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unity is a mess on the inside there are slack channels practically devoted to political bickering i was disgusted with what I saw there (outside of my own engineering team which was actually quite decent with the exception of one person) and left within 3 months
What kind of political bickering? Internal company politics or government/social/identity politics?
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It seems more like its to save money on office real estate and the fees that come with that like cleaning services, security, etc than it is about being employee friendly.
Whatever their reasons, the end result sounds good for employees.
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No game engine can save a game from someone dedicated to being inefficient, like rendering high poly teeth on pixel tall models.
I would have assumed the game engine would be responsible for culling occluded objects. Isn't that one of the most basic parts of a 3D renderer?
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Whatever their reasons, the end result sounds good for employees.
Unity is a worldwide company and while the HQ is now in San francisco, the origins lie in Copenhagen. There's physically no way to reasonably make everyone RTO because there are multiple big bases, and Unity was adjusted to telecommuncations well before the pandemic due to that. So I'm not too surprised it chose to size down physical locations when push came to shove, compared to other tech companies in SV doubling d…
Sure, but from what I saw a lot of these VFX/arts/game studios despite being international, still mandate their teams to be in-office a certain amount of days per week due to the nature of creative work. Especially that certain things like a games or VFX tend to not have their development spread internationally, but are usually developed by only a certain branch office, in which case some days of in-person collaboration might be more productive.
Most notably, this is laying off their entire acquisition of Weta Digital which was an audacious $1.6B purchase. After which Unity did nothing to take the proposed products into the marketplace.
I think they were not easily commercialized. I was a VFX software developer and internal tools are both very advanced and also fragile foot guns if you try to do anything that isn’t exactly down the golden path. VFX devs are not the usual product guys, they are usually either R&D/math guys or hackers, with little in between. The way to commercialize WETA stuff would be to make new product teams and basically redo muc…
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But a company deciding "okay, were done" and just shutting down is effectively laying off 100% of the staff. This company's leadership is already getting flak for laying off under 4%.
Sure and laying off 100% of staff might be better for society if you can replace the jobs with higher productivity ones somewhere else. Same with unions, instead of starting one to fix a dystopian company with bad leadership, could be better to have the employees leave and have the company go downhill than trying to fix something that isn't worth fixing.
Maybe, if you ignore the costs of huge swaths of people being layed off.
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Sure and laying off 100% of staff might be better for society if you can replace the jobs with higher productivity ones somewhere else. Same with unions, instead of starting one to fix a dystopian company with bad leadership, could be better to have the employees leave and have the company go downhill than trying to fix something that isn't worth fixing.
>Sure and laying off 100% of staff might be better for society if you can replace the jobs with higher productivity ones somewhere else Maybe, if you ignore the costs of huge swaths of people being layed off.
And once they come back to the workforce, every month of increased productivity might be "making it back" much faster.
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It seems like WFH is a "perk" when company is in cut down expenses mode, and RTO is mandated when it's thriving.
When you layoff large numbers of people, WFH makes it easier. When you need to start a company or do a hiring push, being in an office can help. In a company that only hires high seniority employees, WFH vs office doesn't matter much.
When you want to layoff a large number of people: RTO will increase the number of employees quitting so you don't have to layoff as many
When starting a company: WFH means you don't need offices, or at least smaller offices which makes a big difference
When you do a hiring push: being open to WFH gives you a bigger pool to draw from
Unity are spending too much money to develop far too little. New engine features are almost universally half baked (DOTS, UI mess). They acquire in demand features from the community just to let them wither (pro builder). The only thing that's consistent between different Unity features is how unpolished they seem. Notably the mess they have made of DOTS seems to have been partially responsible for sinking Cities Sky…
It's looking like there was no plan beyond that, once Riccitiello sailed off into the sunset with his loot.