Unfair because some people absolutely do and will get to continue to work remotely.

- the C-suite, of course. Fran used to work from her beach house in the Hamptons.

- the irreplaceable. Principals and Senior 2s, engineers, and other hard-to-hire roles, if they want it, will get it.

- the lucky. Team leadership willing to pull for you, a capable and empathetic manager, or just asking quickly enough (I have heard people say the teams are capped at 20% wfh).

#Activision #Blizzard

Stupid because they won't offer it to everyone they should, and people will leave. Talented, not-irreplaceable-but-damn-hard-to-replace people who legitimately love working at #Activision #Blizzard and are worth their weight in gold will look at Bungie or the FLEET of new remote startups and decide it's time to move on.

Even some portion of those who get WFH will end up leaving, because "grudging allowance" means remote workers will be disadvantaged in career advancement vs in-office folks.

And cruel to the people who #Activision #Blizzard has already long mistreated, like QA and CS employees across the country.

During covid, many new hires with disabilities & other complications were, maybe for the first time, able to live the dream of making video games because they could do it from home.

Now ABK, who had three profitable years, is forcing them out via the bare legal minimum of ADA compliance, short deadlines, poor communication, and open hostility.

It's offensive & shameful.

The result is already a steady stream of departures (and that's just the small slice I see) at every level of the company - and while AB's RTO was this week, Blizzard's isn't till July.

Teams with dozens of openings are being stretched thinner every day. Scope will be cut. Bugs will get missed. Releases will be delayed.

But hey, maybe profits will go up, and Bobby can socket a few more gems onto his golden parachute as he hands Microsoft what's left of the biggest publisher in the industry.

PS - if you can stomach Twitter, click through to Adam's full thread.

If you've never heard of "crisis mapping", it's the process of identifying resources, vulnerabilities, and critical infrastructure in the event of a catastrophe. For instance: hospitals, first responders, traffic arteries, etc during a hurricane.

In video games it's the members of a team who know how to execute a patch, the new features that have to ship (and those that can be cut...), QA test velocity, etc.