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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

#201

Post by 0xjmp »

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…

Second this. From using LLM within my daily IC workflow, its not that developers are getting a productivity boost, its that our job became more enjoyable. I didn't even realize how much frustration builds up over time while relying on google search for things such as that one obscure api method i forgot the name of. I have to dig and dig... Somehow using GPT in its place has brought a noticeable bump to my quality of life. Most of my dev colleagues share this sentiment. Impact on the tech economy from this? Unknown.

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

#202

Post by enriquec »

johnvanommen wrote: post #193
toomuchtodo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's monetary policy tightening (effective rate 0% -> ~5%), not government spending. There is no recession, just normalization (zero interest rate policy, or ZIRP, was an abnormality). Unemployment is close to lowest levels in history because of structural demographics. When money gets more expensive, you must perform, adapt, or die as a business. Cashflow is king, and profits juiced from government stimulus mentione…

This might be the most succinct description of where we're at right now, that I've read all year.

Kind of - but it ignores the fact that the tightening was to fight inflation due to insane amounts of government spending. And the government just upped the ante and is spending more. Right now the national debt is growing faster than the economy. Expect everything to get a lot worse.

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

#203

Post by Animats »

“For a while now, we’ve been spending way more money than we earn, investing in the next evolution of Epic and growing Fortnite as a metaverse-inspired ecosystem for creators. I had long been optimistic that we could power through this transition without layoffs, but in retrospect I see that this was unrealistic.” - Sweeney.

Epic was actually implementing the Metaverse. But with that dead...

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

#204

Post by myaccountonhn »

rb2e wrote: post #34

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

Hopefully they don't mess it up too badly. Bandcamp is the only way for a Linux user not in the US to get non-DRM music these days :(.

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

#205

Post by enriquec »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #72
enriquec wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Massive government spending? Sure. But "massive recession"? Really?

Recession = two quarters of negative growth. We've had a lot more. I'm not playing with the kafkaesque political redefinitions and find them pretty pathetic actually.

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

#206

Post by tarr11 »

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.

You can also use "Mesh to Metahuman" to make stylized characters but with more interesting facial expressions

https://medium.com/locodrome/unreal-filmmaking-building-a-st...

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

#208

Post by currymj »

fsdjkflsjfsoij wrote: post #195
itsoktocry wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think it depends on your specialty. If you're an enterprise developer, you save on some boilerplate for sure, and it's a nice alternative to Stack Overflow. If you're more of a generalist though? I can see productivity gains of 25% maybe.

> If you're more of a generalist though? I can see productivity gains of 25% maybe. I really doubt this. Copilot/ChatGPT are not useful at all for the hard problems and they're not trustworthy enough for the small problems. Even for the simplest things I have to comb over the generated code very carefully because I've seen them be subtly wrong dozens of times in my relatively short use. If I have to go over everythin…

if you're developing code for a large codebase with stable requirements in a company with good engineering practices, and your work output is the working code itself, it's hard to see that it would be very useful.

if you have to glue together multiple unfamiliar APIs and packages, maybe even seeing a couple new ones per day, you often throw away your code, and your work output is something else with writing code only a means to that end, it hugely speeds things up even accounting for debugging the frequent cases where it's subtly wrong.

this latter situation is more common than many software engineers realize.

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

#210

Post by JumpCrisscross »

giantg2 wrote: post #171
lesuorac wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIUC, Epic Games is private so they only need to convince Tim not to ax their bonuses and not the wider stock market. Although I mean if you're the executive overseeing the devision where users got overcharged perhaps your bonus did deserve to be ax'd.

Even at private companies the performance targets/bonuses are set in the contract, no? Yeah, if you were the cause of the suit, then you definitely shouldn't be getting anything.

> Even at private companies the performance targets/bonuses are set in the contract, no?

For senior management? Usually not.

If you hit it out of the park, the Board rewards you at its discretion. It isn’t until a company is mature enough that even senior managers don’t meaningfully affect the whole that performance targets are worth drafting. (Executives on performance targets early are a red flag.)

> if you were the cause of the suit, then you definitely shouldn't be getting anything

Sunk cost. Question is going-forward risk and return potential.

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