Workers at Nintendo’s third-party repair partner are reportedly overwhelmed with Joy-Con repairs

Workers at Nintendo’s third-party repair facility have reportedly encountered an “extremely stressful” work environment due to a deluge of switches sent in due to Joy-Con drift issues, according to a report from Kotaku. A former supervisor at New York-based United Radio, the company that partners with Nintendo to fix broken devices, said, Kotaku That the high volume of Joy-Con repairs resulted in high turnover and “a lot of bugs”.

United Radio is its own company – Nintendo acts only as an intermediary, handling customer communications and leaving the repair to United Radio, which serves Nintendo customers located in the eastern half of the United States. The ubiquitous Joy-Con drift led to “easily thousands” of Joy-Cons passing through United Radio in one week, and prompted the company to build a dedicated Joy-Con repair workstation, the former supervisor said Kotaku.

Joy-Con drift is a widespread issue This causes the controllers to introduce movement when none is present, which often appears as moving your character on the screen when you’re not touching the thumb sticks. Although many Switch owners hope it will be Latest OLED model That would fix the Joy-Con drift, the problem is still there and Nintendo itself suggested that it may never be fixed. In 2019, Nintendo I started to fix Joy-Con drift for freeEven with the warranty expiration.

to me Kotaku, United Radio hires many temporary workers through the recruitment company Aerotek. The workers reportedly became eligible to be hired as full-time employees of United Radio after three months on the job. However, the former supervisor said Kotaku That most temporary employees stopped working after two and a half months, whether they didn’t show up for work or were fired. This reportedly made it difficult to put together a team of experienced workers, which inevitably led to errors. In one example of such errors, Customer On Reddit, his switch was returned with someone else’s saved data on it. Quoting there are many other online complaints Defective repairsAnd missing components, or Damage to their system.

The high turnover wasn’t the only bug that contributed to the bug fix – the language barrier also posed challenges, the former supervisor said Kotaku. The supervisor claims that they were native English speakers on the job, which makes it difficult to train employees. Bilingual workers are reportedly required to “act as a link” to relay information between the trainer and the trainee.

The tight response times didn’t help with these issues either. The former supervisor said Kotaku United Radio will simply replace any broken Joy-Cons from 2017 to 2018. After that period, workers were reportedly required to repair 90 percent of their Joy-Cons within four days of receiving them. It’s unclear if these policies have been mandated by Nintendo. the edge I contacted Nintendo with a request for comment but they were not immediately answered.

Like Kotaku Note that Nintendo doesn’t just rely on contracted employees to make repairs. Former and current employees of the Nintendo Headquarters Redmond, Washington Tell Kotaku That Nintendo is hiring temporary workers for 11-month cycles with a two-month (or longer) break in between, with employees losing access to health care during that window. Earlier this week, a A former Nintendo employee filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, claiming that Nintendo and employment agency Aston Carter fired them for trying to organize a union.

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