- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.ml
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/5340114
ghostarchive
Original Discussion[1]San Francisco police told Polygon that officers responded to Unity’s San Francisco office “regarding a threats incident.” A “reporting party” told police that “an employee made a threat towards his employer using social media.” The employee that made the threat works in an office outside of California, according to the police statement.
You must log in or register to comment.
deleted by creator
Even better than fake, it’s self-inflicted.
The fact that Unity board of directors haven’t fired the CEO shows that they are A-OK with this.
deleted by creator
That, or an easy day off work.
They were working from another office per the article.
I’ve been working on an indie game project for several years now and invested thousands of dollars into it. Fortunately, I had the foresight to use Godot for it, but if I’d used Unity instead I’d be completely screwed right now. Hell, I’m still using the 3.X branch of Godot because I figured that migrating everything to version 4 would be more trouble than it’s worth. Going to a completely new engine at this stage in development would be completely out of the question.
Good luck with your game! Is it something public we could contribute to?
No, it’s a commercial release. I’d been doing everything with placeholder art throughout most of development but I’ve recently commissioned some artists for some professional assets, and I think I’ll have enough to put together some screenshots and a demo video and get a page on Steam, etc. set up within the next few weeks.
It’s a Metroidvania with influences from cinematic platformers (Another World, Flashback) and immersive sims (System Shock, Deus Ex.)
I’m sorry to stifle your expectations, but if you’re working on that project on your own, you’re very unlikely to reach the 200k/year revenue necessary to trigger this new pricing scheme.
Could be stock options as well. I’d be shitty if part of my compensation was stock and I saw blatant mismanagement taking place.
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.
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
C# and Visual Studio are pretty great now, and they don’t lock you into Windows at all. Most of C# is open source.
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
So your experience is that you’ve never heard of Swift and you haven’t heard anything about dotnet since Visual Basic in 2002.
Classic example of experience bias. “Well in my experience this is how the world works”
For what it’s worth, C# is a ECMA standardized language (https://www.ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-334/) and has a linux-based implementation (mono – https://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/).
Though it is hard to overcome the obvious Windows origins of the first implementation.
Mono is becoming outdated now that dotnet just supports Linux.
(It took a lot from mono to do so.)
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.
For me, it’s “learn everything”.
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.
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 agree for the most part, but Excel is just so good.
They say “Excel excels at excel”.
I prefer Google Sheets over Excel but cannot tell you why.
Is it the UI? We use Google sheets at my work and I hate it. Missing formulas & formatting options that I like.
It works fine if you do the basics, but its not as full featured as I want it.
Really? My Google Sheets has so many formulas and conditional formatting. There’s so much I can’t do in Excel that I can do in Sheets :/
Also, adding checkboxes in Excel is a pain lol. They made it so difficult.
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.
Python/pandas, R or a real database depending on the task.
I don’t dislike excel. I dislike what people do with excel. And I dislike vba
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.
Because at the time I needed more the statistical and plotting part. Ggplot was not yet a thing, but R was already pretty nice for plotting and stat.
I was using other, lower-level languages for more intensive tasks, as I was working in high performance computing.
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).
We all started with fortran the old times in hpc and scientific computing. Kids nowadays don’t know the thrill of retro engineering fortran code! /s
I wish I could bribe past me with future cookies…
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.
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.
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.
Why would Unity go against the gamers? They are the one who are going to generate installations.
Maybe Unity thought it would be a good way to make some noise and keep Unity in people’s mouths.
The inverted Oscar Slap, that was supposed to keep the object’s name out of people’s mouths.
Why would anyone be surprised?
That Unity employee could have been put up to make those threats to smear the policy’s detractors for all we know.
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.
True. They also could’ve just lied.
I wonder if/when someone can FOIA the police records. I really want to know now
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 know exactly what they’re doing.
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.
This shit should be illegal. If it isn’t already.
Destroying a company for your own personal gain is why America is falling under
It’s not going to change as long as the only people to vote for are “red neoliberals” or “blue neoliberals”.
The executive was hired by the board or with the board support (CEO usually)
They did exactly what they wanted
deleted by creator
The stakeholders want to cash out. A temporary bump to increase the company’s value with no regard for future prospects is great for them.
$$$
This scheme worked fine for thousands before him, so clearly board members are not an issue, presumably because they benefit from it.
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.
Or he is just fucked up in the head. That is a possibility too.
But they didn’t just get mad (if this is the full story). They sent them a death threat. I think there is a fine line.
I’ll bite: Death threats are not as serious as tanking an entire company and ruining thousands of lives.
(I don’t actually think that; I just feel like playing devil’s advocate today)
Death threats are personal. Corporations can be boycotted.
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.
And I don’t.
They should not be getting death threat from employees. They should be getting legal threats from the SEC, and prosecuted for insider trading.
Should should should should should
Nothing works within our government anymore.
I thought after some initial inflammatory headlines, ultimately the stock sale was a periodically scheduled sale. Has information on that changed?
Fun thing is though, if it’s a regular scheduled thing and you schedule your burn-shit-down announcement until after, wellllll…
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.
Por que no los dos?
Seriously, tf is going on over there at Unity?
People with passion wanted to work on a great project only to see how the vision was corrupted and turned into a monster.
Like, the regular employee isn’t excited about shit changes either.
I don’t think “regular employee” should be used anywhere close to this story lol. Imagine your passion project being building something for someone else and when that gets upset you resort to death theeats against your employer? Jesus.
Edit: Lol when this story first came out the consensus here was that death threats were not cool, now that it’s an employee everyone is sympathetic? Alright, let’s spin this story to fit our bias, why not!
Maybe it’s different people with different opinions replying
That’s ignoring voting though, which is a good way to get the average sentiment of a community regardless of who is doing the commenting. Is it more likely that the community’s average opinion of death threats flipped overnight or that the new information changed the average opinion?
That’s a fair point.
I’m okay so long as they just kill the execs.
Either someone hates to see their company burn to the ground and responded in an extremely immature way, or a higher up went “let’s get this public town hall canceled in a way that people feel sorry for us. SIMMONS! MAKE A DEATH THREAT NOW!”
The former seems the most likely, but I always hold out hope that it’s middle management being a dumbass as corporate’s gonna corporate
Oh, I imagine working conditions there have gotten worse in recent times, too. The kind of leadership that fucks over their clients like this don’t start with those clients. They treat everyone as a resource to be exploited, and employees are the ones they can abused most readily.
The public furor over the pricing model is the opportunity, not the motive.
The CEO and his cronies don’t understand that people work for more than money. They think all people come into work just to do what is required to get money or, if there is ambition, to rise through the ranks and make more money or have ideas that make more money.
However, there are people, especially in projects like this, that are also there because they believe in something. Believe that they can help creating something special that helps people. Unity has it’s dominance among other things because it’s an easy to use and easy to learn tool that enables people to create games that would’ve otherwise had trouble getting into development.
If you’re doing something you love for a company you’re gonna have a bad time.
Are you working something you hate?
A lot of people are fine working what they love for a company, surely there are issues, but not all companies are batshit and ruin their product.
It’s not so black and white though. Passion jobs are often exploited because people will put up with it more and there is higher demand for those types of jobs.
Your best bet is to find something that is interesting and nice enough to keep you content and not bored to death but not so enthralling that you feel like working unpaid overtime or what ever. Bonus points if it’s paid relatively well.
*insert picture of cat in overalls scouting over snow bank
Removed by mod
Or to get out of work.
I highly doubt we’ll get an answer to that question
Didn’t we call this yesterday? I am certain I saw multiple posters on here predicting pretty much exactly this.
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.
Yea this is a textbook PR stunt to look like the victims and people still buy it.
Based
https://youtu.be/KTa6fWgl7us?si=gotlanLsDBHSrT0c Hank: Peggy, it’s for you. It’s Dale. Peggy: Hello Dale Dale: YOU DONT KNOW WHO I AM BUT I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE
Pocket sand!
This has been a hell of a week for Unity.
As requested by the CEO for cover.
That’s gonna be spicy! 🌶️
deleted by creator
