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

61–70 of 312 posts

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

#61

Post by 1123581321 »

rb2e wrote: post #34

oh No, they sold Bandcamp... According to Jason Schreier https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1707416234461909487

That's a bit disappointing. As a user I just want Bandcamp to be owned by someone who gets it and leaves it alone. As far as I could tell, Epic barely touched Bandcamp. I'm unfamiliar with Songtradr but they have more incentive to integrate the core product into their services as they're in the industry and a smaller company (more need to make the acquisition work for them.) I hope it goes well.

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

#62

Post by paxys »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #56
paxys wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet there has been no operational impact at Google since the layoffs...so maybe they weren't so critical after all?

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

#63

Post by fidotron »

andersa wrote: post #25
lfkdev wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortnite is still a massive cash cow, but man they burn actual billions for the Epic Store which still isn't very epic and is missing most basic features.

It's actually mind blowing how much money they spend on user acquisition while the thing is still full of bugs! Why does it take ages to open? Why did downloading some games launch another launcher that downloaded the game again? Why did it sometimes not switch to idle when in the background and keep wasting CPU? Why does the UI sometimes just randomly not work? Why is every interaction with it so slow ? Why does it…

There is a curious phenomenon in decent sized companies where the more money they have the more problems they have. When flush with cash the middle managers love to overspend and grow mini empires in the promise that one day the product will be finished, but it never will because the warring empires require it being unfinished to justify their ongoing existence.

Things have to get amazingly bad before such empires are dismantled and the product fixed, generally something existential for the company as a whole.

The Epic Store almost certainly could not be fixed without simply rebooting with a whole new team with the incentive structure setup to make it work.

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

#64

Post by madeofpalk »

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…

You think the top 10% of workers are getting, at a minimum, a 30% productivity boost? You think they're getting in an extra 1.5 days worth of work a week because they're using Copilot?

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

#65

Post by enriquec »

mjr00 wrote: post #55
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% overal…

everyone looking for any reason when its obviously a massive recession due to govt. spending

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

#67

Post by danjac »

otteromkram wrote: post #47
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…

Developers usually follow scrum frameworks, so productivity could easily be measured by overall activity, number of issues closed, merge requests completed, etc.

That's about as silly a measure as number of lines of code produced.

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

#68

Post by NotSuspicious »

jmerz wrote: post #45
paxys wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The intersection between politically/socially unpopular and low impact.

in my experience is greater than the intersection between the politically/socially popular and low impact.

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

#69

Post by hibikir »

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'd argue that the productivity boost is mich higher for the lower end developers than for the best ones. They are best at the simple tasks in the most verbose programming languages: Easier to think of them as higher quality auto-completion. The terser the language, and more innovative the problem is, the smalle the LLM help.

So if anyone gains from this, is the companies paying under-market, and therefore typically getting somewhat substandard devs to do boring things. There's major savings in productivity there, precisely because the training for those tasks is so good. If you had your highest performance developers spending a significant amount of time on that kind of busywork, you weren't getting that great of a performance in the first place.

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

#70

Post by enriquec »

paxys wrote: post #60

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.

What an awful sample to draw an absurd conclusion
Post reply on HN