Unity Lays Off 600 Staff Members, Prepares To Close Half of its Offices (venturebeat.com) 42
Unity announced today that it's having its third round of layoffs, with this one affecting 600 staff members. It's also reducing its number of offices from 58 to 30 or less within the next few years. Allegedly these cuts are prompted by fears of a recession. From a report: Unity CEO John Riccitiello told the Wall Street Journal that the company was cutting the number of layers within the company. He said, "It's all about setting ourselves up for higher growth." The 600 employees laid off represent 8% of the workforce, and Unity will have a staff of around 7,000 in the aftermath. The company had its last round of layoffs in January, where it lost almost 300 staff members. Before that, it laid off around 200 employees in June 2022, though Riccitiello has since claimed that many of those employees moved to new positions within the company. In all three cases, Unity has cited future planning as its reasons for doing so.
Middle Tier Mayhem (Score:3)
Everybody in between team lead and VP should probably be concerned. Flattening an organization usually cuts through the middle. I've worked in flat organizations and tall ones... and I have to say that there are times in the flat ones where I miss the hierarchy.. and times in the tall ones where I am furious with it. But an excessive middle tier is never efficient. Makes sense to me.
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Agreed, have also worked a lot in both.
Flat, tall, it really doesn't matter. What matters is you hire good managers and make sure that filters all the way down.
I've been in flat structures where trying to explain to Directors what needs doing and getting sign off takes up so much time you never get any development done, and I've worked in tall orgs where I can literally just get on and do my job because the layers of management are working to hide all that shit from me and remove any barriers like that. I'v
And there was me... (Score:4, Interesting)
And there was me thinking it was simply because John Riccitiello was a useless dickhead who has absolutely tanked Unity's reputation because he insisted on bringing his shady past along with him, including trying to force malware like spyware into Unity games against developer's will, along with knowingly selling stolen art assets on the Asset Store, taking them down when notified, then refusing to give people refunds, hence literally profiting from fraudulent activity.
Couldn't possibly be that right? Couldn't possibly be that he's a clown that's wrecked the company and it's reputation. It's definitely due to the "looming recession" (hint: we're actually coming out the other side of economic turmoil now, because price hikes from Russia's invasion have had a year to bed in, prices stabilise, and replacement supply lines for things like energy to Europe are now firmly bedded in).
It's a shame because Unity was a good competitor to Unreal, but Unreal is now the only game in town given you just have no idea if Unity are just going to fudge malware into your game with the latest release without your knowledge.
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we're actually coming out the other side of economic turmoil now, because price hikes from Russia's invasion have had a year to bed in, prices stabilise, and replacement supply lines for things like energy to Europe are now firmly bedded in
I think you're a little optimistic there, buddy.
But I never heard anything about Unity using stolen assets in their store. That's really quite nefarious in the least. It's still the most popular game engine however, with 50% of games on steam using it, last I read somewhere a few weeks ago.
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"(hint: we're actually coming out the other side of economic turmoil now"
Lol,.you had me until this part. The shit is only beginning to hit the fan
Remain Calm. All is Well. (Score:3)
Over the past year, I and some colleagues would chat about tech company layoffs on Teams. How different it, we thought, from the post 2008 crash days when tech could do no wrong, and even as other sectors were laying off, Google, Apple, Microsoft, et al, were always hiring. We had a weekly tabulation. Then twice a week. Then daily.
We stopped counting. It seems a bit redundant and mind-numbing at this point. We're often up to several companies a day announcing layoffs, and often the same companies... Disney and Amazon come to mind... unleashing fresh waves of layoffs after having already laid off significant numbers in the past months.
And of course, everyone else is laying off too.
And Washington, DC's answer? Remain Calm. All is Well.
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But it really is just the same names making layoffs and that's the point. There's still far more tech jobs than technical staff out there, only now it's companies that couldn't compete with the sexiness of being able to say "I work for Google" or whatever that are actually able to hire. Salaries on offer to me daily are still significantly higher than they were a year ago.
I don't really care how many times Amazon or Unity or Meta make redundancies. It's still ultimately a handful of companies amongst tens o
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It's very short sighted. Recessions are a few years, during which if they just make a bit less profit they can make huge gains on their competitors. They can both retain the best staff, and hire the good people other companies let go.
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"Business Leaders" only plan for the next quarter's results, they can't fathom the sort of long-term thinking you're advocating. Most of them just follow along with whatever "everyone" else is doing anyway...
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And Washington, DC's answer? Remain Calm. All is Well.
Why is Washington DC responsible for tech layoffs due to bad management at tech companies ? Most of these layoffs are just overpriced employees or overhired employees in the pandemic on the back of zero/extra-low interest rate lines of credit from banks. Your reasoning is more political. Just look at the business and their performance. Most of these businesses doing layoffs are paying through the roof for employees that don't deserve that pay.
Pretty classic layoff strategy (Score:2)
I forget the name of the MBA that pioneered this strategy. I only know about it because I read an article about it where his name was mentioned. These constant layoffs aren't just about stock price, it's about pushing you to your breaking point for maximum profit and then p
Everybody wants H1-Bs (Score:2)
Modern layoffs are a strategy for getting more work from those employees than can be reasonably expected. You push them to the edge of burn out and then right before they quit hire up just enough to keep them on. You do this for the handful of employees you can't get H1-Bs or risk dirt cheap contractors for.
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Overall, it is funny how incomes have not gone up since the 1990s. A college grad still makes $35k/year when graduating. In that time, cars have gone from $15k to $65k on average, rents from $450 to $3500 for a studio, and then there are the ISP, cell phone, and other costs which were not present back then, but are big now. Yes, a few people managed to get ahead of the curve by doing full-stack development... but with AI, even the techies are now facing y2k-era job loss, with those jobs staying gone for the indefinite future as countries enact trade barriers, if not go to war.
What are you talking about ? Programmer starting salaries are over 75000$ in my area. Business grads make at least $70000. Of course, if you are a good for nothing with a college degree and below 2 GPA you'll be a waiter somewhere doing a $30000 job but that is not the level you should be measuring with.
Just because someone stupid went to college does not mean that stupid person should also make a $100K out of college. This is America after all. The best make more than the rest.
Re:Pretty classic layoff strategy (Score:4, Insightful)
Or maybe Unity is a failing company shedding talent.
Unity is one of the largest game engine companies (Score:1)
Why is it so important for you to deny something so obvious? I want people to understand the layoff cycle because I'm personally caught up in it and it hurts me. I'd like to stop it, and if more people know about it then it can be stopped. But what do you get out of all this? Is shit posting for no reason all you've got?
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Why is it so important for you to use every article for marginally-related socioeconomic exposition? Also market cap means jack. Unity really is a bad platform rife with problems.
Because I'm getting killed here (Score:1)
And I am *not* abnormal. 65% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. 40% of homeless are working full time.
This is not sustainable. We're eith
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Sounds like you are having regrets of your own mishandling of finance. You have a kid who is out of college and yet you still rent ? Why ? you should have bought in the last 10 years when interest rates were low. This itself shows that you are poor at managing your own finances. Before you complain about how the world is out to get you and your wallet, go take a personal finance lesson.
And if your kid cannot find a job, maybe they are not looking hard enough. Masters/PhD will not solve their issue unless th
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Also, FWIW, if you'll believe my vague source, I have friends who work there currently and it sounds like has been and is currently a pretty terrible place to be. They are just there for the money at this point.
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if employees are just there for money - that sounds like capitalism to me ;)
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Damn (Score:5, Insightful)
Unity Lays Off 600 Staff Members, Prepares To Close Half of its Offices
And here I was hoping it was this Unity [wikipedia.org]. :-) Instead of some gaming company, I'd never heard of, which wasn't noted in TFS, forcing me to actually read TFA [*shudder*] -- how un /. thanks editors. [Now I have to bathe.] :-)
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"If you've played any 3 top indie games in the last 10 years you've almost certainly used it."
And you almost certainly neither noticed nor cared. People play games for the game, not the engine.
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You seriously hadn't heard of the Unity game engine?
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You seriously hadn't heard of the Unity game engine?
For all we know the writer was making a Futurama joke. The fucking summary gives no indication of what industry the writer is even talking about. Hell, the icon for the fucking summary is the generic "business" icon instead of something more appropriate like the "gaming" icon. I thought of the subject being about the unity engine, but I've been wrong before and had to check the comments to be sure.
Not exactly a quality front page post if people are left wondering what the hell you're even talking about.
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"You seriously hadn't heard of the Unity game engine?"
Nope, never have. I too was wondering "Okay, this is big news. So who *are* these people?"
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You seriously hadn't heard of the Unity game engine?
Nope, not a gamer or even that interested in gaming.
SEVEN THOUSAND PEOPLE? (Score:1)
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In the past few years they bought a lot of companies that made specialized products. There's nowhere near that many people directly working on the engine. This is all about consolidating after all the acquisitions.
They have surprisingly few people actually working on the engine. I've dealt with them a lot over the last 5 years or so, and it seems they have 1-2 programmers assigned to each major feature. It's disturbing how often I assume a team is handling something only to hear "The person in charge of tha
Finally (Score:4, Informative)
One of the most bloated companies you've ever seen. They quit despite good hours and good pay because you can't get anything done there, more than half your time is meetings or trying to set up meetings.
Just like with this whole thing forcing Meta to shutter half it's stupid assed metaverse shit and other tech companies to lay off fake workers they hired so managers could brag this is basically a good thing. Now go make something useful!
Overhiring? (Score:2)
Just how deep did they overhire? I would think that a game engine company would have third round of layoffs and it would only amount to 8% of the workforce.
I mean, really? No kidding you need to start running people out the door and closing offices - you probably shouldn't have hired all those people to begin with.
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They didn't overhire. They went public a few years ago, then used the stock to buy up a bunch of other companies. Now they're getting rid of the redundancies.
Re: Overhiring? (Score:2)
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Must be your browser. Works fine for me. It's the usual "Look at us we're so fancy" corporate website. Probably uses a lot of Javascript; do you have Javascript turned off?
7,000? Unity has 7,000 employees? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: 7,000? Unity has 7,000 employees? (Score:1)