I agree 100% with much of the sentiment here that creators deserve respect and a cut of the spoils
At the same time, it really depends.... I'm pretty confident that there are very few engineers at FAANG that can't be replaced. I'd also expect there are very few engineers at Epic, Activision, Blizzard, Naughty Dog, Sony, Rockstar, Ubisoft, Valve, etc... that can't be replaced. Sure, if 30%-70% of the team left on any particular project it would probably die, but at least for AAA titles, there's usually no one person responsible for that title's success? Or maybe there is but it's limited to a few key people and not every person on that team.
IF you're at some indie firm with 5-15 people that's probably less true.
I mostly made this comment because in 1983 most games were made by 1 to 3 people max. By the end of the 80s there weren't many games that had more than 20 people on them and usually they took less than a year to make. It was only in the mid 90s that we started getting 30+ people teams trying to fill a CD with data and it arguably wasn't until the 2000s that we had games that it was common to teams of 30-100+ people multiple years to make.
If you take the truly non-performing folks, well sad to say you can probably get rid of most of them and improve performance.
Otherwise, get rid of any engineer and the minimum impact is 3-6 months code and culture familiarisation before they get up to speed with your particular application/code base/equipment. Can easily be more than a year - especially with some of the big systems.
So yes there is an impact on business performance, and a highly damaging one, far more often than is realised. Companies compete - and companies go under and get replaced, all the time.
>get rid of any engineer and the minimum impact is 3-6 months code and culture familiarisation
On a big project, say 100 devs over 3 years, 6 man months is 1/600th of the work, so a single person is replaceable and it's not even noise. If the replacement takes 6 months to get up to speed the replacement is certainly not a very good developer, even on the biggest projects. At that size, there's lots of small side projects, testing groups, and the like, so there should be plenty of smaller pieces to work on, and some on those small projects are always happy to jump into the main work, not needing 3-6 months to be useful to it.
This is not highly damaging on any but the smallest, shortest projects. And even there people move around all the time and don't destroy projects.
Often the person leaving has not been that good of a contributor due to wanting to leave, while a replacement is new and likely more inclined to work hard.
On a big team, people fit a bell curve, and most likely those leaving are not going to cause much harm (otherwise no big project would get done - all have people coming and going over the lifespan of the codebase).
> I'm pretty confident that there are very few engineers at FAANG that can't be replaced. I'd also expect there are very few engineers at Epic, Activision, Blizzard, Naughty Dog, Sony, Rockstar, Ubisoft, Valve, etc... that can't be replaced. Sure, if 30%-70% of the team left on any particular project it would probably die
The thing is these two things are linked - one engineer leaving and 30-70% of a team leaving. The quantity of who leaves does not matter as much - a project may be able to handle 70% of consultants, interns, junior and regular programmers leaving, but might die if the 30% (or 25%, or 20%) leaving is entirely senior/staff/principal.
One of the lead programmers who has been at the company for many years leaves. He is friendly with some of the other senior programmers and says he thinks the company is slowly going downhill, and he got a new job with better money, and with a saner schedule, work environment and work-life balance. Maybe one of the other senior people leaves for the company he left for. Then other senior people start leaving.
It's like Steve Blank's essay about how a company deciding to start charging fifty cents for soda led to an exodus of its best senior programmers. One lead leaving can be a catalyst for others leaving. So they are in a sense irreplaceable.
If a company is an oligopoly like Verizon/AT&T or the like, then they are privy to revenue and profits they don't have to compete for, and for companies in that situation people are more replaceable. Not for companies that have to be competitive though.
Most developers working on products, not just at FAANG, can be replaced but it's very costly.
You need to find a developer in the specific niche he was competent. Not easy because there is a shortage of developers. Then he needs to get up to speed with the stack and the processes used in the company.
So in theory yes, engineers can be replaced. In practice it's costly, with no guarantee of getting the same productivity, and the process to find someone will leave you with one person less for many months. When you have competent engineers that you want to keep, the last thing to do is to play the "I don't need you anyway" card.
Blizzard lost their entire RTS staff to Frost Giant and will likely never release another RTS again. Sure they can probably survive on lootboxes for Hearthstone and Overwatch, but it's not the company it was. Even WoW is basically dead and is just rehashing with classic. Diablo got turned into mobile lootbox garbage as well, and it's too early to tell if Diablo 4 is going to follow the same path, but I wouldn't hold out hope on it being a critical success.
Large game companies have now essentially become casinos.
At the same time, it really depends.... I'm pretty confident that there are very few engineers at FAANG that can't be replaced. I'd also expect there are very few engineers at Epic, Activision, Blizzard, Naughty Dog, Sony, Rockstar, Ubisoft, Valve, etc... that can't be replaced. Sure, if 30%-70% of the team left on any particular project it would probably die, but at least for AAA titles, there's usually no one person responsible for that title's success? Or maybe there is but it's limited to a few key people and not every person on that team.
IF you're at some indie firm with 5-15 people that's probably less true.
I mostly made this comment because in 1983 most games were made by 1 to 3 people max. By the end of the 80s there weren't many games that had more than 20 people on them and usually they took less than a year to make. It was only in the mid 90s that we started getting 30+ people teams trying to fill a CD with data and it arguably wasn't until the 2000s that we had games that it was common to teams of 30-100+ people multiple years to make.