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New Post: Activision Publishing’s 600 QA workers form union -Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the gaming industry’s top leaders? Learn more about GamesBeat Summit sponsorship opportunities here.  An estimated 600 workers at Activision Publishing’s quality assurance department have formed the biggest union for gaming in the U.S. With the help of the Communications Workers of America, the employees voted... Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the gaming industry’s top leaders? Learn more about GamesBeat Summit sponsorship opportunities here.  An estimated 600 workers at Activision Publishing’s quality assurance department have formed the biggest union for gaming in the U.S. With the help of the Communications Workers of America, the employees voted and certified the results on Friday, forming the Activision Quality Assurance United – CWA union. Quality assurance workers test games for bugs and they’re often the entry level for getting jobs as game developers. Previously, the CWA reached a labor neutrality agreement in 2022 with Microsoft, which now owns the company with its $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Tom Shelley, a technical requirements specialist and one of Activision Quality Assurance United’s organizers, told the Verge that the labor neutrality agreement and Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard last year made their goals of unionizing easier to accomplish. GB Event GamesBeat Summit Call for Speakers We’re thrilled to open our call for speakers to our flagship event, GamesBeat Summit 2024 hosted in Los Angeles, where we will explore the theme of “Resilience and Adaption”. Apply to speak here Microsoft recognized the union and previous recognized a union of 300 QA workers at ZeniMax Online. Activision Blizzard also has unions at Blizzard in Albany and Raven Software in Wisconsin. All of this is happening at a time when the game industry is seeing record layoffs — 8,000 so far this year and 10,500 in 2023. The workers are spread out across California, Texas and Minnesota. All told, the CWA represents more than 1,000 Microsoft workers. Workers have been organizing at Activision since 2021. At that time, the state of California sued (in a now settled case) for widespread sexual misconduct. VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. Source link

New Post: Activision Publishing’s 600 QA workers form union -Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the gaming industry’s top leaders? Learn more about GamesBeat Summit sponsorship opportunities here.  An estimated 600 workers at Activision Publishing’s quality assurance department have formed the biggest union for gaming in the U.S. With the help of the Communications Workers of America, the employees voted... Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the gaming industry’s top leaders? Learn more about GamesBeat Summit sponsorship opportunities here.  An estimated 600 workers at Activision Publishing’s quality assurance department have formed the biggest union for gaming in the U.S. With the help of the Communications Workers of America, the employees voted and certified the results on Friday, forming the Activision Quality Assurance United – CWA union. Quality assurance workers test games for bugs and they’re often the entry level for getting jobs as game developers. Previously, the CWA reached a labor neutrality agreement in 2022 with Microsoft, which now owns the company with its $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Tom Shelley, a technical requirements specialist and one of Activision Quality Assurance United’s organizers, told the Verge that the labor neutrality agreement and Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard last year made their goals of unionizing easier to accomplish. GB Event GamesBeat Summit Call for Speakers We’re thrilled to open our call for speakers to our flagship event, GamesBeat Summit 2024 hosted in Los Angeles, where we will explore the theme of “Resilience and Adaption”. Apply to speak here Microsoft recognized the union and previous recognized a union of 300 QA workers at ZeniMax Online. Activision Blizzard also has unions at Blizzard in Albany and Raven Software in Wisconsin. All of this is happening at a time when the game industry is seeing record layoffs — 8,000 so far this year and 10,500 in 2023. The workers are spread out across California, Texas and Minnesota. All told, the CWA represents more than 1,000 Microsoft workers. Workers have been organizing at Activision since 2021. At that time, the state of California sued (in a now settled case) for widespread sexual misconduct. VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings. Source link

A group of roughly 600 Activision Publishing quality assurance workers have formed the nation’s largest video game industry union. Backed by the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the bargaining unit is the first to organize at Activision under the labor neutrality agreement between the CWA and Microsoft, which went into effect after the company acquired Activision Blizzard last October. Under the terms of the agreement, all Activision Blizzard workers are free to discuss and begin working towards unionizing. As an independent company, Activision Blizzard pushed back hard against any attempts by employees to organize, whereas Microsoft has agreed to remain neutral. The new QA workers’ bargaining unit includes Activision employees in California, Texas, and Minnesota. The CWA now represents more than 1,000 video game workers at Microsoft. The group’s unionizing feels particularly important given the current upheaval in the gaming industry which resulted in more than 8,000 games industry workers being laid off in the first two months of this year. Microsoft was one of the biggest contributors to that figure, laying off 1,900 employees in January, most of them from its Activision Blizzard teams. In a release, Communications Workers of America president Claude Cummings Jr. praised Microsoft for its continuing philosophy of voluntarily recognizing its workers’ unionization efforts: Microsoft continues to keep its commitment to let workers decide for themselves whether they want a union. Time and again, other big companies in the industry have made the decision to undermine and attack their own employees when they join together to form a union. Microsoft’s choice will strengthen its corporate culture and ability to serve its customers and should serve as a model for the industry. Amy Pannoni, vp and deputy general counsel of human resources legal at Microsoft, added: We maintained our commitment to remain neutral during the organizing campaign, and following this vote, we recognize the Communications Workers of America (CWA) as the bargaining representative for the Activision Publishing Central Quality Assurance employees. We look forward to continuing our positive labor management relationship. Source link Employees At ‘Call Of Duty’ Developer Activision Establish U.S.’s Largest Certified Video Game Unionhttps://lnkd.in/dw7XakNy

This is the hardest tech market I have seen in a long time. Please let me know if I can provide connections or references to anyone affected by this or any other layoff. And for the companies laying people off because of AI... You are being short sighted. AI and LLMS are fantastic at many things which humans struggle with like research, parsing massive amounts of text or data, and generating text quickly. But no matter how well it is coded it will be a pale imitation in the areas where humans thrive like creativity, logical decision making (though AI generated intelligence reports help greatly here), as well as that inherent quality that makes us human and recognize it in others. I say this as the founder of an AI consulting firm and ensure that the solutions we offer are Augmentative rather than Replacement. Use AI as the tool it is... And it is a miracle of technology. Don't pervert it into something it was never meant to be simply to save the bottom line. Not only will you miss the primary value of it... You will miss the primary value of your employees. Empower them using AI and you will see a much greater benefit.

Here we go - Barstool Sports is laying off about 100 people. This is about 10% of their total workforce, but it should not come as a surprise if you have paid attention since Dave Portnoy bought back Barstool. Dave said, that Barstool is losing about 10-12M USD per year. Which is something a gambling company (previously under Penn ownership) can deal with, but not something that he wants. Dave wants the company to run at break even. Consider, that Barstool has a non-compete with Penn, which means they cannot advertise gambling, nor do any gambling affiliate partnerships. Something which has been a significant revenue driver of Barstool before their acquisition by Penn. So where do you save the most money? Obviously workforce. They have a huge team in the US, about 1000 people total, and calculate an average annual salary of 100k USD per person. (most of their team is located in Boston and NYC) Most of the people laid off, were directly involved in the Barstool gambling business units. So these teams, had no future in the company anyways, due to the non-compete. How did they lay off 100 people? They sent an email out to everyone. Now some people will argue and scream that this is wrong, inhumane and whatnot. There should be personal talks with everyone, proper exit meetings, personal care etc. This may work on a small scale, but how do you manage that in a large team when 100 people are affected? Especially when they have such a closed circle and intimate working environment. Its impossible. What do you think? How would you have handled laying off 100 people to push the company towards break even? https://lnkd.in/eWXNgtNG

If you built an NFL team with nothing but quarterbacks, it would be the worst team in the history of the league. Just imagine a line of quarterbacks trying to block the defense at the snap of the ball, it'd be disastrous. But when it comes to hiring, too often, engineering managers are trying to do just that. It's common to think you need the best engineer, and that's defined as someone that can do everything from CSS to infrastructure. But in reality, unless it's a team of 1, it's quite unlikely you need someone who can truly do everything. Therefore, when you're hiring, take an hour or so with your team and outline what the strengths and gaps are for that particular team at that particular moment in time, and make sure you do so in a way that looks to build the team up, rather than tear anyone on the team down. It's not an exercise to say "Ashley always has bugs when she adds a new screen" or "Dan's database queries take way too long to execute." Instead, start by calling out what the team is doing really well. These are things you DO NOT need to hire for. Which means, if you interview someone who is great, except for the things your team does well, that's ok. After you have a list of what they're great at and what they could use some help with, break those in to 2 categories: needs and wants. For example, one team I was hiring for said they were just "ok" at TypeScript but they felt like they weren't using it to its full potential. Originally, we listed this as a need, but after more discussion we realized it was more of a want. We were good enough with TS, and we were continuing to improve in that skill. Conversely, there were some other skills we identified needing more immediate help with. Focus on getting your absolute needs to a list of 2, or at most 3, items. Any more than that could become a lot of burden for a single person to shoulder. Take those needs, and use that to shape your job description. You don't have to list every possible technology that your team does. Instead, focus the job description on what you _actually_ need from this person. This upfront work does take some effort, but it pays off in the long run. When you get 100 resumes, it's much easier to parse out which ones actually have the skills you're looking for. It also helps in the interview portion, because now you have a clear definition of what you're looking for. How many times have you been in a discussion where the team is trying to decide between 2 candidate that have slightly different skillset? By knowing what you're looking for up front, you can avoid those conversations. tl;dr: Don't try to hire more of what you already have on your team. Instead, focus on the gaps, and hire for what your team is _actually_ missing.

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About 600 workers at Activision Publishing, the video game maker owned by Microsoft, are unionizing, forming the largest video game workers’ union in the United States, the Communications Workers of America said on Friday. Microsoft recognized the union after the vote count was finalized. The employees work in quality assurance, testing Activision’s games for bugs, glitches and other defects, and 390 of them voted to form a union, while eight opposed the effort, the union said. About 200 workers did not vote. Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard, the maker of Call of Duty and other blockbusters, for $69 billion in October. As part of its lengthy effort to convince regulators to approve the deal, Microsoft signed a first-of-its-kind pact in the industry to remain neutral if workers wanted to unionize with the C.W.A. Managers were trained not to express an opinion about whether unionization was good or bad, and the C.W.A. said Activision’s management upheld the pact and did not interfere in the workers’ organizing efforts. “That has been, organizing-wise, a huge blessing,” said Kara Fannon, a member of the union organizing committee who works for Activision near Minneapolis. “It has helped with a lot of people who were concerned about union busting or potential retaliation.” The new union is the first at Activision since the pact went into effect. “Microsoft’s choice will strengthen its corporate culture and ability to serve its customers and should serve as a model for the industry,” C.W.A.’s president, Claude Cummings Jr., said in a statement. The largest group of employees is in Minnesota, though the union also includes offices in Texas and California. The union’s hopes include negotiating higher pay, improving job security and providing more advancement opportunities for the quality assurance testers, whose perform some of the lowest-paid work in game development. The pact also meant workers were able to sidestep the lengthy and often contentious process of petitioning the National Labor Relations Board for an election. Instead, they used an expedited process, where workers indicated their support or opposition for the union by either signing a union authorization card or voting confidentially online in a portal that opened Feb. 22 and closed on Thursday afternoon. A third-party arbiter, Fred Horowitz, verified the results. After the vote count, Amy Pannoni, a deputy general counsel at Microsoft, said in a statement that the company looked forward to “continuing our positive labor management relationship,” and that it recognized C.W.A. “as the bargaining representative for the Activision Publishing central quality assurance employees.” Workers had been organizing at Activision since at least 2021, when employees across the company staged a walkout after a California civil rights agency sued the company for workplace sexual misconduct. (The company settled the case on narrower grounds

I just attended a virtual networking meetup hosted by Bungie. It was incredibly fun to hear from staff in all different departments. Here are 4 takeaways: 🧠🎮 1: "Teams are stronger than heroes." - That attitude really came through in how the staff members spoke to, and about each other. 2: "People first." One team member expressed how they were nervous to join such a large corporation, because of how often individuals tend to get steamrolled by the machine. Later they discovered that Bungie does things very differently. It was very cool to hear about how serious Bungie is about taking care of their people, and maintaining a work-life balance. 3: "Unleashing limitless potential." It was amazing to hear all the talk of passing the torch, and training the next generation of talent. This practice is woven into all that they do to ensure that their work is lasting. 4: They take chances. One person shared about how they initially had no interest in game development. They only wanted to be a tester so they could play the game early, but ended up getting hired. Years later, they have a senior role. As someone looking for my first big break in the industry, that was super cool and hopeful to hear. All in all, I walked away excited and ready for my next chance to apply at this amazing company.

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