More from Press Start, which is good break time reading:
A few months later, 2K reorganized again. “We had a meeting invitation sent out to us late one night,” said Chris Proctor, the designer in Australia. “‘Everybody meet in the car park at 10:00 a.m.” When he arrived at work the next morning, one of the execu-
tives started reading names off a list. This person, go downstairs.
That person, upstairs. Proctor was told to go to the downstairs group, which he soon discovered was bad news. It turned out that 2K was pulling the XCOM project from the Australia studio entirely,
leaving their staff with nothing to do but support Irrational on the next BioShock game. “The upstairs group were to stay and continue working on BioShock Infinite,” Proctor said. “And the downstairs group was laid off.” As Proctor sat there in a daze, one of 2K’s executives pulled him and a few other designers aside and told them that, actually, they could retain their jobs and keep working on XCOM, but there was a catch: they’d have to move to San Francisco.
“I was really steamed about that,” Proctor said.
Now, I’m not some kind of layoff master here, but wouldn’t it be easier to grant everyone just a touch more dignity by calling them and telling they were laid off and where to go instead of shouting it out in a parking lot?