Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by meragrin_ » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 5:42 PM UTC

VikingCoder wrote: post #223

“For a while now, we’ve been spending way more money than we earn,” wrote Chief Executive Officer Tim Sweeney. Fortnite has generated a revenue of over $26 billion since its release in 2017. How in the world could they possibly have spent more than they make? I mean, how is that remotely possible? 16% of its staff is 870. They had 5,437 staff? That's $797,008 per employee per year. And that's just from Fortnite alone…

Outside workers(contractors and such), Infrastructure, Sales/Marketing, licensing(Star Wars, NFL, DC, etc.).

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

#232

Post by maneesh » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 5:54 PM UTC

enriquec wrote: post #205

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The economy has been growing in 2023 though

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth

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

#233

Post by ryeguy » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 5:54 PM UTC

boringg wrote: post #140

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.

Economy is about to take a nose dive if you haven't been reading the tea leaves. This is both pre-emptive for the coming downturn and a correction for the covid over hiring. Buckle up.

The economy has been "about to take a nosedive" for quite some time now.

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

#234

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 5:54 PM UTC

giantg2 wrote: post #187

JohnFen wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Of it's anything like my job, it's likely that a majority of the slowness is in the non-coding steps - meetings, upgrades/config, business ideation and prioritization, etc.

I mean, that's like most non-junior software development jobs--at least it has been the case for all the ones I've had: Actual, physical, typing-in-of-code is usually about 5-10% of any software developer's job. The rest is tools management, configuration, compiling, merging/source control, code reviews, helping other developers, brainstorming, planning, design reviews, bug management, status reporting, project management rituals like scrum, and so on.

I think many software developers have this romantic, idealized notion that their entire job should be furiously typing code into a computer, and that anything else they have to grudgingly do is unproductive overhead.

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

#235

Post by Rapzid » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 5:55 PM UTC

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…

I haven't opened it in ages; just updated it. Andd... It's hot garbage. How can they have an app that feels this bad?

Apps with a better UX than EPIC GAMES:

* GoG

* Blender

* Godot

TWO OSS projects including a GAME ENGINE, and a game service that made their name on budget and retro titles..

Somebody at Epic should be massively embarrassed with that steamer.

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

#236

Post by skydhash » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 6:03 PM UTC

currymj wrote: post #208

fsdjkflsjfsoij wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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,...

Maybe take the time to be familiar with them? I think that is a description of an unhealthy job. It's like asking an average mechanic to handle optimizing for an f1 car in day 1, then asking him to improve the endurance of a rally car the next day! Then telling them the main point is to market the sponsors, so no need to be perfect.

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

#237

Post by jgilias » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 6:03 PM UTC

tqi wrote: post #162

boringg wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economy is about to take a nose dive if you haven't been reading the tea leaves. This is both pre-emptive for the coming downturn and a correction for the covid over hiring. Buckle up.

I'm curious what signals you're seeing? (I don't pay much attention to this so I haven't really heard anything)

They say that there’s long and variable lag between the monetary policy being made and its effects on the economy.

Soon after they started hiking the rates there were some of the biggest bank failures in US history which amounted to nothing much because they basically hit snooze on it by effectively promising to back 100% of deposits well above the FDIC threshold. Supposedly this measure runs out in a year from when it was made.

I’m not going to try and predict what and when exactly is going to happen. If you like lines and extrapolation, you can go to the St Louis fed website and plot yield curve inversion and effective fed rate.

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

#238

Post by antisthenes » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 6:30 PM UTC

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…

I really hope Bandcamp stays neutral/independent, as that's the only place I legitimately buy music from (and a little bit of Amazon Prime), because they offer convenient .flac downloads immediately after purchase, no streaming, no "app" no garbage like that.

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

#239

Post by sarchertech » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 6:38 PM UTC

paulddraper wrote: post #10

sarchertech wrote: post #4

Wonder why the waited until after the layoff train was over.

It's over?

Myself and several of my friends have gotten offers in the last month or so. Also recruiter spam has picked up pretty heavily.

I’ve also read in a few places that hiring is picking up.

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

#240

Post by dijit » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 6:42 PM UTC

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.

Some of this is marketing.

Lumen is really nice as long as you never hope to have >60fps and don't want open worlds.

The architecture of it is just fundamentally not compatible with the majority of AAA games, especially open world or esports ones.

It's not that Epic are stupid it's that they're "optimising" in all directions and it sometimes causes issues. -- marketing advertises features that are not fit for the purpose they're being marketed for. Lumen is excellent for small games that aren't so CPU heavy or alternatively for non-realtime renders such as scene generation VFX.

Unreal itself is extremely bound to single-core CPU performance, so the idea of adding extra weight to the main render thread (which is basically the only thread) is unconscionable and was a deeply unwise decision.