I'm wondering how many of the commenters here have experienced something similar? The trust is destroyed by the lay-offs, not the communication of them; there's no good or right way to do it, just bad and worse. You're still going to get complaints about how it went down, but after 3 different experiences I think the best one is fast, without warning, and no communication to those remaining until after it's done. Make sure you can answer their #1 question which will be "What did you do for my (now former) coworkers to help them move forward?". You only get one chance at cuts, so make sure you go deep enough. Example: 30% would hurt, but 10% x3 rounds finishes a company for a generation.
I experienced just the opposite: in 2008 at Google we were extremely grateful that there were no layoffs. The only change was that we had to drink cleaned tap water instead of bottled water (and of course there were still people complaining about it :) ), and we got a chance to reset our options at a lower base price in return for resetting the 4 year timer as well (it was a great deal of course).
Hard pass on universal paycuts. That's a similarly bad idea to universal raises & promos - hiring & comp decisions should be made based on performance.
As an EM, I would much rather get the opportunity to prune under-performing engineers than to have to tell every member of my team I'm cutting their comp, knowing that the best couple will leave quickly afterwards.
As an EM, why do you have under-performing engineers on your team in the first place? Either your hiring bar is low, you are not giving enough feedback to improve or you are afraid to cut your losses. None of this needs you to wait for an opportunity to prune under-performers.
An EM is not a king. The process for shedding an engineer is typically long and arduous - a quarter for coaching, then another for a "soft performance plan," and then another quarter for a PIP are not uncommon standard HR practices. God help you if your under-performer is based in, say, Germany.
Regarding a hiring bar, typically an EM may have gotten some say in some of their people, but for the most part not. The suggestion that an EM "giving feedback" is sufficient to improve all employees to a high technical bar is hilarious.
An EM needs to understand the organizational, political, and HR climate of their org. Use what leverage you have to deliver the most impact. Often, that means not going out of your way to expel mediocre engineers, but rather using your resources to propel the rest of your team members to success.
Simple: Politics, optics, and pragmatism. Up to a point it's better to focus on growth and things you can actually fix rather than trying to trim the bushes.
As a PO, how do I tell my boss he hired the wrong person and needs to up his budget by 25% and delay development by 2 months while we hire and onboard someone better? The answer is I don't, because I like my job. Upping all the estimates takes much less energy and is much safer than fighting someone's inflated ego.
The universal cut benefits those who would have been laid off as they're likely the ones who would be most concerned. I've seen this once and the ones who liked it were those who feared losing their jobs knowing it would be hard to find another.
I suspect that would just get all the best employees to leave pretty damn quickly, especially if other companies aren't doing paycuts. All for doing it for execs, though. Don't think you'll lose much by letting them jump ship.
Those 100% of employees will be affected by the decision to shrink costs regardless of staying or being let go.
I'd personally like what happened with one employer. They said there was budget issues and that anyone who wanted to go were offered to be let go with severance. The company is in a slightly worse position that they can't control who took them up on the offer, but it meant that everyone who stayed still wanted to be there and were dedicated to the company post cuts.
The people who stayed didn’t “want to be there because they believed in the mission” of a for profit company. They probably didn’t have any better alternatives.
Why not implement it with an improvement plan that restores the cut pegged to profit/revenue? You could even throw in a cash/stock bonus at some threshold and even a raise?
Universal pay cuts are the worse thing that a company can do. The best employees can get a job quickly and your lowest performers will tend to stay - the exact opposite of what you want.
I would immediately quit any company that does universal paycuts. I assume the execs would also leave if you cut their pay more than they can get elsewhere.
Best solution is to hire better next time, and fire underperformers or entire product organizations.
I worked at a smaller software consulting firm that had to lay off a bunch of people in 2020 (guess why). I was part of the first wave in Q1, a mere month after they promised that they wouldn't lay people off and would explore other options. I even got the same severance package as the Unity people, a month's pay and COBRA coverage, and "best wishes". I understand why they did it, financially speaking, but it still felt like a betrayal for a lot of reasons.
I still have a lot of contacts there and apparently the company culture fundamentally changed after the great 2020 layoffs and many of those contacts left by choice, saying they had no idea if they'd be next if it looked like "tough times ahead" again. Only one friend still works there as a senior dev and he's starting to feel like even his job is on the chopping block now because he has no trust in management anymore.
I mainly just find it sad because that company was a great place to work for the years I spent there, and I believed in their mission statement.
My company did just what you say, and cut a few hundred engineers and managers across the board without warning. 8AM on a Monday morning a bunch of us just got pulled into a MS Teams meeting with a Sr. Director and immediately told "We're sorry to inform you that your job position has been eliminated." Thought I'd done something wrong as there was no warning whatsoever but reached out to a security engineer in the company working in a different state and immediately found out he'd been cut, too. After a couple days started getting texts from folks that a few hundred got cut. Then they do the cutesy offer of "But you can always apply for another of our open and available positions." Sorry, no thanks.
A company I worked for between 2008-2011 had rounds of layoffs. Every person who was laid off had another - better paying job within a month. They reached out to former coworkers who referred them to where they landed.
Once the entire company was acquired for scraps, everyone was let go. We all had lunch, hung around the office and joked around and called recruiters. We all had jobs lined up because we knew the end was near. I had actually unofficially talked to one of our clients to get a contract if the company folded.
How hard should it be for software engineers working for one of the leading game engine developers to find a job?
I felt this at GE. There was a huge group of layoffs around 2016, and while I wasn't working there, the echoes of that were still reverberating across the now decently empty office. Fast forward to 2020, and when the COVID cuts came and they announced another huge layoff, it was a huge impact on the teams, especially since most of the people had seen everyone get laid off. It was a huge blow to moral.
Am I missing something? It strikes me that 4% isn't exactly a large layoff; it's more within the realm of regular turnover and corporate strategy realignment.
> “As part of a continued planning process where we regularly assess our resourcing levels against our company priorities,” said the company in a statement to Waypoint, “we decided to realign some of our resources to better drive focus and support our long-term growth. This resulted in some hard decisions that impacted approximately 4% of all Unity workforce. We are grateful for the contributions of those leaving Unity and we are supporting them through this difficult transition.”
It's unfortunate, but normal. Is the discussion that it should not be normal?
> That number is roughly 4 percent of the company’s total employees. It comes just weeks after Riccitiello told explicitly employees in an all-hands meeting that layoffs weren’t coming.
So if the "top minds" at the company decides layoffs aren't on the table, but does them anyways, something is seriously wrong. If they knew layoffs are coming but told people they are not, something is seriously wrong.
No matter how you turn and twist it, that quote makes it clear that something is seriously wrong in the management at the company. If I was working there, I would also be stressed out at this point, especially since my first thought would be that 4% wouldn't be enough, and I'm next.
Eh it's also a polite way of saying that they're getting rid of the worst performers. There's a balance. Firing bad employees can improve productivity and morale of those that remain. I'd say at most of the companies I've worked for there's been at least 4% of employees that we'd have been better off firing and rolling the dice finding a replacement.
Sure, I have nothing against companies doing so, at long as they are up front about it. That's not what happened here. It would be like they are saying "We're not gonna fire people for poor performance" and then some weeks later announce "We're gonna start firing people for poor performance". It just looks really bad on management.
Running a business isn't easy. And the right decision last week can be the wrong one today. I gag when I hear about employees wanting to share in the ownership of a company that didn't structure itself that way, especially when they only want to share the gains, not the losses.
I've been in companies that did layoffs. I've expressed to colleagues that I'd rather take a pay cut and keep everyone onboard. Most companies are not democracies. Execs make the hard decisions. Some are jerks, most aren't. I used to be friends with someone who was HR director for a women's beauty products company. He showed up for a sporting activity telling us he'd shut down a line of products and laid off nearly a hundred people. And he got a $60k bonus. i asked him how he felt about the folks laid off. He said "nothing he could do, it was happening with or without him". He didn't like my comment about it'd be nice if he donated that bonus to be spread across those former employees. He bought a bigger boat. We... aren't friends anymore.
Layoffs should never be unexpected—at least not without some massive external (or otherwise unpredictable) shock.
It doesn't sound like these layoffs were unexpected to the C-suite. They just didn't want to let people know they were coming, because that would panic people/drop the stock price/make them look bad/etc.
From the point of view of the manager/executive, layoffs should almost always be unexpected to the workforce. You have nothing to gain otherwise and potentially something to lose. Such as morale (contrary to stated 'preference', workers that haven't been fired during a layoff aren't unhappy, and those who were fired no longer matter) and potential sabotage - some subset of to-be-fired workers know they will be fired during a layoff.
Yes, I recognize this view (that corporate policy should be organized for maximum benefit to the corporation, and the actual workers be damned); however, I reject it entirely, because it's inhumane and is part of what is destroying our society.
We need to get past this childish "maximum profit and cut everything else" philosophy and start acting like responsible adults in a society.
In that case I would advice you to read a book about game theory, lest you be cursed to live your life in perpetual confusion about why the world is the way that it is. Cloaking this confusion in "We need to get past this childish philosophy" and "start acting like responsible adults in a society" etc.
That 4% turnover is already 'priced in' and these layoffs are in addition to the regular management out, etc. they plan. If these were just rolled into the regular attrition they wouldn't even mention it or make news about it.
It's hard to say without knowing what projects they cut as part of the process.
If you want to cancel a larger project you can either gut it, and do the work to relocate everyone only to lay them off slowly, or you can do a larger layoff and only relocate people you plan to keep.
Much of the CEO compensation was in Unity stock. Unity had their IPO in 2020, so that was a really good year for the CEO. The stock's high was $196 in 2021. It's down to $37 or so now, near its all time low. So the CEO takes a hit on that. Although he was topped up with a grant of more stock in 2021.
So Riccitiello said no layoffs were coming and then in less than a month started layoffs. That is gross incompetence. Not only does the Unity lose productivity to the distraction this now causes it puts Unity in a bad light. It shows that Riccitiello has no foresight into Unity's financial situation. Or he's just a fucking liar. Either way he should be removed before does more damage. Kick 'em to the curb and get someone competent. Unity is too good of a product to be saddled with Riccitiello.
"might be lay-offs in the next month or so, not sure... and don't know how many people will be impacted; stay tuned! In the meantime please keep doing your job as if nothing has changed."
How would this be better? I saw first hand the damage caused by 4 hours between pre-announcing lay-offs and completing them. Weeks would mean the entire company comes to a stand-still.
There is no "right" answer in this situation; it's a mistake to look for one. The distraction comes regardless and the goal of a decent leader is to minimize it while trying to be thoughtful to those leaving, but you're still taking away someone's job; you can't make that a positive experience.
It is well-known that if you're in the USA you can lose your job at any time, for no reason at all. At-will and all.
People need to plan for that happening, and not just assume it can't happen to them. This example employee should have thought "Hmmm, I should wait some years and save a good amount extra just in case".
I wish it weren't this way, but this is the reality of the world. Yes, it means moving slower and buying a house later (and for more money) - or never at all, but it isn't going to change and our hands are tied.
In the USA you can't out save the housing market unless your making 10x+ the median salary. A lesson I've repeatedly learned. I worked for a number of bootstrapped startups, and purchased houses far under what I could have borrowed based on my salary because I always wanted to have a good solid year+ of runway should I face an unexpected layoff during a downturn.
That has turned out to be some of the worst financial decisions I ever made. While my contemporaries were buying house for 4-5x+ their salary and over time those houses doubled, tripped in value, my house also doubled and tripped in value, but now the difference between the houses I could have purchased and the ones I did, are now in the millions of dollars (aka I have to find 2+ million to upgrade to a house only slightly better than the one I own). Meaning if I want to move up in the housing market to a house I could have purchased a couple years back for just a slightly higher percentage of my income is basically out of reach.
So a lot of people complain about what it takes to get their foot in the door, but the spread between houses has massively widened as well. Just 10 years ago 1.5 million would have gotten a house in the top couple percent, now that number is probably closer to 7-9 million. So even if your salary doubled or tripped, unless you purchased at the max of your previous salary its like starting all over in the housing market.
(and just to make this post longer, this is largely the result of interest free money, a few years back I realized that steady state interest one pays should always be just slightly higher than inflation. Anytime the inflation != interest rates happens it throws things out of wack. AKA while people are complaining about the current rates, if inflation is 8-9% the fed should have immediately reacted with 7-8% rates, which would have massively hammered the system, but apparently no one at us fed/etc has really studied control systems enough to understand that adjusting rates every couple months will never result in a stable system, especially if they fail to react to changes strongly. Their current strategy entirely assumes that inflation/etc slowly rises or falls.).
On the other hand, the people who bought in the aughts were caught underwater with the 2008 crash in home prices. When using leverage to make investments, the lever always works both ways.
I could easily have been a billionaire today if I'd made different moves (like buying all the MSFT or AMZN I could when they went public). I know a billionaire who did just that - he borrowed every penny he could and put it into MSFT at the IPO.
Of course, I was also urged to buy bitcoin when it was $500. I didn't. Shrug.
Where i live (Austin TX), I would have upgraded to a bigger house from my first if they had actually gone down in value. That was actually my plan and part of the reason I bought a cheap house in ~2005. But, the federal government stepped in too soon and made it clear to the banks that they were going to support the market. So outside of a few obviously overspeculated markets a lot of places just stopped going up in value, they never went down or if they did it was single digits.
I placed multiple offers on foreclosed houses (as did a few other people I know) none of us got them because the banks refused to sell them for less than the previous mortgage amount. They let houses sit vacant for 2-3 years until the market was basically recovered in ~2011. One of the ones I bid on, was listed for X, I bid that, was the only bidder and 6 months later the bank counter offered for X + 25%.
So, individuals got screwed on both sides, the people who lost their house, and the "savers" who were denied the deals they were waiting for.
(edit: Just to add to this, basically in auction terms the banks all set a hidden reserve price equal to the previous max while simultaneously listing them for far less than the reserve. It create an optical illusion of the housing market being cheap and full of unsold houses, while people who were actually underwater felt trapped because they would have to take a hit selling the house, and people trying to buy houses couldn't actually buy any without buying the "overpriced" ones being sold by actual individuals. A few people got lucky and bought at below market rates from individuals who had owned them long enough to be able to afford to sell at these lower prices, but those were pretty competitive even during the slowest part of the market. I was regularly outbid (I think it was something like 12 times), despite bidding over listing on them.)
"I was also urged to buy bitcoin when it was $500. I didn't."
I was doing a data science project for a class in 2013. Instructor wanted it implemented and internet visible, with encouragement for users to "vote with bitcoin". It was around $14-$15 at the time. I passed on doing the project...
But remember that for everyone whom you remember for doing the correct thing, there are probably dozens more who did the opposite, such as borrowing every penny they could to put into pets.com or some 'stable'coin. Success is generally hard unless luck intervenes.
The federal reserve is screwed no matter what they do. Reduce interest rates? Lending increases so much the value of money is inflated away to nothing. Increase interest rates? The music stops playing, the borrowing stops, the economy grinds to a halt and enters a recession.
>Yes, it means moving slower and buying a house later (and for more money)
The latter is not necessarily true relative to other countries and showcases people don't understand the long term influence, or lack there off, of various contract structures.
The US has at-will employment dangling a sword of Damocles over your head 24/7. Well, here we have temporary contracts not getting extended to permanent, and the status of a 'permanent' contract being the only way to open doors, which employers will royally abuse to lower other benefits.
US or not, the premise remains the same. Don't be reliant on a party not looking out for your best interests.
The entire US is not at-will employment. And companies with strong employee unions do not have this issue of suddenly and without notice firing their staff...
Minus Montana, every state is at-will employment of some sort or another. And, I think Montana may even have it in some form now.
> And companies with strong employee unions do not have this issue of suddenly and without notice firing their staff...
Lots of people don't work at a place with a union, and don't have access to unionized employment due to industry, current geography, etc. Also we're seeing a huge anti-union push by a lot of interests right now, recently notable being Starbucks.
As the WSJ reported a few weeks ago, companies often find out an employee had quit when the company noticed that they'd stopped showing up for work. Sometimes they disappear with accrued pay being owed them, and don't leave a way to contact them to give them their pay.
Companies doing layoffs often give 2 weeks notice in the form of a 2 week severance check and escorting them out. This is for good reason - very few people are productive as a short timer, and some are even destructive.
I'm not saying companies good employees bad. I'm saying these things cut both ways all the time.
I tendered my resignation once and was met at my desk in an hour. They brought two boxes, watched me pack. They interrupted me while writing detailed status for customers on each of about 5 projects I was working on. I hit the print button, and was escorted to the conference room. They offered a severance package if I agreed not to discuss why I was leaving. I handed the status package I'd printed to my (former) manager. He glanced at it, and recommended they double the severence. Best summer ever. I looked for work, and was paid to deliver sailboats offshore.
The reason people are met at their desk, watched, and escorted out is now and then an employee will be tempted to steal company equipment, and worse, commit some form of sabotage in their anger.
As usual, a stinker here and there ruins it for everyone.
I've been an employer and an employee. It is symmetric. Employees can and do negotiate, and if you do something they don't like, they walk away. You cannot make them do anything.
If anything, it's the employee with more power.
Employees have special rights. For example, meeting payroll is the first priority of any employer. Any disruption on that and the state will hammer the employer into a pulp. Employees have all sorts of legal advantages in pressing frivolous lawsuits against employers. I've had lawyers from BigCorp tell me they just settle the frivolous ones, because it's far cheaper than going to court, especially with the court heavily biased against them. The suing employees know this, which is why they do it.
Employees can walk away at their whim. They can walk away if they don't like the cut of your jib, or because they don't want to work for a woman, or for any racist reason they feel like. An employer cannot.
Employee candidates can ask any question they like of the potential employer. Not so the other way.
CEO: "Don't worry we are not planning any layoffs!"
me: "Why are we talking about layoffs at all? Probably should start planning for contingencies"
Don't get me wrong: There's almost certainly a more transparent way of doing this that doesn't involve straight up lying, and it's crummy as hell, but there's some amount of personal responsibility here in terms of knowing how to read between the lines.
It's a matter of perspective. We have a culture that largely puts business interests above independent peoples interests. If you agree with this then it makes complete sense that it's better for the company because that employee might have been kept and we want to keep them stable. If we warn them, they might become a flight risk and we might not need to cut them. Information asymmetry is our friend so let's give them only the information that's beneficial to us.
If on the other hand you take the perspective of supporting a bottom up independent worker interests above a business's (I fall in this category), then your point is quite valid. Information asymmetry here put me in a terrible situation, if you would have told me earlier, I might have made different decisions. That might not include leaving, but it might have included tidying up my resume and prepping for interviews, just-in-case. Maybe I follow through or maybe I just keep some backups lined up in case things go south. Some may just pass the risk back to the business and jump ship since they assume they have better odds doing this and may even get a promotion.
Personally I don't believe any business leadership's words, I skim financials, I watch movements in the laborforce especially around management, I look at markets and make my own interpretation. I assume they're providing intentional incomplete information to their advantage and try to infer reality from that combined with the other data sources. Businesses are not your friends and will lie to you to their advantage above all else. I'm not a subscriber to Hanlon's razor when it comes to self-interest. What can typically be attributed to self-interest should be considered above incompetence, especially when looking at something as strategic and methodical as a modern business structure that have countless meetings to sit around and discuss and analyze these sorts of things or contract specialized skilled services in these domains.
Why aren't you always keeping your resume tidy and staying ready to interview? In April 2020, when Covid hit, my company did an across the board paycut. The next week a recruiter reached out to me about a job that I really was T interested in. But we kept talking and she referred me to a job I was. I gave her my resume without any changes to it from before the pay cut announcement.
I spoke to the (internal) recruiter about my accomplishments based on a “career document” that was updated.
I did no special technical preparation for my interview loop (BigTech cloud consulting - app dev). I only practiced behavioral questions based on my career document.
>Why aren't you always keeping your resume tidy and staying ready to interview?
Keeping your resume tidy is more of an expression (making sure you have marketable skills), it doesn't take much effort to update experience and new or shifts in skilling.
As to interviews, I could go on about the current broken interview process, but suffice it to say that interview prepping takes several weeks of sitting through competitive programming problems for most people.
For those who presumably need no sort of prep time, good for you, I however need prep time. I also value my personal time and have no desire sitting around for an hour or more every day playing with competitive programming problems so you'll have fresh memory for interviews that use this silly approach. As such, like many people, I need a little bit of lead time before I can get through all the hurdles. I've yet to see a single employer who doesn't use this process in the past 4 years although maybe I have a bad sample. This includes big tech, mid and small tech and some big/mid that aren't even tech focused I spoke with at different points. I'm glad you managed to find a sane employer that considered prior experience, a resume, and traditional interview process. That is not the norm in my area to say the least.
So to add on, I’m older (48), when I looked at the landscape in 2017, my (step)son was graduating in 2020 and it was time for me to take a stab at BigTech.
I really had no interest in the shit show of the modern software engineering interviewing process since I had never had to do a coding interview in my life on the enterprise dev side.
I did know “cloud” by 2020 and had customer facing experience so I was able to pivot to app dev cloud consulting and my BigTech interview was mostly behavioral.
- reach out to my network on LinkedIn and schedule a lunch with former coworkers
- sleep well at night.
I’ve been through
a layoff, I’ve had to jump ship quickly (a company was acquired by private equity), and I had a sudden 10% paycut (2020). Guess how little I stressed?
Interview ready doesn’t mean “practice grinding leetCode”. It means always be in a position when opportunity knocks (or you need to find a door to knock on), you’re ready.
> It's a matter of perspective. We have a culture that largely puts business interests above independent peoples interests.
No. It's about the fact that it's literally the CEO's job to put the business's interests above those of any individual employee. Anything else wouldn't make sense.
Good luck with that attitude when your company depends on highly skilled labor that comes from a very small pool of talent (relative to all labor in the country). The game industry, and game engine programmers in general, are a small group and if a company isn't good to their employees they are going to have a very, very difficult time hiring and staying competitive. It's not like they can just grab bodies and throw them at projects. Even hiring the very best and brightest cloud engineers from a FAANG is going to see them flounder and waste time ramping up to game engine development.
Unless, as the game industry tends to be, every employer is awful, and you can get away with it because there is a lack of better offers for people to consider.
At no point in my life as an adult have I ever depended on my current job for my financial stability. I depended on having a marketable set of skills, a network and a savings account.
I definitely never went into buying a house without having 3 to six months worth of bills in the bank.
On the other hand, as a software developer for 25 years, it’s never taken me more than a month to go from “I’m looking for a job” to “having an offer”. I’ve changed jobs 8 times abs six between 2008.
Well to be honest, this last time took two months just because the hiring process takes longer at BigTech. But I wasn’t really looking. It just fell into my lap.
Speaking of which, even in todays world. Any software developer who worked at Unity shouldn’t have any trouble finding another job quickly. That’s intended to be a compliment.
> At no point in my life as an adult have I ever depended on my current job for my financial stability. I depended on having a marketable set of skills, a network and a savings account.
Congratulations on being one of the most privileged people in the country. You realize ~50% of the country doesn't even have enough money in their checking/savings to cover a $400 emergency expense right? https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/personal-finance/articles/49...
This isn't a "well just stop buying avocado toast, and start pulling yourself up by bootstraps!" problem. This is a systemic problem with wage stagnation and complete decimation of the middle class over the last decades. The fact is the average American can only dream of having privilege you mention like not depending on their current employment to pay next month's rent/mortgage.
We aren’t talking about “most people in the country”. We are talking about software engineers at a well known company that pays far above the median income.
Software engineers at Unity are not “suffering” making between $196K to $330K+
My attitude was the same when I was making $33K as an operator/programmer in 1996 and when I bought my first house when I was making $70k in 2002.
Also, if you are living paycheck to paycheck with $400 in your account, you shouldn’t be buying a house. A house comes with maintenance and responsibilities that you’re not going to be able to pay for. The parent poster used the scenario of someone buying a house and then getting laid off.
"You realize ~50% of the country doesn't even have enough money in their checking/savings to cover a $400 emergency expense right?"
Great quote. Yet I see a lot of really nice cars humping down the highway. Teslas, Bimmers, Rivians, Ionics, etc. Er'ybody on their iPhone 13ProMax AND their AppleWatch. Spending like there's no tomorrow.
Like the man said about living within your means...
Saying that 50% of people live paycheck to paycheck is meaningless unless you are also implying that those same 50% are all excellent at managing their finances. Otherwise you are just saying that it is possible for people to spend every dollar they earn which is obviously true, but not interesting.
Is there a subset of that 50% who is living paycheck to paycheck despite having excellent financial discipline and trying to live within their means? Probably, but without knowing what percentage it is, the 50% (and I've recently heard 64%) doesn't tell you much of anything.
If an individual has chosen to be blissfully oblivious to
- basic economic news though mainstream news sources, which has been plentiful
- the overall financial health of their employer and the sector in which they operate, which usually make up a significant chunk of all-hands meetings, so there's no excuse for not having been exposed to it
- the health of their product/service and its value to their employer as a whole, which they should know simply by virtue of, y'know, doing their jobs
then frankly they're going to be blindsided by pretty much everything in their professional career, not just a mere layoff.
Even if it did run afoul of labor regulations, it's damn near trivial for a business to find a justification ("new information", "changing market conditions", etc.) for a change of plans.
> Bank: "Congrats on your house purchase closing, your new monthly payment of $XXXX is due in two weeks!"
Actually 30-60 days depending on when you close. And candidly, that should be enough time to find a new job for a company with a reasonable hiring process.
This literally happened to me a few years ago. It was stressful but I was fine.
It’s called “living below your means and saving money”. No matter where you are in the US, as software engineers you are probably making well above the median income for your location. You should be able to save an emergency fund.
> It’s called "living below your means and saving money".
… or living well above your means in the time of asset bubbles left and right?
Let's say you and your buddy both make $125K.
If you bought a small $100K serious-fixer-upper house in order to live below your means in 2019 and your buddy bought a large $600K house at the same time which he could barely afford, then who would have "saved" more by mid-2021 when you both sold at 2X valuation?
At some point "living below your means and saving money" needs to turn into "you need to spend money to make money".
"Saving" does not protect you from inflation and it is of nearly zero value in the case of hyperinflation.
We don’t have to be hypothetical. We know an entry level developer at Unity makes almost $200K
I’ve done investment real estate before - I had three houses (including the one I lived in) with mortgages of over $500K when I was making $75K a year. Guess what happened when 2008 came?
How is that person who didn’t save, got laid off and having a $600K mortgage going to fair?
Fast forward to 2022. I have a house in the burbs of a major metropolitan area that at the time I had it built was less than 2x our household income (2016) and I had savings. Since we were living below our means, when I had a 10% (Covid related) pay cut, it stung, but I shrugged and kept it moving.
Saving money is not a defense against inflation. It’s meant as a safety net so when the stock market crashes and you lose your job it’s just a minor inconvenience instead of a major life event.
> In Europe it is common for multiple months of high pitch negotiations between "wanting to lay off" and layoffs. Usually without any riots or panic.
I'm kind of tired of seeing this "well actually, in Europe..." -- there's a reason there's zero major tech innovation happening in Europe. There's a reason Google/FB/Netflix/etc. and 99% of other major software unicorns (save Spotify and handful of others) are from the US. To be successful as a company, you need to be nimble, not burn your runway with bureaucracy.
Working for a startup is a risk and money, for the time being, is very tight.
Unity was started in Europe. It moved to the US when it stopped being a startup. I think there is plenty of innovation in Europe. But you are right, there is something that makes it easier to go from small/medium to big/huge that is easier in the US, and laxer labour laws is probably part of the story.
You mean the low margin unprofitable company that is at the mercy of the record labels and their “product” is the equivalent of a minor division for Google, Amazon and Apple?
Maybe so. But isn’t it a Pyrrhic victory for a for profit company to have a better designed product that is still losing money? That’s not exactly a definition of a “successful company”
So we’re going to gloss over the near total lack of innovation? You guys innovate in design, cars and nuclear physics (colliders to power plants), and that’s about it.
You don’t think any of that has to do with the employment contract?
Way to undersell Europe. Yes, we're a bit lower on global tech innovation. Much of our tech innovation is region specific, which should make it obvious why one, the US won't see much of it, and two, the markets aren't there for VCs to just throw money at it. There are legal and social reasons why they don't target the global market more, too.
>You don’t think any of that has to do with the employment contract?
The Netherlands has a legal notice period of 1 month baseline. Despite that, many companies opt for a longer employee notice period, which then requires them to double that amount from their side. Doesn't sound like the employment contract is at fault here as much as the risk-averse culture, when nothing is keeping these companies from keeping the notice period shorter. Surely, a talented developer does not have to worry about finding a new job so much it requires more than a month.
God forbid I mention Japan, which despite still using fax machines and having similar structures, still produces plenty of global products. Unless your idea of tech is "just software".
It's not as simple as you try to imply. Spend a bit more time doing research between what is legally required, what employers offer and what developers realistically need.
I'm mostly playing devil's advocate. dvt asked a question, and andyjohnson0 deflected by arguing about a sentence fragment.
What's the layoff policy in Japan? I would say it used to be 'never' and that hasn't been the case for some time, but a lot of the innovation ramp for them occurred before the 90's recession that started breaking the social contracts, so that isn't really a point in dvt's favor.
Culture definitely plays a role here, as does need (see also the Netherlands who send consultants worldwide to talk about water management). People like to talk about how different Scandinavian culture is from American culture, but from what I know of Japanese culture, it's at least as far away from say Norway as Norway is away from America. So if dvt thinks that Europe is missing some secret sauce and not just American Exceptionalism, I would say that Japan has substituted a different sauce to good effect.
Japanese companies are more likely to try and get you to resign peacefully or keep you around in a place where you won't cause any damage than to create layoff / firing scenarios. Japanese employees are lifetime employees, far stickier than Europeans.
Layoffs can still occur for economic reasons, but that's the same as in Europe.
>not just American Exceptionalism
There is very little "exceptional" about America in and of itself. What America has, is a lot of cash to throw at getting exceptional people and mess around forever. When your markets are huge, you can throw huge money and gain it back. When your markets are small, you can't.
Which then comes back to the question "so why don't European countries target the English market like the US does? Why care for your local market if you can make much bigger money targeting the global one?". And unfortunately, I don't know why beyond risk-aversity, culture and "that's just how it went". At least in Japan, the Japanese-only market is still far bigger than most [insert non-English European language]-only markets.
Point being, if dvt is arguing "it is the bureaucracy!", that doesn't explain why Japan works, China works, and why Europe tech scene continues to import bureaucracy-heavy approaches from the US tech scene, like you know, big Agile.
Nobody used the web until a couple college kids in corn country added images to it. You can call that market fit if you like and I won't argue with you about it, I just don't agree.
I had to listen to too many rants about the quality of Tim Berners Lee's code to allow that he invented the web. I place too high a premium on execution, which is a big part of my problem with IP and patents. You made a box. Congratufuckinglations. Can you make a million of them? And not chop anyone's fingers off?
If the web were the automobile, he's no living embodiment of Rudolf Diesel. Maybe closer to a valued employee of James Watt. He was channeling Engelbart, channeling Bush, and stuffing it into SGML.
Rudolf Diesel, there's a European inventor. We went a little crazy with that car thing. Sorry about that.
Edit: That was also 30 years ago for the one, 40 for the other. That's quite a long time. Whole countries have cycled though low-end tech to innovator to resting on their laurels in that time.
You going to tell us the US tech market is not boggled down by bureaucracy? Surely you jest. Do you need a reminder who sets the trend for the remainder of the market?
> In Europe it is common for multiple months of high pitch negotiations between "wanting to lay off" and layoffs. Usually without any riots or panic.
I don't think a sudden layoff at any time is an assurance for workers in the sense that it is better to pretend everything is Ok until it isn't.
It's important to note that this is typically a legal requirement (e.g. the requirement to consult prior to redundancy in the UK) rather than something typically done out of any good-will by the companies/employers.
In many European countries, employees have to give notice periods before quitting. They can't just not show up and say I quit. I have seen one month per year of employment topping out at 6 months
Outside of explicit contract law you may be tangled up in, the US doesn't have explicit law and most employees are classified as "at-will" (basically, dependent upon where the business views this freedom as beneficial or non-beneficial to itself).
Since businesses haven't managed to lobby such legislation requirements in for workers to give notice (largely because at-will is typically beneficial to them) and just use contract law where it matters (public personalities, etc.) you can just show up and quit legally, without legal repercussions.
With that said, cultural protections have been put into place under job history in the application process. If I were to show up and without a very good reason tell me employer I quit effective immediately, I can do so unlike the European cases described.
But is this really freedom or an illusion of freedom? Many in the US are living paycheck-to-paycheck to survive. They're financially leveraged and can't really just quit, they need to line up an opportunity and have minimal savings to protect them. For them they can make the choice but it's a bad choice for them and most of the time they won't. Businesses know this and leverage it. The pandemic labor market offered a shift in this giving some bargaining power back to labor but it seems to be clawing right back to businesses again, probably for quite some time.
In what are classified as more professional positions, you're expected to give 2-weeks notice. Many employers request references and if you're honest during your interview, leaving without notice in most cases will require a good explanation and a competent interviewer, otherwise you're a red flag no hire almost immediately and there's a pool of others behind you without said red flag. So, I could quit tomorrow, but I'd have to be very careful with my next employer as to how I go about referencing my previous work, why I left, etc. In most cases I can't really just show up and quit, I need to give notice and wait. Perhaps that's not as long as some European countries closer to the order of 4 weeks IIRC but it's not as free as it might appear to be for the majority of laborers.
This is usually negotiable if you're leaving as well, it's not in the companies interest for the most part to keep you hanging around past wrapping current things up.
Well that would have certainly given me motivation to leave my current job sooner. If I wait N months to quit, I have to stay here another month? Fuck it I’m out.
> How would this be better? I saw first hand the damage caused by 4 hours between pre-announcing lay-offs and completing them. Weeks would mean the entire company comes to a stand-still.
I've worked at multiple companies where we had layoffs announced months in advance. That is the normal sane way of doing things. If it is does really competently, the company starts by offering a voluntary severance package (though that does tend to get rid of the best employees first...).
Yes it sucks, but a transparently and competently run company will let everyone know that the finances aren't looking great and that layoffs will be coming, but they'll try to have everything worked out soon so worry isn't hanging over people's head for long.
It's not one extreme or the other. I don't know what was said exactly, but certainly there's some middle-ground - something along the lines of "right now we don't have any layoffs planned and we'll do everything we can to prevent any, but we can't predict the future, especially with the current state of the economy, so certainly can't make any promises".
Plus you have the people resigning around the lay-offs. Nobody wants to be on a sinking ship and having your workmates sacked and morale at the company dropping can make people think about other opportunities.
I remember a business that had a branch office in another state. The CEO thought he'd be a good guy and told them that the office would be closed in 3 months after the Christmas vacation and they'd all be laid off then.
The employees stopped working and looted everything in the building. Reportedly, trucks backed up to the loading dock where everything was carried off.
They all got their paychecks, but they hadn't done any work in the 3 months and the building was picked clean.
This makes me wonder if there are any books collecting management mistakes. A lot of leaders have to pick this up on the job by making their own blunders. I understand that some MBA programs may attempt to look at case studies, but the ones I’ve read have seemed about anodyne strategy things rather than human-level, savvy operator, street smarts & empathy stuff. Regardless, the winter holidays are clearly a time of year to be extra compassionate and considerate; it’s definitely no good to have layoffs right before xmas. I wonder if the biz had insurance coverage for getting looted this way. Or maybe that physical stuff didn’t have much remaining value anyway.
That's exactly what the Harvard case study approach is supposed to be about. They are mostly open-ended but guide towards being a success or distress story. I remember case studies that discussed the FANG that I worked at before business school. I'd contribute my views and comment on how it was like being on the inside. The cases were a bit anodyne but provided a framework where if you had engaged classmates, you could have good discussions about how to avoid others' mistakes.
The idea that insurance pays so theft doesn't cost the business anything is false. The insurance rates will be raised so you'll wind up paying the bill anyway.
Insurance is a good idea to cover catastrophic loss, but if you can self-insure for other things, you'll be way better off.
Makes sense. My thought was just that the business probably had some sort of commercial property loss coverage that might have covered that case (even though -EV). I’d guess a far more common case of employee theft (retail shrinkage / fell-off-the-truck) is self-insured, as some kind of operating provision.
Yup. I was at EA during his "leadership" too. Never got the axe during the couple of layoffs we went through, but had a lot of good friends who did.
His hiring style seemed to be "open the floodgates periodically and let everyone in, then cull the ones we don't like after a couple of years". Massively demoralizing.
I would never work for a company with him at the helm.
He has been with Unity since when he had been finally kicked out of EA for good. He is a partner in the PE firm (Elevation Partners), which likely had been behind making Unity public.
Back in another life I was once an intern at a well known, but past-its-prime tech company.
The company announced a (1st time ever) layoff in the morning and I got see the guards carry the boxes from cubicles. The VP of our department (responsible for much of the core technology of our products) sent out an email at around 11AM telling everyone we need to focus and that there won't be any more cut to our department, since we are central to our products.
Come 2PM and all of us received an email saying that the VP has resigned from his position effectively immediately.
Not necessarily. As a CEO, you suddenly see your sales plunge. You run the numbers and think: is it just a panic/fluke? Is it going to bounce back? Are we losing the sales to a new competitor?
You eventually conclude that the drop is due to a market downturn. You realize that you have a runway of 1 year, and cannot raise more capital. Se, your choices:
1. You keep cruising like nothing happened. The sales may bounce back within a year (in which case it was a good decision). They may decline further 6 months in (dropping your runway to 3 months). Or they may stabilize at the new level for a while (so when the runway reaches 6 months, you think again).
2. You fire X% of the people. Your runway is now Y years. If the sales bounce back earlier, it's a hassle to re-hire, but is doable. If the cooler market lasts longer, you may need to reiterate.
Making the correct decision is always a guess. Like trying to figure out whether to buy or sell a stock. You observe the market, you try to understand, and then you decide.
As a CEO, if someone asks you on the spot "are layoffs planned", any answer rather than a complete denial will be treated as a "yes": people with better offers will leave, other will start looking for jobs. If in a month the sales bounce back, you lost your bet.
You're right but that's gross competence, not gross incompetence. The job of the CEO is to keep the firm going, not to make employees happy. Most of the time the two coincide, but sometimes they don't. The CEO works for the board of directors/shareholders, not for the employees.
This sort of bullshit is exactly what causes companies to go downhill. Strong leadership would have handled these layoffs much, much differently, to say nothing to the fact that a good CEO should have been able to avoid them entirely.
Riccitiello needs to go. As another commenter put it, Unity is too important of a product for its stewards to be languishing like this.
Not disagreeing with you, but I still think that it doesn't go hard enough to the point of "strong leadership." And I consider leadership here to be not just the CEO but all of the top-level management.
Wouldn't strong leadership have prevented the need for layoffs at all?
It's a very short term perspective. No employee is going to believe this CEO about anything important anymore, in this company or his next. So the disconnect between employees and CxOs grows, and decision making gets decoupled from reality.
> The job of the CEO is to keep the firm going, not to make employees happy.
Sociopathic CEOs actually believe this. Maintaining employee morale is crucial to the long term health of a company. Ignore it and you suffer a slow death from brain drain and disaffected employees. "They pretend to care about us, I pretend to care about my job."
Sociopathic CEOs are also very persuasive with these arguments, making most employees believe it is a necessary sacrifice. And, as is evident, these CEOs put themselves in a trolley dilemmas all the time, instead of being honest and transparent (too proud narcissists) avoiding those all together.
I've seen it be done, either publicly or privately; in smaller companies I've even seen people be told "you will be laid off at X date if we don't get Y funding" as a heads-up; especially when the management doesn't want to lay people off.
Yeah had that happen and it was clear why (small company closed down)
Starting from 6 months the CEOs explained how things are and what would need to happen in order to avoid it.
Two months prior they layed everyone off (including themselves) which is double the legally required minimum period.
In the end we closed down the office together and parted ways.
Most people had offers lined up and at least one colleague of mine ended up with a former customer. The CEO "advertised" him during the final call with the customer.
I've been in a startup where they gave advanced warning about layoffs. One major side effect is that productivity goes to sub zero because of the uncertainty of it all. After going through that, I can see reasons for both keeping people in the dark and giving advanced warning.
Layoffs (or re-orgs for that matter) are never easy.
I worked for a mining company that was bought out, then announced there would be restructures and layoffs.
it took 9 months for them to start.. by the time they did moral was so low they could not hire for new positions or replace needed skilled labor. the sites name was mud state wide. (Western Australia).
I never want to go through that experience again. I got out after 8 month by asking for voluntary redundancy.
Their description here is misleading. Even if the employer is large enough to be covered, WARN act requirements only apply to "plant closings" where some particular site is shut down or "mass layoffs" which have to include either 33% of the people at a site with 150+ people or 500 people overall.
WARN was written before remote work was common. I'm very curious to see how WARN is interpreted by the courts for remote workers. There is no case law as far as I know, and a quick ctrl-f of that DoL PDF for "remote" has no results.
For example, is each remote worker considered to be working at a different "plant" (their home)? If so, it seems like the WARN act could never be triggered for remote workers. So a loophole is that fully remote workers don't get WARN protections. That seems to clearly violate the intent of the law, which is that reasonably-large businesses should give advance warning of layoffs.
Or, are all the remote workers collectively considered to be working at one "remote plant"? In that case, WARN would be triggered if a company of, say, 20k people lays off as few as 3 remote workers in each state. That seems silly also.
What about hybrid workers, where 1000 people "report to" or are "based at" one office, but nobody ever actually shows up (or maybe they do, but only for team-building exercises twice a year)? Are those workers truly "working at" that office site (and thus covered by WARN), or are they working at 1000 independent sites (and thus not covered)?
They pay out 60 days of notification pay in their severance packages and still don't notify. Technically, you can refuse that and I would guess that you would remain a worker who isn't allowed in the office.
>> to provide at least 60 calendar days advance written notice of a plant closing and mass layoff affecting 50 or more employees at a single site of employment.
This doesn't seem to apply to selectively letting ~250 people go globally; I saw no mention of a specific US office of this size being shuttered.
I think it's a mistake to look to people like Musk for good examples of empathetic, compassionate management that can be broadly applied. Ditto for Jobs (whose crown he's apparently taken up as the poster child for wanna-be successful sociopaths)
IBM and HP in their waning years were pretty upfront in quarterly reports that their older staff were a liability and they were actively working to manage them out through early retirements, layoffs, etc.
Companies have many ways they obfuscate or hide layoffs of older workers though, there is very little legal protection as long as the company isn't so stupid and brazen as IBM (i.e. leaves a trail of evidence in emails).
Well, I have a short answer and a long answer to this. The long answer would be more or less an essay, and involve a lot of fairly far-left (at least from an American perspective) views, like "we should be basing our society and our work culture on the benefit of the workers, and of all humanity, rather than the corporate overlords" and "we need to radically restructure our corporate hierarchies, which would lead to it being much less likely that there would either be "layoffs" as we know them now, or a small executive class that could conceal their imminent occurrence from the rest of the company".
But for today, I think I will stick with the short answer, which points in the same direction, but is smaller in scope. I think it can be most clearly expressed in two parts:
First, we need to work on reducing the toxic levels of deceit and secrecy in our corporate culture. Hide everyone's salary, hide the metrics we're evaluated on, hide how poorly the company is doing—all of this is designed to make things either more convenient or more profitable for the executives and shareholders, at the expense of the workers, and at the expense of basic honesty. I'm not saying everyone needs to be 100% open about everything all the time; that's fairly obviously too extreme. But the company itself (and, by extension, its executives and other core officials) needs to be more transparent with its workers, especially for as long as it is effectively their sole source of income.
Second (and very much related), we need to find ways to break the mindset that the stock price is all. An awful lot of the deceit and secrecy—and, in fact, many of the other detrimental behaviors of companies and their executives—stem from the fact that the people at the top are obsessed with making sure the share price keeps growing. I think the way the stock price is treated by execs—and the stock/option-heavy compensation packages they often get—were probably based in something helpful and rational to start with (operating under the assumption that a higher stock price means a healthier company), but to the extent that that's true, it's fallen victim to Goodhart's Law ("any measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure").
How do we do these things? Haven't a clue, honestly. Our system is majorly messed up at every level right now, and chock full of feedback loops, so nearly anywhere you try to start will be resisted strongly without first improving things somewhere else...but conversely, any place you can make a difference will start to make it a little easier to improve things elsewhere.
In Europe it’s commonly illegal to lay off people before negotiations (which may sometimes be rather one-sides but nevertheless there are rituals to observe).
> It shows that Riccitiello has no foresight into Unity's financial situation.
The sudden lay off could hint that there is a deeper and more complex problem going on. They invested in tools that must be integrated in a their engine as soon as possible to recover this money from movie makers. So they increased their workforce, but their technical debt would cause a large resistance, making much of the workforce ineffective. They just realized it.
And the deeper problem is that transforming these tools into an appealing work flow that brings clients is a very hard problem that isn't too technical, but more like a "way" in the philosophical/psychological fields.
Anyone who is an active developer of a Unity-based game knows there are a lot of struggles happening within that company right now, many of them technical and many of them related to poor project management. It's reflected in their product, and it's not even a close call. (See their recent efforts around ECS and their new rendering pipelines.)
They always say this, always do your own due diligence. If you have any stock or options look for the section 702 disclosure with the balance sheet and calculate the runway yourself.
It's impossible to know that without being privy to inside details. What if they had a major deal lined up that unexpectedly fell through? Things like that can change "no layoffs" to "4% layoffs" literally overnight.
Companies are pivoting quickly at this point with the shifting tides and contagion happens fast.
I had the exact same scenario in my previous company. I wonder if some execs imagine that the employees are cattle that you're supposed to calm down before the execution.
Execs don't interface with employees on a level where there is much emotion going on, and they probably see this as a benefit.
This is par for the course. Athletes won't ever say 'I am moving to a new team' a month before a deal is inked. Employees won't go to their manager and say 'I am thinking of leaving in about a month, not sure yet tho'...they give the 2 week notice and peace out.
This is all extremely strategic, anyone who thinks the average exec really gives a damn needs to wake up. There are certainly exceptions, I have yet to see it.
> So Riccitiello said no layoffs were coming and then in less than a month started layoffs.
This isn't a statement of how good or bad of a leader Riccitiello is. Sorry, but "we're thinking about maybe, possibly doing some layoffs if whatever" is a really bad way to run a company. The answer is, and always should be, "No layoffs" until the decision is made to do layoffs, and then you do it as fast as the law allows to very quickly clear uncertainty. Layoffs suck, but telling everyone, "hey, I'm thinking we might do a round of layoffs next week" is a great way to make the damage far worse.
Consider this. Yesterday, Pres Biden said unemployment was at historic lows, and the US economy was extremely strong. Nothing to worry about. So... is he lying? Or stupid?
If CEOs believe his words and push forward accordingly, but the actual open market and business environment signal the opposite, what do you do?
If you believe the market and business environment, start cost cutting measures and implement austerity protocols, the community vilifies you.
If you continue business as usual, but market demand tanks, costs skyrocket, and product accumulates on shelves and loading docks, you'll go out of business.
The idea is if you let it out that layoffs are coming (which isn't a real big deal because the employees know it's coming most of the time, no matter how much it is denied; when layoffs are not coming nobody asks) then the best employees will leave ASAP and the worst will stick around until the layoff date.
I haven't seen it myself, really, and post-layoff date your best employees may already be looking anyway (especially in a layoff as the company folds vs a "rightsizing layoff").
> then the best employees will leave ASAP and the worst will stick around until the layoff date.
I see this tossed around and I question it. The people that will leave are the people with who have good intuition about what is going to go down. In other words, the people who are best able to see through corporate politics.
It's not a given that the "best performers" or "top engineers" have a good eye for "corporate political BS". It's not a given they'll see what is going down and run for the exits. Being a "top performer" in some subject matter they are paid for doesn't imply they are "top performers" in playing the game.
It is just as likely that "the dead wood" have an "A game" with corporate politics and they run for the door instead.
I know plenty of extremely good engineers who would not run for the doors in such a situation.
Do you have any advise on how to get that intuition?
I can see mess of certain companies and their bullshit but I was wrong thinking that they would collapse as they still are limping and alive. Granted it is during good times and have to wait to see during such bad times.
...and I prefer honest and open employees who won't immediately stop all work, squeeze whatever they can out of the company and dedicate 100% of their time to finding a new job on my dime.
The citation you're looking for is anyone who's experienced early warning of unspecified lay-offs yet to come, and what that's like.
yes, but saying "there are no layoffs coming" and then laying people off cheapens the meaning and trust of "there are no layoffs coming" - then "there are no layoffs coming" doesn't mean anything and people panic anyway.
Savvy folks know that no CEO will ever say "yes, we are planning a layoff", and so they know that "there are no layoffs coming" really gives you no information. Naive and younger people will believe it though, so there is still value in saying it.
The key is to listen to the case the CEO makes. "There are no layoffs coming, I promise" is a signal that layoffs are coming.
"There are no layoffs coming. We are growing X% YOY and hiring pace of Y% has not slowed. Yada yada yada." is a signal that it's true.
Right. People learn the code language and learn that others lie, then look to other observations (e.g., insider word from friendly executives, market reports, etc.) to determine the truth. In the end, people are laid off anyway, except now they've learned to mistrust those in authority.
Agreed. Otherwise they will likely lose another 5% due to people wanting to get out of there. If he had something to the effect of, there may be layoffs we just don’t know where yet, here’s how we are approaching it and how we plan to let people go. They may still lose some people but at least it doesn’t feel like a sinking ship you need to get away from.
A Yahoo News top story was something like "Tesla employee's life uprooted for billionaire to save money" in regards to getting laid off from his 'dream job.'
I live under the vague fear of layoff. I've lived in that state for 20 years. The last two years were relatively exceptional.
I think this is a generational thing. Sorry folks. This is how it often is every few years, in the business cycle. If you haven't lived the previous cycles, then it may be a headline shock. If you have, you won't be relaxed about it, but cynical and defensive in your savings and other life strategies.
If you were around in 2008, this is par for the course. They're not going to say "In 6 months we're going to do some layoffs." in the US. Get your weight up, lean on your network, get to the next gig. You must surf the crud to keep afloat. Join blind, keep in contact with your coworkers, and network network network. This is why you make friends with your coworkers, who become diaspora from that job, and can get you an in at new places to jump over hiring queues. This is all assuming you are good at what you do, and have some experience. If you're <2y into the industry, it is gonna be a slog.
I cannot stress this enough: no matter how much you think so, your company does not care individually about you. This might be met with "we must unionize!", but remember, we are highly paid, highly mobile, and highly in demand, possibly of all time! I don't think a union will save you from economic downturn.
Tech moves faster than nearly all other industries because we do not have long procurement timelines, this also means we die by the sword when the tide changes.
The major element of tech is movement of capital. If you do not believe this, think about running a place that manufactures and ships products. Lead times for stock, time for manufacture/finishing, and shipping. The logistics for shipping a software product is: "hubot deploy prod" in slack.
Put Unity at the top of your resume and get applying. It sucks now, but on the long arc we'll make it out of this.
When you look at the work conditions that lead to the rise of the big unions, it's laughable to think that a job that involves sitting at a desk in an air-conditioned office for 40 hours a week is in any way comparable. Most tech employees realize that they've got a pretty good thing going, they earn well above average incomes, typically have top-notch benefits, can find new employment easily if needed, and are not going to perceive a union bringing anything desireable to the table.
You’re right that factory and manual labor abuses are more vivid and immediate, but there are techniques to harm creative and professional workers as well.
This is why there are unions for film and theater industry creatives, as well as nurses, and why there are licensing associations that provide collective power for lawyers and doctors.
Not all tech workers have it cushy, and collective action of some kind (it doesn’t have to be unions) can help protect the most exploited.
Is there any info on which locations were mostly affected by the lay offs? They have a massive office here in Montreal, but it shouldn't be hit too hard considering it's only a 4% reduction in global headcount.
(I honestly thought Unity was much smaller than that, so I assumed their Montréal office was big enough to be one of their most important.)
From Twitter, it appears that teams who'd been building example/demo content (Gigaya and the DOTS FPS/multiplayer sample) were amongst the axed.
Which is particularly disappointing, as Unity really needs to continue with the 'dogfooding', actually building significant projects with their tools to help identify the areas most in need of improvement.
Gigaya was supposed to be a part of their big attempt at dogfooding the engine by building an actual, full length game. This doesn’t fill me with confidence as a user of the Unity engine.
Considering Unity has so many external contacts with game development companies, I'm not going to worry too much about their engine losing perspectives. Gigaya is useless from the beginning IMHO as it is a "demo" project. A demo project, in game development, is completely different from a mature project that is supposed to make money. A better option, if Unity really wants to do in-house game dev, is to buy a small game development company.
Still, I'm kind of confused about Unity's direction - they have virtually 0 presence in the AAA space, and it seems to me they're most successful in the indie mobile, and non-game spaces (VR stuff, visualization etc.).
But if I tune into their keynotes, I get the feeling they are firing on all cylinders on putting out high-definition content - an area UE is infinitely better at, at the cost of ignoring their core developers.
And of course, when talking about Unity, one always needs to mention their perma-beta science experiments which never quite reach production quality, while deprecating similar, existing functionality.
Yeah, that really sounds weird considering games is their core business and now they're doing layoffs after just purchasing WETA that's kind of outside the core business.
I think they realized that 1) It's difficult to compete with Epic for high-end game development, and 2) Middle-Low end game development is probably not to grow much, because the maximum number of successful game dev teams is most likely a fixed X, or a slowly growing X, so eventually they decided to cut anything that is not core and try to grow other fields. Stock market needs fast growing things.
I know someone who went to Unity after being laid-off from 20th Century due to the Disney acquisition. True talent is being tossed around by the whims of executives and the economic climate.
It's unfortunate but true, there will be a lot of dross retained because they are seen as 'team players'. To me that translates to 'incapable of independent thought' and certainly not capable of pulling your ass out of the proverbial fire when push comes to shove.
Yes, this is true. This is how Microsoft and Oracle became what they are-- creativity all pushed out to better places, and only the paper pushers remain to keep the lights just barely on.
The endless summer is finally turning into fall for the tech industry. I have heard several anecdotes of people who just coast and earn absurd salaries, specifically at Facebook and Google. If it can happen there then it's probably a widespread phenomenon of "hire at any cost" and "keeping up with FAANG salaries". Right now it's probably a lot of cost-centers and lower performers getting laid off, but could expand to more muscle if things keep going this way.
Unity made a big push in 2020 because of metaverse optimism, correct? It seems to me like the end of lockdowns and economic downturn is proving just how delusional some of those VR tech ambitions actually were...
Hard to say, they are both owned by the same company though [1], so there is for sure a conflict of interest. Still a good place to look for red flags, as even the most determined company can't bury all bad reviews.
