The Invisible Axe

Increasingly, we seem to live in times where nothing is guaranteed. Be grateful for what that you have, for there's no assurance of tomorrow.

That might be a video game franchise that you're a fan of. A video game studio that you've long rooted for. Or a job that you might rightfully take somewhat for granted, because you work for one of the biggest companies in the world. What else is the point of working for the corporate soul sucker, if not a precious raindrop of stability?

Well, it doesn't work like that anymore. Maybe it never did and the world's just more honest (and mean) about it. Either way, it sucks.

And what's happening at Xbox sucks, too, as we discuss below.

Patrick: The Xbox news is bleak. Depending on your personal preference and worker trauma, you can basically take your pick on which one hits the hardest. But the piece of news that’s stuck with me is the reports that 1,600 of the proposed 3,200 layoffs won’t happen today or tomorrow—but over the course of the next year and change. Nearly 2,000 people will lose their job for…reasons? Microsoft gets to announce a big, shareholder-friendly number now, and decide what jobs they’re eliminating at a later date. Again, for reasons. Tomorrow’s reasons.

All of us have, at one point or another, lived under the threat of the invisible axe. You know it’s there, you know it’s going to fall and slit your throat, but you can’t judge when it’ll swing down.

VICE was like that from basically day one? And yet, I found it never really interfered with my ability to do my job. I didn’t spend every day wondering when it might come. I figured it would come, of course, and then I would have to figure out what happened next, but to some degree, that feeling comes with the territory in this business. What would be so different about this time?

The difference was that the entire business model was fucking crumbling, buddy! When I was laid off in the past, there was a job waiting for me on the other side somewhere else—eventually. Usually. But there were no jobs waiting for me on the other side this time, which is what prompted us to start Remap, which is what prompted me to spin up Crossplay.

It was time to make my own bets, in other words. But I was fortunate and had bets to place. 

What I can’t fathom is having, say, survived the first round of layoffs at Xbox but being unsure if you’ll be part of the second, third…fourth…wave? Who knows how this will actually play out. But if you can’t be confident you’ll have the job you currently have in a month, how can you do good work? If you can’t be confident you’ll be able to lose this job and find another one, in what world can you help Xbox achieve its already bananas proposal to reach “a billion people each day”?

A demoralized workforce scared of their own shadows is not exactly a play for the future. It sounds like conjuring a self-fulfilling prophecy to help doom the future by blaming the past.

Rob: When I was growing up and being prepared for the job market, the jobs you were supposed to want were the competitive ones. High-skill, demanding hours, high barriers to entry, working on projects that carried a lot of risk or uncertainty. Writing it out, that sounds like an insane pitch, but in the 1990s that's what a bright young person should want. My grandfathers both worked for the same companies for 30 years and retired with pensions and benefits, and that model was held up as the option for losers. But if you were smart and good and ambitious, you chose the emerging professional markets in tech and science, or the evolving ones in finance and law, because you were making a bet on yourself. In exchange for all that risk and sacrifice (and was it even a risk, knowing that you had the talent and dedication required to succeed?), you'd make a lot of money doing interesting, meaningful work.

This model was great at producing two types of people: motivated, creative, disciplined employees who would sacrifice themselves to their work, and hired executives like Asha Sharma.