How does a game dev become high priority /necessity to reduce chances of getting layoff axe beyond “have more experience”? Is there any specializations that are safe from the axe?

boynextdoornews

Some specializations are safer than others due to the rarity of the specialization, but the amount of control you have over your job safety is absolutely dwarfed by the number of factors outside your control.

Imagine a hypothetical scenario - maybe technical artist Neelo is much harder to replace than QA tester Desmal, so among all of the devs on Project Wombat at Infinity Ward, Neelo ranks pretty high up there. However, consider now that Project Wombat is the new secret experimental project that's being developed by one of the core Call of Duty studios. Between cutting from the Call of Duty team or from Project Wombat's team, Microsoft would probably cut from Project Wombat team first, right? Rather than cut the teams down evenly, they would probably decide (quietly) to cancel Project Wombat and lay everybody off in order to save people on the Call of Duty team since Call of Duty is their biggest earner and Project Wombat is still unannounced. This means the fact that Neelo has a higher priority job gets absolutely swallowed by the fact that Project Wombat is a lower priority project when compared to the biggest earning franchise at the studio.

This is because layoffs are often not evenly applied across the board, but strategically. If a big company is cutting 10% of workforce, an underperforming studio with a string of consecutive failures might get shuttered completely, while a consistent earner and high performer like Madden may go untouched or only affected minimally. A studio that has a high performer will likely cut more from the lower performer than the higher performer. A project scheduled to launch in three years might get cancelled outright to save a project that launches in one year. These are all enormous decisions that mostly ignore how individually valuable those of us in the trenches are, because our individual value is absolutely dwarfed by the financial size of these larger decisions.

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