Ubisoft's unprecedented “exodus” of developers

https://www.axios.com/ubisoft-assassins-creed-great-resignation-aef86e61-75a8-4446-8ad6-f2c58bd0b730.html

by sofixa • 5 years ago

235 288 5 years ago

jscipione• 5 years ago

This explains why the year late Prince of Persia Sands of Time remake is probably not going to come out any time soon. :/

cheeseomlit• 5 years ago

I wonder if the Splinter Cell remake will fare any better...

willis9362• 5 years ago

SC has a lot of goodwill from good memories and not having the blood wrung from it yet, so my bet is that it will sell well regardless of the quality.

Also, we now have HDR OLEDs so when a guard shines a flashlight at the player we can experience this:

https://youtu.be/Zp2EjsIYIhQ

pdimitar4• 5 years ago

Ubisoft brass argues that, for all its tumult, the company's standing is comparable to its peers.

Pointing out that everybody else has bad ethics too is not a compelling argument. That’s like saying “hey, we are as bad as the others”. Yeah well, okay, but try and improve?

beamatronic• 5 years ago

"Our TPS reports are the same length as everyone else's!"

pm902• 5 years ago

Whenever a company’s leadership tries to gaslight employees by trying to fudge numbers like this, it’s loudly saying that they’re not interested in finding out why employees are really leaving.

To be clear, they aren’t necessarily lying, just presenting facts in a way that doesn’t address the problem. While attrition overall might be similar to other companies, if their most senior developers leave, they’re fucked. But they won’t talk about those numbers.

Anyone still at Ubisoft: better start looking around. Statistically it’s just gonna get worse.

sbarre3• 5 years ago

To be fair, most large enterprises use 'industry-standard' metrics like these because it's all they have.

"Pulse check" survey companies aggregate data across whole industries or verticals and then provide their customers with comparison numbers so they can get a sense, across their industry, on how they are doing, without revealing specific numbers for a given company.

There are many factors - shit working conditions and bad pay being only some of them - that affect churn, and if you think the people in charge of this stuff, HR and people management, are smart enough to really parse those factors - let alone come up with their own useful metrics - you are giving them too much credit.

It's not that they're not interested, it's that they have no idea how to figure it out. They would love to know, but have no idea where to even start.

So they say "we're doing comparable to the rest of the industry" because that's all they know. They're not fudging anything, they literally have no other insights to give.

This is of course not ok, but this is a very textbook case of "don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence".

pdimitar4• 5 years ago

Yep, they're basically using evasive language to admit defeat but also try to deflect blame and distract attention to another matters. Standard stuff, sadly.

Aerroon• 5 years ago

On the other hand, it shows that they're not outside the norm. Perhaps these kinds of problems are endemic to game development on a larger scale?

pdimitar4• 5 years ago

Yeah, unfettered corporate greed is endemic indeed. :(

AlexandrB• 5 years ago

Ubisoft brass argues that, for all its tumult, the company's standing is comparable to its peers.

I think he's referring to Activision Blizzard.

alpaca128• 5 years ago

And being comparable to any of those big names isn't something I would brag about. It's more an insult than a sign of quality.

izacus2• 5 years ago

The numbers quoted look in line with the rest of the "Great Exodus" in the IT industry... Is there any special proof that there's something more going on than the post covid resignation spike (following record high retention 2020) we're seeing across the rest of the industry?

siva7• 5 years ago

It’s a great exodus to greener pastures because developers are a pretty scarce resource in those wild times we’re living

lampe33• 5 years ago

Sorry but what exodus in the it industry?

Here in Germany if you can code "hello world". You will get a job.

Also all of my peers and friends around Europe are still working in the industry.

So I'm just wondering.

Can you point to any source? Is this maybe something that happens in the US?

grumple• 5 years ago

It's also about about techies jumping jobs for more money, not just leaving the industry entirely. It is US-centric and not limited to tech.

https://www.recruiter.com/i/no-post-pandemic-the-great-job-e...

But I'd also say the common wisdom in US tech is to jump jobs every couple of years for a raise anyway, so losing 1/4 of engineers per year seems in line with expectations.

seneca• 5 years ago

I think they mean that devs are leaving companies in higher numbers, not leaving the industry as a whole.

watwut• 5 years ago

Maybe it is meant to be more people changing companies now? I don't see people leaving IT industry either.

izacus2• 5 years ago

I've used the term because that's what the media uses to talk about the spike of people quitting their jobs for new positions.

meowtastic2• 5 years ago

Here in Germany if you can code "hello world". You will get a job.

Maybe I need to learn German, because this definitely doesn't apply to UK from my experience. You need to invest at least 4 months full-time before getting a junior role that pays as much as retail. Then you need to spend your evenings and weekends for the next 1-2 years before earning average salary.

AdrianB13• 5 years ago

In Europe there is a huge number of open positions for the lowest end of qualifications: testers, junior developers, web designers etc, but a very small number for senior developers, architects. This correlates with salaries, jobs with entry level salaries are all over the place, but not the higher end. Again, this is in Europe.

jayd163• 5 years ago

The exodus refers to churn. Resignations are high but hiring is also high.

yawaworht1978• 5 years ago

I can do quite a bit beyond hello world, speak German and have right of residency. What are the salaries for such programmers? Do get in touch if it's really that simple, I am ready to roll. The job requirements on the job pages are all a bit ridiculous with the requirements, am genuinely curious, if you reply with an email I can contact you I would love to have a chat. Danke vorab.

kiawe_fire3• 5 years ago

The gaming sector has already been struggling with a (relative) lack of AAA content and incomplete releases with quality issues.

I can’t help but wonder if we’re in for a rough couple of years in the market with all of the additional tumult.

Granted much of the tumult is a direct result of the conditions that caused quality issues in the first place.

I’ve often argued that AAA games are just too big, and gamer expectations too unreasonable to be sustainable. (Not that I mean to excuse poor management as a leading factor).

Perhaps we’ll see an eventual changing of the guard and a reset to a more sustainable market, closer to what we had in the 90s?

crate_barre3• 5 years ago

As a gamer, I can say we are a fickle bunch. We’re no different that pop-song listeners at this point. We love it when it’s a hit, and we’ll play it out until we can’t stand it anymore and never look back. If you make an indie game or a big budget one, you are vulnerable to this fickle crowd. You are better off hyping the living hell out of a game and cashing in the initial few months than you are to build a modest game with a community that will stick around.

It was never really like this, I’m not sure what happened. I really don’t know where it all went wrong.

It’s a hits driven industry at this point.

oneepic2• 5 years ago

I'm going to go ahead and guess platforms like social media/twitch/etc encourage us to keep looking at the next thing instead of looking at what we have. Meaning the previews look great but they dont translate into lasting experiences.

gjhh244• 5 years ago

Yeah, I don't really get why some people buy all this hype and even preorder stuff. Maybe I'm getting old, but I just don't care anymore for most of the new stuff, no matter how fancy the looks. I downgraded my PC and only play indie / decade old AAA nowadays, with only few exceptions which are mostly niche strategy games.

meheleventyone2• 5 years ago

Games has been a hit driven industry really since it started. Having a longer tail is really a very recent trend. That’s why everyone wants an evergreen GaaS setup. Get a steady annual income and you can float about burning money. You might not even need another hit for decades.

michaelt• 5 years ago

I'm a non-gamer, but my impression is the opposite.

We programmers expect all our tools and libraries to be not only free, but open source too, and then will bitch if they have bugs.

Gamers, though? AAA games release with loads of bugs, clunky DRM/anti-cheat rootkits, often have cheat problems anyway, hundred-gigabyte downloads, online services going down on christmas day, online voice chat full of race hate? They'll pre-order before a single review has come out, at a cost of $70.

These are some of the least fussy customers in the world.

kibwen2• 5 years ago

The paradox is that it feels like better hardware is making AAA gaming worse overall. In order to be taken seriously as "AAA" a developer feels like they cannot choose not to use the hardware to its fullest. Modern hardware means that we can have huge, open, living worlds, so every AAA game must have a huge, open, living world, enormously inflating development costs both in terms of scale and complexity. Likewise, modern hardware means that we can have beautiful, photorealistic graphics, so every AAA game must have beautiful, photorealistic graphics, massively inflating the budget due to hiring so many artists to make those assets, resulting in games that can't afford to take risks because of how much investment has been put into them. The temptation to do this has always existed, but now technology (and gamer expectations) has advanced far beyond the ability of game devs to scale.

Perhaps we’ll see an eventual changing of the guard and a reset to a more sustainable market, closer to what we had in the 90s?

How about a different point of view: the 90s originated this problem. The advent of 3D hardware meant that every game had to be 3D. The shame is that with the prior generation (SNES et al) we were just mastering the art of 2D games, but suddenly all that gets chucked out the window (or nearly all, see Symphony Of The Night as the exception that proves the rule) in favor of crude, clunky, first-gen 3D adaptations. It wasn't until the mid-2000s that the advent of modern indie gaming would pick up the thread of 2D games, resulting in some of the best gaming experiences I've had. Maybe ten years from now AAA studios will at last feel free from the obligatory burden of pushing hardware to its limit and will content themselves with putting out games that are less technologically ambitious (and put some fraction of the saved effort towards something else, like storytelling or game mechanics).

mdoms6• 5 years ago

I completely disagree with this take. The worst offenders recently have been games where the developers were determined to continue supporting outdated old XBox and Playstation hardware as well as trying to offer a next generation experience to PC and next-gen consoles.

bob10293• 5 years ago

The paradox is that it feels like better hardware is making AAA gaming worse overall

Perhaps this is like induced demand with road expansion projects. All you are doing is making the pipes/scalars bigger. You aren't fundamentally changing the nature of the equation or otherwise solving for some bigger creative problem.

Constraints are the path to high quality experiences. Fun emerges because we impose artificial limits on our reality (i.e. game logic). A totally unconstrained simulation without any rules would get boring very quickly.

Imposing real world constraints on those developing games should also encourage more creative solutions that will more likely be experienced as novel and fun by the user.

No one ever had a good time simply because a player model could be rendered with 10e8 triangles rather than 10e7 in the prior iteration.

brendoelfrendo2• 5 years ago

I sometimes wonder if open worlds have become the norm because, now that they’re possible, they’re easier. Not in a raw effort sense, but in a creative sense. They solve the question of “what will the player do?” by giving the player a carnival of map checkpoints: shoot some targets here, do a scavenger hunt there; it pads out a story that could otherwise be played in 6-8 hours into a game that can be marketed as a 40-60 hour AAA adventure you can “play your way”. They’re not easier for the creatives, but they’re easier for everyone else.

Of course, the continued existence of games like Dark Souls, and the meteoric success of games like Among Us and Phasmophobia tell me that players don’t always want to “play their way.” There’s plenty of demand for games with a finite amount of well-made content with a satisfying gameplay loop.

Dracophoenix• 5 years ago

The paradox is that it feels like better hardware is making AAA gaming The advent of 3D hardware meant that every game had to be 3D. The shame is that with the prior generation (SNES et al) we were just mastering the art of 2D games, but suddenly all that gets chucked out the window (or nearly all, see Symphony Of The Night as the exception that proves the rule) in favor of crude, clunky, first-gen 3D adaptations.

If we don't do anything new, how do you expect things to get better? SNES games wouldn't exist if Nintendo decided to remain as a trading card merchant on the basis that electronics would piss away a century's worth of hard work in "mastering" the trading card market. And besides, early attempts at 3d on the N64 were a success. Super Mario 64 is still one of the most influential games to this day.

LegitShady4• 5 years ago

The market is large enough that I don't see why its important in any way. If one company you like has a major failure or even gets bought out by a larger firm, there are a lot of alternatives who can compete for your time and attention. What constitutes a 'rough couple years' for the market?

The guard changed and like hollywood, the accountants and inbred corporate boards are in charge forevermore.

Massive gamer expectations don't exist in a vacuum, they exist because the AAA game space is heavily marketing for the purpose of building hype and expectation. It's on purpose. once in a while there's an anthem or cyberpunk level implosion but why do they care when they're raking in billions in microtransactions? That's just the cost of doing business.

The companies release incomplete low content games because people keep buying them and the profit is massive. There's too much money to be made in microtransactions and repeat fees like season passes. There have been a few large notable failures but their net loss is much smaller than the massive income through microtransactions.

We will never return to a 'sustainable market' because the market is all about companies trying both the existing things and new things to maximize profit and minimize cost, and others copying. The market is thus always in tumult and is never sustainable, with some firms failing and some firms succeeding at different times based on the ebb and flow of whatever the current events are at the time.

bob10293• 5 years ago

I’ve often argued that AAA games are just too big, and gamer expectations too unreasonable to be sustainable.

The most recent AAA game that I have attempted is Battlefield 2042.

I managed to force about 7 hours of that game in, and probably won't be able to convince myself to go back for more. I had maybe ~15 minutes of fun across that interval. You could probably flip a coin to determine if my experience was adverse because of rushed buggy garbage, or if it was a bad gameplay concept to begin with (i.e. ridiculous scope).

I still find myself playing older games like Overwatch, League of Legends and Minecraft with far more frequency than anything else out there. Maybe I've become jaded or burned out on gaming, but something in my head keeps saying that these studios just aren't trying anymore.

What is it about one of these "older" titles that can keep me playing for 5-6 hours per day that we cannot seem to capture and move into newer titles? Maybe this is just me and everything is fine...

ethbr010• 5 years ago

New AAA games feel like what you get when you digest a previously popular title through "What did you like?" focus groups, generate a list of checkbox features, write a game spec from that list, and then make that game.

And at no point is anyone in the room asking "Is it fun?"

friedman235• 5 years ago

I'm a massive battlefield fan, I've played every game they've released in the past 15 or so years and battlefield 2042 was so actively not fun I got a refund for it.

Almost every major game developed during the pandemic has been like this. Even Halo, a really good game, had massive swathes of content cut from the game because it was unfinished.

sosborn• 5 years ago

It is partially you, but not in a general "You are different than everyone else" sense. Nostalgia is powerful - the games I played when I was younger will always win out in my head compared to newer games.

jayd163• 5 years ago

You're comparing one AAA to known massive hits. I don't think its fair to say its a trend just from that.

What is it about older games? Survivor bias.

lampe33• 5 years ago

Except Nintendo games I only play indie games.

They are like the games in the 90s or 00s.

So yeah we have this market its just not were these AAA companies play.

Some cool indies: - Shovel Knight - Hades - Deep Rock Galactic - papers please! - unnamed goose game - Probably more which I forgot

pfraze• 5 years ago

I think the shift to "games as a service" or calling a game a "platform" is a reflection of what's happening here. To my knowledge, Halo Infinite, Roblox, CoD, Battlefield, and Fortnight have called their games platforms. Riot is doing something kind of similar with funding indie studious to build on their tech and IP. What they generally mean is that they're moving away from releasing new games/versions every N years and instead continuously updating a single release with new content, modes, and so on.

From a product perspective, this makes a lot sense to me. We're past the era when new releases diverge significantly from their past versions. This approach of continuously updating an existing game has already been happening for a while with Fortnight and CoD, and it's led to a lot of variety with much less friction to getting the new experience.

From an economic perspective, I assume it's a lot cheaper to develop updates than new releases, and a lot of them can monetize with cosmetics.

If we're doing platforms, I'd love to see modding culture make a big comeback this way - more of what Roblox is doing, but with something aimed at adults. The old days of Halflife and Warcraft 3 mods were so huge in my childhood, and I feel like it's a huge missed opportunity by these studios not to tap into this more.

raxxorrax2• 5 years ago

Doesn't really scale, as you mostly have one or two games per genre that will become dominant.

I fear this approach would actually kill any user generated content. The king of user generated content are probably still the elder scrolls games, but I doubt they will develop anything like that ever again because it fails to make a business case against something like fortnite, even if the probability to develop the next craze is quite slim. I believe their latest online versions don't leaver many possibilities for modders

Reichhardt• 5 years ago

The huge 30% commissions charged by Sony, Microsoft, Valve, Nintendo, Apple, Google are a huge negative factor to the potential profits of the industry. On top of that, you have sales taxes from every country in the world, which are creeping upwards globally. For every $1 of customer spending, typically only 50-60c reaches the developer.

In most other Tech sectors, you can go straight to customer, without platform commissions or taxes, and the profitability and salaries reflect that.

All of the profits in Gamedev are taken by platform holders.

yjftsjthsd-h• 5 years ago

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/UBSFY/ubisoft-ente... lists "Annual Gross Profit (Millions of US $)" => 2021 $2,217. I think they're doing fine.

munk-a• 5 years ago

One programmer told Axios they were able to triple their take-home pay by leaving.

Tripling is pretty impressive - but as a developer who used to work in the game industry you'll definitely see a significant bump leaving - I personally saw a 50% bump and I'm still not in a particularly high earning tech sector.

Bayart• 5 years ago

I was about to say, some of it is due to the high demand for devs, but a lot of it is just down to the video games industry being incredibly exploitative.

cecida• 5 years ago

It certainly showed in the hot buggy mess that was AC Valhalla.

fileoffset• 5 years ago

Ubisoft are no better than Activision or EA. Absolute scum. They ruin every game they touch with their greed.

tester756• 5 years ago

I don't think it's unique to them

"Here" (Eastern EU) almost all software people I know did change / are changing / strongly consider changing jobs

various experience level, various industries, various salary expectations.

darth_avocado• 5 years ago

It is embarrassing that developers [also designers and other creatives in gaming] are the core of any tech company, but very few companies actually value them accordingly. This is especially true in the gaming industry. Most companies start with great talent, but then more and more middle management comes in. Managers hire more managers so they can become senior managers. Non functional bloat starts coming in the form of sales, marketing, “strategy and ops” etc. Not saying they don’t add value, but they get hired and rewarded way more than the value they add and ultimately drown the company.

rileymat23• 5 years ago

How are you measuring value added? A great product with no sales adds very little value.

willis9362• 5 years ago

And marketing with no product has no value.

ecf• 5 years ago

A great product sells itself.

2muchcoffeeman2• 5 years ago

That argument works both ways though. What are they marketing and selling when all the devs leave?

ethbr010• 5 years ago

... and inevitably, the C-suite is replaced by people with a management or finance background, and no game creation experience, who proceed to drive the company into the ground. Has been the story of game studios since forever.

vkou2• 5 years ago

...who proceed to drive the company into the ground. Has been the story of game studios since forever.

Has it?

Everyone loves to dunk on EA, Ubisoft, Sony, Blizzard-Activision, etc, for producing mountains of AAA shovelware[1], but the big players in the industry seem to undergo a pretty normal rate of growth, death, and merger for large companies.

It's entirely possible (Likely, even!) that under better management[2], they'd be more successful, but I wouldn't say that gaming firms are driven into the ground by managers any more frequently than they are in any other industry.

There's certainly a high rate of bankruptcy and death in small and medium-sized gaming companies, but I feel that has more to do with the incredibly speculative and inconsistent nature of cashflow, and the high cost of securing funding in the industry.

[1] Given that people have been dunking on these firms for that reason for the past decade, they sure are taking a long time to be driven into the ground...

[2] The bar for 'better management' is pretty damn low for some of the firms I've mentioned.

oarabbus_3• 5 years ago

The share prices and revenue numbers of these allegedly driven-into-the-ground companies seems to tell the opposite story.

jonathankoren3• 5 years ago

I always figured the gaming industry gets away with its treatment of workers because there's always a new crop of naïve people whose dream is to make games, so they can burn them out, and then just toss them away, and then suck in the new crop. Other sectors can't get away with it as easily because no one says, "It's been dream since childhood to make auto insurance more profitable."

ethbr010• 5 years ago

This is what seems toxic about the entire "enterprise" (i.e. not indie) video game industry.

It's figuratively (and sometimes literally) the equivalent of someone cruising college bars looking for folks "willing to be paid for a few private pictures."

Take someone with hopes, dreams, aspiration, pay them the minimum you can get away with (that due to their stage of life seems like a lot), dress up the entire experience with pomp and fun and free snacks, tell them how they're going to change the world, extract every ounce of profit you can from them, at the expense of their life, health, and career, and then dump them by the side of the road and GOTO 10.

It's a fundamentally exploitive business, and it shows in the salaries (especially vs work volume expectations). At least MAMAA pay sufficiently well that it's a mutually beneficial deal to employee and employer.

jabl4• 5 years ago

Yeah, that's my interpretation too from talking to and reading about people's experiences in the industry. (Disclaimer: I don't work and have never worked in the computer games industry myself)

Unfortunately it seems par for the course for many "flashy" creative professions. There's a much larger influx of people wanting to work in the industry than actual jobs, so employers take advantage of the situation to press down wages and treat people like shit (say, unpaid internships).

marginalia_nu2• 5 years ago

It's probably not quite that black and white.

You need business smarts too if you want to succeed. Ion Storm is a good example as it was everything contemporary Ubisoft is not. It was a very developer-run shop that out of one office produced critically acclaimed Deus Ex, but at the same time produced flop-of-the-ages Daikatana.

It's a tricky balancing act. You can definitely have too much business influence over the creative process. Ubisoft would never produce a flop like Daikatana, but neither would it produce a gem like Deus Ex.

speeder• 5 years ago

https://www.metacritic.com/game/ds/imagine-wedding-designer disagrees with you :P

Ubisoft is actually good at making crap games. For example they bought a Brazillian studio that was often contracted to do some cool hunting games. Then they forced the studio to pump low-score after low-score NDS games (Wedding Designer was one of them), there was tons of executive meddling, then they said the studio that was crap and closed it down.

Thing is, at the time it was literally the best studio in Brazil, and this incident caused some damage to Brazillian games industry :(

Trasmatta• 5 years ago

Some extra context: those two games were made by entirely different teams. Daikatana was built by John Romero's team, and Deus Ex was made by Warren Spector's team. I don't think there was much collaboration or even communication between the teams. Romero just bankrolled Spector, who happened to have quite a bit more experience, and was likely much better suited to the director role.

polote• 5 years ago

It is embarrassing that developers [also designers and other creatives in gaming] are the core of any tech company

Clearly not true, especially in b2b enterprise where you can sell even if you don't have a product

viraptor• 5 years ago

That's called running a scam and that's not really comparable...

zdragnar• 5 years ago

I always thought this was an overhyped myth until I watched a relatively innovation-oriented enterprise purchase a database company... So many hilariously bad powerpoint slides, so much money on the table.

When we were instructed to use it, we discovered that the "database" (really just a custom prolog engine + storage container) couldn't support paginated queries. Would have to fetch millions of rows on the server, then pick only the 20 we were interested in to send to the front-end.

Most of the dev team spent the next few months doing little but dreaming up powerpoint presentations we could use to get millions, as every schema change required recompiling the entire db from source, so we had lots of sitting around time until management figured out how badly they screwed up.

willcipriano2• 5 years ago

Finally a company with no cost centers, just idea men generating pure profit and making deals with other idea men.

MattGaiser• 5 years ago

Enough people seem to want to work on gaming, even under the extreme conditions, for devs to not be very valuable in that context.

Passions projects as a job can be very expensive.

spamizbad• 5 years ago

While there are lots of people trying to break into the industry, the real question is how good are they? Building games is hard work.

It's just an anecdote, but one dev told me at the studio he worked on, his project had 22 engineers assigned, but just 3 devs ultimately contributed 90% of the code written. And while those 3 devs were very skilled developers, he claimed they weren't so-called "10x" engineers. They've all since moved on to greener pastures doing work outside the industry making substantially more money.

alkonaut• 5 years ago

It has to become a workforce that skews young and inexperienced, if older and/or more experienced developers (such as those with families) have options to go to the studios that don’t do permanent crunch time?

I’m getting the feeling from some recent AAA games (looking at you EA/DICE) that quality is going down with each released game while spin-off studios pop up indicating to an outsider that some “core” competence has left.

aspaceman2• 5 years ago

If you're unable to retain the people with the necessary skills, it doesn't matter how high the demand for the field is.

There are very few people with relevant graphics programming skills. Who cares if 10000 undergrads wanting to be game devs if none of them know C++, and even fewer know what a pointer is.

You may think I'm joking, but even undergrads coming out of the most elite institutions have no knowledge of these things.

How the hell you gonna explain compute shaders to a guy like that? You can only license out these problems to third party tools so much. Epic isn't going to come in and save you when you fuck up the release.

ClumsyPilot4• 5 years ago

That's poor reasoning - there are several million people willing to be president, but 99.999% of them (possibly 100%) aren't capable of doing the job

PragmaticPulp4• 5 years ago

Not saying they don’t add value, but they get hired and rewarded way more than the value they add and ultimately drown the company

I thought similarly when I was younger, but then I became a manager and realized it’s not so black and white.

Going back to IC developer (for a while) was a surprising relief from the stresses of managing people.

I know some companies let managers run wild and make devs do all the work, but most successful tech companies actually have very high demands of managers. A decent manager will be good at hiding all of the behind-the-scenes issues from the team, but I didn’t truly understand the volume of problems managers quietly deal with until I was in the role.

Shorel2• 5 years ago

True, but I don't think it's the same for second and third level managers.

Basically, you as a manager do all the hard work.

The boss of your boss... he can do some hard work, or he can just rely on you and the other direct managers, and simply get the benefits.

mupuff1234• 5 years ago

Any chance you can provide some examples for issues you've encountered "behind the scenes"?

mylons2• 5 years ago

"hiding all the behind-the-scenes issues" that COME from the management/ops/marketing/sales layer. it's kinda like a snake eating it's tail.

ksec4• 5 years ago

Google may not have "started" the whole get rid of middle management idea, but they have certainly popularised it. Only to learn later ( much like 99.9% what Google does ) that you do need middle manager. But then they have zero idea how it should work. ( much like 99.9% of their product ) May be A/B testing?

Middle Management is hard. Constantly being torn apart by top and bottom. You either have decent manager that gets your team a huge boost of productivity but stressed to burn out. Or they run wild and becomes the villain themselves. I guess this is either you die being a hero or do it long enough to become the villain.

ljm2• 5 years ago

A decent manager isn't so different from a scrum master in the agile world. A good manager is an intentional bottleneck; they are careful about what gets through the pipeline.

gmadsen4• 5 years ago

as someone who is considering switching to a management role, what has been your experience as a prior developer, and now coming back, do you feel like you have lost any "edge" being an IC? Also what new perspectives have carried over? I think I'm hoping to get basic team building and management skills to one day start a business, my preference is to be by myself struggling with technical problems, but I see the value in the management skill set

pengaru• 5 years ago

https://mipmip.org/tidbits/boat-race.html

it_does_follow• 5 years ago

very few companies actually value them accordingly

This is something that has definitely gone through waves a few time during my life time.

In particular I remember the early startup era (~2010) developers were treated very well (though I don't think they were ever treated that great in the games industry). Ironically they weren't paid as ridiculously as today, but they tended to play a much larger role in the company, and their time was treated as very valuable.

Back then startups would be a team of engineers, a designer, a marketer with all of the product vision coming from CEO or maybe as very senior product role (typically cofounder). The contemporary world filled with PMs would have seemed (and still does to some of us) foreign to anyone at the time.

The truth is industry tends to despise a "monopoly on talent", and so we've seen the bureaucratization of the industry. The rise of boot camps has worked to devalued the skills of a talented engineer (though it might be harder now than before to hire talent), interviews are formalized into a robotic screening processes, and the current structure of teams, largely driven by PMs/product owners, has radically devalued the input form engineers in the way the product is developed.

If you have been in the industry less that 10 years you'd be surprised how much say engineers used to get in at the start of the most recent tech boom, as well as how different the hiring process was. In 2011 the two biggest signals for interviews were a strong github page and especially OSS contribution. Passionate, curious software engineers were the most sought after people and they were considered very much a part of the leadership of a company, driving it's culture and success.

Today engineers have been more or less reduced to hot-swappable drones across the industry.

ModernMech• 5 years ago

Interesting post. I think what happened was that there used to be an idea that good tech was an important competitive advantage. Therefore, highly competent developers were listened to. But the industry came to realize that it's not better tech that wins, but underhanded, addictive, and deceptive tech. Engineers in my experience aren't motivated to use their engineering power to deceive, so if your goal is to use software to monetize users by violating their privacy, you need someone else at the helm of that ship.

syntheweave• 5 years ago

I think the industry has foiled itself recently through sheer scale. The number of niche roles has exploded and with it, so too the depth of the software stack. The good talent in any subsection ends up going deeper than they can be trained or evaluated for. The rest tread water and add noise to the pipeline. As a result there is an increasing sense of nobody knowing what's going on and compensation being poorly correlated with talent, meaning many orgs can't handle their technical challenges and don't know it until it blows up.

The actual solution would be to be suspicious of software as an end and relinquish more control of it to the open-source commons so that they can optimize their core business. But that can't happen if your core business is "being a platform," and as we know, platforms are where the big profits lie anyway. So it's going to go on like this until we cycle out of the current software stacks and move into ones with different social arrangements at their core.

TaylorAlexander5• 5 years ago

This is a major problem with the “one guy is in charge” model of running a business. All these employees care about how the company treats people but this one guy is willing to be a jerk and not apologize and now all these employees have little recourse but to quit.

Even if you think the hierarchy is useful for practical purposes, a cooperatively owned business can give voting rights for everyone so they elect a manager and can fire or demote them as needed. Instead we get the mess that is Ubisoft.

hnaccount141• 5 years ago

I've always wondered why worker co-ops aren't more common in software. It seems like the industry would be particularly well-suited for it.

foverzar• 5 years ago

Even if you think the hierarchy is useful for practical purposes, a cooperatively owned business can give voting rights for everyone so they elect a manager and can fire or demote them as needed.

So, when has that ever worked, apart maybe a small startup between friends?

datavirtue2• 5 years ago

Union. If you can set wages and benefits you can also set business direction and other working conditions that effect company health. The history of business regulation is strewn with arbitrary policies examples set by "the guy in charge."

fxtentacle• 5 years ago

Large game companies make a significant percentage of their revenue from the so-called "whales", which tend to be lonely people with an addiction control problem.

Most developers want to make games like they would want to play them. That means no grinding, no pay to win, no taking advantage of your players. But if you run your studio that way, you're way less profitable than the competition which is managed by greedy sharks and fully "monetizes" (=exploits) anyone who's willing to touch microtransactions. For stock market companies, having competitive numbers is a big deal or else you'll pay through the nose for borrowing the $200 mio that a AAA game will cost.

In short, "the market" makes sure that game companies become exploitative, and true believers leave to fund their own indie studio.

But that means I disagree with you that senior management adds no value. They do precisely what they were hired for, which is to make sure the studio has a good stock price and, hence, enough money to finance future games. It's just that most developers hate em, and for good reason.

rkk3• 5 years ago

Large game companies make a significant percentage of their revenue from the so-called "whales", which tend to be lonely people with an addiction control problem.

Yes but those companies are freemium or in-app purchases "games" which is AFAIK a completely different model than Ubisoft which sells $60 games once like FarCry or Assassins Creed.

vvanders• 5 years ago

From my experience there's a bit more dynamics in there. In particular the publishing agreements(I've been privy to a few) are structured in ways that the developer takes a substantial amount of risk and very rarely gains the reward of a breakout hit. Things like the first royalty doesn't come in until all development + marketing costs(which can be as much as dev) are paid back. Caps on payouts for companies or individual employees, etc.

The structure is much closer to what you see in the recording industry contracts , there's even been cases in the past of publishers denying milestone payments during peak burn to put the company into bankruptcy to gain the IP + source and then re-hire the dev-team back at 70% salary. Combine that with an robust supply of fresh faces trying to "break-in" it's not really a surprise the industry is the way it is.

If you're on the dev side of the industry you've got quite a few options to exit, if you're in art there's less options since a lot of adjacent industries have similar conditions(I've heard from past co-workers that the animation industry is even more brutal).

It's really a shame since there's some really fun technical problems to be solved and a lot of creativity but that ultimately gets exploited into the state it is today. It could be a better industry but it isn't. For those that want to build games I usually recommend doing it as a side project, there's a high probability that you can work on a genre you like(I never did during my time in industry) and you aren't subject to the state of the industry.

mschuster912• 5 years ago

This is especially true in the gaming industry. Most companies start with great talent, but then more and more middle management comes in. Managers hire more managers so they can become senior managers. Non functional bloat starts coming in the form of sales, marketing, “strategy and ops” etc.

Once again, I have to refer to the excellent work "Bullshit Jobs"...

Waterluvian• 5 years ago

I’m not hyper capitalist but I do think that employees will be valued as much as they need to be. This unprecedented exodus will illustrate that: they will either be replaced with or without raising compensation and working conditions. We’ll have to wait and see.

ayngg• 5 years ago

It is almost the natural progression I would say. Steve Jobs talked about it with regards to Xerox in a famous interview where technology gets you to a dominant position, but marketing monetizes that position so there will be a natural progression in leadership favoring marketers who become responsible for much of the growth after a certain point over developers.

Just looking at video games, the most profitable games now aren't AAA games with super immersive graphics, worlds, stories and so on, it is the mobile gacha games with simple graphics and simple mechanics that are basically predatory in how they are able to ingrain and establish themselves into a routine while they siphon money away from a certain demographic of their user base. These days AAA games are mostly AAA in their cost to produce, few are innovative, or produce better gameplay or tell better stories than what is being made by smaller indie studios. Most are just pretty to look at if you have a beefy video card that can crank the settings up.

sudosysgen• 5 years ago

Well the most successful gacha game is a AAA game with a pretty nice story, a very large and detailed world, fairly complex mechanics, etc..., So it's clear those things still have a lot of value.

sirspacey• 5 years ago

That’s what I’m curious about - what does it look like to build a company for & run by engineers?

I used to think middle management was the thing to eliminate. But then I learned - middle managements’ job is to protect their team from disconnected leadership.

I’m not sure what the answer to that is, but I’m committed to finding out how to create a great place for engineers and their creativity. My co-founder & I created a company just to do that. Mostly it’s about avoiding inputs that drive exploitive management. We don’t take outside capital, we fire clients if they don’t treat our engineers well, just shedding anything that seems to be or proves to be exploitive.

We’re already finding out just how much it matters - the people we hire are having the most fun they’ve ever had.

The money we make is fine, but not really the point. cover salaries, do cool stuff.

gnahckire• 5 years ago

Last I checked Valve is a game company with a pretty flat org structure.

They have their own problems but, last I checked most people like working there.

nine_zeros• 5 years ago

I know there will be a lot of comments about how "A good manager can do wonders". No one denies this.

The problem is that the industry is rife with bad managers who only care about themselves instead of the actual producers of output.

Truly surprising to see how many managers overestimate their role so much without producing any value.

Managers should be paid less than ICs and should really only be assistants to ICs (especially if ICs are syncing with product, marketing and doing all non engineering work anyway). The manager is only a paper pusher at this point.

manigandham• 5 years ago

"more than the value they add"

This sounds like a very biased perspective. Sales and marketing is not "non functional bloat" - it's actually far more important because if you don't have sales then you don't have a business.

There have been countless companies with brilliant engineers that no longer exist because they couldn't actually bring a product to market. Also managing people is incredibly difficult and easy to ignore if you've never done it.

golergka• 5 years ago

I'm sorry, but I don't see who in their right mind could look at the current developer labour market and say that companies don't value them (us). Even in gamedev, where I worked most of my life (but not anymore) salaries are not *that* lower and crunchtime is not *that* more prevalent.

drewcoo• 5 years ago

I don't think anyone is embarrassed. If they are, they don't seem to act like it.

mdoms6• 5 years ago

The triple-A gaming industry in general seems to be in a bit of a crisis. Quality of releases for the past couple of years has been abysmal, and creative direction seems to be now entirely in the hands of overpaid, unengaged executives who are totally disconnected from the gaming world.

Games are routinely being released in a half-baked state. How could a developer with a real love for the medium be happy working at organisations like this?

Ubisoft is one of the worst offenders (especially in terms of creative direction) so it's no surprise that they are the most affected.

LegitShady4• 5 years ago

The triple-A gaming industry in general seems to be in a bit of a crisis

Aren't they making more money than ever before? Why is that a crisis? Imagine you're the most profitable you've ever been even with the quality issues - why is that a crisis at all?

The purpose of the companies is to make money and they are. The games are just the widget they're selling. If people keep buying widgets, whether they're subscription widgets or microtransaction widgets, the business is working.

mdoms6• 5 years ago

Why is that a crisis?

For the exact reasons I stated in the rest of my post? I didn't say "AAA companies aren't making money".

jandrese• 5 years ago

It's kind of like saying Hollywood is in crisis because mid-budget fresh IP movies are almost extinct because the studios only want to make comic book movies that pull in a billion dollars at the box office.

From a creative output standpoint it is probably true, but the only thing that matters in Hollywood is money and by that measure they are doing fine.

pepemon• 5 years ago

Red Dead Redemption 2 is an absolute gem in all terms and it was released in 2019, not so long ago. Shiny new Halo Infinite is very nice too. There were failures like Cyberpunk 2077, but such cases were always present in the industry. What abysmal quality are you talking about?

hylaride2• 5 years ago

The video game industry as a whole has been a notoriously bad place to work for techs for a long time. It is extremely deadline driven, technical decisions are often made by product managers (or worse, other business people), and on top of that the pay is often mediocre compared to other industries.

In the past, they've gotten away with it by enticing young people in (often because they loved video games growing up and want to make them) and burning them out. That seems to be a strategy that no longer works now that recruiters for all sorts of companies/industries have become so aggressive that you'll very quickly learn you're being taken advantage of if your linkedin profile is even moderately up to date and checked.

These labour shortages (in all sorts of industries) are really going to be fascinating to watch. It's been 40 years since workers have had this kind of power/positioning and it'll be interesting to see if and how companies will adapt and change.

jatone• 5 years ago

agreed, I'm excited to see what happens. its taken those 40 years for globalization and women in the work force to be integrated and absorbed. we're just now seeing the labor markets plateau.

hylaride2• 5 years ago

I think on top of all that, the two largest demographic groups, millennials and boomers, are no longer working together as the latter start to retire en mass (that's already been accelerated as many took early retirement during the pandemic). It will indeed be exciting to see what happens now...

HideousKojima• 5 years ago

That seems to be a strategy that now longer works now that recruiters for all sorts of companies/industries have become so aggressive

Companies are also becoming more and more willing to post salary ranges along with job postings these days as well, which makes jumping ship from game dev even easier. "I could make 30-50% more and only work 40 hours a week instead of 60-80, at the low cost of giving up games to write boring tax software instead? Sign me up"

kranke155• 5 years ago

You also will be working on boring tax software from 9 to 5. That gives you hours every week to build your own toy games, potentially even with friends making something cool.

Const-me• 5 years ago

giving up games to write boring tax software instead

I don’t believe tax software actually needs people with game development background. The GUI is relatively basic, the code is not terribly complicated nor performance-critical, but probably needs niche skills like SQL and finance.

However, there’re huge areas of software with both problems and technologies being rather similar to videogames. These areas include CAD/CAM/CAE and many other non-gaming 3D graphics applications such as VFX and medical imaging, HPC, robotics, low-level multimedia, computer vision, some parts of AI/machine learning, professional audio, some parts of embedded, some parts of mobile.

croutonwagon• 5 years ago

I was reading an AMA with Todd Howard of Bethesda a while back and noticed he said they were hiring. So I took a look specifically in my specialty (ops/cloud ops etc). I hesitate to use the buzzword dev ops because all of our code is focused on automating operations, enhancing reliability and balancing with cost so my core devs can do their work better, faster etc.

Anyway. In Bethesda land it was called NOC admin or something with a very clear deadline of you becoming a developer only within three years or getting out.

It made total sense why fallout 76 has so many issues with their net code. They don’t actually want people with any experience in managing these things, they want guys to just hit reboot it seems and use it as a jumping block.

At my company it’s telling how little networking and systems stuff our coders and sql folks know and when left to their own, things run pretty bad. My company has learned from this and we have pretty good reliability as a result and have a unique ability to scale and automate, especially products that were done by different core teams since my team often comes in and makes it all integrate well.

Anyway, all that said it was pretty eye opening and while I still like video games here and there, and even Bethesda ones, I have no desire to go work in that industry. I’ll stick to my sector.

lemoncookiechip• 5 years ago

Between the sexual misconduct scandal, the more recent NFT Quartz PR nightmare from both the outside and inside, as well as a general shake in the AAA industry due to similar sexual misconducts, allegations of racism and discrimination of minorities, physical abuse, toxic working environments, crunch culture above and beyond what is standard for other industries, mass layoffs after record profit years every year... It is no wonder that people are tired, or that we see more and more big names devs leave and form their own studio alongside with friends every other month. (An example being Activision-Blizzard who keeps bleeding big names and new studios keep forming).

There's no apparent effort from the leadership of the industry to change all the above, as well as a continuous push by publisher for more monetization methods on top of pre-existing ones at the cost of the studio's PR (NFTs being the most recent). Combine this with a general lack of care for the quality of releases at launch or guaranteed long term support for the titles, which leads to animosity and lack of trust from consumers.

There's also the fact, that all of this leads to developers and staff, being harassed on social media by people who don't and don't want to understand and simply want someone to blame.

Also worth mentioning that there's a on-going pandemic for the past 2 years, that has left people both mentally and physically exhausted. So... that probably doesn't help at all when paired with the above.

EDIT: Also worth adding, is the fact that CEOs are earning multi-million dollar bonuses on top of very large salaries (especially when compared to CEOs from other industries) when people are getting paid so poorly that they can't afford to eat (https://www.gamerzunite.com/activision-blizzard-underpays-em...) or get layoff during a record profit year.

mottosso• 5 years ago

An example being Activision-Blizzard who keeps bleeding big names and new studios keep forming

If there's anything good coming out of all of this, it's this. We need less consolidation overall, and new studios emerging with this level of experience can only be a net-positive for the world.

tyingq• 5 years ago

Seems like it will probably have snowball effect. With this many leaving, the remainder have more work to do than before. And assuming the rumors about game dev are mostly true, the company will react by forcing long work hours and other unpleasant new policies, etc. Which will make more want to leave. Rinse, repeat.

jabl4• 5 years ago

I haven't played anything by Ubisoft in a really really long time (nothing against Ubisoft per se), but I have to say based on reviews/walkthroughs [1] of Far Cry 6 on youtube that it must be a masterpiece. Not because it's any good, but because it unintentionally is so hilariously shitty.

[1] see e.g. the ongoing walkthrough by Mighty Jingles

exar0815• 5 years ago

Never, in about a million years, I would have expected The Mighty Jingles referenced on Hacker News. My internet career now absolutely went full circle.

jabl4• 5 years ago

Happy to oblige. ;)

FooHentai• 5 years ago

Ubisoft have been on my personal veto list for years for a host of reasons. Dreadful launcher, bland padded-out content, lack of after-launch updates, key activation problems. The juice was consistently not worth the squeeze, so I just don't touch anything they're putting out nowadays.

Shorel2• 5 years ago

Reading all comments criticizing some modern AAA games: If you are into simracing, we are entering a new golden age.

Particularly with Automobilista 2, the latest update is amazing, and the developers, called Reiza, are more of an indie studio instead of a big player. But the end result is nothing short of AAA quality.

Other titles we enjoy are Automobilista 1, rFactor2, iRacing, and Asetto Corsa Competizione.

aspaceman2• 5 years ago

IMHO, the results possible with modern open source tools are really amazing. I think a lot of the "cost" of AAA are inefficiencies in the pipeline, and issues of scope.

A racing title seems especially easy to limit scope in. Compare your titles with the F1 games. There's no fancy campaign with voice acting and 3D modeled faces. But it plays really nice and the used assets are pristine. Indie no longer has to imply "2D pixel art".

Speaking from experience, it's not that hard to teach some artist friends how to use blender. Then it's just a matter of compensating them fairly and you're off to the races. Plus it's fun. If you haven't tried 3D art, it's surprisingly intuitive. Like a sculpting with magic hands and clay that isn't annoying.

TOMDM• 5 years ago

Ubisoft brass argues that, for all its tumult, the company's standing is comparable to its peers.

The brass has realized they don't need to be good, just competitive.

ClumsyPilot4• 5 years ago

Good, I hope they learn a lesson.

Anecdote: i know a fintech that fired their last per developer, while about 30% of their payment processing systems were written in perl. They tries to press a friend of mine into fizing it when it broke 'again', and he quit on the spot with 'someone has to take reaponsebility for the braindead decisions around here'.

beebmam• 5 years ago

When companies pay "market rates" for their developers, there should be no surprise that there's high turnover. They'll easily get a better deal going somewhere else simply due to the variance in those market rates.

Here's one easy solution: pay the people at your company more so they don't want to leave for an offer that will certainly be less good than what they have with you.

Good software engineers are hard to find. You should be paying them their weight in gold.

dschuetz• 5 years ago

It is really saying a lot when asked about workers complaining the top management starts shoveling numbers instead of facing the issues. This is how far removed management is from reality; it's all numbers and analytics to them, acting like robots.

mabbo2• 5 years ago

It's a great market for senior developers in Canada right now.

A lot of companies are moving to full remote for a large portion of their developers. Especially important is that this includes some Bay Area big names. These companies are willing to pay well for talent and don't care where you live.

Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal have historically paid senior developers poorly compared to what the Bay offered. But we devs chose to be here instead because we like Canada, want to raise our families here. Sometimes because of US Visa issues, but not as common as you'd think.

But now we are being offered the best of both worlds. Better pay than anyone previously offered; you can stay in Canada; you can even work from home every day and avoid commuting.

And it's not like every developer leaving Ubisoft is going to Instacart (though I'll bet a few are). The market on senior developer labor is just suddenly more competitive. Every dev with more than 5 years experience is reevaluating their current total comp and listening to recruiters offering more.

But don't worry, says Ubisoft, we replaced those very senior ICs with a bunch of new people. As long as developers-in is greater than developers-out, I'm sure it will all be fine.

Thaxll• 5 years ago

Working for US compagny with not HQ in Canada can be a lot of problems. You have to pay for everything, insurance etc ... it's a lot of complications.

kache_• 5 years ago

Considering the fact that I made half a million dollars this year, I'm sure it was worth not having dental insurance

SuoDuanDao2• 5 years ago

As we never tire of pointing out, health insurance is less of an issue in Canada.

nikon• 5 years ago

letsdeel.com

mabbo2• 5 years ago

One doesn't work for the US company, just a Canadian subsidiary. Which means Canadian HR, who handle all of that stuff for you. It's a long-solved problem you're worried about.

Also: It's Canada. Health insurance isn't a big deal here because we have a first world health care system. Sure, additional health insurance is useful, but most people don't need it.

martinpw• 5 years ago

I think a significant amount may also be pull from FAANG companies which are now getting a lot more into 3d content creation. I don't have so much visibility on the games side, but at least in film and VFX I am seeing a lot of former colleagues at studios moving to those companies for much higher salaries and job stability.

hintymad• 5 years ago

Oh no! I really enjoy Assassin's Creed, and I wish the quality of the game will not deteriorate. Assassin's Creed is especially good for a layback gamer like me, who does not like time pressure and would like to take their own pace to finish the game. The fabulous view and handy tutorials and guides along the way helps too.

Jerry2• 5 years ago

One of my best friends from college days ended up at Ubsioft Montreal and he spent around 8 years up there. He left last month due to changes in management. About 3 months ago they hired some new manager and this person had no clue about programming, or software development in general, yet she was in charge of the whole team. After a whole lot of infighting, my friend decided to leave after they refused him a change of a team. He ended up leaving for another AAA game publisher. At least 4 other members of his previous team also ended up leaving after him.

I'm often reminded of the old adage: people don't leave companies, they leave managers.

onion2k• 5 years ago

The optics of leaving half way through the development of a big project looks much worse than leaving after it's completed. Hiring managers question why people leave. I would be surprised if there wasn't a large number of people moving on in their career after working on and launching a big title like AC:Valhalla or FC6. That seems like the ideal time to find a new role at a higher level, using your latest credit to leverage a better package somewhere new, especially if you're a "top 25" person on the team.

shp0ngle• 5 years ago

Blizzard seems even worse.

Poor Blizzard. Even a few years ago, with the Overwatch release, it still looked strong. With some stains but strong.

Alas.

biophysboy• 5 years ago

I've seen bad press about game developers for quite a while, and I've increasingly seen that the explanation is corporate greed. But if its greed, why are game developers able to get significantly higher pay and quality of life by working elsewhere? Why are video game execs more greedy than any other software company? Is the tech/entertainment industry more scummy than the tech/business industry, at least among its leadership?

I know nothing about this industry, but it seems like the margins for a game are extremely low. People balk at the $60+DLC prices, but you can get high quality games for $20 or less if you just pretend to live a year or so in the past. Is this not a confounding explanation for the shady stuff the game industry does, like lottery-style mechanics, repetitive franchises, and poor work-culture?

Having said all this, developers should absolutely get more bargaining power at their studios. If this increases the price I ultimately see, so be it.

jayd163• 5 years ago

Employers will pay what the market will support. People will accept lower pay (and even allow themselves to fall into a lot of bad working conditions) for making games because its actually pretty enjoyable a lot of the time. Not to mention the starry eyed kids that will accept just about anything to work in games.

beeboop• 5 years ago

I really want to break into the gaming industry doing game development even though it's a step down in pay and working conditions - I just applied because of this. Hopefully they're desperate enough to hire a mediocre developer like me :)

throwawayubi• 5 years ago

I was recently fired from Ubisoft, mainly because the human resources people were not familiar with the type of visa I had.

This type of visa allowed me to work outside the country - it was not the regular working visa, but rather something very close to a permanent residentship. I had to use this option when a member of my family died and I had to return to my home country to take care of things and the rest of my family. This was agreed to and approved by my manager and I asked him to take care of personnel issues - he said sure and I left the country. At the same time, he got approval for my transfer to another studio in another country.

A few weeks ago, I received a threatening message from a human resources person claiming that by leaving the country, I had put the studio in danger and so on. Turns out they had lost my visa information and decided to shift the responsibility to me. I tried to fix it, sent them everything they needed, but it didn't work. They decided to fire me because that was the easiest way they thought it would be.

So they fired me. They gave four reasons for firing me in the termination letter. None of those reasons were stated in the policy or in my contract.

As a cherry on top, the HR officer blamed me for what happened, ignoring the facts, ignoring previous email threads, ignoring my manager who told him that everything was actually handed over and everyone had been informed and coordinated. The HR person lied to upper management (both HR and IT) and presented me as if I had left the country without informing anyone. As a result, I lost the opportunity to be transferred to another studio.

Remarkably, no one in IT or HR management (except for my direct manager) spoke to me during the process to hear my side of the story. They ignored my manager as well.

Another fun fact - when I came to the company, it took them 1.5 months to make sure I could actually work on this visa - it took me 10 minutes to call the ministry and get verbal confirmation, and another 2 minutes to find the relevant information on the government website. It was definitely a red flag, but I unfortunately ignored it.

F*k them. It was one of the worst experiences in my carreer. The way it was communicated, the fact that noone even tried to listen to me, it was just so humiliating. Had they communicated it properly, I would have quit myself and waited for the transfer. Instead, they presented me as an enemy and kicked me out of the company.

Ubisoft's unprecedented “exodus” of developers

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