Boston Post Mortem Layoff Recovery Panel

There's no way to sugarcoat it: Layoffs have been a challenging and intensely present part of the games industry for years. Within the past year, many game developers have been the victim of layoffs for the first time, or for the first time in a while. When you get laid off, what happens next? What do you do? Join Boston Post Mortem as our panel discusses what life after layoffs looks like.
Our panel will be hosted on the Boston Post Mortem Discord. As is usual for Boston Post Mortem, the first hour of the meeting will be for freeform discussion--we'll be trying something a bit different than usual during this online chat portion of our meeting, so we hope you'll try it out with us! The panel will start at 7:30.

Meet our panelists:
Oleg Brodskiy
Oleg Brodskiy serves as Development Director at Firaxis, drawing upon 11 years of experience across a broad variety of roles, teams, and studios. He honed his bizdev, production, and design skills across indie games and AAA titles, where he worked on such products as Marvel Puzzle Quest, Star Trek: Timelines, and Ghost Story's Judas, before he was promoted to Game Director for Archer: Danger Phone. Prior to joining Firaxis in mid-2022, he was the Producer on Lord of the Rings Online.

Chris Maire
Chris Maire is one of the organizers of Boston Indies, and an engineering manager at Skymap Games. He's been laid off once.

Walt Yarbrough
Walt joins WPI after a decade teaching at Becker College, where he was a Visiting Digital Fellow. A management and production specialist, at Becker he revised and expanded the Production curriculum in the Interactive Media degrees, developing and teaching classes on the Agile/Scrum, Kanban and Waterfall/CPM production methodologies. A problem solver, Walt often accepted the challenge of covering other courses, as needed, including Programming, Data Analytics, and Design. He was also responsible for creating his signature Live Studio classes, partnered with industry professionals to refine and update released software at professional levels.

Before joining Becker, Walt had a long career in AAA software development, managing large international teams on such projects as Dark Age of Camelot, Ultima Online, the Sims Online and Lord of the Rings Online. His professional work continues today, serving as Executive Producer for Massdigi in their dozens of shipped games and applications.

In his spare time, Walt gravitates towards cooperative and competitive online games, such as World of Warships Legends and Smite, often playing with his adult children. He also enjoys hiking, camping and fixing up older houses with his partner.

Meg Glynn
Meg Glynn is a UI/UX Swiss army knife with 15 years of experience in games and game-adjacent spaces.