3catcircus said:
It actually, doesn't make any economic sense, in the long run.
When you let experienced people go and end up hiring them back as freelancers, you can save a few bucks. Eventually, though, they'll likely re-hire some of them as full-time employees, at which point any savings realized from letting them go are wiped out by the larger salary you have to pay them when you re-hire them. Not to mention all the extra overhead of processing them back into your HR systems.
More than that, actually. It's a very short-sighted practice. It only makes economic sense for one year. In the long term, it actually costs you significantly.
Because the value of an older, more experienced employee is that the 10 years or so experience they have in the industry has granted them a deep, longitudinal, experiential knowledge that cannot be matched. They know game design. They live and breathe it. It has made up their livelihood for a big chunk of their existence on this planet. It saves you money by doing things like avoiding newbie mistakes and by thwarting attempts by the marketing department to take over everything and by giving you a grounding in the work that you do, day in and day out. Older employees provide leadership, guidance, and skills that come from simply having more years of experience.
Those benefits are difficult to quantify in absolute dollar terms (the benefits are more social, quantum, and structural, and though they result in absolute dollar savings, it is an indirect influence), so as far as the bean-counters are concerned, they're worthless.
I get that when the axe drops, someone's head has to roll, and better it be a well-paid dude with good connections and a solid resume then someone in a more precarious position.
But if I were a WotC employee, I might want to start asking why the axe has to drop so often, why so many heads have to roll, and where the head of this hydra lies, because it's not like Rich Baker or Steve Winter were
poor performers. If D&D wasn't meeting expectations, I can't imagine the blame lays at their feet. It's higher up and deeper in. The problem appears to be systemic within WotC. It's not like Paizo has to lay off a handful of old hats right before the holidays every year, and while Pathfinder is doing swimmingly, I'm confident WotC still pulls in a bigger profit at the end of the year, with or without the yearly firings.
It is as if the very organization of the company is hostile toward the concept of an employee working there until they retire.
But
lets hear Greg Leeds spin this news circa three months ago:
ICv2 said:
This year there have been some new developments in Dungeons & Dragons, and people are trying to read between the lines. There have been some reductions in staff (a couple of long time people have left the D&D team), and also there has been a cutback in releases at the beginning of the year for D&D. Are you reducing your emphasis on the role-playing game exploitation of the D&D property?
No, we are not reducing the emphasis on the roleplaying game property for D&D. I need to correct you. We have had some long time staff leave, a couple of people, but we haven’t reduced the overall number of people working on D&D. We are constantly adjusting and tweaking our organization. I think that any healthy organization has some amount of movement. With Dungeons & Dragons, because of that direct personal relationship that our staff has with the gaming community, our ultimate customers, when someone changes it’s far more noticeable than it is in many other businesses. But, I can tell you that in my 20 years of management experience I don’t think that I have seen an organization more stable over a period of 15 years than we have had in Wizards of the Coast or D&D. You take the average tenure of our employees working on D&D and it’s extremely high. We will have and have had occasional turnover, but D&D is a healthy, thriving business on the role-playing side and will continue to be.
When I think of "stability," I generally don't think of the last 15 years of D&D, honestly...from TSR to WotC to 3e to 3.5e to 4e to Essentials to now maybe 5e, and with christmas firings on a yearly basis, "stability" isn't really the word I think of.