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Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff

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

#211

Post by jzb »

troyvit wrote: post #196
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…

This is interesting! When I saw the Epic news the first worry I had was regarding Bandcamp. Even after I quit trying to get a job there I'd look at their jobs page all the time to get a sense of their health. It's been empty for a few months. One of the suppositions people had about Epic buying Bandcamp was that maybe it would allow Epic to more easily license music for their games. From the press release[1] it seems…

If Songtradr doesn't screw it up, I'm fine. I too used to look at their hiring page a lot. I think that Bandcamp has so much untapped potential, but it's held back by a mediocre site and terrible interface if you own more than 100 albums.

They added playlists, I think, this year but I have > 1200 albums on the service (I buy a lot of full discographies and subscriptions when labels have them) and it's so painful to try to go back past the first 100 or so.

Music discovery is OK through the site - their Bandcamp Daily and other content is great - but it could be so much better. And it's screaming for better social features. Sigh.

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

#212

Post by marcosdumay »

Tainnor wrote: post #101
hiddencost wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of big shops are choking under bureaucracy and process right now, which is the sort of things LLMs are good at.

How does an LLM help when you can't get anyone to sign off on a change, or when QA is understaffed, or when there's too many stakeholders making conflicting and sometimes nonsensical requirements? That kind of stuff can't be solved by technology.

In short, an LLM helps in creating enough shit disguised as work to keep the people spouting nonsensical requirements busy enough to not dwell on the important parts of the system.

LLMs are phenomenal busywork generators. And as a natural consequence, if you want to stay productive, you should be suspicious of anybody that uses one.

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

#213

Post by jzb »

JAlexoid wrote: post #165
politelemon wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see it as a good thing at all. They're effectively being thrown about to yet another operating model which will have a disruptive impact on them. The new company Songtradr focuses on licensing, it's a b2b, while Bandcamp is a b2c. So it can be easy to see how they'd want to make Bandcamp more like themselves. Of course I'm being negative and cynical, apologies. I share the same fondness for Bandcamp.

I mean... Bandcamp is also licensing, all of works of art "copy sales" are just licensing agreements. B2C is just commonly a preset non-commercial license. (I believe that Bandcamp also allows you to sell a commercial license) Let alone Bandcamp is a good source for smaller DJs to acquire tracks, which isn't a long shot for Songtradr.

Is it popular with DJs, over something like Beatport?

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

#214

Post by spywaregorilla »

bpiche wrote: post #174
spywaregorilla wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you show evidence of him "blaming" Valve? I'm not aware of that. And it appears as though you are criticizing his character based on a behavior he didn't do. Off the top of my head I can think of him saying the Valve Steamdeck is great: https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/141575567884990054... And him saying that Valve not demanding crossplay is bad.

Sure, I google'd it for you https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-games-store-self-publishing/?ut... https://www.pcgamesn.com/shenmue-3/steam-key https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/t1ws13/tim_sweene...

I strongly agree with the merit of the first link's argument. Cross play is important.

The second one seems reasonable, factually accurate, and not a big deal.

I dislike the third argument regarding crypto because I think crypto is trash, but I do think Steam's (and many others) 30% cut of transactions is predatory vs. Epic's 12%. I also think it is predatory to require that games use the Steam Wallet for in app purchases meaning that steam gets a cut.

None of these are blaming Valve for being successful.

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

#215

Post by Rapzid »

Reticularas wrote: post #135
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…

No one in game and game engine development is using ChatGPT. It doesn't even work, even if it was productive, as barely any problems the average gamedev faces on a day-to-day have been surfaced to the training data of an LLM.

ChatGPT 4 may be better but CoPilot is terrible at making suggestions on algorithm work. It'll slip a -(x) in to parameters where it's supposed to be positive. Use the sim but wrong variable names. Swap parameters around. It's can be a nightmare and cost you way more time debugging than it saves typing.

Specifically with type-ahead suggestions I believe with typing you are more engaged in thinking about what is correct. With a CoPilot suggestion the tendency is to just skim it to see if it look good. And that's probably part of the problem; the LLM is trained on what looks good!

This may look good:

  computeNodeDistance(sourceNodesA, destNodesA, x, -1)
But it's supposed to be:

  computeNodeDistance(sourceNodesA, destNodesB, x, 1)
Good times.

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

#216

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

This is a first order short term phenomenon. But also, the LLMs by themselves guide the developers into creating repetitive low quality code, and any bias into using a LLM will bias the developers into adopting verbose boilerplate-happy languages and frameworks.

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

#217

Post by bpiche »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #214
bpiche wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I google'd it for you https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-games-store-self-publishing/?ut... https://www.pcgamesn.com/shenmue-3/steam-key https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/t1ws13/tim_sweene...

I strongly agree with the merit of the first link's argument. Cross play is important. The second one seems reasonable, factually accurate, and not a big deal. I dislike the third argument regarding crypto because I think crypto is trash, but I do think Steam's (and many others) 30% cut of transactions is predatory vs. Epic's 12%. I also think it is predatory to require that games use the Steam Wallet for in app purc…

Tim's saying that Valve not supporting cross play is 'classic lock-in'

That's absolutely blame to me, but you're entitled to your own interpretation

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

#218

Post by giantg2 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #210
giantg2 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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

Basically the only way people evaluate you is pn past performance. If you made a bad judgement call resulting in these sorts of penalties, you're likely out.

"For senior management?"

For executives.

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

#219

Post by jmye »

c7DJTLrn wrote: post #86
toyg wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>That's not really about sustainability, it's just a way to drop the ones that didn't really work out These layoffs are just a way for CEOs to improve "efficiency" AKA increase margins so they get a nice fat bonus - COVID overhiring has been a convenient excuse and every company has jumped on it.

So you don’t think they actually overhired and that that massive growth in headcount was needed and justified?

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

#220

Post by Rapzid »

softfalcon wrote: post #173
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.

I'm a senior who generalizes in full stack web development due to my wearing many hats at my company. ChatGPT and GitHub CoPilot have regularly barfed out garbage for me while I use them. I spend more time double checking whether it's right than I do writing code with it. It's terrible for my use case where I am doing somewhat complex fixes/refactors everywhere. It just regularly makes up stuff, or gets the wrong API…

This is my experience. These productivity gain numbers are being pulled out of thin air, and certainly not broadly applicable.
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