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.
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.
This is the problem with the shareholder mentality that’s ruining a lot of products and services. They don’t give a damn about the longevity of the company. They only care about money now; and as soon as things go sour, they’ll sell their shares and move on to the next company.
Taking your company public is like giving it cancer
There should be law forcing major players in the market to commit for 10 years + when they buy shares above a certain threshold and when those 10+ years pass they should be forced to justify when selling. Might be dumb but just saying as things are the market/system will just rot on the daily. Shits corrupted to the core imo.
deleted by creator
Honestly, they’re probably in on it. Greed is all this is.
Absolutely, that’s why they all sold their stocks before they announced this
I know that execs have time windows they have to be in to buy and sell their stocks, and it has to be planned months in advance, but a massive TOS change like this doesn’t happen overnight or without buy in all the way to the top. They absolutely planned this, and I hope the SEC nails their asses to the wall over it.
yeah I’ll admit i don’t know much about how all this stufd works, but thanks to others i also found out about these rules. But imo those time windows are absolutely useless in preventing insider trading if they plan to do both things in the same time window anyways
That, or an easy day off work.
They were working from another office per the article.
I’m sure they’re gonna be getting many days off work now
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wish I could bribe past me with future cookies…
“an employee made a threat towards his employer using social media”
Wow. That’s… probably against their internal social media policy.
HR won’t take kindly to that on their annual performance review.
“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.”
“let’s see…areas for improvement. 'Fewer death threats towards co-workers”."
There won’t be another annual review if the company stops existing
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.
What even is “the gaming community” anymore? Basically everyone except boomers play games.
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
Removed by mod
Or to get out of work.
I highly doubt we’ll get an answer to that question
Seems like unity knew it was an employee from the start and told the police as much, so probably the second
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?
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.
Be passionate about your work! Right up to the point where you start disagreeing with how I am bastardising it… then you can fuck off.
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.
They are rebranding to Disunity.
Division, ironically
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.
Then why don’t they look for work at another company?
Making death threats is still a major dick move regardless of the circumstances.
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.
You can’t just solve a company’s culture by yourself.
You can either convince enough people to unionize, or you can save yourself.
I’m pretty sure killing is a worse way to ruin someone’s life.
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?
Not sending death threats is the bar set for civility these days?
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.
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.
Yeah it’s even worse than that. They knew it was from one of their employees but chose not to release that information because “PR”.
They can go spin on it.
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
Didn’t we call this yesterday? I am certain I saw multiple posters on here predicting pretty much exactly this.
Yeah, it sounded weird that it would be a gamer or developer, much less any “fan” of unity.
Yea this is a textbook PR stunt to look like the victims and people still buy it.
Based
And death threat pilled
As always is the case. It’s a pr stunt
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!
As requested by the CEO for cover.
This has been a hell of a week for Unity.
