
In the Videogame Industry, Hiring People Is a Last Resort - somerandomness
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-a-75-billion-business-is-getting-out-of-the-hiring-game-1491838235
======
alxmdev
A while back I was chatting with an engineer who worked on the network code
and infrastructure for a popular simulation game. After all the heavy lifting
was done, he and others were promptly fired and replaced by contractors. The
guy poured his heart and soul into the project and was vested way beyond a
paycheck, yet he was literally replaced like a cog the minute a spreadsheet
called for it. So much for wanting talented and loyal employees. It must be
too easy to forget that all these business decisions affect real human beings,
not empty automatons.

~~~
BeetleB
>The guy poured his heart and soul into the project and was vested way beyond
a paycheck, yet he was literally replaced like a cog the minute a spreadsheet
called for it.

This is one reason why "follow your passion" is a bad career strategy.

It's not unique to this industry. Look at all the folks who get PhDs and waste
their 30's doing low paid postdocs ($50K is higher end).

~~~
specialist
Passion is fine. Whatever works for you.

I'd advise against making someone else rich, at your own expense.

Been there, been done like that.

~~~
BeetleB
Having a passion is fine.

Following your passion is fine.

Complaining about low pay because you are following your passion is not. If
they're complaining, they care about more than their passions, and they (not
their employers) are responsible for satisfying their needs.

You can get lucky and follow your passion as well as take care of material
needs, but those are the exceptions. Not the norm.

~~~
justicezyx
No, passion and money usually aligned. That's the whole undernote of any
startup pitch.

If there were not aligned, then we should strive to change the market and
society to make them align. Without a proper incentive mechanism, no
innovation can be done optimally.

~~~
BeetleB
>No, passion and money usually aligned. That's the whole undernote of any
startup pitch.

I would beg to differ. The aligned ones are the exceptions.

Unless your passion is to make money, that is.

The whole point is that if your passion is something other than to get rich,
you are more inclined than the average person to take lower pay to pursue your
passions.

"Wow, it's awesome employer X is willing to pay me to do passion Y. I never
thought I could make a living doing this!"

"Those who use their skills to do boring work (code/CAD monkey) to make more
money are sellouts!"

Most startups are in it for the money. As pg himself wrote: It's not at all
unusual in the early phases for a startup to completely change direction
because they didn't find a market for their "passion". The goal is to get
rich, not to solve business problem Z.

>Without a proper incentive mechanism, no innovation can be done optimally.

I agree with the caveat that the incentive need not be "get rich". Making a
lot of money often lowers innovation by constraining it.

~~~
justicezyx
Our definition of "rich" likely differs.

I am saying rich being above average and can secure a above average starting
point for offspring. I do not think rich should be "rich enough to be
considered privileged".

------
dandare
Dear employees, please do not be loyal to your employers. You can be loyal to
your boss if he deserves it but your employer is not a natural person, it is a
legal person and as such it can not be loyal back to you. If the situation
requires you will be made redundant or replaced or moved - or promoted. There
is a contract between you that defines what you owe to each other and if you
are loyal beyond that you are essentially giving your money to some
shareholder on the other side of the world. When dealing with a legal person
always act in your own interest.

~~~
kemiller2002
My boss actually "beats" this into people. He explains repeatedly that the
company has no loyalty to you, and that you must have some sort of a life
outside of work and extra work is giving more to the company than what you are
paid for. I saw him threaten to fire someone for working overtime once,
because he can't fix the staffing problem until the company feels the pain of
having a staffing problem.

~~~
throwaway9475
It's different if you get paid for overtime, though (usually time and a half).
Companies threaten action against people working overtime because then the
company has to pay more and that's a Bad Thing (TM), (even though the
employees are providing way more value to the company than the company is
providing to them), not because people want a staffing problem to make the
company "wake up" or something. My mother doesn't work overtime out of the
goodness of her heart, she just scrapes by and wants to be able to retire at a
reasonable age.

~~~
kemiller2002
Yeah, I should note we're all salaried. None of us get more money for working
extra hours.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
I'm trying to figure out whose idea IT professionals being salaried was.

------
spacelizard
This will continue to be the norm in industries where the marketing cycles are
so short and high-stakes. Firms get burned by picking the wrong contractors.
Contractors get burned by spending a lot of time bidding on the wrong
projects. These problems will continue to get worse as the stakes rise, as
there will be even less time to make decisions properly. The project
management debt they mention doesn't go away, it increases exponentially.

The article suggests industry shifts more towards project-based economies as
they progress, but I think this is wrong. The examples of Hollywood and video
gaming are both outliers, because both of these industries have put up huge
resistance to lengthened product cycles. In part they perceive it as reducing
competition. And it's true, but personally I am starting to wonder what all
this competition is actually getting us. Prices for customers are dropping,
however we seem to get a lot of sequels and recycled content in the name of
cost-cutting, and then a lot of extraneous fighting over who gets to release
what on what platform just to push royalty charges up. And what do we have to
show for it? A lifetime of fickle and perpetually unhappy customers? Please
make it stop.

The only solace that I have is that a lot of this is still driven by the
hardware arms race. This won't end, but we will start to see more
consolidation as the industry continues to mature.

~~~
stickfigure
_a lot of this is still driven by the hardware arms race_

Only a handful of AAA games are in the "HW arms race". By sheer numbers, the
overwhelming vast majority of games sold are casual games downloaded on mobile
devices.

The game industry is driven by people's short attention spans. It doesn't
matter how fast you upgrade the technology, people get bored of playing the
same game in the same way they get bored of watching the same movie even if
you upgrade it to super-purple-ray-3D-smellivision. You already know the plot.

~~~
TheGRS
The industry is in a weird space these days. If you build for mobile the best
bets are either focusing on a small handful of free-to-play micro transaction
games or focusing on many bite-sized, $1.99 or ad-supported games. Those who
build for consoles and are backed by a publisher go for big next-gen spectacle
that takes teams of hundreds to develop, so when its time for the next project
they are pushed to work on a few sequels that reuse assets and their engine
over trying something new and different (which is ironically what probably
gave them success in the first place). Franchises have been a thing for a long
time, but the scope of them is now huge, to the point where some release
something new every year to stay relevant. If you want to build something
original its best to stick with a medium-sized team backed through
Kickstarter, which has its own set of problems in terms of constantly needing
to keep up with PR and paying out all of the promised rewards. I've always
been interested in joining the industry because I love the medium for its
potential, but I think I'll stick to hobby projects for the foreseeable future
considering all of those options.

~~~
cableshaft
Kickstarter also has the issue of possibly not raising enough money to get the
job done too. Shovel Knight, for instance, burned through all of their
Kickstarter money and the team had to work without any income for five months
to get the game out the door:

 _" We ended up operating for five months without money or payments to the
team here," the post reads. "It was a difficult period, where some of us were
awkwardly standing in front of cashiers having our credit cards declined,
drawing from any possible savings, and borrowing money from our friends and
family. But we made it to the other side!"_

Source: [http://www.polygon.com/2014/8/6/5974557/shovel-knight-
sales-...](http://www.polygon.com/2014/8/6/5974557/shovel-knight-sales-broke)

Would you work for anyone for five months with no paycheck? I couldn't afford
to even if I wanted to.

Granted, Shovel Knight has seen huge success since its release, and I'm sure
they made all of their lost wages and then some, but still, that project could
have potentially died before it got released, and many more lower profile
Kickstarted video games never get released.

------
stevenwoo
Video game studios often go cheap on things besides contractors, my experience
from the inside is that the majority of voice talent is used outside the usual
Hollywood system because they don't want to pay close to a union actor's
competitive wages, and forget royalties for people who are not Hollywood
famous. For instance, this is part of the reason Bill Roper is the voice of a
lot of Warcraft 1 characters - they didn't want to pay professionals, and he
was already there.

I haven't been on the inside in a while but we might have one musician on a
AAA title and he/she would compose all the music and they might also do all
the foley work because musicians you might have heard of would probably laugh
at the wages and would demand royalties. Obviously part of the issue is making
video games can be a crap shoot where a game with original IP is just as often
a failure as a success so it can be hard to justify spending money on an
unknown entity, and royalties don't exist except for bigger successes for the
most part.

~~~
dazzawazza
I worked on a bunch of Disney games during the PS1/2 era and I can add to this
(but I was not employed by Disney):

Even with the clout of Disney it was really hard to work with "professional"
actors who were SO bad at doing the voices for games. They were slow and VERY
error prone. They often demanded ridiculous extras and final say on lines used
but couldn't match their performance in the original movie. We could hire
professional voice actors and record quality accurate depictions of the
characters in 1/10th of the time. In fact recording the foreign versions where
we used the original foreign voice actor was nearly always easier and more
efficient because there is less ego.

The Hollywood system is a sham. There are fixed unionised rates for voice
acting but that's not worth the top actors time so they roll in to the studio
to do their $100/hr talk knowing that when they leave there is a brand new
BMW, Lexus or even piece of art to add to their private collection waiting for
them as a gift. We're talking Picasso's as sweeteners!

The games industry has a lot wrong with it but it's nothing like the shambles
of the movie industry.

~~~
lj3
> couldn't match their performance in the original movie.

Yikes. That makes me wonder what the director had to do to get a good
performance out of them. Did they just have them say the lines over and over
and over until they accidentally got a good take?

~~~
dvtv75
> Did they just have them say the lines over and over and over until they
> accidentally got a good take?

Not everyone is George Lucas.

Seriously, though, I think the various coaches (dialog, accent, acting) on set
might have a lot more influence on the process than we're lead to believe.

------
mungoid
What makes this so frustrating for game developers looking for work (or people
wanting to get into the field) is that it is really difficult to find the
names of those contract companies. Most dont even think to look for something
like this. People usually think "Oh i love that companies games so im gonna
apply there." Only to never hear back, because they contract.

I have years of professional game development and simulation work under my
belt and I find it one of the most difficult fields to actually get in to. I
always end up just doing the usual software development while still aspiring
to actually get a job as a game developer. IMO this is a slippery slope for
game companies

~~~
lj3
> it is really difficult to find the names of those contract companies.

I worked in games for 3 years and we worked with a few contractors. I noticed
a few bizarre things about the contractors we used. We never worked with the
same contractor for two different games in a row. Every contractor we used we
heard of through word of mouth. They were all small (2-20 people) and most of
the time they had no to little online presence. The most effective avenue for
getting jobs seemed to be handing your business card out at GDC to as many
people as you can.

As far as I can see, if you want to be a game contractor, you're better off
starting one on your own than trying to get hired by a contracting company.
Find a game artist who's also just starting out, launch a shitty game or two
to show that you can, then hand your card out at GDC.

~~~
mungoid
Yep, exactly! I was in pretty much in the same boat as you, and almost every
project we got or worked on ended up coming from other contracting companies
that were in over their head.

I think that right there is the biggest issue of contracting companies,
because their sales people and account managers will over-promise, get the
contract signed and then the PM's and developers will have to work extra hours
to make up for it. Leading to rushed, poor quality software. And ultimately
they get absolutely no credit for the work because the company that hired them
claims the credit.

I actually left that company last year to get out of the chaos and do my own
freelancing, but that even led into the exact same issues. Since I'm not a
super-mega-rockstar freelancer, if i wanted to make ends meet financially, I
would have to over-promise to bring in enough work. But now, it is just me so
I have to work 12 hours a day anyway to make clients happy.

Honestly I think aspiring game devs would be better off just making and sell
games they enjoy until they can bring in enough money to sustain them.
Possibly even making a hit game that starts their own company. Hopefully one
that does not contract out work ;-)

------
kelvin0
Ex-VideoGame dev Here (console mostly).

Let's not forget the barrier to entry for shipping video games is going down
drastically (except for AAA where it keeps getting more expensive!).

So, the big publishers are shipping AAA games with margins that are getting
thinner and require careful balancing acts to make those releases profitable.
Players expect better Gfx, Sound, Music, VR/AR, Multiplayer and vast open
world universes, these things are not cheap ...

As an alternative path, many 'indies' are able to make it on their own and
it's possible to work as a contractor and indie dev. Tools like Unity and
Unreal and the plethora of mobile gaming plaforms are very accessible to
almost anyone with basic technical knowledge.

With 17 years experience as a Dev, I can tell you the most talented, creative
and smart devs/progs/engineers I have met are in the Video games industry, I
haven't been in any other industry where it gets even close to that.

~~~
flamedoge
Cost of programming is going down, with all the new game engines... It's
definitely becoming easier and most work is becoming gluing things together.
Plus you can literally flip switch to enable graphical features..

------
bane
The videogame industry is in bad need of a more developed studio system like
what's used in the movie industry. It exists to a point, but it's usually a
large developer establishing short-term studios to capture geographically
located talent (or converting acquisitions into short-term studios to squeeze
the last bit of talent out of a geographic area).

Too many videogame industry jobs are 1-off, lasting only so long as their part
in the production of a single game exists. In essence, they work for the game.
This is also true of the movie industry in many cases, but more often than
not, work is farmed out to a variety of small production companies who each
bring a few bits to the table. In a movie, the lighting guy works a steady-ish
job for a lighting company, the cameras are rented from an equipment company,
many of the actors will work for a couple agencies and so on.

The production company hires out and assembles these pieces, which are often
union supported, and makes a movie. It's not too many people who work for the
movie.

Once the movie shuts down production, the lighting guy goes back and asks his
company where his next gig is, the actors have their agency working for them,
the cameras go back into rentable inventory and so on.

This spreads risk out and keeps the industry from going through huge
hiring/firing cycles.

The video game industry hasn't really matured to this point. You get a job
working for EA Games East or wherever, get assigned to work on "Dog Touch
Magic 2 - iOS" do your work, and if you're lucky will get asked to work on
"Dog Touch Magic 3" or whatever. If you don't work for a studio directly,
you're probably freelancing. But there's very little middle ground like in the
film industry.

There's no real equivalent of say "I need 3d modelers for this game, let's get
2 or 3 contractors from Modelhaus Inc." bring them on for 4 months to make
some models and then return them to their company to be hired out again.
Instead EA Games East will have staff modelers or some freelancers, and their
jobs may last beyond the game or task they're assigned to.

It kind of blows my mind that there aren't even unions yet in the gaming
industry, they've been talked about for decades, but the industry hasn't done
it yet.

~~~
cableshaft
> It kind of blows my mind that there aren't even unions yet in the gaming
> industry, they've been talked about for decades, but the industry hasn't
> done it yet.

Game industry veteran here. It's not surprising to me at all. Large dev
studios don't want unions. They've been able to capitalize on an endless sea
of starry eyed young devs willing to work 60+ hour weeks for months on end for
half the salary they could make in other software fields until they get burned
out, just so they can say they worked on the 10th sequel of a game they loved
as a kid, or tell their friends 'I worked on this game you can download here!'
and it doesn't look like the supply of that has gone down at all.

Meanwhile, individual software developers not in the midst of a company death
march and are probably doing the Indie thing and tend to see themselves as
lone wolves and thus don't make much effort to organize with their other
developers.

There's associations like IGDA (International Game Developers Association),
but in my interactions with them, I haven't seen them organize anything more
than social activities with some veteran from the game industry to give a
talk.

~~~
Apocryphon
There's been a lot of talk about software unions, and based on the horror
stories from the video game industry, game developers would probably benefit
most.

~~~
cookiecaper
There's also a lot of talk about offshoring development jobs to contractors on
Upwork who charge $2.50/hr. For games, you'd probably need an offshore person
in the $30-$40/hr range, but still much cheaper than a domestic employee. If
there's a union, what's to stop the big companies from doing that and
bypassing Americans altogether, as some companies are already doing?

~~~
Apocryphon
Worse quality of games leading to greater competition from domestic indie
devs?

------
rodionos
[https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/why-a-
dollar75-billi...](https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/why-a-
dollar75-billion-industry-is-powering-down-on-employees/ar-BBzF4sg) \- copy on
msn

~~~
mwcmitchell
thank you!

------
grogenaut
The article says 89 employees. A game studio in Seattle I worked at had 77
FTEs and we made AAA sony games. We'd contract up ton 120 or so in house pre-
launch and of course hired mocap studios and other project shops. But I'm
actually surprised Phoronix has that many employees.

Anyway this is actually a pretty large size for a game studio. More numbers
from studios building much larger (RL is more about balance and in game items
than story or world building):

Bungie had around 550 (heavily staffed up) before Destiny came out. Zipper had
250 before they shut down. Naughty dog I think had around 150 before they spun
up LoU, I recall them around 250 now.

~~~
mappu
_> I'm actually surprised Phoronix has that many employees._

Psyonix

------
stickfigure
This article is dreadful. Here's an alternative view:

Talented software engineers are sick of 80-hour-week grinds as underpaid
salary employees in an industry where nine out of ten products fail. By
working contract/hourly, they get _actual money_ in liu of their name in a
credits list that nobody reads - even in the unlikely event their product
ships.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Are you saying salaried employees _don 't_ get paid if the game tanks? I'm not
sure what you're going for here.

~~~
snovv_crash
Salaried employees don't get paid overtime.

~~~
daemin
This depends on the company. Where I work now we do get paid for overtime, but
we have to organise it with our managers and producers first, and it has to be
for a good reason. At the moment we are not in "crunch" so we only do overtime
if we think we need to.

~~~
snovv_crash
You're incredibly lucky. From everything I've seen and heard this policy is
very much the exception, although I hope that changes in the future.

I really like a policy that gives management and employees aligned incentives;
it puts everyone on the same team and makes sure people value the other side's
perspective.

------
dmoy
I don't get it. They seem to imply there's more done by contractors than not,
with "Network of contractors" and "Lean core of in-house", but in both
examples given (rocket league, blizzard), full time outnumber contractors 2:1
or 3:1?

~~~
midnightclubbed
I agree, the article reads like they had an idea for a story and tried to fit
the facts around it. The heaviest use of contractors in the games industry is,
as they imply in the article, in test. Typically you'll have a small core test
group in-house to handle test during development and then a much bigger
outsourced group you'll ramp up prior to release. In a large multiplayer game
you may want 100s of testers on hand at any one time, but only for a few days
at a time. Outsourcing gives you that.

Depending on the game you may be content heavy in which case may use outside
contractors (or outside studios) to help with the mass of work but that seems
to have dropped off as a practice in recent years. Using Chinese and Indian
art outsourcing studios was big 10 years ago. More recently the big players
have moved to a model where each of their development studios has a game (or
two) in development with a core team working only on that game and a content
team who will work on whichever studio needs their help (typically the next
game for release).

If you are not 'outsourcing' the entire game development you'll typically want
most of the core staff in the same location and full-time. Design, code,
technical art and art direction all have to work very closely together. Not
something you can easily split around the world or assign to short-term
contractors.

Psyonix did outsource their console versions to another studio (likely
comprised of full-time employees), which is common with smaller companies who
would rather not have to ramp-up their engineering staff for console support.
It also saves Psyonix the large capital expense of purchasing development
kits.

~~~
dmoy
Ok thanks, what you described sounds much more realistic and in line with what
I've heard from family members who did video game testing than the narrative
the article was talking about.

------
exelius
The video game industry is the new movie industry -- except nobody is
unionized. The film industry is notorious for this crap as well; look at the
Sausage Party controversy for a recent example. Honestly, a programmer on a
video game is not much different than a camera operator, a film editor or a
VFX engineer. Sure, you need quality work in those areas to have a good
product, but great work in these areas can still be submarined by a terrible
concept ( _ahem_ ScarJo's Ghost in the Shell).

And really, can you blame them? Revenues are largely based on the work of the
producer (marketing / promotion), the director (overall tone / quality) and
the acting talent (big names = box office draws); the folks behind the scenes
get screwed over (or they would if they didn't have unions ensuring some long-
term consequences for producers acting in bad faith).

~~~
mwcmitchell
what happened in the case of Sausage Party?

~~~
searine
[http://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/vancouver-union-
fil...](http://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/vancouver-union-files-
complaint-behalf-sausage-party-artists-unpaid-overtime-
allegations-142666.html)

------
olivermarks
Some of the most cynical middle and senior manager types I've ever met were
hiding in the woodwork at Sony Playstation. Invisible if there was any danger
to them and not supporting the people doing challenging work, and taking
credit and ownership anytime anything was successful.

Not a good HR model for the wellbeing of 'free agents'

------
henrik_w
The example in this article is for game development. I've been thinking about
this for SW development in general, and to me there seem to be two strong
reasons why it makes more sense to have permanent employees than contractors:

\- SW is never done. Any successful application is continually developed, so
there are always more work to be done on the application.

\- Knowledge gained. The longer you work on a product, the more you learn
about it, the source code and the domain. With permanent employees, the
knowledge is retained (until they quit), but with contractors the knowledge is
lost more quickly.

[https://henrikwarne.com/2017/01/22/software-development-
and-...](https://henrikwarne.com/2017/01/22/software-development-and-the-gig-
economy/)

~~~
k__
Most companies I met are after employees and not contractors.

Big corps because they want to form the people so they become exactly as they
want them.

Small start-ups probably because they can't sell a company without employees?

On the other hand I know a few devs of bought start-ups that had hard times
because the buyer only wanted a few of the devs and only those they considered
good, not the "bystanders".

Also, managers want more control and employees can be scared with the prospect
of losing their job, because they value stability.

As a contractor I'm always aware of losing a project, people don't have any
budget left or it is simply finished and I need to go on, so if a manager
wants to give me a hard time, I simply wrap things up and go to another
company.

------
zubat
This isn't anything new to how the business is structured. Note the elision of
the 50+ employees in-house: even if it's one artist and one programmer, you
really need them to be full-timers to run the main production cycle, or at
minimum longer-term contractors who have time to ramp up. Otherwise you get
too many bottlenecks. Outsourcing ports, localization, and audio was done
almost from the beginning. (Go look up how Rob Hubbard wrote the soundtrack to
Commando on C64 for one example)

That said, the trend definitely continues to lean towards a small core team
that can put the pieces together, and then external teams who can leverage a
longer term specialization, lowering management risks on both ends by reducing
the "seasonal layoff" dynamic of game launches.

------
otachack
I haven't read the article but I do have my two cents to add toward the
subject of game development hiring.

Going into college I had the dream of eventually working at Blizzard or some
other big video game company. However, I ran into articles about studios of
beloved games hitting misfortune (Sierra, Westwood Studios, etc.) from either
bankruptcy or being bought out by bigger game companies. I also read articles
on how former big studio employees were being dumped at the end of projects.
You can see Hideo Kojima as a latest example.

There is, however, a silver lining. All, if not most, of the tools for
developing software are out there to use for free or with doable licensing
which usually rely on sales of the developed game. Unity, Unreal being big,
powerful game engine examples while Gamemaker or even straightup IO libraries
like SDL being on the other side of the spectrum.

With these tools, coupled with various distribution methods like GoG, Steam,
eShop, itch.io, or just straight binary hosting, indie developers have been
killing it in the video game space when it comes to creativity and
originality. There is the problem of the door for entry being a bit too open
and so you tend to see a lot of vaporware, clones, bad games, or even
alpha/beta games that seem to just stagnate due to feature creep or other
misfortunes. But there are gems being put out that even surpass the crap AAA
companies put out.

I see former workers of big companies ditch or get laid off from their former
employer to start their own gig or join one. It's exciting to see what they
come up with and which ones succeed.

------
aanm1988
> Consulting firm Accenture PLC, one of the world’s largest outsourced labor
> providers, calls it the “liquid workforce,” which can be turned on and off
> like a faucet.

A faucet of 10k H-1B visas a year making an average salary of just 81k.

~~~
robjan
Is that really "just"? It's still a lot more than the average worker.

~~~
aanm1988
Depends. How much would they be paying employees if they weren't able to use
these outsourcing companies?

~~~
EduardoBautista
Probably less since they can just outsource to other countries.

------
ocschwar
Remember, folks: "follow your passion" only works if your passion is taking
care of your family.

~~~
Kenji
Or when you are the sole owner of the fruit of your passion, instead of
stupidly giving it away.

------
jscipione
In every industry hiring people is a last resort, that's why Trickle Down
Economics doesn't work.

------
georgeecollins
This is the way film production has been for decades. The problem with games
is that there isn't a union to protect credits or establish work rules. If
there was, I would only work as a contractor.

------
georgewsinger
Why does this happen in the gaming industry but not other computing industries
(or is it happening there also?)?

~~~
ben010783
It is more extreme in the gaming industry because you need so much staff to
make a game, and then the needs change drastically after the game is released.
From the article:

> Layoffs often hit after a game was released, which was hardest on workers
> who were let go and damaged morale for those who stayed. “It was like
> ‘Welcome to the family!’ ” he recalls. “Then we released the game, and it
> was ‘See you later!’ ” Outsourcing became a solution to the hire-and-fire
> cycle, says Mr. Hartsman.

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gumby
as opposed to? I find it ironic that they compare to the movie industry,
another one riven with dreadful pathologies.

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RedStarComrade
[https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/why-a-
dollar75-billi...](https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/why-a-
dollar75-billion-industry-is-powering-down-on-employees/ar-BBzF4sg)

Article without the paywall.

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DroidX86
Anybody have a full article link?

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spacelizard
[https://m.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u=https://www.wsj.com/artic...](https://m.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-a-75-billion-
business-is-getting-out-of-the-hiring-game-1491838235)

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hackerbob
Paywall bypass bookmarklet
[https://jsfiddle.net/samx10/n6mxp8ag/](https://jsfiddle.net/samx10/n6mxp8ag/)

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Avalyst
Paywalled article

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pascalxus
99$ to see 1 Article! wsj.com, you need to get to know your customers better.
Complete Fail!

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EduardoBautista
If you are a customer you shouldn't need to pay. And it's not for 1 article.

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z3t4
good games never gets old. they will last throug many generations. technology
might change though. but as a single developer its a huge step to hire
someone.

