Pickles JG
First Post
I have no memories of Rich Baker fond or otherwise but I thought his "Rule of 3 Column" was excellent.
I wish them both well!
I wish them both well!
S'mon said:Reading "State of the Mongoose", I saw Matt Sprange does the typical thing for UK companies in bad times and boasts of their efforts to *avoid* redundancies. It seems like (many) US companies measure their virility by how many employees they've laid off.
Agreed. Sometimes you have to lay people off; that's the reality of business. And if somebody's not doing their job, of course you fire them. But annual layoffs, in good times and in bad, are a sign that somebody in management is doing a crappy job.
I suspect the impetus here is coming from Hasbro rather than WotC. Not to say Wizards isn't capable of making bad choices, but this smells like some exec trying to make next quarter's share price look shinier, which is mostly a pathology of big publicly traded companies rather than small tight-knit ones.
I'm fairly confident in making an educated guess that, for all the layoffs, Greg Leeds isn't taking a significant pay cut or benefits reduction any time soon.
It strikes me that laying off your senior creative staff, while the management that brought the company to the point of having to lay off people sit rather comfortably in their jobs, smacks of a moral hollowness. Not on the part of the company, of course -- WotC is a construct, not an entity that can have a morality. But on the part of the people in management who make these decisions, for whatever justification they see for themselves.
If D&D was selling like it did before the edition wars, before Paizo essentially re-sold WotC's v3.5 rules under a new name (which Paizo admits because they needed it in print to support their bread and butter, Adventure Paths)...
mudbunny said:But do you know if Greg Leeds' salary/benefits are so significantly higher than those of Steve and Rich that they would have a substantial effect were he to cut them?
mudbunny said:As mentioned upthread, WotC has been doing layoffs like this for quite a few years, since well before Greg Leeds entered the picture. There are quote a number of reasons why Rich and Steve could have been laid off: