Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 312 posts

Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff

#51

Post by danielvaughn »

Mistletoe wrote: post #44
danielvaughn wrote: post #30

Shouldn't there be games coming out fairly soon (next 1-2 years) that take advantage of Lumen/Nanite/Quixel/Metahuman? From my POV, the future looks bright for Unreal because those technologies give it a pretty crazy edge over its competitors, and that's not even taking into account the Unity fiasco.

For people like me that didn't know what this is. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/metahuman Pretty amazing. Although I don't know if I even need characters this real in my games. At some point it becomes too much like real life and kind of boring? I think I like the fantasy aspect of games too much and I like to escape.

I should have included links, thank you

Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff

#53

Post by noobermin »

BazookaMusic wrote: post #37
eigenvalue wrote: post #26

This is probably just continued post-COVID demand normalization. Basically all software and gaming got a massive bump that was obviously going to have an unsustainable component to it. But in many cases companies planned like it was totally sustainable and would continue. That’s why even super profitable companies like Microsoft and Epic are doing layoffs in 2023. The other reason of course is that they went a bit cr…

Anecdotal experience but most of the people I've seen being fired in one of the big ones are senior people working in customer facing roles, where the expectation is that they will be replaced by AI and wishful thinking. Newly hired people were more junior and cheaper than previous employees so it makes no sense to fire them.

"one of the big ones" = epic? big what, departments?

Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff

#55

Post by mjr00 »

eigenvalue wrote: post #26

This is probably just continued post-COVID demand normalization. Basically all software and gaming got a massive bump that was obviously going to have an unsustainable component to it. But in many cases companies planned like it was totally sustainable and would continue. That’s why even super profitable companies like Microsoft and Epic are doing layoffs in 2023. The other reason of course is that they went a bit cr…

> I wonder also how much of a driver new programmer productivity tools like copilot and ChatGPT are factoring into this. If your top 10% productivity workers just got a 30%+ productivity boost, that means you can easily shed the bottom 20% productive workers and still be ahead of the game.

I can confidently say that this factors in 0%. Layoffs were happening in the industry even before the LLM craze.

And a 30% overall productivity boost for a "top" developer is a massive overestimate. Your best developers aren't spending their days writing boilerplate unit tests.

Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff

#56

Post by bcrosby95 »

paxys wrote: post #41
n4r9 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first two paras I agree sound fairly likely. Regarding the second para, the interesting part for me is: how do these companies determine which are the unproductive devs? My impression so far is that senior management has no way of measuring this, given how little data is provided to back up decisions to RTO. Not so sure about the third para. Why would one company be more ahead of the game than any other, if indee…

It's not possible to measure with 100% accuracy, but let's not kid ourselves every company and every division can easily pick out the bottom 10-15% of devs who have close to zero real impact. The actual number in fact is likely far greater than that.

Anecdote coming up, but when Google laid off a bunch of people those that I know that worked there said the most critical people on their teams were the ones let go.

Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff

#57

Post by pharmakom »

eigenvalue wrote: post #26

This is probably just continued post-COVID demand normalization. Basically all software and gaming got a massive bump that was obviously going to have an unsustainable component to it. But in many cases companies planned like it was totally sustainable and would continue. That’s why even super profitable companies like Microsoft and Epic are doing layoffs in 2023. The other reason of course is that they went a bit cr…

Anecdotally, GitHub Co Pilot is barely a 5% performance boost. Still useful, but I think a nice coffee machine does more.

Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff

#58

Post by boshalfoshal »

eigenvalue wrote: post #26

This is probably just continued post-COVID demand normalization. Basically all software and gaming got a massive bump that was obviously going to have an unsustainable component to it. But in many cases companies planned like it was totally sustainable and would continue. That’s why even super profitable companies like Microsoft and Epic are doing layoffs in 2023. The other reason of course is that they went a bit cr…

Keep in mind companies planned like it was sustainable and hired a lot because from a business perspective, its much easier to overhire and lay off later than it is to be understaffed during a period of potential unprecedented growth. It doesn't fully rationalize many companies actions but its just an application of a regret minimization framework.

I personally don't believe its a massive function of Generative AI (although it could be), I think the major contributing factor is that the projections that companies made in 2020/2021 and the hiring they did to resource more projects to take advantage of those rosy projections ended up falling short of real expectations. i.e instead of needing to take advantage of a potential 20% yoy future growth in their target markets, they only really need to staff for a 10% yoy growth.

Also probably a bit of "monkey see monkey do" where a company that actually needs to layoff (meta) lays off a bunch of people, and other large companies that may not "need" to layoff (like Google) follow suit since now its "socially acceptable."

Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff

#59

Post by toyg »

eigenvalue wrote: post #26

This is probably just continued post-COVID demand normalization. Basically all software and gaming got a massive bump that was obviously going to have an unsustainable component to it. But in many cases companies planned like it was totally sustainable and would continue. That’s why even super profitable companies like Microsoft and Epic are doing layoffs in 2023. The other reason of course is that they went a bit cr…

Meh, it's nothing to do with that, it's just a layoff round.

Epic went from 2200 employees in 2020 to almost 9000 in 2023. They are now basically shedding 1 out of 6 hires they've done since 2020. That's not really about sustainability, it's just a way to drop the ones that didn't really work out.

Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff

#60

Post by paxys »

Why are people still reading tech layoff news and trying to attribute it to specific problems at a company? Remember that Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, Shopify etc. laid off large chunks of their workforce while collectively making hundreds of billions of dollars in profit. Companies lay off people because they can, simple as that.
Post reply on HN