Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 179 posts

Re: Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'

#141

Post by qwytw »

nithayakumar wrote: post #4
dagmx wrote: post #3

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.

Just Weta FX - those were the guys and gals that used Weta tooling for producing films and such. Not Weta Tools - those are the guys and gals building and maintaining the Weta tools

But it seems that 265 is pretty much the entire headcount of Weta Digital’s 'tools department' they have acquired back in 2021? From their announcement:

"Unity welcomes Weta Digital’s world-class engineering talent of 275 engineers that are known for architecting, building, and maintaining Weta Digital tools and core pipeline."

So it just seems they have just thrown away $1.6 billion. If they were unable to commercialize any of their tools while they still had the people who built them it will be entirely hopeless now.

Re: Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'

#142

Post by qwebfdzsh »

bluescrn wrote: post #101
nextworddev wrote: post #29

3.8% is lower than most required attrition programs at FAANG

It's the 4th round of layoffs in under 2 years

They are still massively over-bloated. Realistically they should cut at least another 30% or so (for some reason they still have about 50% more people than they did at the beginning on 2022).

Of course that would turn into a disaster due to obvious reasons (good luck firing the "right" people). So they are kind of screwed, no way can the generate enough income to support 7000 people without massive growth.

It's a bit of an apples to oranges but Epic for instance "only" has around ~4,5 employees yet just Fornite alone is reportedly bringing almost 2x more revenue than Unity's entire business...

Of course that might just be an indication that you can't really make much money (or even be profitable) from selling a game engine (licensing Unreal is just a side-gig to Epic after all, they made less than $300 mil from it last year).

Re: Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'

#143

Post by lotsofpulp »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #128
eloisant wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's the other way around. 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

> RTO will increase the number of employees quitting Depends on the job market in that area. People only quit if they know they'll easily find equal or better paid gigs than what they already have, but in 2023 most people working in tech tended to stay where they are due to the market stagnation/slump, especially if they got above market rates during the 2021-2022 boom and know they won't get anything better in the c…

They quit because they don’t want to move or can’t afford to move to be close enough to the office.

Re: Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'

#144

Post by Tsarbomb »

initplus wrote: post #31

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…

What? DOTS is great and extremely performant. CS2 is completely the fault of the developers.

The real issue with Unity is that they don't double down on DOTS + HDRP/URP. I have not opened the editor for a few months but last time I worked in Unity the legacy render pipeline was still the default and documentation around DOTS and HDRP was somewhat lacking which is a shame because when you get it working, it works super well.

Re: Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'

#145

Post by eropple »

qwytw wrote: post #139
gumballindie wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa imagine the people they forced to relocate and now are telling them it was the wrong decision. I can only say that unity’s leadership are idiots, nothing else.

Well you can bounce them back and forth until they just quit on their own. Seems like a "great" way to reduce costs without having to "layoff" anyone and pay severance.

Constructive dismissal isn't that hard for a tech worker to prove.

Re: Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'

#146

Post by JohnFen »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #128
eloisant wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's the other way around. 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

> RTO will increase the number of employees quitting Depends on the job market in that area. People only quit if they know they'll easily find equal or better paid gigs than what they already have, but in 2023 most people working in tech tended to stay where they are due to the market stagnation/slump, especially if they got above market rates during the 2021-2022 boom and know they won't get anything better in the c…

> People only quit if they know they'll easily find equal or better paid gigs than what they already have

I don't think this is true (or at least, it has tons of exceptions). People quit if they think that they have an alternative that is better. This doesn't have to mean equal or better pay. I know a number of people who have quit and taken lower-paying work because those jobs improved their quality of life in other ways.

Re: Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'

#147

Post by mholub »

kalleboo wrote: post #106
codeflo wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a zoomed out view with tiny people walking around, that would be mostly be a case for LOD, not culling. That is, you wouldn't render a highly-detailed character model and cull out each tooth mesh individually, which would still be very expensive, but you should render a simplified mesh to begin with.

In the case of this game, the mouths were never open, the teeth were never visible at all. Which is obviously a massive failure of the developers (using a prefab model with a ton of completely unused detail is a waste of everyones bandwidth, storage and memory), but the teeth should at least never be rendered by the engine.

this is very computationally expensive to do such operation (to understand that teeth is completely occluded by something else like mouth)

this is called occlusion culling and usually it brings a lot of problems on its own (it's CPU intensive and you need to apply it smartly only where it helps)

and even if this occlusion culling would be cheap, the way how it is usually done requires precomputing a lot of data - so occluders are static geometry

since character head is skinned mesh - so dynamically changes every frame based on joints positions - that will be another level of complexity

game engines are not really helpful here

Re: Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'

#148

Post by seattle_spring »

MrScruff wrote: post #92
lmm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever their reasons, the end result sounds good for employees.

Unless like me and many other people I know, you prefer working in an office five days a week.

Luckily for people like you and other people you know, most companies provide this, so please don’t ruin it for the few remaining companies that don’t.

Re: Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'

#149

Post by paulddraper »

ffgjgf1 wrote: post #66
paulddraper wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do these layoff include any of the C-suite Yes > The people directly responsible for the company's situation? Yes > Accountability? Some. > No? Bruh, I just said yes.

Can you can elaborate? Which other executives are being fired? Even Riccitiello got an infinitely better deal than he deserved but he isn’t part of these specific layoffs.

[flagged]

Re: Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'

#150

Post by whywhywhywhy »

vishwajeetv wrote: post #110
initplus wrote: post #31

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…

Why did they use Unity for Cities Skylines 2? Unity is widely known for performance issues in game dev community right? (I am not a game developer). Why not unreal engine etc?

Wouldn't say its known for performance issues but it certainly is known for scale issues in open world games (Things like moving too far from 0,0,0 causes polygons to flail and physics to break, so you need to do tricks to work around that) which feel like the sort of thing you're going to encounter on a game world that exists from person scale up to plane scale.
Post reply on HN