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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

#131

Post by Mc91 »

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…

If ChatGPT should be able to generate any code, a function that outputs a set of prime numbers longs in Kotlin should be simple enough (unless you consider Kotlin, the 12th-20th most popular language according to various surveys, too obscure). One that has a good big-O runtime that is compact as possible. After a bit of futzing I get this:

fun sieve(n: Long) = (2L until n).fold((2L until n).toMutableList()){p,i->p.apply{for(j in i * 2 until n step i)this[(j-2).toInt()]=0}}.filter{it!= 0L}

and it works OK in some situations:

>>> sieve(100L)

res5: kotlin.collections.List = [2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97]

Let's try another test input -

>>> sieve(10000000L)

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space

Oops.

Also if the 12th-20th most popular language (Kotlin) being too obscure is the reason, how will they fare currently except with the most popular languages?

This is about as simple as a function as you can get. 95% of my programming work is standups, sprint planning and grooming, looking at Swagger or other API backend documentation for information, looking through Outlook, Teams and Confluence for information about my story, looking for UI on Figma, contacting various teams for more information - then someone wants me to review their pull request and stop to do that - but notice they have some business logic wrong because they don't fully understand the domain. Yet even something simple like a function generating a list of prime numbers, ChatGPT struggles with.

Not that it can't get better, but it's no threat to most programmers I know in the short term (and if it becomes one, I'll shift over to writing Python scripts that call Pytorch, numpy etc. - I already do so in my spare time).

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

#132

Post by outworlder »

paxys wrote: post #62
bcrosby95 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote coming up, but when Google laid off a bunch of people those that I know that worked there said the most critical people on their teams were the ones let go.

And yet there has been no operational impact at Google since the layoffs...so maybe they weren't so critical after all?

> And yet there has been no operational impact at Google since the layoffs...so maybe they weren't so critical after all?

How do you even know that?

Usually the only way that you will see that, as a customer, is when the people who left are unable to keep up with all the firefighting and things ultimately explode. Either with outages or a security breach.

You can accumulate a _lot_ of tech debt before customers notice. For smaller companies, that's often a fatal amount of debt.

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

#133

Post by paxys »

izacus wrote: post #80
paxys wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet there has been no operational impact at Google since the layoffs...so maybe they weren't so critical after all?

What do you mean "no operational impact"? How did you measure that? People on this site are constantly complaining how horrible the Google services became.

Google services became worse in periods when they doubled headcount year over year than when they did layoffs.

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

#134

Post by klik99 »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #102
bpiche wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And he'd blame Valve, too. EGS might be great for devs, but it's not good for users. It's not a big conspiracy against him. People just don't want to use the store! Whining in the face of obvious failure makes you look like a real loser.

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.

Yes, this. I was going to reply with the same thing but thought it wasn't worth. There is a lot of hate towards Epic due to EGS, which I get - but Tim has never said anything about losing income due to other stores existing. Sure he's said a lot of bad things about Apple, but never about Valve. He's actually a really good guy, all the hate towards him really irks me - fine, hate the epic game store, I don't personally but I get it, all this world building where he becomes this stupid generic money grubbing CEO is just wrong. It's just reddit echo chamber stuff.

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

#135

Post by Reticularas »

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.

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

#136

Post by JAlexoid »

otteromkram wrote: post #47
n4r9 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first two paras I agree sound fairly likely. Regarding the second para, the interesting part for me is: how do these companies determine which are the unproductive devs? My impression so far is that senior management has no way of measuring this, given how little data is provided to back up decisions to RTO. Not so sure about the third para. Why would one company be more ahead of the game than any other, if indee…

Developers usually follow scrum frameworks, so productivity could easily be measured by overall activity, number of issues closed, merge requests completed, etc.

That's literally the last thing that managers look at, when it comes to making a layoff decision.

Never have I ever been the person with highest "overall activity, number of issues closed, merge requests completed, etc.", yet I have not been laid off in a very long time.

Last time I thought I was getting laid off, I misread the manager's comments as PIP.

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

#138

Post by btown »

1123581321 wrote: post #61
rb2e wrote: post #34

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

That's a bit disappointing. As a user I just want Bandcamp to be owned by someone who gets it and leaves it alone. As far as I could tell, Epic barely touched Bandcamp. I'm unfamiliar with Songtradr but they have more incentive to integrate the core product into their services as they're in the industry and a smaller company (more need to make the acquisition work for them.) I hope it goes well.

I'm somewhat hopeful about the synergies here. Giving musicians an easy path to monetize their catalog, as well as market their availability to be commissioned by brands, is a good thing... especially when artists are being dually hammered by Spotify's deci-cents-per-stream industry baseline and live music promoters' anticompetitive behavior.

That said, there are ways Songtradr could abuse their new position of trust. I hope they're smart enough not to do that, but I also hope that an archival project for free downloads on long-inactive Bandcamp accounts is underway...

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

#139

Post by [deleted] »

paxys wrote: post #62
bcrosby95 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote coming up, but when Google laid off a bunch of people those that I know that worked there said the most critical people on their teams were the ones let go.

And yet there has been no operational impact at Google since the layoffs...so maybe they weren't so critical after all?

[deleted]

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

#140

Post by boringg »

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.
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