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

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

#221

Post by Rapzid » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 5:27 PM UTC

fsdjkflsjfsoij wrote: post #195

itsoktocry wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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…

Mirrors my experience exactly and in CoPilot's case with VSCode until very recently it would suppress normal IntelliSense breaking that whole muscle memory flow.

I'm convinced I've spent more time scrutinizing, undoing, and debugging the CoPilot code than it saved me on typing.

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

#222

Post by JumpCrisscross » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 5:29 PM UTC

giantg2 wrote: post #218

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even at private companies the performance targets/bonuses are set in the contract, no? For senior management? Usually not. If you hit it out of the park, the Board rewards you at its discretion. It isn’t until a company is mature enough that even senior managers don’t meaningfully affect the whole that performance targets are worth drafting. (Executives on performance targets early are a red flag.) > if you were th…

"Sunk cost. Question is going-forward risk and return potential." Basically the only way people evaluate you is pn past performance. If you made a bad judgement call resulting in these sorts of penalties, you're likely out. "For senior management?" For executives.

> if you made a bad judgement call resulting in these sorts of penalties, you're likely out

If you’re likely to make them again and/or don’t bring enough counterbalancing value to the table. If it came out of thin air it’s performative to punish. There’s a good Lee Iacocca quote about this somewhere.

> For executives

Senior management and executives are the same thing in a general context. (Another is upper management.)

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

#223

Post by VikingCoder » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 5:32 PM UTC

“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, ignoring all of their other sources of revenue. Imagine spending "way more" than that.

What am I missing?

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

#224

Post by spywaregorilla » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 5:34 PM UTC

bpiche wrote: post #217

spywaregorilla wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly agree with the merit of the first link's argument. Cross play is important. The second one seems reasonable, factually accurate, and not a big deal. I dislike the third argument regarding crypto because I think crypto is trash, but I do think Steam's (and many others) 30% cut of transactions is predatory vs. Epic's 12%. I also think it is predatory to require that games use the Steam Wallet for in app purc…

Tim's saying that Valve not supporting cross play is 'classic lock-in' That's absolutely blame to me, but you're entitled to your own interpretation

I strongly agree that it is anti-competitive and anti-consumer to not allow crossplay.

That's not blaming Valve for being successful. That's calling them out for anti-consume practices.

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

#225

Post by alephnerd » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 5:35 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…

Their Gross Income (ie. money remaining after Revenue is spent on expenses) has been dropping severely [0]. In 2019 their net income was $1.8B yet by 2022, their net income was $700M. That's a 61% DROP in net income in just 3 years.

If your expenses are growing faster than you revenue, you done goofed.

If we look at earning statements (can't cuz they're private), this was probably due to overhiring.

[0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1234193/epic-games-annua...

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

#226

Post by justin66 » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 5:36 PM UTC

A standard step to improve the books if they're intending an IPO in the near future.

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

#227

Post by bpiche » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 5:38 PM UTC

spywaregorilla wrote: post #224

bpiche wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tim's saying that Valve not supporting cross play is 'classic lock-in' That's absolutely blame to me, but you're entitled to your own interpretation

I strongly agree that it is anti-competitive and anti-consumer to not allow crossplay. That's not blaming Valve for being successful. That's calling them out for anti-consume practices.

That's a fine opinion to have. Carry on.

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

#228

Post by r00fus » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 5:39 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)

I am ambivalent about a downturn but the resumption of student loan repayments could pull $100B ($9B/mo) out of the market [1] - which might directly impact Epic's market.

[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/a-100-billion-drag-on-u-s-...

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

#229

Post by Rapzid » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 5:40 PM UTC

bpiche wrote: post #217

spywaregorilla wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly agree with the merit of the first link's argument. Cross play is important. The second one seems reasonable, factually accurate, and not a big deal. I dislike the third argument regarding crypto because I think crypto is trash, but I do think Steam's (and many others) 30% cut of transactions is predatory vs. Epic's 12%. I also think it is predatory to require that games use the Steam Wallet for in app purc…

Tim's saying that Valve not supporting cross play is 'classic lock-in' That's absolutely blame to me, but you're entitled to your own interpretation

> They have a classic lock-in strategy where they build these services that only work with their store, and they use the fact that they have the majority market share in order to encourage everybody to ship games that have a broken experience in other stores... And we were bitten by this early on with a number of multiplayer games coming to the Epic Games Store. Steamworks didn't work on our store, so they had either a reduced set of multiplayer features or none...

What's controversial about that? What's he blaming them for?

Competition is good for consumers. If Steams leadership position is making it harder to have quality, viable alternative game stores that's bad for dev's and consumers long term.

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

#230

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

JohnFen wrote: post #150

hibikir wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that the productivity boost is mich higher for the lower end developers than for the best ones. They are best at the simple tasks in the most verbose programming languages: Easier to think of them as higher quality auto-completion. The terser the language, and more innovative the problem is, the smalle the LLM help. So if anyone gains from this, is the companies paying under-market, and therefore typically…

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?

I was asked to help evaluate a couple code-generating LLMs at work, so I set out to build a couple toy apps in languages and frameworks I wasn't very familiar with.

My experience was that it was about as useful as searching Google and Stack Overflow without knowing what a good answer looks like. You copy and paste a lot of code, a lot of it works, but inevitably, something breaks and you have no idea why. So you still have to go back to "the hard way" of reading the documentation and building an understanding.

I'm sure things will improve over time, especially for products built specifically for code generation, but my first and second impression is that so far, LLMs don't actually lower the bar for junior programmers.