> 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.
Sounds like fraud, and managing in bad faith.
It's definitely shitball, dishonest, bad faith management... but it's not fraud.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
That is fortunately one big thing loosened over COVID, though; could never imagine having a devkit in my own house before 2020.
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can't speak too much for the vfx industry. I imagine its similar culture and NDA contracts in terms of where content can "stay".
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.
Well to be fair that didn't work out that well either...
> also the employees
Still almost dirt cheap by SF standards.