There is no way the entire studio is on call. We have on call devs for every single product which means around 30 people on call every given day. That’s less than 5% of our engineering workforce and exactly 1% of the overall workforce.
I highly doubt all the devs are on call for Christmas. I bet its just some Network guys and some software engineers. Managers of course get pulled in if shit hits the fan but they get paid the big bucks regardless.
There is definitely something else going on here. Maybe the holidays were cut because they took a whole year to ship online coop. Maybe they are behind on the next dlc and their new studio head is punishing them by forcing them to come to work during the Christmas New Years week. Or maybe this is just a dumb tweet we are reading too much into.
If shit hit the fan at 343 and employees are asked to work to fix critical issues, then hey do it. The boss will surely give back vacation time later to take off another time. Now if the managers are telling employees to skip their entitled holidays and never get them back that's a different story.
On call can happen to anyone in an important role. It's just part of the job. Now if someone is urgently asked to stick around and fix something, the employee can always try to pull the 'ol "Fuck off everyone, I'll be back in two weeks", but that wont go over well with anyone.
There's been times I've worked on a days off. Or I had to be part of a meeting on that day. Big deal. Tell the boss and he'll say thanks, go ahead and take a different day off.
No company is going to force employees to work on vacation unless there's something urgent going on. In fact, if things are smooth sailing most bosses are happy the employees are off for the week. The worker gets time off, and also another perk for the manager.... any asshead employees are out of their face for a week.
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