[TRENCHES] Tuesday, April 10, 2012 - Apocalypse
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Apocalypse
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/apocalypse
You load sixteen tons…
AnonymousThere was this game company…..Ok, among the many things for which they were actually famous for, this little nugget never made it to the light of day. They had a sister studio in the UK from which they would recruit programmers. They’d offer moving costs, entry-level salary (which is OK because taxes are cheaper here, right?) and even find them an apartment walking distance from work.
The recruits would be under strict instruction from the HR director when they came over to explain to Customs and Immigration that they were here on vacation so they could get hired without having to get in queue for an H1B1 visa. They’d show up, “luck” into a job, and then the company had an immigration attorney that would handle getting them a work visa.
Only here’s the deal. Once you get one of those work visas, if you lose your job, it expires in 48 hours. If you quit or get fired, you have 2 days to find another job or you’re an illegal. And oddly enough, there was always some kind of delay with the lawyer if someone got too close to getting their green card.
So they would import these fresh-out-of school programmers, get them settled, and then stick them on projects that were mandatory 70 hours a week at least, and would have them by the balls until the project shipped or they got laid-off. One of those projects was on 7x10 for the entire 2 years that I worked there.
It almost backfired once when a new guy and his wife were on the way into the country. Their flight was delayed, the line at Customs was long; the wife got testy. They got pulled out for additional scrutiny and the wife said, “Can we hurry this up? He has to be at work on Monday.” They got sent back to the UK that night, on their own dime, barred from re-entering the country for a while, and no job waiting back at home. Nothing happened to the Company.
I regret I never figured out a way to nark on the HR director without hurting the genuinely sweet bunch of guys that they dragged over here and burned out.
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This is exactly why a whole industry can continue to exploit it's employees. If you don't stand up to business jerks exploiting people no-one else is going to.
I don't think it's that he didn't want to stand-up to them, it's the question of how.
If you have no direct evidence, or worse yet there is no solid evidence, all you're going to do is get yourself and anyone who stood by you fired.
But yeah, the story kinda sounds superficially similar to a human trafficking ring.
Question though. The people are submitting the story anonymously, so why are the company names left out? Are Mike, Jerry, and Scott intentionally asking for person and company names to be left out?
Edit: Just checked, yup.
It's to avoid unwanted lawsuits. I'm pretty sure the guys want to keep the website more under entertainment than journalism; since they don't fact check, they just ask submitters to leave out company names to avoid getting dragged to court for making defamatory statements by the big bad studios.
PSN ID: fearsomepirate
The government can get the evidence if someone tells them where to look. I'm pretty sure the people at ICE are intelligent enough to think "Huh, all of your foreign employees showed up in our country on tourist visas and you just happened to hire them on the first day of their vacations."
It sounds like the only thing stopping the submitter from reporting it is that he didn't want all of those people to lose their jobs and be kicked out of the country.
Is this the sort of work testers do on an MMO after it launches? It seems more like they're still talking about game testing in the stories, but the comic has veered off into an office comedy about MMO devs or something.
In all honesty, the only difference is that the company dumps them to die in the streets instead of shoots them outright in the back alley and harvest their organs for the black market (don't worry, I'm certain given sufficient time corporate American will find a way to legalize that as well).
Also, FYI, it looks like the Jerry & Mike version of PVP started on Monday. Kinda wish they'd post the comics in the PA hub, but I guess that's a little outside the lines.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
It certainly seems easier than firing everyone and hiring a bunch of brand new people who know nothing about the game.
There's nothing particular to the US here. This stuff is pretty typical the world over.
Human traffickers wouldn't let you bring your family with you either, and as bad as the situation probably is for those stuck coders, it's still probably better than real sweatshop work.
Normally they do because the patches will need to tested. In a small company it makes sense to use the same people.
"So, we fix all the nodes, right?"
See also:
Congregation ("... I agree. We should fix this node.")