Your entire workforce shouldn't have to walk out for you to offer the basics to your employees.
Why pay wages for Q&A testers when you can get your payers to do it for free...
ABK being ABK. Who would have thought?
This happens all the time. The temporary workers are not being laid off. Their contracts had a set date, they already knew what that date was. They have been notified that date will not be extended. And this is not a "Christmas" thing, the end date is well beyond that into January and they have been given generous notice.There are probably good reasons these 20 out of 500 are not being converted which the company has no business telling anyone about. These people could be poor performers, or they could be reorganizing a team that was not longer needed out of existence and so they do not want to convert them to full time employees. And yes it may be to save some money financially. No company has unlimited resources. No one likes to hear about people losing their jobs, but the reality of running a business forces these kinds of decisions. Be happy for the 500 people who just got promoted.
Quite frankly, every single company does this and it's not strange at all. They do it to maintain overhead, and sometimes for other reasons.For example, I used to work at Apple Corporate here in Austin as a contracted employee and they cut mine and dozens more contracts about 8 months early because the iPhone X battery issue cost them money.. So yea. Told me the same thing "you did nothing wrong, and in fact were some of our best."Those decisions tend to get made by people who don't see the people, ever, and gague everything on numbers.
It's not pleasant, but that's how temp work is. If you haven't a permanent contract you should always be aware that you're at the whim of the contractor.- I'm sure their hard work will elevate them to go on to better things.
And the **** train keeps on rolling, Clearly they dont like how Raven studios doing well under their business roof at Activision. Thats why you should always have an internal contract. External supportors and consultants even in devloper department are so easy to get rid of by any firm, just stop their work by terminate the contract. You cant do anything but go home and find another work.
layoffs in favor of more profits is the norm in corporate America. it's not just limited to the gaming industry. IBM/Lenovo are the worst at doing this, on a quarterly basis mind you. Mainly bc most of the people at a Director level or higher have no Earthly idea who or what ACTUALLY allows them to make all that money (or they do, and they just don't care). Most corporations don't see their employees as people or even the positive resource that keeps them earning - but only as disposable and replaceable by people earning a lesser salary - and in some instances, forcing those new people to do the role of 2 people. Sadly it will cost them time and money at some point down the road (usually within a month or two) when they realize "oh crap, we actually DID need that person (or those people)". I have seen it so often in my time working in corporate America in the last 21 years.
I've worked as temp QA, when we were all let go we got 2 weeks notice, they didn't even need to give us that, they could have just said "Dont come in tomorrow" when our contracts were due to be extended and they chose not to. No one walked out or struck as this was expected and we knew we'd get pretty much no notice.I really dont understand why people think this is such a big deal, sure if they'd fire 20 permanent staff to replace with temp.