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So Riccitiello said no layoffs were coming and then in less than a month started layoffs. That is gross incompetence. Not only does the Unity lose productivity

So Riccitiello said no layoffs were coming and then in less than a month started layoffs. That is gross incompetence. Not only does the Unity lose productivity to the distraction this now causes it puts Unity in a bad light. It shows that Riccitiello has no foresight into Unity's financial situation. Or he's just a fucking liar. Either way he should be removed before does more damage. Kick 'em to the curb and get someone competent. Unity is too good of a product to be saddled with Riccitiello.

miked85 4y ago
I would be surprised if any CEO would ever actually say there are layoffs until they happen.
- danaris 4y ago
  As true as that may be, I think it's indicative of some fairly deep-seated problems in our culture, and it very much needs to change.
  - lbotos 4y ago
    This sounds more combative then I mean, so do take it in the best light: In what ways do you think it can be different?
    - danaris 4y ago
      Well, I have a short answer and a long answer to this. The long answer would be more or less an essay, and involve a lot of fairly far-left (at least from an American perspective) views, like "we should be basing our society and our work culture on the benefit of the workers, and of all humanity, rather than the corporate overlords" and "we need to radically restructure our corporate hierarchies, which would lead to it being much less likely that there would either be "layoffs" as we know them now, or a small executive class that could conceal their imminent occurrence from the rest of the company". But for today, I think I will stick with the short answer, which points in the same direction, but is smaller in scope. I think it can be most clearly expressed in two parts: First, we need to work on reducing the toxic levels of deceit and secrecy in our corporate culture. Hide everyone's salary, hide the metrics we're evaluated on, hide how poorly the company is doing—all of this is designed to make things either more convenient or more profitable for the executives and shareholders, at the expense of the workers, and at the expense of basic honesty. I'm not saying everyone needs to be 100% open about everything all the time; that's fairly obviously too extreme. But the company itself (and, by extension, its executives and other core officials) needs to be more transparent with its workers, especially for as long as it is effectively their sole source of income. Second (and very much related), we need to find ways to break the mindset that the stock price is all. An awful lot of the deceit and secrecy—and, in fact, many of the other detrimental behaviors of companies and their executives—stem from the fact that the people at the top are obsessed with making sure the share price keeps growing. I think the way the stock price is treated by execs—and the stock/option-heavy compensation packages they often get—were probably based in something helpful and rational to start with (operating under the assumption that a higher stock price means a healthier company), but to the extent that that's true, it's fallen victim to Goodhart's Law ("any measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure"). How do we do these things? Haven't a clue, honestly. Our system is majorly messed up at every level right now, and chock full of feedback loops, so nearly anywhere you try to start will be resisted strongly without first improving things somewhere else...but conversely, any place you can make a difference will start to make it a little easier to improve things elsewhere.
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  Musk announced Twitter layoffs happening - and he hasn't even finalized the purchase of the company.
  - skeeter2020 4y ago
    I think it's a mistake to look to people like Musk for good examples of empathetic, compassionate management that can be broadly applied. Ditto for Jobs (whose crown he's apparently taken up as the poster child for wanna-be successful sociopaths)
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  It's counterfactual.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I've seen it be done, either publicly or privately; in smaller companies I've even seen people be told "you will be laid off at X date if we don't get Y funding" as a heads-up; especially when the management doesn't want to lay people off.
  - arlcode 4y ago
    Yeah had that happen and it was clear why (small company closed down) Starting from 6 months the CEOs explained how things are and what would need to happen in order to avoid it. Two months prior they layed everyone off (including themselves) which is double the legally required minimum period. In the end we closed down the office together and parted ways. Most people had offers lined up and at least one colleague of mine ended up with a former customer. The CEO "advertised" him during the final call with the customer.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Yeah, I've been "laid off" by the same person three times in my career; each time he worked to hire me back as soon as he had a new venture going.
- senectus1 4y ago
  I worked for a mining company that was bought out, then announced there would be restructures and layoffs. it took 9 months for them to start.. by the time they did moral was so low they could not hire for new positions or replace needed skilled labor. the sites name was mud state wide. (Western Australia). I never want to go through that experience again. I got out after 8 month by asking for voluntary redundancy.
- gumby 4y ago
  Actually if you have more than 100 employees in a US location (which Unity does) you are required to give 60 days' notice per the WARN act. https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/termination/plantclosings https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/termination/plantclosings
  - yakak 4y ago
    They pay out 60 days of notification pay in their severance packages and still don't notify. Technically, you can refuse that and I would guess that you would remain a worker who isn't allowed in the office.
  - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
    Their description here is misleading. Even if the employer is large enough to be covered, WARN act requirements only apply to "plant closings" where some particular site is shut down or "mass layoffs" which have to include either 33% of the people at a site with 150+ people or 500 people overall. Their detailed worker guide makes this clearer: https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/Layoff/pdfs/WorkerWARN2003.pdf https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/Layoff/pdfs/Worke...
    - labcomputer 4y ago
      WARN was written before remote work was common. I'm very curious to see how WARN is interpreted by the courts for remote workers. There is no case law as far as I know, and a quick ctrl-f of that DoL PDF for "remote" has no results. For example, is each remote worker considered to be working at a different "plant" (their home)? If so, it seems like the WARN act could never be triggered for remote workers. So a loophole is that fully remote workers don't get WARN protections. That seems to clearly violate the intent of the law, which is that reasonably-large businesses should give advance warning of layoffs. Or, are all the remote workers collectively considered to be working at one "remote plant"? In that case, WARN would be triggered if a company of, say, 20k people lays off as few as 3 remote workers in each state. That seems silly also. What about hybrid workers, where 1000 people "report to" or are "based at" one office, but nobody ever actually shows up (or maybe they do, but only for team-building exercises twice a year)? Are those workers truly "working at" that office site (and thus covered by WARN), or are they working at 1000 independent sites (and thus not covered)?
- spookthesunset 4y ago
  I've been in a startup where they gave advanced warning about layoffs. One major side effect is that productivity goes to sub zero because of the uncertainty of it all. After going through that, I can see reasons for both keeping people in the dark and giving advanced warning. Layoffs (or re-orgs for that matter) are never easy.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  IBM and HP in their waning years were pretty upfront in quarterly reports that their older staff were a liability and they were actively working to manage them out through early retirements, layoffs, etc.
  - mathattack 4y ago
    Is that legal?
    - qbasic_forever 4y ago
      No and there are currently investigations ongoing: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/02/12/ibm-accused-of-ageism-older-workers-are-dinobabies-who-should-be-made-an-extinct-species/?sh=1442d482129c https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/02/12/ibm-accuse... Companies have many ways they obfuscate or hide layoffs of older workers though, there is very little legal protection as long as the company isn't so stupid and brazen as IBM (i.e. leaves a trail of evidence in emails).
- Sharlin 4y ago
  In Europe it’s commonly illegal to lay off people before negotiations (which may sometimes be rather one-sides but nevertheless there are rituals to observe).
midislack 4y ago
Listen you don't tell people there are going to be layoffs. It's bad management.
- jackmott42 4y ago
  That is the common thinking but perhaps you are all just wrong about that.
  - wowokay 4y ago
    Agreed. Otherwise they will likely lose another 5% due to people wanting to get out of there. If he had something to the effect of, there may be layoffs we just don’t know where yet, here’s how we are approaching it and how we plan to let people go. They may still lose some people but at least it doesn’t feel like a sinking ship you need to get away from.
- avh02 4y ago
  yes, but saying "there are no layoffs coming" and then laying people off cheapens the meaning and trust of "there are no layoffs coming" - then "there are no layoffs coming" doesn't mean anything and people panic anyway.
  - nathanaldensr 4y ago
    Right. People learn the code language and learn that others lie, then look to other observations (e.g., insider word from friendly executives, market reports, etc.) to determine the truth. In the end, people are laid off anyway, except now they've learned to mistrust those in authority.
  - cecilpl2 4y ago
    Savvy folks know that no CEO will ever say "yes, we are planning a layoff", and so they know that "there are no layoffs coming" really gives you no information. Naive and younger people will believe it though, so there is still value in saying it. The key is to listen to the case the CEO makes. "There are no layoffs coming, I promise" is a signal that layoffs are coming. "There are no layoffs coming. We are growing X% YOY and hiring pace of Y% has not slowed. Yada yada yada." is a signal that it's true.
skeeter2020 4y ago
"might be lay-offs in the next month or so, not sure... and don't know how many people will be impacted; stay tuned! In the meantime please keep doing your job as if nothing has changed." How would this be better? I saw first hand the damage caused by 4 hours between pre-announcing lay-offs and completing them. Weeks would mean the entire company comes to a stand-still. There is no "right" answer in this situation; it's a mistake to look for one. The distraction comes regardless and the goal of a decent leader is to minimize it while trying to be thoughtful to those leaving, but you're still taking away someone's job; you can't make that a positive experience.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  In Europe it is common for multiple months of high pitch negotiations between "wanting to lay off" and layoffs. Usually without any riots or panic. I don't think a sudden layoff at any time is an assurance for workers in the sense that it is better to pretend everything is Ok until it isn't.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    In many European countries, employees have to give notice periods before quitting. They can't just not show up and say I quit. I have seen one month per year of employment topping out at 6 months
    - meheleventyone 4y ago
      This is usually negotiable if you're leaving as well, it's not in the companies interest for the most part to keep you hanging around past wrapping current things up.
    - Frost1x 4y ago
      Outside of explicit contract law you may be tangled up in, the US doesn't have explicit law and most employees are classified as "at-will" (basically, dependent upon where the business views this freedom as beneficial or non-beneficial to itself). Since businesses haven't managed to lobby such legislation requirements in for workers to give notice (largely because at-will is typically beneficial to them) and just use contract law where it matters (public personalities, etc.) you can just show up and quit legally, without legal repercussions. With that said, cultural protections have been put into place under job history in the application process. If I were to show up and without a very good reason tell me employer I quit effective immediately, I can do so unlike the European cases described. But is this really freedom or an illusion of freedom? Many in the US are living paycheck-to-paycheck to survive. They're financially leveraged and can't really just quit, they need to line up an opportunity and have minimal savings to protect them. For them they can make the choice but it's a bad choice for them and most of the time they won't. Businesses know this and leverage it. The pandemic labor market offered a shift in this giving some bargaining power back to labor but it seems to be clawing right back to businesses again, probably for quite some time. In what are classified as more professional positions, you're expected to give 2-weeks notice. Many employers request references and if you're honest during your interview, leaving without notice in most cases will require a good explanation and a competent interviewer, otherwise you're a red flag no hire almost immediately and there's a pool of others behind you without said red flag. So, I could quit tomorrow, but I'd have to be very careful with my next employer as to how I go about referencing my previous work, why I left, etc. In most cases I can't really just show up and quit, I need to give notice and wait. Perhaps that's not as long as some European countries closer to the order of 4 weeks IIRC but it's not as free as it might appear to be for the majority of laborers.
guardiangod 4y ago
>That is gross incompetence. Back in another life I was once an intern at a well known, but past-its-prime tech company. The company announced a (1st time ever) layoff in the morning and I got see the guards carry the boxes from cubicles. The VP of our department (responsible for much of the core technology of our products) sent out an email at around 11AM telling everyone we need to focus and that there won't be any more cut to our department, since we are central to our products. Come 2PM and all of us received an email saying that the VP has resigned from his position effectively immediately. Imagine what this does to the employee moral.
synu 4y ago
Is this the same Riccitiello from EA? If so he laid me off twice in two different layoffs. Maybe he is a guy they bring in for that sort of thing?
- pteraspidomorph 4y ago
  Seems so. Knew the name sounded familiar.
- munificent 4y ago
  > Is this the same Riccitiello from EA? Yup. I was at EA during his "leadership" too. Never got the axe during the couple of layoffs we went through, but had a lot of good friends who did. His hiring style seemed to be "open the floodgates periodically and let everyone in, then cull the ones we don't like after a couple of years". Massively demoralizing. I would never work for a company with him at the helm.
  - synu 4y ago
    I always worked in the shared services groups (publishing) that they kept deciding they didn’t want, and then changed their mind.
- deleted 4y ago
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- pandaman 4y ago
  He has been with Unity since when he had been finally kicked out of EA for good. He is a partner in the PE firm (Elevation Partners), which likely had been behind making Unity public.
altdataseller 4y ago
When did he say that no layoffs were coming?
ffhhj 4y ago
> It shows that Riccitiello has no foresight into Unity's financial situation. The sudden lay off could hint that there is a deeper and more complex problem going on. They invested in tools that must be integrated in a their engine as soon as possible to recover this money from movie makers. So they increased their workforce, but their technical debt would cause a large resistance, making much of the workforce ineffective. They just realized it. And the deeper problem is that transforming these tools into an appealing work flow that brings clients is a very hard problem that isn't too technical, but more like a "way" in the philosophical/psychological fields.
- timmytokyo 4y ago
  Anyone who is an active developer of a Unity-based game knows there are a lot of struggles happening within that company right now, many of them technical and many of them related to poor project management. It's reflected in their product, and it's not even a close call. (See their recent efforts around ECS and their new rendering pipelines.)
rambojohnson 4y ago
Unity is the iTunes of game engines.
- dyingkneepad 4y ago
  Can you explain why?
plasticchris 4y ago
They always say this, always do your own due diligence. If you have any stock or options look for the section 702 disclosure with the balance sheet and calculate the runway yourself.
H8crilA 4y ago
You're right but that's gross competence, not gross incompetence. The job of the CEO is to keep the firm going, not to make employees happy. Most of the time the two coincide, but sometimes they don't. The CEO works for the board of directors/shareholders, not for the employees.
- l30n4da5 4y ago
  > The job of the CEO is to keep the firm going, not to make employees happy lol. keep pissing off employees and see how long you can 'keep the firm going'. that mindset makes no damn sense.
  - H8crilA 4y ago
    Who said anything about keeping on doing that? It is not the right thing most of the time.
- tomc1985 4y ago
  This sort of bullshit is exactly what causes companies to go downhill. Strong leadership would have handled these layoffs much, much differently, to say nothing to the fact that a good CEO should have been able to avoid them entirely. Riccitiello needs to go. As another commenter put it, Unity is too important of a product for its stewards to be languishing like this.
  - scruple 4y ago
    Not disagreeing with you, but I still think that it doesn't go hard enough to the point of "strong leadership." And I consider leadership here to be not just the CEO but all of the top-level management. Wouldn't strong leadership have prevented the need for layoffs at all?
- jandrese 4y ago
  > The job of the CEO is to keep the firm going, not to make employees happy. Sociopathic CEOs actually believe this. Maintaining employee morale is crucial to the long term health of a company. Ignore it and you suffer a slow death from brain drain and disaffected employees. "They pretend to care about us, I pretend to care about my job."
indymike 4y ago
> So Riccitiello said no layoffs were coming and then in less than a month started layoffs. This isn't a statement of how good or bad of a leader Riccitiello is. Sorry, but "we're thinking about maybe, possibly doing some layoffs if whatever" is a really bad way to run a company. The answer is, and always should be, "No layoffs" until the decision is made to do layoffs, and then you do it as fast as the law allows to very quickly clear uncertainty. Layoffs suck, but telling everyone, "hey, I'm thinking we might do a round of layoffs next week" is a great way to make the damage far worse.
- deleted 4y ago
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UkrainianJew 4y ago
>That is gross incompetence. Not necessarily. As a CEO, you suddenly see your sales plunge. You run the numbers and think: is it just a panic/fluke? Is it going to bounce back? Are we losing the sales to a new competitor? You eventually conclude that the drop is due to a market downturn. You realize that you have a runway of 1 year, and cannot raise more capital. Se, your choices: 1. You keep cruising like nothing happened. The sales may bounce back within a year (in which case it was a good decision). They may decline further 6 months in (dropping your runway to 3 months). Or they may stabilize at the new level for a while (so when the runway reaches 6 months, you think again). 2. You fire X% of the people. Your runway is now Y years. If the sales bounce back earlier, it's a hassle to re-hire, but is doable. If the cooler market lasts longer, you may need to reiterate. Making the correct decision is always a guess. Like trying to figure out whether to buy or sell a stock. You observe the market, you try to understand, and then you decide. As a CEO, if someone asks you on the spot "are layoffs planned", any answer rather than a complete denial will be treated as a "yes": people with better offers will leave, other will start looking for jobs. If in a month the sales bounce back, you lost your bet.
scifibestfi 4y ago
It's impossible to know that without being privy to inside details. What if they had a major deal lined up that unexpectedly fell through? Things like that can change "no layoffs" to "4% layoffs" literally overnight. Companies are pivoting quickly at this point with the shifting tides and contagion happens fast.
WalterBright 4y ago
I remember a business that had a branch office in another state. The CEO thought he'd be a good guy and told them that the office would be closed in 3 months after the Christmas vacation and they'd all be laid off then. The employees stopped working and looted everything in the building. Reportedly, trucks backed up to the loading dock where everything was carried off. They all got their paychecks, but they hadn't done any work in the 3 months and the building was picked clean.
- blevin 4y ago
  This makes me wonder if there are any books collecting management mistakes. A lot of leaders have to pick this up on the job by making their own blunders. I understand that some MBA programs may attempt to look at case studies, but the ones I’ve read have seemed about anodyne strategy things rather than human-level, savvy operator, street smarts & empathy stuff. Regardless, the winter holidays are clearly a time of year to be extra compassionate and considerate; it’s definitely no good to have layoffs right before xmas. I wonder if the biz had insurance coverage for getting looted this way. Or maybe that physical stuff didn’t have much remaining value anyway.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    The idea that insurance pays so theft doesn't cost the business anything is false. The insurance rates will be raised so you'll wind up paying the bill anyway. Insurance is a good idea to cover catastrophic loss, but if you can self-insure for other things, you'll be way better off.
    - blevin 4y ago
      Makes sense. My thought was just that the business probably had some sort of commercial property loss coverage that might have covered that case (even though -EV). I’d guess a far more common case of employee theft (retail shrinkage / fell-off-the-truck) is self-insured, as some kind of operating provision.
  - smugma 4y ago
satellite2 4y ago
I had the exact same scenario in my previous company. I wonder if some execs imagine that the employees are cattle that you're supposed to calm down before the execution.
- mym1990 4y ago
  Execs don't interface with employees on a level where there is much emotion going on, and they probably see this as a benefit. This is par for the course. Athletes won't ever say 'I am moving to a new team' a month before a deal is inked. Employees won't go to their manager and say 'I am thinking of leaving in about a month, not sure yet tho'...they give the 2 week notice and peace out. This is all extremely strategic, anyone who thinks the average exec really gives a damn needs to wake up. There are certainly exceptions, I have yet to see it.
  - satellite2 4y ago
    No, but they don't make promises that the opposite is going to happen. | This is all extremely strategic If the strategy is to show your business partners that you are unreliable
standardUser 4y ago
That's simply how layoffs work. If we want a different way, we should support stronger labor laws.
slowhand09 4y ago
Consider this. Yesterday, Pres Biden said unemployment was at historic lows, and the US economy was extremely strong. Nothing to worry about. So... is he lying? Or stupid? If CEOs believe his words and push forward accordingly, but the actual open market and business environment signal the opposite, what do you do? If you believe the market and business environment, start cost cutting measures and implement austerity protocols, the community vilifies you. If you continue business as usual, but market demand tanks, costs skyrocket, and product accumulates on shelves and loading docks, you'll go out of business.

miked85 4y ago

I would be surprised if any CEO would ever actually say there are layoffs until they happen.

danaris 4y ago
As true as that may be, I think it's indicative of some fairly deep-seated problems in our culture, and it very much needs to change.
- lbotos 4y ago
  This sounds more combative then I mean, so do take it in the best light: In what ways do you think it can be different?
  - danaris 4y ago
    Well, I have a short answer and a long answer to this. The long answer would be more or less an essay, and involve a lot of fairly far-left (at least from an American perspective) views, like "we should be basing our society and our work culture on the benefit of the workers, and of all humanity, rather than the corporate overlords" and "we need to radically restructure our corporate hierarchies, which would lead to it being much less likely that there would either be "layoffs" as we know them now, or a small executive class that could conceal their imminent occurrence from the rest of the company". But for today, I think I will stick with the short answer, which points in the same direction, but is smaller in scope. I think it can be most clearly expressed in two parts: First, we need to work on reducing the toxic levels of deceit and secrecy in our corporate culture. Hide everyone's salary, hide the metrics we're evaluated on, hide how poorly the company is doing—all of this is designed to make things either more convenient or more profitable for the executives and shareholders, at the expense of the workers, and at the expense of basic honesty. I'm not saying everyone needs to be 100% open about everything all the time; that's fairly obviously too extreme. But the company itself (and, by extension, its executives and other core officials) needs to be more transparent with its workers, especially for as long as it is effectively their sole source of income. Second (and very much related), we need to find ways to break the mindset that the stock price is all. An awful lot of the deceit and secrecy—and, in fact, many of the other detrimental behaviors of companies and their executives—stem from the fact that the people at the top are obsessed with making sure the share price keeps growing. I think the way the stock price is treated by execs—and the stock/option-heavy compensation packages they often get—were probably based in something helpful and rational to start with (operating under the assumption that a higher stock price means a healthier company), but to the extent that that's true, it's fallen victim to Goodhart's Law ("any measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure"). How do we do these things? Haven't a clue, honestly. Our system is majorly messed up at every level right now, and chock full of feedback loops, so nearly anywhere you try to start will be resisted strongly without first improving things somewhere else...but conversely, any place you can make a difference will start to make it a little easier to improve things elsewhere.
DocTomoe 4y ago
Musk announced Twitter layoffs happening - and he hasn't even finalized the purchase of the company.
- skeeter2020 4y ago
  I think it's a mistake to look to people like Musk for good examples of empathetic, compassionate management that can be broadly applied. Ditto for Jobs (whose crown he's apparently taken up as the poster child for wanna-be successful sociopaths)
daniel-cussen 4y ago
It's counterfactual.
bombcar 4y ago
I've seen it be done, either publicly or privately; in smaller companies I've even seen people be told "you will be laid off at X date if we don't get Y funding" as a heads-up; especially when the management doesn't want to lay people off.
- arlcode 4y ago
  Yeah had that happen and it was clear why (small company closed down) Starting from 6 months the CEOs explained how things are and what would need to happen in order to avoid it. Two months prior they layed everyone off (including themselves) which is double the legally required minimum period. In the end we closed down the office together and parted ways. Most people had offers lined up and at least one colleague of mine ended up with a former customer. The CEO "advertised" him during the final call with the customer.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Yeah, I've been "laid off" by the same person three times in my career; each time he worked to hire me back as soon as he had a new venture going.
senectus1 4y ago
I worked for a mining company that was bought out, then announced there would be restructures and layoffs. it took 9 months for them to start.. by the time they did moral was so low they could not hire for new positions or replace needed skilled labor. the sites name was mud state wide. (Western Australia). I never want to go through that experience again. I got out after 8 month by asking for voluntary redundancy.
gumby 4y ago
Actually if you have more than 100 employees in a US location (which Unity does) you are required to give 60 days' notice per the WARN act. https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/termination/plantclosings https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/termination/plantclosings
- yakak 4y ago
  They pay out 60 days of notification pay in their severance packages and still don't notify. Technically, you can refuse that and I would guess that you would remain a worker who isn't allowed in the office.
- SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  Their description here is misleading. Even if the employer is large enough to be covered, WARN act requirements only apply to "plant closings" where some particular site is shut down or "mass layoffs" which have to include either 33% of the people at a site with 150+ people or 500 people overall. Their detailed worker guide makes this clearer: https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/Layoff/pdfs/WorkerWARN2003.pdf https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/Layoff/pdfs/Worke...
  - labcomputer 4y ago
    WARN was written before remote work was common. I'm very curious to see how WARN is interpreted by the courts for remote workers. There is no case law as far as I know, and a quick ctrl-f of that DoL PDF for "remote" has no results. For example, is each remote worker considered to be working at a different "plant" (their home)? If so, it seems like the WARN act could never be triggered for remote workers. So a loophole is that fully remote workers don't get WARN protections. That seems to clearly violate the intent of the law, which is that reasonably-large businesses should give advance warning of layoffs. Or, are all the remote workers collectively considered to be working at one "remote plant"? In that case, WARN would be triggered if a company of, say, 20k people lays off as few as 3 remote workers in each state. That seems silly also. What about hybrid workers, where 1000 people "report to" or are "based at" one office, but nobody ever actually shows up (or maybe they do, but only for team-building exercises twice a year)? Are those workers truly "working at" that office site (and thus covered by WARN), or are they working at 1000 independent sites (and thus not covered)?
spookthesunset 4y ago
I've been in a startup where they gave advanced warning about layoffs. One major side effect is that productivity goes to sub zero because of the uncertainty of it all. After going through that, I can see reasons for both keeping people in the dark and giving advanced warning. Layoffs (or re-orgs for that matter) are never easy.
qbasic_forever 4y ago
IBM and HP in their waning years were pretty upfront in quarterly reports that their older staff were a liability and they were actively working to manage them out through early retirements, layoffs, etc.
- mathattack 4y ago
  Is that legal?
  - qbasic_forever 4y ago
    No and there are currently investigations ongoing: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/02/12/ibm-accused-of-ageism-older-workers-are-dinobabies-who-should-be-made-an-extinct-species/?sh=1442d482129c https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/02/12/ibm-accuse... Companies have many ways they obfuscate or hide layoffs of older workers though, there is very little legal protection as long as the company isn't so stupid and brazen as IBM (i.e. leaves a trail of evidence in emails).
Sharlin 4y ago
In Europe it’s commonly illegal to lay off people before negotiations (which may sometimes be rather one-sides but nevertheless there are rituals to observe).

midislack 4y ago

Listen you don't tell people there are going to be layoffs. It's bad management.

jackmott42 4y ago
That is the common thinking but perhaps you are all just wrong about that.
- wowokay 4y ago
  Agreed. Otherwise they will likely lose another 5% due to people wanting to get out of there. If he had something to the effect of, there may be layoffs we just don’t know where yet, here’s how we are approaching it and how we plan to let people go. They may still lose some people but at least it doesn’t feel like a sinking ship you need to get away from.
avh02 4y ago
yes, but saying "there are no layoffs coming" and then laying people off cheapens the meaning and trust of "there are no layoffs coming" - then "there are no layoffs coming" doesn't mean anything and people panic anyway.
- nathanaldensr 4y ago
  Right. People learn the code language and learn that others lie, then look to other observations (e.g., insider word from friendly executives, market reports, etc.) to determine the truth. In the end, people are laid off anyway, except now they've learned to mistrust those in authority.
- cecilpl2 4y ago
  Savvy folks know that no CEO will ever say "yes, we are planning a layoff", and so they know that "there are no layoffs coming" really gives you no information. Naive and younger people will believe it though, so there is still value in saying it. The key is to listen to the case the CEO makes. "There are no layoffs coming, I promise" is a signal that layoffs are coming. "There are no layoffs coming. We are growing X% YOY and hiring pace of Y% has not slowed. Yada yada yada." is a signal that it's true.

skeeter2020 4y ago

"might be lay-offs in the next month or so, not sure... and don't know how many people will be impacted; stay tuned! In the meantime please keep doing your job as if nothing has changed." How would this be better? I saw first hand the damage caused by 4 hours between pre-announcing lay-offs and completing them. Weeks would mean the entire company comes to a stand-still. There is no "right" answer in this situation; it's a mistake to look for one. The distraction comes regardless and the goal of a decent leader is to minimize it while trying to be thoughtful to those leaving, but you're still taking away someone's job; you can't make that a positive experience.

rightbyte 4y ago
In Europe it is common for multiple months of high pitch negotiations between "wanting to lay off" and layoffs. Usually without any riots or panic. I don't think a sudden layoff at any time is an assurance for workers in the sense that it is better to pretend everything is Ok until it isn't.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  In many European countries, employees have to give notice periods before quitting. They can't just not show up and say I quit. I have seen one month per year of employment topping out at 6 months
  - meheleventyone 4y ago
    This is usually negotiable if you're leaving as well, it's not in the companies interest for the most part to keep you hanging around past wrapping current things up.
  - Frost1x 4y ago
    Outside of explicit contract law you may be tangled up in, the US doesn't have explicit law and most employees are classified as "at-will" (basically, dependent upon where the business views this freedom as beneficial or non-beneficial to itself). Since businesses haven't managed to lobby such legislation requirements in for workers to give notice (largely because at-will is typically beneficial to them) and just use contract law where it matters (public personalities, etc.) you can just show up and quit legally, without legal repercussions. With that said, cultural protections have been put into place under job history in the application process. If I were to show up and without a very good reason tell me employer I quit effective immediately, I can do so unlike the European cases described. But is this really freedom or an illusion of freedom? Many in the US are living paycheck-to-paycheck to survive. They're financially leveraged and can't really just quit, they need to line up an opportunity and have minimal savings to protect them. For them they can make the choice but it's a bad choice for them and most of the time they won't. Businesses know this and leverage it. The pandemic labor market offered a shift in this giving some bargaining power back to labor but it seems to be clawing right back to businesses again, probably for quite some time. In what are classified as more professional positions, you're expected to give 2-weeks notice. Many employers request references and if you're honest during your interview, leaving without notice in most cases will require a good explanation and a competent interviewer, otherwise you're a red flag no hire almost immediately and there's a pool of others behind you without said red flag. So, I could quit tomorrow, but I'd have to be very careful with my next employer as to how I go about referencing my previous work, why I left, etc. In most cases I can't really just show up and quit, I need to give notice and wait. Perhaps that's not as long as some European countries closer to the order of 4 weeks IIRC but it's not as free as it might appear to be for the majority of laborers.

guardiangod 4y ago

>That is gross incompetence. Back in another life I was once an intern at a well known, but past-its-prime tech company. The company announced a (1st time ever) layoff in the morning and I got see the guards carry the boxes from cubicles. The VP of our department (responsible for much of the core technology of our products) sent out an email at around 11AM telling everyone we need to focus and that there won't be any more cut to our department, since we are central to our products. Come 2PM and all of us received an email saying that the VP has resigned from his position effectively immediately. Imagine what this does to the employee moral.

synu 4y ago

Is this the same Riccitiello from EA? If so he laid me off twice in two different layoffs. Maybe he is a guy they bring in for that sort of thing?

pteraspidomorph 4y ago
Seems so. Knew the name sounded familiar.
munificent 4y ago
> Is this the same Riccitiello from EA? Yup. I was at EA during his "leadership" too. Never got the axe during the couple of layoffs we went through, but had a lot of good friends who did. His hiring style seemed to be "open the floodgates periodically and let everyone in, then cull the ones we don't like after a couple of years". Massively demoralizing. I would never work for a company with him at the helm.
- synu 4y ago
  I always worked in the shared services groups (publishing) that they kept deciding they didn’t want, and then changed their mind.
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pandaman 4y ago
He has been with Unity since when he had been finally kicked out of EA for good. He is a partner in the PE firm (Elevation Partners), which likely had been behind making Unity public.

altdataseller 4y ago

When did he say that no layoffs were coming?

ffhhj 4y ago

> It shows that Riccitiello has no foresight into Unity's financial situation. The sudden lay off could hint that there is a deeper and more complex problem going on. They invested in tools that must be integrated in a their engine as soon as possible to recover this money from movie makers. So they increased their workforce, but their technical debt would cause a large resistance, making much of the workforce ineffective. They just realized it. And the deeper problem is that transforming these tools into an appealing work flow that brings clients is a very hard problem that isn't too technical, but more like a "way" in the philosophical/psychological fields.

timmytokyo 4y ago
Anyone who is an active developer of a Unity-based game knows there are a lot of struggles happening within that company right now, many of them technical and many of them related to poor project management. It's reflected in their product, and it's not even a close call. (See their recent efforts around ECS and their new rendering pipelines.)

rambojohnson 4y ago

Unity is the iTunes of game engines.

dyingkneepad 4y ago
Can you explain why?

plasticchris 4y ago

They always say this, always do your own due diligence. If you have any stock or options look for the section 702 disclosure with the balance sheet and calculate the runway yourself.

H8crilA 4y ago

You're right but that's gross competence, not gross incompetence. The job of the CEO is to keep the firm going, not to make employees happy. Most of the time the two coincide, but sometimes they don't. The CEO works for the board of directors/shareholders, not for the employees.

l30n4da5 4y ago
> The job of the CEO is to keep the firm going, not to make employees happy lol. keep pissing off employees and see how long you can 'keep the firm going'. that mindset makes no damn sense.
- H8crilA 4y ago
  Who said anything about keeping on doing that? It is not the right thing most of the time.
tomc1985 4y ago
This sort of bullshit is exactly what causes companies to go downhill. Strong leadership would have handled these layoffs much, much differently, to say nothing to the fact that a good CEO should have been able to avoid them entirely. Riccitiello needs to go. As another commenter put it, Unity is too important of a product for its stewards to be languishing like this.
- scruple 4y ago
  Not disagreeing with you, but I still think that it doesn't go hard enough to the point of "strong leadership." And I consider leadership here to be not just the CEO but all of the top-level management. Wouldn't strong leadership have prevented the need for layoffs at all?
jandrese 4y ago
> The job of the CEO is to keep the firm going, not to make employees happy. Sociopathic CEOs actually believe this. Maintaining employee morale is crucial to the long term health of a company. Ignore it and you suffer a slow death from brain drain and disaffected employees. "They pretend to care about us, I pretend to care about my job."

indymike 4y ago

> So Riccitiello said no layoffs were coming and then in less than a month started layoffs. This isn't a statement of how good or bad of a leader Riccitiello is. Sorry, but "we're thinking about maybe, possibly doing some layoffs if whatever" is a really bad way to run a company. The answer is, and always should be, "No layoffs" until the decision is made to do layoffs, and then you do it as fast as the law allows to very quickly clear uncertainty. Layoffs suck, but telling everyone, "hey, I'm thinking we might do a round of layoffs next week" is a great way to make the damage far worse.

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UkrainianJew 4y ago

>That is gross incompetence. Not necessarily. As a CEO, you suddenly see your sales plunge. You run the numbers and think: is it just a panic/fluke? Is it going to bounce back? Are we losing the sales to a new competitor? You eventually conclude that the drop is due to a market downturn. You realize that you have a runway of 1 year, and cannot raise more capital. Se, your choices: 1. You keep cruising like nothing happened. The sales may bounce back within a year (in which case it was a good decision). They may decline further 6 months in (dropping your runway to 3 months). Or they may stabilize at the new level for a while (so when the runway reaches 6 months, you think again). 2. You fire X% of the people. Your runway is now Y years. If the sales bounce back earlier, it's a hassle to re-hire, but is doable. If the cooler market lasts longer, you may need to reiterate. Making the correct decision is always a guess. Like trying to figure out whether to buy or sell a stock. You observe the market, you try to understand, and then you decide. As a CEO, if someone asks you on the spot "are layoffs planned", any answer rather than a complete denial will be treated as a "yes": people with better offers will leave, other will start looking for jobs. If in a month the sales bounce back, you lost your bet.

scifibestfi 4y ago

It's impossible to know that without being privy to inside details. What if they had a major deal lined up that unexpectedly fell through? Things like that can change "no layoffs" to "4% layoffs" literally overnight. Companies are pivoting quickly at this point with the shifting tides and contagion happens fast.

WalterBright 4y ago

I remember a business that had a branch office in another state. The CEO thought he'd be a good guy and told them that the office would be closed in 3 months after the Christmas vacation and they'd all be laid off then. The employees stopped working and looted everything in the building. Reportedly, trucks backed up to the loading dock where everything was carried off. They all got their paychecks, but they hadn't done any work in the 3 months and the building was picked clean.

blevin 4y ago
This makes me wonder if there are any books collecting management mistakes. A lot of leaders have to pick this up on the job by making their own blunders. I understand that some MBA programs may attempt to look at case studies, but the ones I’ve read have seemed about anodyne strategy things rather than human-level, savvy operator, street smarts & empathy stuff. Regardless, the winter holidays are clearly a time of year to be extra compassionate and considerate; it’s definitely no good to have layoffs right before xmas. I wonder if the biz had insurance coverage for getting looted this way. Or maybe that physical stuff didn’t have much remaining value anyway.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  The idea that insurance pays so theft doesn't cost the business anything is false. The insurance rates will be raised so you'll wind up paying the bill anyway. Insurance is a good idea to cover catastrophic loss, but if you can self-insure for other things, you'll be way better off.
  - blevin 4y ago
    Makes sense. My thought was just that the business probably had some sort of commercial property loss coverage that might have covered that case (even though -EV). I’d guess a far more common case of employee theft (retail shrinkage / fell-off-the-truck) is self-insured, as some kind of operating provision.
- smugma 4y ago

satellite2 4y ago

I had the exact same scenario in my previous company. I wonder if some execs imagine that the employees are cattle that you're supposed to calm down before the execution.

mym1990 4y ago
Execs don't interface with employees on a level where there is much emotion going on, and they probably see this as a benefit. This is par for the course. Athletes won't ever say 'I am moving to a new team' a month before a deal is inked. Employees won't go to their manager and say 'I am thinking of leaving in about a month, not sure yet tho'...they give the 2 week notice and peace out. This is all extremely strategic, anyone who thinks the average exec really gives a damn needs to wake up. There are certainly exceptions, I have yet to see it.
- satellite2 4y ago
  No, but they don't make promises that the opposite is going to happen. | This is all extremely strategic If the strategy is to show your business partners that you are unreliable

standardUser 4y ago

That's simply how layoffs work. If we want a different way, we should support stronger labor laws.

slowhand09 4y ago

Consider this. Yesterday, Pres Biden said unemployment was at historic lows, and the US economy was extremely strong. Nothing to worry about. So... is he lying? Or stupid? If CEOs believe his words and push forward accordingly, but the actual open market and business environment signal the opposite, what do you do? If you believe the market and business environment, start cost cutting measures and implement austerity protocols, the community vilifies you. If you continue business as usual, but market demand tanks, costs skyrocket, and product accumulates on shelves and loading docks, you'll go out of business.