4d ago

After More Layoffs, Unionized IGN Workers Are Done Picking Up The Slack: "We feel greatly understaffed and undervalued"

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/36423623

Ziff Davis and IGN routinely decide that work done by our laid off colleagues is not important. But inevitably, that crucial work falls onto those who remain.
Not this time. Not anymore.
Source: IGN Union on Bluesky.

30 comments

I'm happy to see that all around the games industry and the surrounding areas like game journalism the value of unions is rediscovered. Work to rule is very effective against these insidious tactics of one layoff round after another while announcing record profits, because if noone cares that work piles up because of not enough hands, it hurts the owners in the only way they understand - in their finances.
This greedy thinking of only next quarter's numbers must end.
- I suspect that tech management & executive culture has learned & become accustomed to exploit the mental health of their employees. Software and tech are stereotypically jobs well suited to neurodiversity and ADHD, and those people are prone to hyperfocus & long hours and may benefit from tight timelines. If management just gets used to recruiting for autism/adhd, then develops management strategies that work well with that population, it's going to be difficult as the field matures and attracts more neurotypical people.
  I used to tell my mentees that no one was going to explicitly tell them that 10, 12, 14 hour days were mandatory. That long hours were not a metric for success. It was that they would be competing for jobs with people who really did want their life to be their job and would happily spend that much time working, because that's all they want to do. It's only when the pool of available jobs grows beyond the number of those obsessive workaholics that they have to start hiring people who have any interest in work-life balance or collective bargaining.
  
  Tough times for that. Every interview or recruiter I've spoken with lately, I say the words "PTO" and/or "work life balance" and they act like I said a dirty word.

Yikes. Sad to see ANY company treat their employees like this. Diabolical
Was IGN respected prior to this? I hadn't used the site in like 12 years, haven't kept up with them. It has always been the big meme for a 10/10 IGN so I can't assume the company was held in super high regard prior
- High enough regard to be very profitable, which makes the job cuts even more ridiculous.
- People dislike them because of their reviews, that have the same integrity and reliability of a wet tissue.
  
  Hey, you can also dislike them because their site is littered with Marvel news, unusable without an ad blocker, and barely usable with one.
- I liked their guides

What does the "until February 13th" bit mean? That after that date they'll go back to overworking if nothing has changed?
- Likely to just mass resignation, like how Escapist employees did and established Second Wind.
  
  That makes sense. Hopefully seeing the success of SW will encourage more people in similar positions to do the same

My bet is: you can't reliably fire unionised workers, so you make them want to quit instead.
The IGN newsroom is a joke, name one reputable journalist you are SURE works there without checking first, and I'll be genuinely surprised, the only value is in the brandname, their coverage can probably be replaced by some LLM horseshit with nobody really noticing.
The higher ups know it, the journos know it (hence why they unionised) and thus they're at an impasse.
Once they inevitably lose this standoff they'll be replaced by third-worlder english speakers with chatgpt, mark my words.
- Rebekah Valentine is a top tier games journalist doing reporting for IGN.
  
  Noted, I didn't even know she existed. What are some good articles she wrote for IGN that you'd recommend?
  I don't expect IGN to keep anyone on the writing team but it's good to know good authors.

Okay. so it'll be amusing when IGN decides to pivot to 1099 contractors and terminate these employees as well.
- Weird that worker exploitation is so amusing to you
  
  You're probably right that it's weird. I think most of my amusement comes from the way that those of us who are powerless delude ourselves into believing that we can be powerful - but no matter how you count it, zero times two is still zero. And I've just realized, they probably won't hire that many contractors, they'll test out LLM slop first. If it sells ads at the same rate, they'll "phase out" the human side over time. The corp ideals will put profits over people, always. They'll take the obvious path, because they care about one metric: profit.

30 comments