An ex-Sony exec said laid-off employees should ‘go to the beach for a year’ or ‘drive an Uber’ Lian Kit Wee Sep 11, 2024, 7:15 AM MESZ

Chris Deering Sony Former Sony Entertainment president, Chris Deering, told recently laid-off employees to take a break for a year and wait for opportunities to return. Reuters

Ex-Sony Entertainment president Chris Deering said laid-off employees should take time off. Deering said that he doesn’t believe the recent Sony layoffs result from corporate greed. In February, Sony said it would lay off 900 employees from its PlayStation division.

Former Sony Computer Entertainment Europe president Chris Deering has a blunt message for recently laid-off game developers: They should “go to the beach for a year” or “drive an Uber” until the job market improves.

Deering, who led Sony’s European PlayStation division during the launch of the iconic game console and its successor, PlayStation 2, acknowledged the pain of Sony’s recent cuts.

The company said in February it would lay off about 900 people globally and close PlayStation Studios’ London studio, amid a slowing gaming market. Deering dismissed the notion that the layoffs were purely driven by corporate motives.

“I don’t think it’s fair to say that the resulting layoffs have been greed,” Deering said on journalist Simon Parkin’s “My Perfect Console” podcast. "I always tried to minimize the speed in which we added staff because I always knew there would be a cycle.

Fluctuations in consumer spending and recent games’ diminishing sales impact the company’s ability to “justify spending the money for the next game,” making some staffing cuts inevitable, said Deering.

Deering offered some unconventional advice for game developers affected by the layoffs. He suggested workers take time off or find temporary work, like driving for Uber, while the industry stabilizes.

“It’s like the pandemic,” Deering told Parkin. “You’re going to have to figure out how to get through it, drive an Uber, or whatever. Find a cheap place to live and go to the beach for a year.”

His remarks come at a time when layoffs have hit the gaming industry hard.

Other game developers, including Microsoft and Unity, have similarly downsized their studios this year, cutting over 3,000 jobs at the start of the year, BI reported in February.

This series of layoffs in the game industry stemmed from slumping game sales and a shrinking gaming demographic, BI previously reported. Revenue from video game sales in the US in 2023 fell by 2.3% from the previous year, and the average time spent gaming fell from 16.5 hours to 13 hours from 2021 to 2022. Related stories

However, Deering seemed optimistic about the prospects for game developers. He told Parkin that laid-off workers should take advantage of the time off to recharge but keep an eye out for any opportunities to return to the industry.

Game development skill is not going to “be a lifetime of poverty or limitation. It’s still where the action is,” said Deering.

Deering is currently an advisor for Cudo Ventures, a company specializing in monetization applications.

Sony Interactive Entertainment and Deering did not respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside business hours.

When is someone going to find a password but somehow be stopped because it expires in as many as six months? What is it mitigating?

The current thinking as I understand it is expiry policies make most types of accounts less secure because users just cycle through the same predictable pattern of adding increasing numbers of exclamation points or incrementing the last digit at each required password change, and if you require new passwords to be too substantially dissimilar from x number of previous ones then users can’t remember them at all. Policies that make people use minimally complex passwords because they have too many to remember and don’t understand how password managers work inevitably increase password reuse between services and devices which does the opposite of improving security. Especially with MFA enforced, which I’ve been known to do as aggressively as I can get away with, there’s just no sense in requiring regular password resets – as long as the password remains complex, unique, and uncompromised. I’m not a network security expert but I am responsible for managing these sorts of things in my role and that’s the rationale I use for the group policies in a typical customer’s environment.

Current IT best practice is that passwords should never expire on a set schedule, but they should expire if there is evidence they’ve been breached.

You might wanna read up on the most current NIST guidelines

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/09/nist-proposes-barring-some-of-the-most-nonsensical-password-rules/

Most places in the US will have nothing about severance written down anywhere, but it’s very common to actually pay severance in a mass layoff situation (unless the whole business is going under).

In most of the developed world there is a mandatory level of severance (and companies can obviously exceed that if they want but the base amount is guaranteed). In BC it’s one week after three months (the probationary period) a second week after one year and then one additional week per year up to a maximum of eight weeks.

“No, no it’s everyone else who’s the problem, not me!”

Could still be hair!

In third panel those are the person’s arms ;)