The terrifying part is the evidence that on-site is better is a couple of anecdotes from the CEO. These people are sociopaths. “I had a couple of good meetings, so all people who stay remote are fired.”
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The Future of How We Work Together at Roblox
61–70 of 71 posts
Re: The Future of How We Work Together at Roblox
#62I totally agree with the impact of spontaneous things happening when in person. I had been working remotely for 8 years and really was 100% for it and advocating it. I recently joined a new job where I'm at the office 3 days a week, and I can definitely feel the difference both in the time it took me to onboard (compared to other remote-only onboarding I did) and the productivity / relationships / other gains from th…
Depends on if your life revolves around work or your work revolves around your life.
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Re: The Future of How We Work Together at Roblox
#63Re: The Future of How We Work Together at Roblox
#64If you are impacted by this type of surprise RTO by your employer, it is perfectly fine to pretend to go along with the relocation plan to give yourself more time to find a new job.
Re: The Future of How We Work Together at Roblox
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
No reason remote work can’t be spontaneous, even easier IMO because you don’t have to herd cats into the same space. A ping on chat and within 1 min multiple people can be in the discussion without even having to move.
What they mean by spontaneous is things happing by chance. You pinging someone isn’t happening by chance, you’re choosing to do that - to make contact. Compare to a physical office, where by chance you’re in the cafe at the same time as someone else who you usually don’t think about. But somehow you start talking and a good idea comes from it. I’m remote and have no problem pinging anyone on slack from my teammate to…
You can also just start talking in chat, even in group channels; doesn’t have to be DMs. And the you’ll have a log of your good ideas. And likely someone random will jump into your discussion.
Re: The Future of How We Work Together at Roblox
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
No reason remote work can’t be spontaneous, even easier IMO because you don’t have to herd cats into the same space. A ping on chat and within 1 min multiple people can be in the discussion without even having to move.
Maybe? Personally I've never used a virtual whiteboard that was any good. I blame the much smaller area and the mouse input. Of course if your ways of working mean you can collaborate without any need for whiteboards, I guess things could be fine. Clearly, things like the Linux kernel get along OK without such collaboration.
You’ll probably want to translate your great idea to a digital diagram at some point for the design doc or documentation. Might as well start there, then you have less work to do later.
Re: The Future of How We Work Together at Roblox
#67I totally agree with the impact of spontaneous things happening when in person. I had been working remotely for 8 years and really was 100% for it and advocating it. I recently joined a new job where I'm at the office 3 days a week, and I can definitely feel the difference both in the time it took me to onboard (compared to other remote-only onboarding I did) and the productivity / relationships / other gains from th…
Depends on if the culture supports messaging the right person when it comes to mind or just when it's convenient. Slack/Teams/email/etc can be spontaneous as well. Just a matter if the culture appreciates and encourages the behavior. If the CEO is leaving off-sites w/ brand new, strategically significant, ideas that no one was comfortable even hinting at via Slack/Teams/email - yep, seems like a very in-person, face-…
Easy for management to pat themselves on the back for good ideas but then excuse themselves from a failed execution because there is no log of the ideation ever happening.
Re: The Future of How We Work Together at Roblox
#68Plenty of kids play roblox. They're not profitable. Clearly this is a shadow layoff. They carve out an exception for their best and brightest, but clearly the writing is on the wall. Profitability is not on the horizon, and talent should leave.
>They're not profitable How is that possible? They don't even have to bother making the "games" they immensely monetize on.
Easy. Hire thousands of people to do dubious jobs and target infinite, unreasonable growth of the company for investors rather than profit.
Re: The Future of How We Work Together at Roblox
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
What they mean by spontaneous is things happing by chance. You pinging someone isn’t happening by chance, you’re choosing to do that - to make contact. Compare to a physical office, where by chance you’re in the cafe at the same time as someone else who you usually don’t think about. But somehow you start talking and a good idea comes from it. I’m remote and have no problem pinging anyone on slack from my teammate to…
You can also just start talking in chat, even in group channels; doesn’t have to be DMs. And the you’ll have a log of your good ideas. And likely someone random will jump into your discussion.
There's a difference between the random chance dynamic I'm talking about, and sending a message to a slack channel.
Re: The Future of How We Work Together at Roblox
#70Plenty of kids play roblox. They're not profitable. Clearly this is a shadow layoff. They carve out an exception for their best and brightest, but clearly the writing is on the wall. Profitability is not on the horizon, and talent should leave.
>They're not profitable How is that possible? They don't even have to bother making the "games" they immensely monetize on.
According to their most recent 10K (FY 2022 + FY 2021 data) their operational costs vs. revenue are:
* 25% payment fees (google and apple app stores)
* 28% developer exchange fees (they have to incentivize other people to build those games on their platform)
* 31% (up from 24%) infrastructure (servers/cloud) and trust and safety
* 39% (up from 28%) R&D
* 13% (down from 16%) general and administrative
* 5% (up from 4%) sales and marketing
They'd have to slash the last 4 of those items by 70% to get to a +20% operating margin.
In FY2022 and averaged over the past 4 quarters revenue growth has fell back down to 15% (in FY2021 revenue more than doubled, which is likely where everyone felt that the gold rush was on).
If they could hold the last 4 of those items constant and grow topline revenue while letting payment fees and developer exchange fees grow with revenue it would take them ~8.5 years to get to a +20% operating margin.
It's kind of interesting how they pile trust and safety into infrastructure so that you can't tell if they're either underfunding trust and safety (freaking everyone out over their kids using the platform) or those T&S costs are exploding (indicating lack of scalability of T&S and making it even harder to achieve any kinds of operating margins). One very obvious problem with the idea of across-the-board 70% cuts in everything is that they likely can't do that in T&S.
Now the next problem is that their cash has dropped from $3.08B to $2.12B in the latest quarterly report, they have $1.65B in long term debt up from $1.39B a year earlier (although it looks like only $1B in an actual loan and the rest in capital leases, which is what has been growing). They have total assets of $5.6B and total liabilities of $5.4B (with Goodwill and intangibles of ~$200M) for effectively zero net equity.
They look pretty well doomed unless most of the company goes on a pretty severe diet.
And given the "higher for longer" interest rate environment they're not going to get any cheap financing bailouts to kick the can down the road.
This article is pretty funny:
https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/04/06/will-roblox-be-a-t...