not a gamer so I was unfamiliar with the company from DK Layoffs at Blizzard underscore all that is wrong with Corporate America. Today my former company Blizzard Entertainment laid off a substantial part of its workforce. I had left the company about a year ago, but many of my friends and colleagues remained and were affected by today’s job cuts. Spoiler For those of you not familiar with the company, Blizzard is a storied video game developer based in Irvine, California which has published many of PC gaming’s most venerated franchises including World of Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, Heartstone and Overwatch. The company is a business unit of Activision Blizzard -a company formed on a merger between Blizzard and Activision- which is also known for hits like Call of Duty and Candy Crush. Blizzard had been riding high for a number of years, but some unfortunate delays in the product pipeline coupled with some bad management decisions and heightened competition led to a down year in 2018 and poor outlook for 2019. As a result, the company decided to undertake a restructuring and layoff employees. This happens all the time in the corporate world, so the fact that there were layoffs is not really the point of the diary. It is the way that the layoffs were handled that is noteworthy. First, during the past four months, there have been a series of management departures and shenanigans. The popular longtime CEO and founder of Blizzard announced his retirement in October. Then in December the CFO of the parent company Activision Blizzard suddenly quit to take a job at Netflix. He was replaced by an alumnus Activision exec who Earned a cool $15 million signing bonus just to take the role. Fast forward to last week- as Activision Blizzard prepared for their upcoming earnings call, word leaked out that layoffs would occur the following week, leaving employees fretting about their futures over the weekend. Today, just as earnings calls were starting, employees were informed of their fates. While managers and HR staff informed those who were being let go, the CEO of Activision Blizzard literally kicked off his earnings call by crowing that the company had achieved record results in 2018 with $1.4 Billion in revenues and $740 million in operating income. Sounds pretty amazing right? But there was a problem- earnings had missed targets and that the company would lay-off 8% of its workforce as a result. So who paid the price for this miss? Not the management team. Every single one of them walked away safe and well compensated (data from 2017, but illustrative) No they let go the workers- mostly in non-development roles like community support, marketing and customer service. Again, I understand that layoffs happen. But for a company with 50% profit margins to determine that 800 employees needed to go while no executive shared their fate is an incredible indictment of our corporate governance system that puts the value of shareholders above those who do the work. Wednesday, Feb 13, 2019 · 9:04:03 AM CST · Overwatched Thanks for recommending this story! I left out a couple of things. First, layoffs not only hit Blizzard; they hit Activision Publishing and King (makers of Candy Crush) as well. I focused on Blizzard as I am more familiar with them. Second, what makes this lay-off jarring is that Blizzard used to be run as a semi-autonomous business unit and the original management team built a player and employee friendly company. Mass layoffs were virtually unknown- last one was in 2010 I believe. This lay-off is illustrative of how far that old culture has changed. Third, if anyone who was affected by the layoffs is reading this, I am deeply sorry that your world was shaken up. Take advantage of the resources that Blizzard is offering as you transition. Your resume is powerful — you will find a new role somewhere.
I feel like Howard Schultz should be referred to as something like "Macchiato Trump" or "Frappuccino Trump" Maybe "Pumpkin Spice Trump" when the leaves start changing colors
thanks chelsea clinton for lending further credence to this idiotic "controversy" by chiming in when literally no one asked you to
Of course they do because if they don’t have to constantly think of how to supply fuel, the military would become much more mobile and reactionary. If anyone should be pro-renewable energy it’s the military.
That's neat but can I just shoot out some quippy one liners about this topic that I rip from my favorite takeslinger on Twitter?
It was a tweet from the PM of Israel saying they're going to meet with a bunch of world leaders to strengthen the purpose of 'war with Iran" But it sounds like whomever in that office was translating to english got lost in translation.
A tweet from the Israeli PM account talking about Jewish and Arab countries "working together to advance the common interest of war with Iran" It's since been revised to "common interest of combating Iran"
Freakin' uppity Injuns Utah rep wants mostly white part of county to secede from mostly Navajo part after lost election Judge Lyon Hazleton swears in San Juan County, Utah, officials on January 7, 2019. From left to right: Assessor Greg Adams, Clerk John David Nielson, and Commissioners Bruce Adams, Kenneth Maryboy, and WIllie Grayeyes. Phil Lyman, a newly elected Republican lawmaker in the Utah House of Representatives, has a long history as a typical “Sagebrush Rebel” desirous of transferring federal lands into state hands. An avid supporter of Cliven Bundy and his gun-toting land-grabbers, in 2014, Lyman was a leader of an ATV protest ride on protected public lands that had been blocked to continued motorized traffic by Bureau of Land Management officials because riders were wrecking an area filled with fragile terrain and thousands of cultural artifacts of the Ancient Puebloans, the ancestors of today’s Pueblo Indians. He was sentenced to 10 days in jail and three years’ probation for that action. Spoiler San Juan County in red. He was also an adamant foe of designating the Bears Ears region of San Juan County, Utah, a national monument. Not just the 1.3 million acres authorized by President Barack Obama in late 2016, or even the hatchet job approved by Donald Trump in 2017 that cut it to just 200,000 uncontiguous acres, a decision now being vigorously litigated: Lyman wanted not a single square inch of Bears Ears protected. Unprecedented Native input organized by the Navajo, Ute, Zuni, and Hopi Inter-Tribal Coalition had been key in bringing about the designation by Obama. The tribes, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, and assorted other environmental advocates wanted a monument of 1.9 million acres. But they and the tribes got a big portion of the land most important to them included. Now Lyman wants to divide sprawling San Juan County in two: one part that would be mostly white, and one part mostly Navajo. That’s his response to the federally mandated redrawing of county districts that in November led to the victory of two Navajo county commissioners, the first time the three-member commission has ever had a Native majority—and not just Native, but Democratic, after decades of white Republican rule. Lyman previously served two terms as a county commissioner from Blanding, the county’s largest community, with a population at the last census of 3,375. The entire county has a population of just over 15,000. At the time of his swearing-in as a San Juan County commissioner last month, with Republicans vowing to challenge the shift, Navajo Willie Grayeyes told the Salt Lake Tribune, “It’s very, very hard to accept changes. [After] over two decades, maybe three decades, of the status quo, that’s what they’re used to.” And that’s what they think they’ve been entitled to since the conquest of the West. The Republicans had tossed Grayeyes off the November ballot because, they claimed, he wasn’t really a resident of Utah. He asserted that he is a resident of the Navajo Mountain community of the mostly rural Navajo Nation, which straddles Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. A federal judge agreed and restored his candidacy. But now Lyman wants to debate splitting the county. This requires a process that hasn’t happened in Utah since the sliver now called Daggett County was carved from Uintah County in 1917. Many people today think that was a mistake, because Daggett, with a population of just over 1,000, is economically unsustainable. The splitting process first requires a petition signed by at least a fourth of the residents of each portion of the county proposed for division. If enough names are gathered, the vote must include majorities in what would be the seceding county and what would be left of the old county. A Republican state legislator, Kim Coleman, has introduced a bill—HR93—to drop the requirement for a majority vote of residents in the existing part of the old county. Last week, over the objections of two Democrats, the House Government Operations Committee recommended the bill for a vote by the full House. Guess who gets screwed if the bill becomes law. Bethany Rodgers at the Salt Lake Tribune reports that Lyman says he’s not necessarily a proponent of a breakup but thinks it should be debated. He says the judge’s decision requiring that the county be redistricted was unjust because it divided Blanding into three pieces: In his ruling, Judge Robert Shelby wrote that “it is critically important that the officials representing the citizens of San Juan County are elected under constitutional districts — not districts that have been racially gerrymandered.” [...] Lyman said the changing power dynamic isn’t the reason he’s talking about dividing the county. But “chopping Blanding up into three pieces” has left that community feeling aggrieved, said Lyman, whose legislative district is three-quarters white. “It really was just designed to disenfranchise a community. The fact that we’re the largest community and we don’t have a commissioner representing us is troublesome,” Lyman said. “It illustrates that, you know, we’re not all on the same page.” That’s certainly true. But then, when it comes to Indians, Lyman hasn’t been on the same page for a long time. He certainly had no worries about disenfranchisement during the decades that the Navajo were structurally frozen out of any chance of gaining a majority on the commission.
I’ll be fine removing all congresspersons that have made anti-semitic remarks (no one that I’m aware of) if we also get rid of all the ones that have made anti-Muslim remarks. Fair is fair.
The crazy thing is that she's actually selling it a little short. I mean it was a team assembled by us, trained exclusively by us - not merely elsalvadorians "backed" by us. Her breakdown of why the question is relevant is probably the best part and needs to be on fucking repeat hard.
it's difficult to condense abrams' war crimes into a 4 minute session chapo did a good interview with the dude who wrote this piece for intercept on abrams' numerous atrocities: https://theintercept.com/2019/01/30/elliott-abrams-venezuela-coup/ (and the interview for anyone interested: )
Google Richard burr open secrets. Top campaign contributor? Reynolds American, a tobacco company. #5 is also a tobacco co