General Gaming Ubisoft Workers prepare to Strike

[SuperSpreader]

Employees At ‘Assassin’s Creed’ Maker Ubisoft Urged To Strike Following New RTO Policy—Why CEOs Are Doubling Down

WWW.FORBES.COM

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Ubisoft faces a strike as it enforces a new RTO policy. Learn why CEOs are pushing for office returns and what it means for workplace culture.

 

[Mr.Vic20]

[Biggie]

Good. No more shitty games. 

[Best]

6 minutes ago, Biggie said:

Good. No more shitty games. 

 

I was waiting for your response 😆 

[Biggie]

9 minutes ago, Best said:

 

I was waiting for your response 😆 

Damn and I was looking forward to climbing more towers to unlock areas on the map in the new game! 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

18 minutes ago, Biggie said:

Good. No more shitty games. 

I’m pretty sure they made shitty games before 2020 too. 

[nublood]

RTO pfffffft. Man I never even left. The covid years just meant my drive to work was easier and less traffic. 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

14 minutes ago, nublood said:

RTO pfffffft. Man I never even left. The covid years just meant my drive to work was easier and less traffic. 

I worked from home for 3 months and then took a position that was back in the office. I loved the drive to work and home, and every lunch it was like having my own private restaurant. 

[legend]

While there are certainly jobs where you must be in office, software development generally is not one of them. I'd be willing to guess that executives push for this because they're predominantly old gen x or boomers and personally don't know how to effectively use technology.

[Brick]

21 minutes ago, legend said:

While there are certainly jobs where you must be in office, software development generally is not one of them. I'd be willing to guess that executives push for this because they're predominantly old gen x or boomers and personally don't know how to effectively use technology.

 

Or they're renting office spaces that are now mostly vacant that they feel they're wasting money on if employees are not in them working. 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

15 minutes ago, legend said:

While there are certainly jobs where you must be in office, software development generally is not one of them. I'd be willing to guess that executives push for this because they're predominantly old gen x or boomers and personally don't know how to effectively use technology.

I think in this case it is about control. Harder to try and enforce crunch if you can’t actually monitor people working. 
 

in 2022 I think a lot of RTO was because of management and leadership wanting to be seen. I saw something a while back that said people in management and executive roles value 2 things; Money and status symbols like parking spots and big offices. And they can’t walk around telling people what their compensation is, so they want everyone to see them in their office so they can see their success.  

[legend]

3 minutes ago, Brick said:

 

Or they're renting office spaces that are now mostly vacant that they feel they're wasting money on if employees are not in them working. 

 

Could be! But here's a crazy idea for them then: stop renting giant spaces and save money  

[legend]

4 minutes ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

I think in this case it is about control. Harder to try and enforce crunch if you can’t actually monitor people working. 
 

in 2022 I think a lot of RTO was because of management and leadership wanting to be seen. I saw something a while back that said people in management and executive roles value 2 things; Money and status symbols like parking spots and big offices. And they can’t walk around telling people what their compensation is, so they want everyone to see them in their office so they can see their success.  

 

I could totally see dumb vanity being a role too!

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

2 minutes ago, legend said:

 

Could be! But here's a crazy idea for them then: stop renting giant spaces and save money  

depending on how many years their lease is it may cost more to break it than to keep it. Or in the rare cases of companies that came into a bunch of money due to several years in a row of stupid levels of success, they actually paid for the construction of the building they are in and own it, along with debt from its construction. 
 

for the record I both like WFH for people and hate it. Our SW devs got more productive than they had ever been. But then you get some people that answer a few emails and take a couple of meetings from a boat on the lake and call it a full work day so they don’t use vacation time. Some act so put out if 1 day a quarter they have to drive into the office. They take off early, come in late or take extended lunch breaks with less visibility. It’s the same class divide bullshit of white collar and blue collar that was always there, but now the white collar has even less oversight and so gets away with working even less while saving money. 
 

fuck those people, they can go back to the office and work to the point their family and friends begin to forget their face again. 
 

anyways, as for the Ubisoft devs, I don’t want them to go back to the office just to crunch for 90+ hours a week. But if people able to collaborate in real time where a group of people can huddle around somebody’s desk to get through something and it results in better products, then I’m all for that.
 

but I think the problems more culturally engrained coming down from leadership. And has been for years. It’s why Ubisoft games, regardless of franchise and genre all feel like the same crap. There was a time when people couldn’t wait to see what Ubisoft did next, because each game/franchise had a unique identity and seemingly revitalized a genre. Now hardly anyone cares because Star Wars is gonna feel like Assassin’s Creed, which also feels like Ghost Recon, which also feels like Farcry, which also feels like every other game that uses the same “Ubisoft open world formula”. All because it’s less risky and more marketable, I guess. 

[legend]

1 hour ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

depending on how many years their lease is it may cost more to break it than to keep it. Or in the rare cases of companies that came into a bunch of money due to several years in a row of stupid levels of success, they actually paid for the construction of the building they are in and own it, along with debt from its construction. 

 

How long are such contracts? Perpetually keeping it is eventually still a cost. They can simply downsize to whatever is appropriate in the future and use what they have until then at reduced size.

 

1 hour ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

for the record I both like WFH for people and hate it. Our SW devs got more productive than they had ever been. But then you get some people that answer a few emails and take a couple of meetings from a boat on the lake and call it a full work day so they don’t use vacation time. Some act so put out if 1 day a quarter they have to drive into the office. They take off early, come in late or take extended lunch breaks with less visibility. It’s the same class divide bullshit of white collar and blue collar that was always there, but now the white collar has even less oversight and so gets away with working even less while saving money. 
 

fuck those people, they can go back to the office and work to the point their family and friends begin to forget their face again. 
 

 

I mean, you just fire those people  It's not that complicated. If they weren't doing work in the office you would have fired them then too.

 

1 hour ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

anyways, as for the Ubisoft devs, I don’t want them to go back to the office just to crunch for 90+ hours a week. But if people able to collaborate in real time where a group of people can huddle around somebody’s desk to get through something and it results in better products, then I’m all for that.
 

 

I don't think anything points to this being true. It's not that there are never any useful things about being in person, but they're far outweighed by the rest and you can do occasional retreats. If nothing else, making your employees miserable when they clearly don't want to do this and don't have to is a pretty clear loss to force them to anyway.

 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

40 minutes ago, legend said:

I mean, you just fire those people  It's not that complicated. If they weren't doing work in the office you would have fired them then too.

I wish I could, but not up to me, and it seems their bosses don’t care or are doing it too. It was so funny one year after we got acquired by another company somethings got merged and changed while others were still under the old system. We merged into the new company’s payroll system and the new company had alarmingly allowed everyone to see the entire organization time off calendar for everyone coming in from the old company. The Wednesday before thanksgiving was full of time off requests using PTO. Our company didn’t count black Friday as a company holiday, you had to use PTO to take it off, they gave everyone an extra floating holiday to use anywhere if you wanted. Guess what we all could see, a bunch of WFH white collar salaried people taking Wednesday off but not Friday strangely enough, yet they didn’t work Friday either. Just a bunch of people abusing the system. 
 

I’d be more inclined to say “good for them” if there weren’t hourly employees being treated like shit and paid like shit. And fuck if some of these entitled white collar assholes aren’t quick to complain when they are just mildly inconvenienced before they logoff at 3:58pm while some of us are busting our ass to save an account worth several hundred million dollars, and in some

cases havung to shoulder some of their responsibilities too. But sure, steal a free day off. 

[legend]

6 minutes ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

I wish I could, but not up to me, and it seems their bosses don’t care or are doing it too. It was so funny one year after we got acquired by another company somethings got merged and changed while others were still under the old system. We merged into the new company’s payroll system and the new company had alarmingly allowed everyone to see the entire organization time off calendar for everyone coming in from the old company. The Wednesday before thanksgiving was full of time off requests using PTO. Our company didn’t count black Friday as a company holiday, you had to use PTO to take it off, they gave everyone an extra floating holiday to use anywhere if you wanted. Guess what we all could see, a bunch of WFH white collar salaried people taking Wednesday off but not Friday strangely enough, yet they didn’t work Friday either. Just a bunch of people abusing the system. 
 

I’d be more inclined to say “good for them” if there weren’t hourly employees being treated like shit and paid like shit. And fuck if some of these entitled white collar assholes aren’t quick to complain when they are just mildly inconvenienced before they logoff at 3:58pm while some of us are busting our ass to save an account worth several hundred million dollars. But sure, steal a free day off. 

 

Unfortunately, bad management can make anything suck. But this isn't a problem with remote work itself and if management inventing the problems, then they shouldn't be the ones complaining about it! My org has been doing remote work for everyone for 8 years now. It's not that complicated.

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

 But I’m more with the devs on this one. Ubisoft has far worse issues than people WFH. It’s leadership not letting creatives be creative. The problem with marketing and business people get in charge. They think the product doesn’t matter as much as how you can market the product. 

[sblfilms]

High functioning and productive people always assume everybody else is like them, but a majority of people are less productive without the structure of working on site.

 

23-19.pdf - Google Drive

DRIVE.GOOGLE.COM

 

[XxEvil AshxX]

Ubisoft just needs to be a third party publisher again.

[legend]

On 10/3/2024 at 7:12 AM, sblfilms said:

High functioning and productive people always assume everybody else is like them, but a majority of people are less productive without the structure of working on site.

 

23-19.pdf - Google Drive

DRIVE.GOOGLE.COM

 

 

That's an interesting article, but I think your takeaway is overly simplistic from that they show and argue. One of the salient issues they raise is that remote work is not equally good across professions, which is certainly true. Other relevant factors is that in the cases where productivity dropped the common theme was that management felt less able to communicate/coordinate and had difficulty in mentoring newer people. These are growing pain organizational issues that can be overcome if the management actually wants to do it. The problem is they often don't want to change and you get a worse experience that places that were designed from the ground up. I'm open to the possibility that that's a permeant challenge, but it is absolutely the case that organizations who felt forced into this do it badly and my own experiences show that it can be done right.

 

Indeed, in the concluding "Looking ahead" remarks of the article, they forecast remote work continuing to rise in appropriate sectors as the organizational methods and technology adapt to it.

 

Quote

Another reason to anticipate steady or slowly rising work-from-home rates over
the next several years is that organizations will continue to adapt their practices to

manage hybrid and fully remote workers more effectively. That will raise produc-
tivity in work-from-home mode. Where experience teaches that remote work is

unsuitable, organizations will revert to traditional arrangements, if they not have
done so already.

Yet another reason involves the innovation incentives created by the big shift.
A growing market provides incentives for investments in innovations to serve that
market (Schmookler 1966). The US market for technologies and products that
support remote work is now four times as large as in 2019. It has also become much
larger in the rest of the world. To assess the force of the Schmookler effect, Bloom,
Davis, and Zhestkova (2021) consider the monthly flow of newly filed applications
for US patents. They use automated text readings to determine which ones claim
to advance technologies in support of video conferencing, telecommuting, remote

collaboration, and work from home. Patent applications that advance these tech-
nologies double as a share of all newly filed US patent applications from January

to September 2020. In ongoing research with Mihai Codreanu, we find that this
redirection of innovation efforts has continued through at least early 2022. So, it
is reasonable to anticipate that remote-collaboration technologies and tools will
continue to advance at a rapid pace for some years to come, further reinforcing the
shift to remote work.

 

 

They similarly remark earlier how the change in tools can radically change productivity outcomes, showing that in research, remote collaboration went from a drag to a boon:

 

Quote

Chen, Frey, and Presidente (2022) also study the relationship of remote collab-
oration to the impact of scientific articles, as reflected in citations. Before 2010,

remote collaboration produced articles that were more incremental in nature
and less likely to yield “disruptive” advances, echoing the findings in Lin, Frey,
and Wu (2023). However, Chen, Frey, and Presidente also show that the quality
discount on articles written by dispersed teams shrinks over time, vanishes around
2010, and then becomes a premium. A plausible explanation is that advances in
remote-collaboration technologies made it easier and cheaper to coordinate a
broader range of specialized and geographically scattered complementary inputs.
In the model of Becker and Murphy (1992, Section 6) such a fall in coordination
costs raises the innovation rate.

 

 

Given these observations and others in the article, I don't think your take away that it only works for high-functioning people is an accurate summary of the conclusions.

[SuperSpreader]

My job can be 100% done remote but most of these people need to be in office because they don't accomplish anything