“The customers love you, your colleagues respect and trust you… but upper management have expressed concerns about your comments around flaying them and their families alive.”
I had assumed it was a fabricated threat that came from “inside the house.” Now it looks like it was a real threat from inside. I can’t condone what the employee said, but I can sympathize with their plight. Not to mention that of all Indie devs whose workflows have likely been uprooted by Unity’s selfish move.
Three years ago after trying Unity for a month I chose to learn Godot instead. I see now how right that decision was. Well done past self. Have a future cookie.
Leave one out overnight and tell your present self that they can have it in the future if they do x before tomorrow. If you succeed, then you get a cookie. If you fail, eat the cookie anyway. At least you tried.
For me the rule that has always worked is “bet everything on open-source”. It has always paid off.
When people at uni used Matlab, I learned R (before R-studio even existed) and python. I moved to linux as soon as I could. I never wanted to learn anything MS or Apple specific, or proprietary technologies such as visual studio, excel, vba, c#, SAS. I went on docker ASAP…
Now the world in my field runs on open source tecnologies, and I am the leaders of the “new stuff” wherever company I go.
On the long term learning open source solutions is always a win. Best case scenario it becomes the industry standard, worst case scenario it gives you the know how to master proprietary tools
I was completely unaware! I haven’t been keeping up with the .net / c# ecosystem mostly because my job doesn’t make me. That’s both good and bad, I guess.
When people at uni used Matlab, I learned R (before R-studio even existed) and python.
Good move. MATLAB is trash.
I never wanted to learn anything MS… …or proprietary technologies such as… …excel
Eh, depending on your career Excel is worth a tiny bit of time given its pervasiveness and how powerful it is. But like you say, learning open source will make Excel a piece of cake.
My experience is very different. I know a lot of c# developers, they are locked, even if c# now looks open source. They are locked as a mac user is locked to mac. C# is the most monopolizing language I know. Usually people know more languages, they easily move from one language to the other, from one programming style to the other depending on the task, they can easily learn different tools, different ways of doing stuff. All c# developers I know seriously struggle to move out of their conform zone, that is visual studio. To the level that many even struggle with vscode. And the way of doing things of visual studio is usually good for windows but it is the worst when doing more “modern” things, from ai to kubernetes
That’s a good rule. I only accidentally got into open-source, but now that I know what it is and what it’s all about, I am totally sold on it and will almost always choose open-source over proprietary alternatives.
I don’t use excel other than as a glorified calculator. I don’t use word as well. My department knows and I am pretty open when I do interviews. If the job requires to open more than 1 file Excel every 2 months, I am out. If I need to open a single excel sheet with VBA, they wasted my time.
Excel is fine, is what people do with excel that is not fine
What do you use for spreadsheets, libreoffice? I could see not liking a specific program but I love a spreadsheet and use them constantly. I use libre for ideological reasons but don’t find it as convenient for certain tasks as excel or google sheets.
Preach it! One of my colleagues writes all his machine learning code in Matlab. Brilliant person, has done some incredible research, but can do anything with the code because no organization is going to bring Matlab into its clusters and pay for all the licenses needed to run it. So while plenty of presentations and papers have been written of this research, the actual process of letting people use it takes an additional army of Python developers to translate and test every new feature and enhancement.
This is what happens when you build your career around walled garden platforms. Inevitably, you’ll reach a dead end. Focus on learning tools that enable you the most. Open source will always win in the end, because it will never come with this very heavy piece of baggage that proprietary tools have. This is why the internet is built on Linux and not Windows.
Unity is the same way. When you build your career on a technology that a single company can strip from you on a whim, that’s a big risk. I really hope that Godot and other open source engines take off after this. It will be a painful transition for many developers, but hopefully it’s a lesson very well learned.
The best devs in XYZ language/framework aren’t the ones who are experts in XYZ, but the ones who are just good enough in XYZ and 15 other things that they see what XYZ excels at, and lacks, and how patterns from elsewhere could be adapted to supercharge XYZ’s strengths and mitigate its weaknesses.
I’m curious why you chose R as an alternative to Matlab instead of Scilab. Scilab is specifically designed to be a free and open source alternative to Matlab.
For my thesis I was writing some test software and when deciding which language to use Matlab was immediately ruled out due to the cost (and also the extra cost for the toolkits I’d need). I instead went with Scilab which now means that anybody wanting to reproduce my results can do so freely.
Makes sense, thanks for the response! It is kind of fun to have a mix of the higher level (like R/Scilab) and lower level (which I used Fortran for mine).
Honestly at this point I feel worse for the guy who made the threat than anyone else. Can you imagine what is like working with those sort of bosses with such exploitative tendencies and an utter disregard for an entire industry? They get to ruin countless lives but if anyone gets mad that’s the unacceptable one who is punished.
The number of people being ruined is pretty different though.
I get it, it’s a callous attitude, but I’m wondering if going for civility above anything else is really working out. I’d love for such situations to be settled with a reasonable discussion, but do they ever?
Because a threat is not an attempt…but saying “I’m gonna kill you” is not the same as actually trying to kill you.
Obviously, but you don’t ignore it either. You don’t wait for a DUI to crash before doing something about the threat. Say you’d like to shoot the president and see if the secret service ignores you.
You said that he didn't kill anyone because he got caught first. Which implies that if he didn't get caught he would have actually killed someone.
They really aren't the same. It's a common fallacy on the Internet to lunge straight to the worst possible case and equate that to whatever it is you're arguing, but it really isn't the same. Sure, the secret service won't ignore you if you say you'd like to shoot the president. But will their reaction be the same as if you've smuggled a gun in to a press conference and are spotted actively moving to get near him? Obviously not, because what I said remains true. Simply saying "I'm gonna kill you" is not the same as actually trying to kill you.
It might have been wiser, but seems to me we got to a point we should be thinking of the circumstances.
Besides, that only would have solved their individual problem, IF they even managed it. The way the company is being run would remain the same. How it would impact all the people who rely on that engine would remain the same.
It’s “never acceptable” to threaten someone, but intentionally ruining countless people’s livelihoods is “nothing personal”. Something is off about that.
It is, but all we have right now is Unity’s claim that this is what happened. We don’t even know the content of the threat, who made it, why they made it. All of that context could cast this in a wildly different light. I am very suspicious of Unity the company’s motives here in saying this when we haven’t heard from anyone else.
They absolutely do when it benefits them and they think they can get away with it, I don’t know how you could make such a blanket claim without questioning yourself just a little bit.
And of course it would be negative, but I think there’s a chance the claim casts a negative light on the company, and not on the employee, who is as yet unnamed. As it stands now, any of the following could be true:
The entire story is fiction, made up by Unity to distract from literally everything else about them. Distractions are massively important to companies at times like this, and it’s almost like clockwork that you find them making up distractions when they can’t find a way to put a good spin on the press.
There’s a real employee who posted something on social media, and it was a death threat. The death threat was about the current news. Bad employee, hope they see some consequences. I am doubting this right now because we don’t have any actual evidence of it, and because of point (1). Furthermore, the vagueness of this press announcement and the fact that “you wouldn’t know him, he works in another state” gives them cover . . .
There’s a real employee who posted something negative on social media. It was not a death threat, and is being deliberately misconstrued by Unity to allow them to deploy point (1).
There’s a real death threat posted on social media by someone who sucks. That person is not, in fact, a Unity employee and the announcement to the contrary was either deliberate misinformation or a simple mistaken identity. IDK what this would say about the company, but gamers can be real shitty. If this one is the case, I hope that person sees consequences, but they probably won’t.
There’s a real post on social media framed as a death threat, deliberately planted by someone at Unity to create a distraction, see point (1).
There’s more, and quite frankly it gets tiresome to see people jumping to defend when ploys like this have been the playbook for shitty companies since the invention of the company. I don’t know which of these things will be turn out to be true, but neither do you, and it’s so boring to see someone claiming they know the facts here for sure.
Unity employees have extraordinary working conditions and pay. It sucks that their hard work gets tarnished by stupid executives and poor PR but let’s not paint the employee as a victim here.
A fair point. None of the news articles even give us any real, meaningful details as to what happened so we don’t know if it was just execs who were threatened or if, perhaps, there was a bomb threat or something. I wish we could see a screenshot of the actual threat so we could make a determination.
I can just see their PR team last night planning to spin Unity as a victim after the death threat, in an effort to stop the bleeding, only to find out it was one of their own employees.
A nice company has a great product and is well liked by its customers.
New executive manager comes in and thinks “how can I quickly get a huge bonus”? The answer always is implement new changes that will tuin the company in a year and a half, but that manager will have received his bonuses and is gone, leaving the company in ruins.
I can’t say 100% for sure that this is what happened, but whenever something like this happens, it’s just somebody deciding they want a quick buck
I dont understand how the board allows this behaviour, how do they not interween when an executive clearly is abusing the terms of the contract at the expense of the conpany
They’ve been collecting metrics for months and plugging them into spreadsheets to figure out exactly how profitable this will be, just waiting for the right moment to pull the trigger.
They knew it would be incredibly unpopular. They knew it would likely kill the company one day.
But the spreadsheet doesn’t care about any of that so neither do they. They sold off stocks then made the announcement.
When the changes go live, they’ll squeeze everything they can out of successful projects, who will be left in a position of “losing 50% to Unity is better than losing 100% from pulling the game”.
They’ll stuff their pockets with us much of that money as they can and when the spreadsheet tells them to, they’ll pull the plug and strip the company for parts.
It was the best thing for them and that was all that mattered.
Not to mention money can be made litteraly betting on the stock price swinging from the bad news. Calls and puts plan far enough in advance and automate/preset triggers via broker agreements and can even avoid getting nailed for the obvious insider trading a lot of the time.
They also made the announcement right after an iPhone announcement. Unfortunately, the iPhone was completely underwhelming, so the news didn’t get buried like they probably expected.
Soooooooo it wasn’t “the gamers” making the credible threats after all, even if I wouldn’t put it past the gaming community to make threats of this nature.
That’s an implausible take. Loyal employees wouldn’t go for such a ploy and disgruntled employees … well, conceivably would take such action on their on volition.
I’m not sure if anyone at Unity ever accused the gamers, we all just jumped to the conclusion because that’s exactly the kind of thing the scene would do.
I’m pretty sure back when I made games, it wasn’t Unity employees sending me unhinged tantrums because a number was changed from an 11 to a 12.
I think it is more than just people who plays games. It’s more people who play games and participate in community, which is a smaller percentage, though still probably quite big
…There’s probably an ecological definition for “community” that you could try to transfer over… I think in cases where a large group of individuals don’t actually interact with all of each other either directly or indirectly, but are nonetheless relevant as a grouping because they share a particularly contextually prominent set of traits (E.G. “Plays Video Games”), then “population” might be a more appropriate term (if a bit sterile).
Not even an anonymous threat, which could have been implied by the initial reporting. Riccitiello used this opportunity to cancel a town hall event where he could be confronted with these controversial changes by overblowing the actual threat to his company and his employees. Wow, coming from this sleazebag I'm not surprised.
EDIT
So now, anytime a CEO or representative uses death threats and/or retaliation against employees as an excuse to interrupt company functions it could be considered entirely suspect. He's not the first to do it recently (fuck you u/Spez), but this doesn't help respond against actual credible threats to people from disgruntled users.
And as shit goes down because no one enforces corporate, the rest of us suffer the consequences.
When upper managemeny does stock selloffs before sabotaging the value of the company, it generates distrust in the whole market if they are not prosecuted. Traders stop buying and the economy goes into recession.
I mean I guess you could time it once like that, but if that’s your plan, you could have just sold it all a year before you planned on tanking the stock when you set up the schedule and make more money. Or just not tank the stock.
polygon.com
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