Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset' | Hacker News Reader

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

reuters.com

223 pointsPhilpax161 comments

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 Skylines 2.

Just points to a mess at the leadership level. Their failed relicensing debacle shows the poor level of judgement of the C suite.

No love for Unity here, their licensing debacle was horrendous, but I've seen no indications that DOTS is responsible for CS2 perf issues. Everything I've seen points to other things lacking in the engine (a decent LODing system for example), general optimization issues that'd be present in any game shipped too early, and inefficiencies in the rendering pipeline.

"Unfortunately a lot of the graphics-related issues are indirectly caused by the game’s use of DOTS"

"The cause for unnecessary geometry is both the lack of simplified LOD variants for many of the game’s meshes, as well as the simplistic and seemingly untuned culling implementation. And the reason why the game has its own culling implementation instead of using Unity’s built in solution (which should at least in theory be much more advanced) is because Colossal Order had to implement quite a lot of the graphics side themselves because Unity’s integration between DOTS and HDRP is still very much a work in progress and arguably unsuitable for most actual games"

https://blog.paavo.me/cities-skylines-2-performance

I think if a game development team is going to try ECS for gameplay, they need to have the resources to go ensure it’s comprehensive enough for their needs. It can be challenging to “bolt on” a data-oriented design and have it interface with the rest of the code base. Conway’s Law will apply if not everyone’s on board with it.

At some point, that in house engine is going to be cheaper and easier to work with.

Alternatively, a tough conversation needs to be had with the team about complying with unity's way.

Battlebit runs on the same engine, but I think they made exactly the right trade offs to achieve their experience.

I don't care if the game world looks realistic. I just want it to be fun. Simulations are a nuanced point of this, but even so if CS2 looked no better than the original, I probably wouldn't have noticed.

I was wondering if and how they were using DOTS with HDRP since (from brief pokes, I of course can't speak for all of DOTS) to my knowledge, there was no major work done integrating HDRP/URP. Both were moving targets that were probably moving even faster than DOTS.

I guess the answer is an unfortunate "we did not" as of now. Real shame because the ideas of a proper DOTS renderer (not a literal renderer, moreso an ECS oriented way to deliver data to the GPU. Likely HDRP/URP) was one rumbling for years. And probably still is. And with all the industry layoffs/leavings I hope they don't drain too much of the brain to get that off the ground.

No game engine can save a game from someone dedicated to being inefficient, like rendering high poly teeth on pixel tall models.

I would have assumed the game engine would be responsible for culling occluded objects. Isn't that one of the most basic parts of a 3D renderer?

Yes I would expect that from a 3d engine that I pay a license fee towards, but I also expect the developer to performance test and fix some of these things before release

Developer prioritize features and fixes. You don't know if there were worse issues before release. It should be on the managers and the publisher to set reasonable timelines and delay release when it can't meet expectations.

Occlusion culling is pretty usecase dependent if you want a performant solution. Unity implements frustum culling and Umbra which is a pre-computed solution. The latter is probably not great for CS2 and the former is basically the minimum. Unity have definitely slept on introducing more alternatives though.

Even if a 3D object is culled by the renderer, the mesh is still loaded in memory

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.

For anybody else reading this and thinking (like I did) that these comments about teeth are a deliberately silly example invented for the purpose of this discussion - it turns out that Cities Skylines 2 really did have NPCs with teeth in their models, per this[1] story from up the thread.

1: https://blog.paavo.me/cities-skylines-2-performance/

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

Considering how long it takes to load games like Battlebit (super low poly 3D) or Graveyard Keeper (2D), speed/efficiency/optimization is not something I expect to see much of with Unity. While there are exceptions, its performance seems pretty consistently bad.

they thought they had the Hollywood lock. Then turns out Hollywood isn't worth shit these days and treats em' like some post house on deathrow either way.

They bet too much, too hard, in all the wrong places. And tried lock-in and pricing out the indies. They should've done the Adobe thing and let those college kids pirate.

Dunno, very expected from this angle.

The issues with CS:2 are well documented and nothing do with DOTS; it was entirely the game developers fault.

The vendor of the tools should always try to empathize with the users of their tools and make the experience better.

Even if the user insists on being a little bit weird. Perhaps especially so.

We like to chase the most difficult customers. It forces us to have the best products.

Unity isn't one tool, however. DOTS does a lot of amazing things, but most of its job is done on the CPU. and issues here sound like GPU laden issues. DOTS could certainly do a better job talking to HDRP but DOTS has always been talked about as "in alpha/beta" until mid 2022. those integrations and polish are the exact reasons why, and I argue that it came out of beta much too early as is.

I think many of the issues with Unity are caused by them not using their own product. If they are never going to make games, then they need to listen to their customers far more closely.

They pivoted from developing an engine to developing an IPO.

It's looking like there was no plan beyond that, once Riccitiello sailed off into the sunset with his loot.

There never is. This is how capitalism works. Cory called it enshittification.

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?

I presume because they already used Unity in Cities Skylines (the original), and it would be easier to build and improve on the previous edition instead of throwing most of it away and starting a new project with a new engine.

People underestimate the cost of switching game engines.

While a lot of concepts are transferrable between engines, if you've got a team of experienced C#/Unity developers who haven't touched UE, switching to C++/UE is likely to cost a lot of time/money. A new engine can still be a steep learning curve for experienced game developers. You might be able to pick up the basics over a weekend, but reaching expert levels of knowledge takes years.

That cost increases further if it means restarting a project from scratch rather than building on top of an existing codebase (which will likely include not just the game itself, but also an assortment of tools built within Unity for building content and improving workflows).

Unity's killer feature for many is still its C# support. If you're a small team or solo developer who doesn't need AAA levels of performance, it can be a big time-saver over working with C++.

That's one of the reasons why Godot started brushing up their C# support recently.

For that that small/solo team it's also easier to switch engine and since they can't get custom license deals like the big boys having the same language may encourage some to invest the time and resources.

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.

In Outer Wilds, the player stays at 0,0,0 while everything else moves around them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbY0mBXKKT0&t=1907s

I was under the impression this is how things always work in graphics pipelines. You don't want to give up on all the precision between 0 and 1

They were already entrenched with their first game, and used that opportunity to buy into the DOTS hype.

DOTS had a much troubled development cycle; most of what was promised was eventually abandoned, and the key people were laid off. Anyone that bought into it is now stuck in the hybrid-DOTS limbo, where they have to invest substantial amount of time into making the engine features work.

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.

DOTS isn't ECS. DOTS was supposed to be, a Data Oriented Tech Stack. Currently it only has ECS with some extra bits. Ergo, DOTS is an unfinished mess. And that unfinished mess --along with a mandate to release for Gamepass-- culminated into CSII suffering from utterly ridiculous issues.

Also notable:

> Unity will shut down offices in 14 locations such as Berlin and Singapore, pending employee consultation in some countries, and significantly reduce its office footprint for the remaining offices, including in San Francisco and Bellevue, Washington.

> Unity will no longer mandate that employees work from offices three a days a week and will reduce "full in-office services" to three days a week in most locations, the company said.

Nice! It's nice to see a company make an employee-friendly movement here, as opposed to many of the other big players forcing their employees back into the commute rat-race.

It seems more like its to save money on office real estate and the fees that come with that like cleaning services, security, etc than it is about being employee friendly.

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

if you're not part of the staff being let go

Unity is a worldwide company and while the HQ is now in San francisco, the origins lie in Copenhagen. There's physically no way to reasonably make everyone RTO because there are multiple big bases, and Unity was adjusted to telecommuncations well before the pandemic due to that.

So I'm not too surprised it chose to size down physical locations when push came to shove, compared to other tech companies in SV doubling down on their billion dollar real estate they built.

>There's physically no way to reasonably make everyone RTO because there are multiple big bases

Sure, but from what I saw a lot of these VFX/arts/game studios despite being international, still mandate their teams to be in-office a certain amount of days per week due to the nature of creative work. Especially that certain things like a games or VFX tend to not have their development spread internationally, but are usually developed by only a certain branch office, in which case some days of in-person collaboration might be more productive.

Yeah, games are in a weird place because console dev kits were paranoid as all hell when it came to usage. There'd be office mandates purely because you couldn't take those home, nor even remote into one without a bunch of red tape. There's still remnants of that to this day, which is probably why they couldn't be even more aggressive on remote status.

That is fortunately one big thing loosened over COVID, though; could never imagine having a devkit in my own house before 2020.

----

can't speak too much for the vfx industry. I imagine its similar culture and NDA contracts in terms of where content can "stay".

Devkits have been software locked for a while now and need an always on internet connectivity to the mothership to work, so even if the HW kit would leak onto e-bay, there's nothing you can do with them as they would immediately be backlisted and usually that leads to the studio being blacklisted as well for the blunder so it's natural the studios don't want them to leave the office. You never know which disgruntled employee would rage-quit taking the devkit with him leaving you to deal with the wrath from the console manufacturer.

When I was doing some security evaluations on a gaming console it was mandatory to lock the HW samples in a vault at the end of the business day when the last person to leave the office was done with them. Naturally that made WFH impossible even during covid.

Any cost cutting measure is silly when they choose to have their HQ in SF over Copenhagen.

Copenhagen is one of the most expensive cities in the world, also the employees are expensive and the candidate pool is smaller. And then there's the timezone issue as I assume most of the leadership is in the US.

> And then there's the timezone issue as I assume most of the leadership is in the US.

Well to be fair that didn't work out that well either...

> also the employees

Still almost dirt cheap by SF standards.

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

I don't even work 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.

Sure, I’m just arguing that limiting how often you can work in the office isn’t inherently a win for all employees.

Jim Whitehurst was always very remote-friendly when he was CEO at Red Hat

One that has no benefit for employees and employers, beyond tax incentives.. Real planned economy vibes there.. Well.. You can not save economic models based on nost algia with lots of costs for all sides. They just wither and die over time anyway..

Sound of a shoe dropping...

It seems like WFH is a "perk" when company is in cut down expenses mode, and RTO is mandated when it's thriving.

I would have thought it is RTO mandated when you need to reduce payroll and want to incentivize workers to resign, and then back to WFH once that target is met and expenses need to be cut further.

> incentivize workers to resign, and then back to WFH once that target is met and expenses need to be cut further

Sounds like fraud, and managing in bad faith.

It's not at all fraud.

It's definitely shitball, dishonest, bad faith management... but it's not fraud.

When you layoff large numbers of people, WFH makes it easier.

When you need to start a company or do a hiring push, being in an office can help.

In a company that only hires high seniority employees, WFH vs office doesn't matter much.

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 current market.

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

> 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.

> When you do a hiring push: being open to WFH gives you a bigger pool to draw from

Onboarding a large number of new WFH employees at the same might easily turn into a disaster though (for example if you "need" to grow your headcount at 50-100% per year like Unity did... of course they didn't need to do that but that's different problem).

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.

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.

I think they were not easily commercialized. I was a VFX software developer and internal tools are both very advanced and also fragile foot guns if you try to do anything that isn’t exactly down the golden path. VFX devs are not the usual product guys, they are usually either R&D/math guys or hackers, with little in between.

The way to commercialize WETA stuff would be to make new product teams and basically redo much of the work with professional software devs and figure out where the original VFX R&D had gaps - and it always has massive gaps.

Unity just went nuts with wacky acquisitions the last couple years and this was one of them.

> internal tools are both very advanced and also fragile foot guns if you try to do anything that isn’t exactly down the golden path.

HT: That’s also an important point explained when we talk about internal VS commercial (or build VS buy) in the animation/VFX industry.

Internal softwares does less than 5% (or less) of commercial products, but they are doing it in a straight, fab compatibility way. No effort is made in making the tool working with your fab, the tool is shaped for the fab from scratch. That’s the value of internal tools. Converting those is viable product is very risky.

Yeah, you could see this outcome a mile away. While there are examples of in-house VFX software being commercialised (eg. most of the Foundry's offerings) it's generally not built to the same spec as commercial software. There are plenty of good developers but the teams are smaller and resources are focused on bang for buck.

Wait, Unity owned WETA FREAKING DIGITAL? My goodness!

>and end an agreement with a digital video effects company [Weta Digital]

Man, what did I even get laid off for if they were gonna cut off their billion dollar acquisition anyway? Thought they'd at least leverage that talent and tech to properly compete with Unreal in the Film space. But alas. More unfulfilled dreams.

I was intending to join Unity as an intern, only to realise that the entire office had closed.

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).

Epic did exist and make money shipping Unreal Engine before Fortnite, although Fortnite became a huge success I'd say that having people in the same building having to actually build a real product with the tools you make in that building is also the right attitude to being able to make tools that are profitable and work for real people.

Heard from a comment on here that all Unity tech demos use extreme custom tweaks on the base engine and then when that demo ships it all gets thrown out because it doesn't really function beyond what was demoed in a modular way an end user could benefit from it.

But doesn't change the fact that financially Unreal is a side business for Epic (IIRC even their storefront somehow makes more money..). What's the point in making those tools if you can make significantly more money arguably in a much easier way?

This is way Unity pivoted into ads and is/was(?) trying to entire other areas like VFX/industrial etc. stuff. Charging per seat is just a terrible business model for a game engine.

> Heard from a comment on here that all Unity tech demos use extreme custom tweaks on the base engine and then when that demo ships it all gets thrown out

That's true, they didn't even throw out that stuff, demos were made on a separate branch of the engine by team(s) completely separate from the people working on the engine. That and most of the stuff they were doing in their demos is irrelevant for pretty much all of their users anyway (and obviously they weren't very effective at attracting VFX and AAA clients..). IIRC they canned most of their in house demo team back in 2022.

> building having to actually build a real product with the tools you make in that building

Honestly I'm not 100% sure about that. It's not like all teams have the same problems and workflows and it's not like Unity is not getting enough feedback from their users.

Will the boards of tech companies ever learn that once founders and key tech people are sidelined they no longer fulfil their core mission of delivering tech? Tech companies need to remain tech focused because thats what people want from them. Unity ticks a lot of chekboxes but as others said are half baked. The only market it seems to serve well is mobile because mobile has few demanding features.

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38452493

Unity promised much but never delivered. DOTS is a mess. For AAA you are better with Unreal and for small games Godot might be enough.

Unity's only advantage is the huge community and the tons of stuff in their store and the huge number of tutorials.

Anyway, I am glad I exited game de few years ago and I am much happier doing web development and microservices.

Starting to seem like modern Unreal works well for small games too.

How about cutting 100% of the idiotic board who cost them their business?

[dupe]

Some more discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38452493

now do Ironsource ($4.4B)

The other 3.2% goes in a second round?

unity is a mess on the inside

there are slack channels practically devoted to political bickering

i was disgusted with what I saw there (outside of my own engineering team which was actually quite decent with the exception of one person) and left within 3 months

>there are slack channels practically devoted to political bickering

What kind of political bickering? Internal company politics or government/social/identity politics?

Check his username for an answer

Do these layoffs include any of the C-suite / execs / upper management?

You know, the people directly responsible for the company's situation? Accountability? No?

This started with the CEO being removed, so I think, Yes!

Except he's still getting paid until April. I doubt the employees getting the sack because of this will be extended the same sweet deal.

Pretty messed up that you can fuck up and make hundreds lose their jobs, and get paid for several months afterwards to do literally nothing.

Wasn't as nice as what I hear from Epic, but Unity layoff did have severance. 2 weeks of pay per year of tenure. Probably below average for tech, above average for games.

But yea, golden parachutes for me but not for thee.

There's one CEO, and n employees. The one will always receive preferred treatment, over the many. Is it pretty fucked up that 1+1=2? Both are constants in the universe.

Whether he did a good job is irrelevant, he did a job and got paid for it. It'd be pretty fucked up if the board hired him, then didn't pay him per contract.

> Whether he did a good job is irrelevant

LOL! Well, at least you're not trying to hide the fact that the ridiculous compensation isn't commensurate with performance.

Most people don't get paid out to the end of their contract if they're let go early, or not that I've seen and if you're let go for ineptitude why should they?

This is just different rules for the rich. I'm sure he'd survive much better even without that money than any other employee being let go with their much less generous package.

It's almost as if it's a way harder job or something, I mean look at your own post you have animosity towards them despite knowing nothing about them just from them taking on that job.

Someone has to do those jobs, but what offends people is the extent to which that class keep giving themselves more all the time, and exponentially more than what happens to the rest of us. All jobs are important, not just the C suite.

They get paid appalling amounts of money when they're just treading water - it's not fair they also get good payouts when they stuff up so monumentally.

I mean the CEO 'resigned' in October, if that's what you're looking for.

I'm c-suite and the most important function of layoffs is to preserve the business as an ongoing concern, preserving what jobs I can. If the business fails, everyone loses their job, which is terrible!

Now, if the reason for layoffs is due directly to poor decisions by someone who should not have reasonably made that decision given the variables in front of them, that person should probably be terminated. But layoffs can occur for all manner of reasons. If you are in the business of making feather hats, and suddenly feather hats go out of style because of shifts in market demand, how can you fire the business leader? Not everything is in the control of management. Management comes in every day, sees the situation before them, and makes the best decisions they can to grow the business.

I think the point being made is that management costs a business disproportionately more than lower-level employees, so arguably plenty of cuts should be seen there too if cost-cutting were really the only concern. It's just basic statistics if all else is truly equal.

The vast majority of tech layoffs this year had nothing to do preserving the business as an ongoing concern.

This is how I explain senior execs to junior engineers: their job is not to write code or give speeches, it’s almost entirely about making decisions in the absence of perfect information.

That’s an important skill. But it also provides the perfect cover for bad decisions, because “we didn’t know then what we do now.”

So I have little sympathy for the c-level exec who ends up on the wrong side of events as they unfold, because…that’s the gig. If they don’t want unfair blame they can get a different job.

That’s true, but also keep in mind executives aren’t fired for making bad decisions, they’re fired because the board (or CEO) thinks someone else can do better going forward.

Or to take blame for past company performance, or for political reasons, or whatever. All of that might fall under "someone else can do better." Sometimes execs are fired for making bad decisions, whether fairly or unfairly.

If the police want to pull you over, they can always find a reason. Same with a board firing an exec. Whether the nominal reason is the same as the actual reason is pretty hard to tell from the outside.

Again, that's the gig, and if someone doesn't want the uncertainty or the downside risk, they can hand the compensation back and do something where performance is more measurable and treatment is more equitable. By the same token, my view of a "successful exec" depends on repeated success over time, not just a hot IPO or a good quarter.

Good take. It's pretty much the entire function of being C-Suite, putting your ass on the line for decisions nobody wants to make and having the confidence/credentials/ego/whatever to get people to buy into your decision.

It is your job to anticipate the market – you are responsible for all the business decisions! If you're allowed to shrug it off and say "we didn't see this coming, we did the best we can, by the way 3.8% of you are getting laid off because of this but not me, even though I made the calls", well, it sounds like you're just milking the business for yourself until it well and truly goes kaput.

> is your job to anticipate the market

No, it’s not. It’s to engage it best.

Take two cultures: one that executes leaders for making bad calls and one that judges them according to what they knew when they made the decision. Who wins?

We’ve run this experiment hundreds of times because it’s appealing to think steep consequences for bad decisions leads to good decisions. But it doesn’t. It causes caution and indecision. The example that comes to mind is Carthage vs. Rome; the former executed failed generals while in Rome "defeated generals seldom faced serious punishments" [1].

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/libyan-studies/artic...

Then the compensation model is inherently unfair if the rank and file is forced to bear the brunt of bad leadership.

> the compensation model is inherently unfair if the rank and file is forced to bear the brunt of bad leadership

Considering solely risk, sure. There are other relevant inputs. More pertinently, this is why we have public services and safety nets.

So we outsource bad decision making of overcompensated people to the public. Brilliant.

Anyone can put their hat in the ring and get into management. I wasn’t born with a silver spoon, I had no connections, and I attended a weak school. I worked my fucking ass off and networked everywhere I could. I built a reputation.

If you can convince people that you are deserving of leadership, you have the guts to put yourself on the line in front of tens or hundreds or thousands of people, go ahead. This is your life and the people you are responsible for. If you do this and want to work for peanuts, be my guest. I get paid what the market thinks I’m worth.

I don’t disagree with what you posted but the last sentence needs highlighting:

> I get paid what the market thinks I’m worth.

It helps when “the market” is your peers who also benefit from benchmarking higher salaries for management.

You’re making all valid statements, but we see CEOs driving businesses into walls, and refuse to take responsibility. I size things for a living, a mistake can mean injury or death. If this happens I tell you I’ll have to bear the consequences. And I’m having an average pay. What’s the market thinks about this? Genuinely interested to know.

If only coders who held CEOs to that kind of standard held themselves to the same standard when bugs are found in their code. Are you just "milking the business" when you don't compensate it for the cost of remedying the bugs you wrote? And the answer is, of course, yes, you and the CEO are and any reasonable excuse you could make applies to the CEO as well.

Is that really tantamount to cutting off someone's source of income and livelihood?

> who held CEOs to that kind of standard held themselves to the same standard

Why? It makes perfect sense to hold CEOs to a much higher standard than ordinary employees. There is nothing flawed about that at all.

> excuse you could make applies to the CEO as well.

Well it shouldn’t

What’s with the sense of entitlement towards jobs in HN?

Businesses will continue to employee you as long as they think it’s a net benefit to them. Their outlook can change at anytime and for nonsensical reasons.

I would suggest accepting this state of affairs. That might mean making sure you have savings, or up to date job skills. Refusing to believe this can happen to you because you have worked so hard or been so loyal will only lead to heartache.

We've built a world where you either get a job, or you are culled from the population. Culling is inhumane, so the only way to resolve that moral quandary is to guarantee jobs.

Being culled occurs when you are not in the workforce. It’s not the same issue as a guarantee to your current employer.

Either way these are just wishful normative statements. The business reality is that they will not guarantee you a job.

Good comment.

If you (anyone who reads this) are an employee, remember this is how c-suite people see you.

You're cost. You're something that prevents the business from being "preserved". You're like water or electricity bills from the businesses' point of view. You'll be fired not because you did anything wrong: firing you is nothing different from using less water. Water, of course, can't be wrong or right.

That's why you should have zero loyalty to the business. (You're water bills. Water bills don't have loyalty)

Businesses do not exist for making jobs. If we wanted jobs simply for jobs’ sake, then we would pay people to dig holes and fill them in (a lot of government jobs are glorified versions of this).

Businesses exist to fulfill a market need, and every business fulfilling that market need competes in some axis of cost vs. quality.

We are all human. I feel for people laid off. I have been laid off before, and businesses I operated have failed - full stop. I’m talking complicated bankruptcy with the courts and everything. This is not a good outcome for anyone except the court appointed lawyers.

Even when I lay people off, or if people quit on their own for greener pa$ture$, I maintain relationships with people who I respect. More often than not I meet these people again, either hiring them directly or working with them again. The world isn’t zero sum, and being laid off isn’t a sociopathic situation of management vs. labor.

I absolutely don't think that businesses exist to make jobs. You'll never find me saying so. Continue on my own analogy, thinking businesses exist to make more jobs is just like thinking they exist to use water. It would be crazy if anyone said it out loud this way.

One of the reasons businesses (and business leaders to some extent too) argue for reduced tax burdens is because “they are job creators”.

It’s literally an argument many businesses make when lobbying.

Lobbyists don't exist to accurately inform the populace or to profess sincerely held beliefs but to effect advantageous political change.

Indeed. My point is that the “job creator” argument is flip flopped depending on whatever is convenient.

There's not even a contradiction there, let alone flip flopping: That businesses create jobs doesn't imply that job creation is their primary purpose, and getting two different answers to two different questions from two different people simply is not flip flopping.

When businesses are laying people off because they’re prioritising profit and also arguing for tax incentives because they’re creating jobs… then yes, I’d call that a contradiction of actions.

But maybe we’ll just have to agree to disagree on this.

Businesses exist to make money for their owners, full stop. Any needs they fulfill are largely incidental.

That's how we end up with businesses like landlords, which fulfil negative needs and extract value without creating anything at all.

Making it possible to live in a house without having the money up front to buy one does provide value.

If they weren't owned by landlords, you'd have the money up front to buy one.

That does not follow at all. How would, for example, a college student with no assets be able to buy a house up front if landlording was illegal?

How do they buy anything else, like textbooks or coffee? They have a student loan - that's how.

You ever met a college student with an Xbox? If we stopped treating houses as an investment and started treating them as a commodity like Xboxes, you could afford one.

I very much doubt it because it takes many times as many resources to create a house than an Xbox. Making housing loans to people with no income or assets is a great way to cause a financial collapse, as we saw not too many years ago.

That seems like a mischaracterization of what the comment said.

> how can you fire the business leader?

Ummm... why wouldn't you fire the business leader in that situation? He locked the company in to a niche market that was subject to the volatility of fashion choices when he could have had his feather techs fletching arrows or stuffing pillows. Had the bet paid off, he'd reap the benefits.

> If you are in the business of making feather hats, and suddenly feather hats go out of style because of shifts in market demand, how can you fire the business leader?

Were you a c-suite at Kodak or something? "There was nothing we could do after people didn't want to shoot photos on film anymore" meanwhile Fujifilm pivoting hard into chemical materials, makeup, medical etc etc (although ironically due to the meteoric rise of Instax, their highest income is once again consumer photo film...)

You fire the business leader because he didn't see the writing on the wall and expand into down comforters, other styles of hats, etc etc.

That's one view of the world. One people try to push for but I don't agree with. It's OK for companies to have a lifecycle associated with what they do. There's no need for companies to be behemots that last forever. If you are a hat company, to me there's no direct implications that tells me it's better for society if the hat company starts making shoes vs the company ending and different cohorts of employees going to different places, potentially some founding a shoe company, potentially not.

Many many dollars are wasted due to companies trying to survive at all costs and fail at it.

But a company deciding "okay, were done" and just shutting down is effectively laying off 100% of the staff. This company's leadership is already getting flak for laying off under 4%.

Sure and laying off 100% of staff might be better for society if you can replace the jobs with higher productivity ones somewhere else.

Same with unions, instead of starting one to fix a dystopian company with bad leadership, could be better to have the employees leave and have the company go downhill than trying to fix something that isn't worth fixing.

>Sure and laying off 100% of staff might be better for society if you can replace the jobs with higher productivity ones somewhere else

Maybe, if you ignore the costs of huge swaths of people being layed off.

The costs depend on a lot of variables we're assuming here, they might be negligible. In some european countries where I live (not sure how it works in the US) if you get fired you'll get several months up to ~2 years - depends on the country - of subsidies while you look for jobs. Of course there will be more stress during the months you are switching but economically, having big companies with old business models, syphoning subsidies and tax breaks and all manner of life support measures just to stay alive... In many cases you'd spend less by letting the company go bankrupt and supporting the employees directly in their transition.

And once they come back to the workforce, every month of increased productivity might be "making it back" much faster.

> Same with unions, instead of starting one to fix a dystopian company

There is immense value in the company structures themself. You can't just bail and take them with you. The inertia of the customer base for example. It has to be really bad to not be worth fixing if the alternative is redo from the ground up.

Some fields have less moat though.

> The inertia of the customer base for example. It has to be really bad to not be worth fixing if the alternative is redo from the ground up.

This only matters from the pov of the company. From the pov of society those customers will move faster or slower to better competitors, which is what you want. Though you don't even need to have them have to figure it out from one day to the next, you could for example go to your best competitor ask them for money to buy your customer base, and use that money to pay your creditors, employees etc in the bankrupting process.

Building companies takes resources. Just bailing if the executives go mad is probably not optimal either. You can somewhat keep executives or shareholders in check and protect them from each other by being difficult. Just as long as not both are bad, or at least only temporary bad.

But with job hoping being incentived I guess it is futile?

There are so much BS I blame on the concept of job hoping engineers. Companies can't even make bags for spaghetti nowadays that are openable by hand since there are a constant churn of newbie plastic pasta bags engineers around at them.

>This only matters from the pov of the company. From the pov of society those customers will move faster or slower to better competitors

It absolutely matters to customers. Depending on the type of business, it could be extremely inconvenient to have to change to a different one when they close.

> 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.

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