Business Big Tech Layoffs Megathread - Techbros... we got too cocky...

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Since my previous thread kinda-sorta turned into a soft megathread, and the tech layoffs will continue until morale improves, I think it's better to group them all together.

For those who want a QRD:


Just this week we've had these going on:

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But it's not just Big Tech, the vidya industry is also cleaning house bigly:

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All in all, rough seas ahead for the techbros.
 
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Terrifik said:
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An inevitable conclusion. While the game awards trailer killed them early, they would have been killed either way - Game awards put more eyes, good and bad on them. Its the only reason they launched to hit 100k, and the underlying game only retained ~8k. Without it, they probably woulda launched around 10-20k and trail out at 3k. The people the trailer turned off, would have been turned off regardless of marketing because their disgust was towards the idea of yet another live service pvp hero shooter.

The only reasonable choice they've made seems to be the hard cut here. The game has some redeemable elements, but to 'fix' it would basically involve making a whole new game, and they clearly didn't have the runway for that. Frankly, this action suggests they were at the do or die point when they did launch, nothing left in the pipe.
 
Ahriman said:
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That's not really true.

The 40 person dev team weren't all EX-Ubisoft, really just the main core. A lot of people they picked up had never done gamedev before, anywhere, and learned on the job like a lot of indie devs do. I wouldn't want to spread misinformation such as Ubisoft ever having employed 40 talented people out of their 17,000 headcount when the actual number is still somehow lower.
 
Ahriman said:
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I wonder how many more layoffs it'll take before they recognize this basic truth. Game Developers care about their jobs and careers - no duh. Games journalists care about their ego's and their weird culture fights, and they've decided that its a win for them when more of 'their' people work in the industry, and therefore a loss when less do - A weird and irrelevant line to draw. Gamers just want more good games.

I could give less of a shit about how talented someone says they are, how well liked they are by their peers, etc. If someone called every black guy in Activision a Nigger and then released that one indie title that perfectly scratches a niche itch of mine, I'm buy it, I don't give a fuck. I've played games with bad underlying code that were fun, I've played games that were visually poor that still got 100+ hours out of me.

I give no shits about the employment rate of the games industry. Right now, that metric is completely unrelated, if not negatively correlated, to the quality or quantity of products I receive. The 2000-2010 period was infinitely better than today, giving us absolutely shitty games and absolute gems every year. 2007 alone gave us Halo 3, CoD 4, Supreme Commander, Bioshock, C&C 3, Lost Planet, Assassins Creed, The Orange Box, and that's only scraping the surface. Every genre was eating well, every niche and franchise and passion had something to play. That year spawned or redefined so many genres and norms, entire franchises that still define major gaming pillars today trace their lineage back here. There's no years comparable to it afterwards, but many years like it before.

The industry produces less, both in absolute terms, general quality terms, and individual quality hits, than it did in the past. It does this at far higher expense, with far more manpower involved at every stage. Despite this lackluster performance, the universal demand from the industry is more. More time, more money, more people, even more unfinished projects. All the talent in the world doesn't matter if you waste it. All the resume padding in the world doesn't matter if you can't deliver. All the desire to work for someone in the world doesn't matter if nobody wants to hire you. I feel like many of the people in these spaces forget that jobs are someone buying your labor, and they only do it if there's a return. Otherwise, they run out of money and then they definitely can't buy anyones labor anymore.
 
I’ve been interviewing people a lot lately and I thought I might share a few things for kiwis currently on the job market…

1. DO NOT ADMIT TO FRAUD OR OTHER CRIMES IN THE INTERVIEW. “No fucking shit”, you might say. And yet, people still do it all the fucking time. Double check your anecdotes. Fudging stuff to get SOC2? Crime. Abusing software licensing systems to save money? CRIME. Please just don’t tell me any of this. I have to blacklist you if you do.

2. Any valid interview is a personality test plus an IQ test. Why do people make you do leetcode? It’s an IQ test. Why do they ask you about work experience? It’s a personality test. We aren’t allowed to directly administer personality tests and IQ tests because there are, as the euphemism goes, “group differences”. For example, black people have lower IQs on average, women and Asians are too agreeable, etc. So we have to pretend these tests are job related to avoid disparate impact lawsuits.

What does this mean for you? Here is the personality profile of an engineer

Openness to new experiences: high. High as possible. You should be curious and enthusiastic about new things.

Introversion/extraversion: free axis. You can be a frat boy or a shut in, it doesn’t really matter. Be yourself.

Neuroticism: low as possible. You should be calm and not easily stressed.

Agreeableness: moderate. This is important!! You cannot be a doormat and you cannot be a negative Nancy. You must be MODERATELY AGREEABLE. What does that mean in interviews? Push back on things in your anecdotes, but not TOO much. Don’t block progress unless something is illegal or dangerous. This is where most people choke in behavioral interviews.

Conscientiousness: moderately high. You must be nice and get along well with colleagues.

As for the IQ testing portion… not a lot of advice to give there. Understand the “why” of leetcode and all the puzzles. Does it suck? Yes. Is it a bullshit charade? Yes. Is it necessary? Also yes.
 
Terrifik said:
Speed run completed
Terrifik

💰 Grifter Post in thread '"Mad at the Internet"'

Going to crosspost to tech thread.
Its done , Jeff killed atudio in about less time than concord.
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Edit for quote
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Just like ashs of creation .
The road map
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Reactions:Informative x 3 Lol x 2 Like x 1
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What the devil is High guard? This is the first I've heard of it.
 
Ahriman said:
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Exactly. There is a HUGE talent glut and you can have your pick of ex R*, Ubisoft and now Sony devs who probably aren't woke retards/troons/annoying fat women.
Tanner Glass said:
That's not really true.

The 40 person dev team weren't all EX-Ubisoft, really just the main core. A lot of people they picked up had never done gamedev before, anywhere, and learned on the job like a lot of indie devs do. I wouldn't want to spread misinformation such as Ubisoft ever having employed 40 talented people out of their 17,000 headcount when the actual number is still somehow lower.
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This, the days of multi hundred people dev teams is rapidly going away apart from the few absolute juggernaut franchises
Duane Dibbley said:
GTA6 will be the straw that breaks the back of the industry.
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No.... It'll be Star Citizen

GTA6 will launch in a fully playable state with GTA Online 2.0 printing money day 1
 
Fortune: Sam Altman says the quiet part out loud, confirming some companies are ‘AI washing’ by blaming unrelated layoffs on the technology
As debate continues over AI’s true impact on the labor force, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said some companies are engaging in “AI washing” when it comes to layoffs, or falsely attributing workforce reductions to the technology’s impact.
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“I don’t know what the exact percentage is, but there’s some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, and then there’s some real displacement by AI of different kinds of jobs,” Altman told CNBC-TV18 at the India AI Impact Summit on Thursday.

AI washing has gained traction as emerging data on the tech’s impact on the labor market tells a muddied, inconclusive story about how the technology is or will destroy human jobs—or if it has yet to touch them.

A study published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, for example, found that of thousands of surveyed C-suite executives across the U.S., UK, Germany and Australia, nearly 90% said AI had no impact on workplace employment over the last three years following the late-2022 release of ChatGPT.

However, prominent tech leaders like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have warned of a white-collar bloodbath of AI potentially wiping out 50% of entry-level office jobs. Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski suggested this week the buy-now, pay-later firm would reduce its 3,000-person workforce by one-third by 2030 in part because of the acceleration of AI. Around 40% of employees expect to follow Siemiatkowski’s lead in culling staff down the line as a result of AI, according to the 2025 World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report.

Altman clarified he anticipates more job displacement as a result of AI, as well as the emergence of new roles complementing the technology.

“We’ll find new kinds of jobs, as we do with every tech revolution,” he said. “But I would expect that the real impact of AI doing jobs in the next few years will begin to be palpable.”
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Signs of AI washing​


Data from a recent Yale Budget Lab report suggests Altman and Amodei’s vision of mass worker displacement from AI is not certain and is not yet here. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey, the research found no significant differences in the rate of change of occupations mix or length of unemployment for individuals with jobs that have high exposure to AI from the release of ChatGPT through November 2025. The numbers suggested no significant AI-related labor changes at this juncture.

“No matter which way you look at the data, at this exact moment, it just doesn’t seem like there’s major macroeconomic effects here,” Martha Gimbel, executive director and cofounder of the Yale Budget Lab, told Fortune earlier this month.

Gimbel attributed the practice of AI washing to companies passing off diminished margins and revenue from a failure to effectively navigate cautious consumers and geopolitical tensions to AI. WebAI founder and CEO David Stout also wrote in a commentary piece for Fortune that tech founders are facing increased pressure to justify exorbitant and continued investment in AI, which is the reason why many have created narratives of AI disrupting labor and the economy through predictions of mass worker displacement.

This era of toe-tapping in wait for the effects of AI to take hold rhymes with the 1980s IT boom, according to Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok. Nearly 40 years ago, economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow observed little productivity gains in the PC age, despite prognostications of a productivity surge, and Slok sees a similar pattern today.

“AI is everywhere except in the incoming macroeconomic data,” he wrote in a blog post last week.
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Evidence of AI’s impact on jobs​


Slok also said this lull in AI-driven economic impact could follow a J-curve of an initial slowdown in performance obscured by early mass spending before an exponential surge in productivity and labor changes.

Economist and Stanford University’s Digital Economy Lab director Erik Brynjolfsson said in a Financial Times op-ed recent labor data may be telling a new story of AI indeed impacting productivity and labor. He noted a decoupling of job growth and GDP growth reflected in the latest revised job numbers: Last week’s job report revised down job gains to just 181,000, despite fourth-quarter GDP tracking up 3.7%. Brynjolfsson’s own analysis revealed a 2.7% year-over-year productivity jump last year, which he attributed to AI’s productivity benefits beginning to peek through.

Brynjolfsson published a landmark study last year showing a 13% relative decline in employment for early-career employees with jobs with high levels of AI exposure. Most experienced workers, meanwhile, saw employment levels that remained stable or grew.

“The updated 2025 U.S. data suggests we are now transitioning out of this investment phase into a harvest phase,” he wrote in the FT, “where those earlier efforts begin to manifest as measurable output.”
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:thinking:
 
Some big boy on LinkedIn said that writing code wasn't the issue, which is why producing more code faster with AI isn't gonna fix shit, especially when you promptly fire anyone who may have the brains to make AI do the proper things. One thing I've noticed in game dev is that at no point do people talk wage, ever. It's rights, Anti-AI and 'getting to work for Blizzard'. Do devs make fuck all? They tend to live in the most expensive areas of the west coast yet none flaunt their wealth as most normal people do. It's the only field in which people would take a pay cut just to work for a big company, whereas I'd imagine working for a big company like Google you'd be paid better than the average tech group goon sesh that'll live 5 months.
 
⋖ cørdion ⋗ said:
Some big boy on LinkedIn said that writing code wasn't the issue, which is why producing more code faster with AI isn't gonna fix shit, especially when you promptly fire anyone who may have the brains to make AI do the proper things. One thing I've noticed in game dev is that at no point do people talk wage, ever. It's rights, Anti-AI and 'getting to work for Blizzard'. Do devs make fuck all? They tend to live in the most expensive areas of the west coast yet none flaunt their wealth as most normal people do. It's the only field in which people would take a pay cut just to work for a big company, whereas I'd imagine working for a big company like Google you'd be paid better than the average tech group goon sesh that'll live 5 months.
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Actual talented devs go and spin up their own studios, so the 'getting to work for Blizzard' crew are generally are what's left over and are paid accordingly.
 
⋖ cørdion ⋗ said:
One thing I've noticed in game dev is that at no point do people talk wage, ever. It's rights, Anti-AI and 'getting to work for Blizzard'. Do devs make fuck all? They tend to live in the most expensive areas of the west coast yet none flaunt their wealth as most normal people do. It's the only field in which people would take a pay cut just to work for a big company, whereas I'd imagine working for a big company like Google you'd be paid better than the average tech group goon sesh that'll live 5 months.
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Some of them are trying to fight for wages, but they're not entirely stupid despite general sentiment, and they recognize that investors are nervous about the high cost of game development, which is almost entirely salary costs. They've instead hyperfixated on trying to unionize the entire industry, and that somewhere along that stack they'll somehow find a magic pile of money to pay everyone a lot better with - Maybe they think they can bully investors out of it, as if the investor needs a game specifically more than they need a general rate of return. Maybe they think they can leach it out of the C suite salaries, but the fastest way to get a shitty executive team is to try and fleece a smart one. Its a naive thought for people who makes games that lose a hundred million dollars to think that there's a big pile of money they can hoover up, but that same kind of failure is also why they're not getting anywhere. They tend to see the most success pushing union moves in studios that are struggling and the staff are desperately looking for a lifeline, and studios that are struggling tend to die pretty quick, often before the union has a chance to really form. Gives game journos plenty of fodder to try and pretend its all union bashing, until you look and see a given studios total ten year financials are tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in the hole.
 
Kuritan Deplorable said:
investors are nervous about the high cost of game development, which is almost entirely salary costs
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Any idea what the breakdown is? Yes, improving graphics and increasing game length is going to result in more man-hours going into a game, but licensing costs for the various engines/assets that go into modern games have got to be rising too.
 
UncleTusky said:
Any idea what the breakdown is? Yes, improving graphics and increasing game length is going to result in more man-hours going into a game, but licensing costs for the various engines/assets that go into modern games have got to be rising too.
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Couldn't say, at the hundred plus head level you're not talking the off the shelf engine terms or asset stores, you're talking custom licensing agreements and hiring support studios to produce assets. Which is functionally just adding headcount under a different label. The fixed costs for an engine are so irrelevant compared to headcount costs that the main driver of the switch off custom engines into standard ones like Unreal is because most people have experience with them, so can get up to speed right away when you suddenly surge the team size. A secondary concern tends to be the time it takes to modernize an in-house engine, but it mostly seems to be a draw as your engine devs just spend time customizing the off the shelf engine anyway - this is very normal, and very labor intensive.

It really does all come back to headcount and man hours, there is very little in the way of fixed costs for game development. For game dev, Unreal doesn't even offer per seat in their 'public' deals, its all royalties, unless you negotiate a custom agreement that states otherwise, but royalties are a $0 up front cost, so from a cost savings perspective, it really can't be beat. The software for the artists is going to be coming to less than $3k/year, depends whether they're a 2d, 3d or audio artist. If you could do the unthinkable and halve those fixed costs, you'd need to have a hundred employees to add up a 150k saving to afford saving one persons job, or bringing on employee 101.

Meanwhile, in manufacturing, you can reengineer a part to use less material, or redesign it in such a way that it can be made with one or two fewer machining passes. You can find a way to make something out of a cheaper type of plastic, or source raw material from a lower bid supplier. They can actually put pressure on different elements of their fixed costs, and that fixed cost makes up a much bigger portion of the total expense. Game dev doesn't have any of that kind of level that it can pull, assuming you ignore the illusion of AI. The entirety of their product is people creating things from digital nothingness.
 
⋖ cørdion ⋗ said:
Some big boy on LinkedIn said that writing code wasn't the issue, which is why producing more code faster with AI isn't gonna fix shit, especially when you promptly fire anyone who may have the brains to make AI do the proper things. One thing I've noticed in game dev is that at no point do people talk wage, ever. It's rights, Anti-AI and 'getting to work for Blizzard'. Do devs make fuck all? They tend to live in the most expensive areas of the west coast yet none flaunt their wealth as most normal people do. It's the only field in which people would take a pay cut just to work for a big company, whereas I'd imagine working for a big company like Google you'd be paid better than the average tech group goon sesh that'll live 5 months.
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Yes. As a dev, we make fuck all compared to normal software engineers. Everyone knows that working in the industry is basically paying a “fun tax” because you get to make games, which is supposed to be fun and creative. Maybe back in the day but nowadays everything is purely based on marketing and business analysis. The discrepancy is getting paid 25-50% compared to someone at Google, Apple, etc. at the same skill level. Designers make 20%+ less than us (I am unaware as to how much artists make, I believe it is somewhere in between). Plus, despite the lower pay, they crunch and burn you out with unpaid overtime. It’s no wonder all the top tier talent leaves. They either find jobs in actual tech or go off to be indie devs.

There are some fame companies that pay better, Riot specifically comes to mind. Many of the “legends” of yesteryear tend to pay the worst, like Blizzard. I don’t know if they raised their rates, but they used to be about 20% below the medium.

As for why people fight for “rights” rather than pay? I think it’s that most of us are just so burnt out and defeated that the only ones making a stink are young politically active leftist types. The kind that don’t really do their work and others are forced to pick up the slack for them. The biggest ones also tend to be in design. They don’t have skills that can be transferred. So, despite their shit pay, they’re still getting paid more than if they had to get a job outside of games. Most engineers just want to put their heads down, get their work done, and maybe at some point jump ship to someone who pays better.
 
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