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Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff

bloomberg.com

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

#141

Post by KronisLV »

danjac wrote: post #67
otteromkram wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

How else would you measure how much work someone does, other than by how much tracked work that's attributed to them there is?

The people using these indicators probably don't care about someone who might have fewer closed issues but instead is helping out 5 people work more efficiently, but rather about people who are constantly shipping measurably less than others, stack ranking and all - in their minds, development should be viewed as some widget factory.

Just look at what happened to agile and how SAFE ended up: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/agile-at-scale

That's also how you get attempts to turn some abstract complexity evaluation (story points) into hours that could be billed to a client ahead of time, even though it probably shouldn't and doesn't work like that.

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

#143

Post by bhouston »

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.

> Companies lay off people because they can, simple as that.

If some divisions or individual employees in a company are not making meaningful impact on the bottom line and are not long-term strategic for future profits, then it makes sense to let them go.

Just because these are hugely profitable companies, doesn't mean you should be spending money on things that will not lead to you generating additional funds. That is like keeping real-estate rented but not filling it with people -- it is wasted resources, whether it is humans or real-estate.

These companies over-hired or were sloppy in terms of their spending and that has changed in the new environment.

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

#144

Post by ReactiveJelly »

jzb wrote: post #95

From the announcement: "The company also announced that it’s divesting Bandcamp, an online audio distribution platform it acquired last year" I don't care a ton about Epic, but I love Bandcamp. It's my primary mechanism these days for discovering and acquiring music. I was puzzled when Epic bought Bandcamp, apparently they were too. They're being kicked over to Songtradr -- I hope that's a neutral to good move, but I…

Hm. Guess I should go get FLACs of everything I've ever bought on Bandcamp.

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

#146

Post by [deleted] »

JAlexoid wrote: post #114
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most of the people I've seen being fired in one of the big ones are senior people working in customer facing roles Which industry? I’m seeing a lot of middle layers being reduced, but not the rainmakers.

Until hiring decisions are subjective and prone to manipulation - the "rainmakers" will not be fired. Middle management is screwed, though. Though functions like CEO and a lot of the executive suite - are under threat of just being replaced.

[deleted]

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

#147

Post by robertlagrant »

DoughnutHole wrote: post #92
enriquec wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Even if you agree that there was a recession the US exited it a year ago. The economy has been growing since last August. This (and other layoffs) are a response to increased interest rates imposed to combat inflation. Companies don't have access to as cheap credit, so they're trying to appease shareholders by cutting costs to improve profitability. This puts the brakes on the economy and may cause a recession if it…

> Companies don't have access to as cheap credit, so they're trying to appease shareholders by cutting costs to improve profitability.

It's not just profitability and shareholders, although those are good indicators of whether or not you're overspending. If the cost of capital goes up, something has to give to pay for that.

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

#148

Post by logicalmonster »

misterbishop wrote: post #19

Fingers crossed they kill the Games Store.

How does that help gamers? I'm not saying I'm a fan of Epic's game store or that anybody is poised to post a serious threat to Steam's dominance anytime soon, but it seems like a good thing that Steam has some competition to keep them honest.

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

#149

Post by JumpCrisscross »

JAlexoid wrote: post #114
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most of the people I've seen being fired in one of the big ones are senior people working in customer facing roles Which industry? I’m seeing a lot of middle layers being reduced, but not the rainmakers.

Until hiring decisions are subjective and prone to manipulation - the "rainmakers" will not be fired. Middle management is screwed, though. Though functions like CEO and a lot of the executive suite - are under threat of just being replaced.

> functions like CEO and a lot of the executive suite - are under threat of just being replaced

By what? A Board-hired AI?

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

#150

Post by JohnFen »

hibikir wrote: post #69
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…

Maybe this is the answer to a disconnect I've noticed. A number of devs where I work have started using ChatGPT to help with their work, but it hasn't resulted in any noticeable productivity or quality gains.

But the devs here are all very experienced senior-level engineers. Perhaps that's why we aren't seeing any gains?

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