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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

#171

Post by giantg2 »

lesuorac wrote: post #124
giantg2 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it can. If the executives want to hit their performance bonuses they might start axing lower revenue projects or support groups. In a higher rate environment, it's certainly possible that the decision is made to lay people off to reduce the higher cost debt that needs to be incurred or the time it will take to pay it off, even if the company is otherwise profitable.not saying that's the case here though. Of cour…

IIUC, Epic Games is private so they only need to convince Tim not to ax their bonuses and not the wider stock market. Although I mean if you're the executive overseeing the devision where users got overcharged perhaps your bonus did deserve to be ax'd.

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.

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

#173

Post by softfalcon »

itsoktocry wrote: post #74
pharmakom wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, GitHub Co Pilot is barely a 5% performance boost. Still useful, but I think a nice coffee machine does more.

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 version, or just outright poops out non-existent syntax crap.

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

#174

Post by bpiche »

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.

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...

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

#175

Post by JAlexoid »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #149
JAlexoid wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until hiring decisions are subjective and prone to manipulation - the "rainmakers" will not be fired. Middle management is screwed, though. Though functions like CEO and a lot of the executive suite - are under threat of just being replaced.

> functions like CEO and a lot of the executive suite - are under threat of just being replaced By what? A Board-hired AI?

Half of your marketing can already be replaced with AI, and CMO's strategy is better generated by ChatGPT. Quite a few people on the marketing team should be shaking...

Quite a few CEOs should just sit on the board and stick to reviewing an AI generated strategy implementation plan. Because it's still the board that decides on the strategy, while CEO typically is focused on the implementation of said strategy.

CEO as a fulltime position is definitely under threat here.

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

#176

Post by bpiche »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #144
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…

Hm. Guess I should go get FLACs of everything I've ever bought on Bandcamp.

That's the whole reason to use bandcamp

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

#177

Post by alanfranz »

JAlexoid wrote: post #114
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most of the people I've seen being fired in one of the big ones are senior people working in customer facing roles Which industry? I’m seeing a lot of middle layers being reduced, but not the rainmakers.

Until hiring decisions are subjective and prone to manipulation - the "rainmakers" will not be fired. Middle management is screwed, though. Though functions like CEO and a lot of the executive suite - are under threat of just being replaced.

Otoh middle management often provides the human layer, something chatgpt can’t do. What would you replace manager 1:1 with? Planning? Coaching? Frustration venting? Team building?

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

#179

Post by MikusR »

klik99 wrote: post #134
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.

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 personall…

When Microsoft announced Windows Store he was one of the biggest fud spreaders about it. And everyone was praising him about it.

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

#180

Post by n4r9 »

JAlexoid wrote: post #122
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…

Sorry, but mass layoffs aren't exactly the most rational ones. There's a lot of "you have to cut X off your salary budget", pick whoever you want. Then it's up to the managers to pick, very subjectively, who they want to work with the most. FFS - I managed to dodge 4 layoffs at a startup, including my whole department being cut wholesale. My managers always kept me, even though I wouldn't call myself the "best" or "t…

That makes sense. In lieu of a reliable objective measure of an employee's impact, the next best thing is to trust the managers judgement. I would still question how effective this is at selecting the "unproductive" workers; I guess it really depends on how good the managers are.
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