanded a sacrifice. You really think any of the top brass would be affected?
They literally do 1000 times the work the devs do to justify the millions in pay and compensation, and the whole place would grind to a halt if they were affected (/s if you believe that)
When such acquisitions are happening all what happens is that the stock/shares of one company (Activision/Blizzard in this example) is replaced by the stock/shares of another company (MS in this example) and the purchasing price is simply another way of discussing the stock exchange ratio. Company can have zero money to do that.
Layoffs after this size of merger are pretty typical. The number of people seems high, but it might be due to Activision’s own acquisitions over the years.
First round of layoffs after a merger is consolidation of corporate administrative functions. ActiBlizz finance, accounting, HR, etc is no longer needed. Microsoft already has all those needs covered. And it wouldn’t surprise me to learn ActiBlizz had a lot of administrative bloat.
Most of the knowledge workers will be kept for now. Will be future cuts there as objectives are finalized and staff needed becomes clear.
68 billion to acquire IP, but can’t afford to pay the people who make and maintain it.
Well, yeah.
The shareholders demanded a sacrifice. You really think any of the top brass would be affected?
They literally do 1000 times the work the devs do to justify the millions in pay and compensation, and the whole place would grind to a halt if they were affected (/s if you believe that)
a lot of these jobs are among the first where humans are being replaced by AI
We’re in open-season mode for AI at my day job. No one’s being replaced by AI.
It’s a great tool for code/copy generation, but it gets so much wrong that now we’re both coders and qa for bots feeding us scaffolding code.
Can*
Doesn’t
When such acquisitions are happening all what happens is that the stock/shares of one company (Activision/Blizzard in this example) is replaced by the stock/shares of another company (MS in this example) and the purchasing price is simply another way of discussing the stock exchange ratio. Company can have zero money to do that.
Layoffs after this size of merger are pretty typical. The number of people seems high, but it might be due to Activision’s own acquisitions over the years.
First round of layoffs after a merger is consolidation of corporate administrative functions. ActiBlizz finance, accounting, HR, etc is no longer needed. Microsoft already has all those needs covered. And it wouldn’t surprise me to learn ActiBlizz had a lot of administrative bloat.
Most of the knowledge workers will be kept for now. Will be future cuts there as objectives are finalized and staff needed becomes clear.