8 ms·

Pixar reportedly conducts rare layoffs

141 points by starkparker 3y ago

onion2k 3y ago
Your previous track record has pretty much no baring on whether you're safe in a layoff. Only the perception of what you can bring to the company in the future counts for anything. It's hard to argue how that's wrong.
- wnevets 3y ago
  But we're also a family here at Company Co and we will need you to work more unpaid overtime this week.
- tomxor 3y ago
  > Only the perception of what you can bring to the company in the future counts for anything. Like your track record for instance.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  It's not that difficult to argue. These businesses, whether they like it or not, are based on bedrock rules of analyzing past performance for the purposes of investment, marketing, and strategy. That it works for all those things, but somehow not employee performance is a bizarrely inconsistent assertion to make.
- oofta-boofta 3y ago
  People who do great work in the past will typically do great work in the future. It's called "being a high performer", and someone who establishes a good track record of being a high performer will provide more value in the future compared to someone without such a track record.
  - closeparen 3y ago
    Executives don’t care to take the time to transition high performers to new projects or the risk that they will successfully adapt to new technologies. They’re making big moves, they “have to move fast” and “need people who can hit the ground running.” Fresh faces can have the perfect resumes for the new direction and no attachment to the status quo or clout to call on in resisting the “transformation.”
- marpstar 3y ago
  We see exceptions to this, and some attach on to the idea that you can become so indispensable that you could never be let go. "Technical Fellow" positions and the like. Company I worked at previously had the founding engineer still around, constantly working in a silo on special projects -- nothing the principals couldn't have been doing. But nothing lasts forever.
  - voidfunc 3y ago
    Technical fellow's and keeping founder's around long past their prime isn't done because those people produce some kind of valuable work that the rest of engineering cannot, it's because it's easier to pay them rather than let them run off and start or work for a competitor.
- olliecornelia 3y ago
  Ya you could be the top performer and then just like that 20 years later they might fire you.
- 23B1 3y ago
  It's wrong because it treats people like transactions instead of living creatures. Obviously we don't know the full story, but people make mistakes, underperform, or somehow lose their touch. If it's a pattern and the person obviously just doesn't want to work there anymore, fine. But on balance, I think it's better to counsel, coach, and develop people over time, regardless of experience or tenure or attitude. Not only do I believe employee churn to be more expensive in the long run (brand reputation, institutional knowledge, handover premium) but I believe it to be ethically wrong. This attitude has personally served me well. I can't prove it with data, but my heart is whole and I have no regrets about going above and beyond to retain and develop employees. I'd rather die without guilt and have a packed funeral – than a trillionaire and alone.
  - achates 3y ago
    It sounds nice to keep failing executives around indefinitely while you try to train or mentor them, but in practice the company can't keep losing $100 million a movie and remain in business. Being nice to bad directors means laying off a lot of other people in the long run.
    - 23B1 3y ago
      I totally think that’s fair… And again we don’t know what happened in this particular situation. I just think that there is this foolish and ultimately costly view of employees that they are interchangeable parts, when in fact there are more effective ways to improve financial performance.
andsoitis 3y ago
including two of the executives behind “Lightyear”: director Angus MacLane and producer Galyn Susman. MacLane had been at Pixar for more than two decades, serving as an animator on classics like “Toy Story 2,” “The Incredibles” and “Finding Nemo.” He co-directed the 2016 sequel “Finding Dory” before his first solo directorial feature film “Lightyear.” The spinoff of the “Toy Story” franchise, which featured Chris Evans as the voice of Buzz Lightyear, was a commercial dud; Deadline estimated the film lost the studio more than $100 million. Susman, likewise, was a longtime Pixar employee. She is also the hero of one of the company’s most legendary stories. During the making of “Toy Story 2,” a Pixar employee accidentally wiped the servers of nearly the whole movie. Thankfully for the animators, Susman was working from home while taking care of her newborn child — her backup copy saved the film. Having done great work in the past is not enough to incentivize others to keep you around.
- oofta-boofta 3y ago
  This is why I never go "above and beyond" anymore. Companies only care what you did for them yesterday and will drop you like a bad habit because it'll make their stock price go up by 0.000000001% Have a bad day? Fuck you, you're fired. Doesn't matter that you saved the company tens or hundreds or even millions of dollars last year. That was last year. What have you done for the bottom line today, peon?
  - zinclozenge 3y ago
    Agreed, and I'll go one further. This is why you should work multiple jobs, aka overemployment.
    - geodel 3y ago
      True. Other day I saw a provocative challenge on LinkedIn Whats stopping you from doing 336 hours worth of work in 168 hours of a week? To be honest I had no answer.
      - zinclozenge 3y ago
warning26 3y ago
To be fair, Lightyear was pretty bad. (Really, seasoned space explorers were surprised that time dilation exists?)
- cryptoz 3y ago
  As a space nerd, I thought Lightyear was great actually - I really loved it. I think it got great reviews too? (Except for the people angry about the gay 'kiss hello' obviously)
  - geraldwhen 3y ago
    Why make a product your audience doesn’t want? Some parents don’t want to explain homosexuality to their 5 year olds in a movie about children’s toys.
    - mynameisvlad 3y ago
      Oh please. It was literally a passing moment. Something that no kid would have caught in between the actual things happening. Certainly not something that any kid-- who in general are curious not judgemental-- would have asked about after the movie. If anything, it's the bigoted parents who are gasping in shock and outrage at an extremely mundane scene. This is pearl clutching taken to the extreme.
      - whatwhaaaaat 3y ago
        You can call it whatever you want but people will vote with their wallets. I have a rainbow star trek shirt on right now. I support the gay and lesbian community in anyway I can. I will not take my children to see these movies. There are simply too many other options that do not push this crap on me that I will choose instead. My kids have been at birthday parties with gay couples. Wanna know what questions they asked about it? None! Because they are children and have no concept of sexuality. The studios are pulling out all this forced crap as soon as the strike is over too so obviously someone somewhere is reading the writing on the wall. Parents have had enough of this crap and we’re not afraid to speak up.
xwdv 3y ago
[flagged]
- dekhn 3y ago
  in any causal chain, there are proximal and ultimate causes.
  - x3874 3y ago
    Or root causes and contributing factors.
- unethical_ban 3y ago
  The person who allowed her to have a backup hard drive did not "save" Toy Story 2. The person who saved Toy Story 2 was the person who wrote the code that enabled the copying of data to additional hardware.
  - throwway120385 3y ago
    Clearly it was the drive manufacturer, who made drives that could be moved in a station wagon.
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    Come on, it's easy. The person who saved Toy Story 2 was the person who physically clicked File -> Save... in whatever VFX software Toy Story 2 was being worked on.
electric_mayhem 3y ago
On one hand, that’s shitty and shows how much loyalty corporations typically have to their people (zero). On the other, they were associated with a flip, and corps are known to be all about $ and ‘what have you done for me lately’. On a third hand, because why not, job security is being able to find another job and with their track record of saving the day in a big way and operating at that level for twenty years, they’re hopefully already pretty set and if they want to keep working should have little trouble finding a new team who’d be excited to have them. Which isn’t in any way to diminish how much it sucks. Wish them the best.
- atonse 3y ago
  I mean she worked for Pixar for an additional 20 years after that incident, right? (not counting who knows how many years she worked for Pixar before the incident) There doesn't seem to be any correlation with that concept of loyalty here – it is absolutely unfortunate, but if they are laying people off because the numbers aren't making sense, unfortunately, they would be focusing on the mix of people they need moving forward, regardless of loyalty. Both things could be true, they likely had a great symbiotic relationship (20 years after the incident, who knows how many years before, for people at the talent level of working on Pixar movies, they could leave and work anywhere else, but they chose to stay at Pixar for a reason), AND this person's position just didn't make it when determining how to make cuts. It's just an unfortunate situation but seems to not really line up cleanly with the "was this loyalty" question.
dagmx 3y ago
This article is pretty poorly written. Galyn was NOT an animator. Not everyone who works on an animated feature film is an animator, there's a whole cast of amazingly talented people in a range of disciplines that bring these films to life. You can see this from her IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0839877/ https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0839877/ She was on the development team on Toy Story 2 and then a Producer there after. I do feel bad for her losing her job, but 23 years is a LONG time ago to have define your entire career and that story is somewhat apocryphal from all accounts internally. If we're talking about loyalty, the rest of her career there after is actually much more interesting to talk about. I think its a disservice that a site like this boils her down to a role she didn't do and a singular event for clicks.
bena 3y ago
My only real response to this story is "And?" Being responsible for saving Toy Story 2 is a good thing, yes. She should be celebrated for that, yes. However, it should not potentially shield her from any and all repercussions in the future. Toy Story 2 came out 24 years ago. Her child has had time to grow up and have children of their own by now. If they had fired her within the year, yeah, I'd have been upset. That's a dick move to do to someone who saved your company however much it would have cost to reproduce all of that work. But 24 years after the fact, yeah, I have no issues disconnecting the two events.
CodeWriter23 3y ago
This is DEI at work. My BIL who happens to be a white guy, was the show runner for not one but two Animated Disney Series. Not even a phone call from Disney when the contract was up on the last one. The best his agent for decades has been able to do for him is get him a staff writer job. Dude is a brilliant Executive Producer, works his ass off to make his shows great, decades of experience, 20+ writing credits on his IMDB profile (tons of merit in his resume) and this is now his reality. Uncredited staff writer.
- KerrAvon 3y ago
  “Random white guy got laid off” does not automatically mean “he was fired because he wasn’t black.”
- IE6 3y ago
  curious your POV of the situation where someone who doesn't look like you gets laid off, still DEI at work or ???
- RichardCA 3y ago
  If you check the Glassdoor page for WDAS you will see that situations like that are the norm. Occam's Razor is satisfied without the need to stand up a DEI strawman. But I'm still sorry about your BIL. I have friends who have met similar fates, sometimes with great loss up to and including divorce / breaking up of families, and exacerbated stress leading to severe medical issues. It's normal in the Los Angeles technical job market to know someone who has been through something like that.
bhouston 3y ago
Pixar is struggling. Unclear how much is related to Disney+ strategy (where they release via Disney+ rather than in theatres) and Covid restrictions, but its recent releases have struggled financially (numbers from Wikipedia): * Onward - $140M * Soul - $120M * Luca - $50M * Turning Red - $20M * Lightyear - $226M It used to be that Pixar films regularly got past $1B in revenue. This new reality where they gross very little is strange. And this new reality likely means that Pixar has to reduce costs.
- lawn 3y ago
  It's disappointing because both Luca and Turning Red were great, and Soul wasn't shabby at all. Haven't seen Lightyear and Onward was boring.
  - jcranmer 3y ago
    The Luca and Turning Red numbers are very disappointing, it seems, because they didn't receive any theatrical release in the US. Comparing them to Coco's numbers, it seems from the countries they did receive a theatrical numbers, they'd post several hundred million in revenue in non-COVID times. Onward snuck in just before the COVID lockdowns, so it does represent a "real" box office bomb compared to Luca/Turning Red.
    - radicaldreamer 3y ago
      Onward was in theaters for only a few days before the lockdowns started. It was actually the last movie I saw in theaters prior to covid.
  - theGnuMe 3y ago
    I enjoyed Lightyear but it sounds like I am the exception. The plot was a little too complicated for a kid though and my kids don't ever want to rewatch it. In contrast my kids loved the new Mario movie which I thought was not very good. However, we all liked the sonic movies so... <shrug>.
- BlackjackCF 3y ago
yieldcrv 3y ago
what dictates whether layoffs are news? this was the most non-news layoff I've seen in some time and I don't understand why we are pretending it is a conversation piece, especially with this title. discussions about corporate loyalty of lack thereof... what? the incident in the title was 2 and a half decades ago and even then, why get married to an organization? that sounds like a sure-fire way to contribute to wage gap for your demographic "people don't leave jobs, they leave managers" well, you clearly haven't met me and everyone I know.
- mynameisvlad 3y ago
  > Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    I don't think it is inappropriate. I was clear about what I wondered so the discussion would be around that.
    - mynameisvlad 3y ago
      Your first two sentences boil down to "why is this here?" > what dictates whether layoffs are news? > this was the most non-news layoff I've seen in some time and I don't understand why we are pretending it is a conversation piece, especially with this title.
      - yieldcrv 3y ago
        okay, let me know if you’d like to discuss what dictates that
jjk166 3y ago
Admittedly she didn't save Toy Story 2 through skill or foresight or any other quality that would make them an exceptionally valuable employee, it was just luck that she needed an extra copy at that time for unrelated reasons. Not to say that Susman is a bad employee, obviously she remained employed there for decades more and was promoted repeatedly to high positions, just that "saving Toy Story 2" is likely one of the least impressive parts of her resume.
vlovich123 3y ago
Didn’t Pixar throw away that copy and restart from scratch anyway? > But there was another twist. After all the efforts to save Toy Story 2, most of the original version of the film ended up being chucked out anyway. Bosses didn’t think the movie was good enough and it was remade. So I don’t see how saving a backup of a version that was mostly thrown away saved the movie. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/lightyear-toy-story-2-deleted-b2017238.html https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/...
globular-toast 3y ago
Wait, so, a person "saved" the film by simply having a backup. Was it this person's idea to keep backups? It doesn't seem to be so. In fact, the backup was several days old. I wonder why this person would be given this honour. I wonder... I also wonder if people just expect such a person to have a job for life after one such "heroic" performance. I wish I could be so lucky.
dang 3y ago
Please don't editorialize titles. (Submitted title was "Pixar lays off animator who saved Toy Story 2 with car full of hard drives") From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
SeanLuke 3y ago
Dave Smith founded Sequential (Sequential Circuits) in 1974, produced the groundbreaking Prophet-5 synthesizer, and invented MIDI, which had a profound impact on the electronic music industry. In 1987 Sequential went belly up due to some bad business decisions, and its intellectual property was largely purchased by Yamaha. Smith went on to develop some groundbreaking synthesizers for Yamaha and Korg. In 2002 Dave Smith decided to make synthesizers on his own again, but as he did not own the name Sequential any more he resigned himself to naming his company Dave Smith Instruments (or DSI). In 2015, after talking it over with the head of Roland (another major Japanese synth manufacturer), the President of Yamaha decided to unilaterally give Dave Smith the highly prized Sequential trademark (and sequential.com) back. It is my understanding that Dave didn't even know they were going to do this. They just gave him the intellectual property as a gesture of goodwill between synth manufacturers and in recognition of everything he had done. DSI was promptly renamed Sequential. Pixar could learn something from this.

141 points by starkparker 3y ago

Your previous track record has pretty much no baring on whether you're safe in a layoff. Only the perception of what you can bring to the company in the future counts for anything. It's hard to argue how that's wrong.

wnevets 3y ago
But we're also a family here at Company Co and we will need you to work more unpaid overtime this week.
tomxor 3y ago
> Only the perception of what you can bring to the company in the future counts for anything. Like your track record for instance.
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
It's not that difficult to argue. These businesses, whether they like it or not, are based on bedrock rules of analyzing past performance for the purposes of investment, marketing, and strategy. That it works for all those things, but somehow not employee performance is a bizarrely inconsistent assertion to make.
oofta-boofta 3y ago
People who do great work in the past will typically do great work in the future. It's called "being a high performer", and someone who establishes a good track record of being a high performer will provide more value in the future compared to someone without such a track record.
- closeparen 3y ago
  Executives don’t care to take the time to transition high performers to new projects or the risk that they will successfully adapt to new technologies. They’re making big moves, they “have to move fast” and “need people who can hit the ground running.” Fresh faces can have the perfect resumes for the new direction and no attachment to the status quo or clout to call on in resisting the “transformation.”
marpstar 3y ago
We see exceptions to this, and some attach on to the idea that you can become so indispensable that you could never be let go. "Technical Fellow" positions and the like. Company I worked at previously had the founding engineer still around, constantly working in a silo on special projects -- nothing the principals couldn't have been doing. But nothing lasts forever.
- voidfunc 3y ago
  Technical fellow's and keeping founder's around long past their prime isn't done because those people produce some kind of valuable work that the rest of engineering cannot, it's because it's easier to pay them rather than let them run off and start or work for a competitor.
olliecornelia 3y ago
Ya you could be the top performer and then just like that 20 years later they might fire you.
23B1 3y ago
It's wrong because it treats people like transactions instead of living creatures. Obviously we don't know the full story, but people make mistakes, underperform, or somehow lose their touch. If it's a pattern and the person obviously just doesn't want to work there anymore, fine. But on balance, I think it's better to counsel, coach, and develop people over time, regardless of experience or tenure or attitude. Not only do I believe employee churn to be more expensive in the long run (brand reputation, institutional knowledge, handover premium) but I believe it to be ethically wrong. This attitude has personally served me well. I can't prove it with data, but my heart is whole and I have no regrets about going above and beyond to retain and develop employees. I'd rather die without guilt and have a packed funeral – than a trillionaire and alone.
- achates 3y ago
  It sounds nice to keep failing executives around indefinitely while you try to train or mentor them, but in practice the company can't keep losing $100 million a movie and remain in business. Being nice to bad directors means laying off a lot of other people in the long run.
  - 23B1 3y ago
    I totally think that’s fair… And again we don’t know what happened in this particular situation. I just think that there is this foolish and ultimately costly view of employees that they are interchangeable parts, when in fact there are more effective ways to improve financial performance.

andsoitis 3y ago

including two of the executives behind “Lightyear”: director Angus MacLane and producer Galyn Susman. MacLane had been at Pixar for more than two decades, serving as an animator on classics like “Toy Story 2,” “The Incredibles” and “Finding Nemo.” He co-directed the 2016 sequel “Finding Dory” before his first solo directorial feature film “Lightyear.” The spinoff of the “Toy Story” franchise, which featured Chris Evans as the voice of Buzz Lightyear, was a commercial dud; Deadline estimated the film lost the studio more than $100 million. Susman, likewise, was a longtime Pixar employee. She is also the hero of one of the company’s most legendary stories. During the making of “Toy Story 2,” a Pixar employee accidentally wiped the servers of nearly the whole movie. Thankfully for the animators, Susman was working from home while taking care of her newborn child — her backup copy saved the film. Having done great work in the past is not enough to incentivize others to keep you around.

oofta-boofta 3y ago
This is why I never go "above and beyond" anymore. Companies only care what you did for them yesterday and will drop you like a bad habit because it'll make their stock price go up by 0.000000001% Have a bad day? Fuck you, you're fired. Doesn't matter that you saved the company tens or hundreds or even millions of dollars last year. That was last year. What have you done for the bottom line today, peon?
- zinclozenge 3y ago
  Agreed, and I'll go one further. This is why you should work multiple jobs, aka overemployment.
  - geodel 3y ago
    True. Other day I saw a provocative challenge on LinkedIn Whats stopping you from doing 336 hours worth of work in 168 hours of a week? To be honest I had no answer.
    - zinclozenge 3y ago

warning26 3y ago

To be fair, Lightyear was pretty bad. (Really, seasoned space explorers were surprised that time dilation exists?)

cryptoz 3y ago
As a space nerd, I thought Lightyear was great actually - I really loved it. I think it got great reviews too? (Except for the people angry about the gay 'kiss hello' obviously)
- geraldwhen 3y ago
  Why make a product your audience doesn’t want? Some parents don’t want to explain homosexuality to their 5 year olds in a movie about children’s toys.
  - mynameisvlad 3y ago
    Oh please. It was literally a passing moment. Something that no kid would have caught in between the actual things happening. Certainly not something that any kid-- who in general are curious not judgemental-- would have asked about after the movie. If anything, it's the bigoted parents who are gasping in shock and outrage at an extremely mundane scene. This is pearl clutching taken to the extreme.
    - whatwhaaaaat 3y ago
      You can call it whatever you want but people will vote with their wallets. I have a rainbow star trek shirt on right now. I support the gay and lesbian community in anyway I can. I will not take my children to see these movies. There are simply too many other options that do not push this crap on me that I will choose instead. My kids have been at birthday parties with gay couples. Wanna know what questions they asked about it? None! Because they are children and have no concept of sexuality. The studios are pulling out all this forced crap as soon as the strike is over too so obviously someone somewhere is reading the writing on the wall. Parents have had enough of this crap and we’re not afraid to speak up.

xwdv 3y ago

[flagged]

dekhn 3y ago
in any causal chain, there are proximal and ultimate causes.
- x3874 3y ago
  Or root causes and contributing factors.
unethical_ban 3y ago
The person who allowed her to have a backup hard drive did not "save" Toy Story 2. The person who saved Toy Story 2 was the person who wrote the code that enabled the copying of data to additional hardware.
- throwway120385 3y ago
  Clearly it was the drive manufacturer, who made drives that could be moved in a station wagon.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  Come on, it's easy. The person who saved Toy Story 2 was the person who physically clicked File -> Save... in whatever VFX software Toy Story 2 was being worked on.

electric_mayhem 3y ago

On one hand, that’s shitty and shows how much loyalty corporations typically have to their people (zero). On the other, they were associated with a flip, and corps are known to be all about $ and ‘what have you done for me lately’. On a third hand, because why not, job security is being able to find another job and with their track record of saving the day in a big way and operating at that level for twenty years, they’re hopefully already pretty set and if they want to keep working should have little trouble finding a new team who’d be excited to have them. Which isn’t in any way to diminish how much it sucks. Wish them the best.

atonse 3y ago
I mean she worked for Pixar for an additional 20 years after that incident, right? (not counting who knows how many years she worked for Pixar before the incident) There doesn't seem to be any correlation with that concept of loyalty here – it is absolutely unfortunate, but if they are laying people off because the numbers aren't making sense, unfortunately, they would be focusing on the mix of people they need moving forward, regardless of loyalty. Both things could be true, they likely had a great symbiotic relationship (20 years after the incident, who knows how many years before, for people at the talent level of working on Pixar movies, they could leave and work anywhere else, but they chose to stay at Pixar for a reason), AND this person's position just didn't make it when determining how to make cuts. It's just an unfortunate situation but seems to not really line up cleanly with the "was this loyalty" question.

dagmx 3y ago

This article is pretty poorly written. Galyn was NOT an animator. Not everyone who works on an animated feature film is an animator, there's a whole cast of amazingly talented people in a range of disciplines that bring these films to life. You can see this from her IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0839877/ https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0839877/ She was on the development team on Toy Story 2 and then a Producer there after. I do feel bad for her losing her job, but 23 years is a LONG time ago to have define your entire career and that story is somewhat apocryphal from all accounts internally. If we're talking about loyalty, the rest of her career there after is actually much more interesting to talk about. I think its a disservice that a site like this boils her down to a role she didn't do and a singular event for clicks.

bena 3y ago

My only real response to this story is "And?" Being responsible for saving Toy Story 2 is a good thing, yes. She should be celebrated for that, yes. However, it should not potentially shield her from any and all repercussions in the future. Toy Story 2 came out 24 years ago. Her child has had time to grow up and have children of their own by now. If they had fired her within the year, yeah, I'd have been upset. That's a dick move to do to someone who saved your company however much it would have cost to reproduce all of that work. But 24 years after the fact, yeah, I have no issues disconnecting the two events.

CodeWriter23 3y ago

This is DEI at work. My BIL who happens to be a white guy, was the show runner for not one but two Animated Disney Series. Not even a phone call from Disney when the contract was up on the last one. The best his agent for decades has been able to do for him is get him a staff writer job. Dude is a brilliant Executive Producer, works his ass off to make his shows great, decades of experience, 20+ writing credits on his IMDB profile (tons of merit in his resume) and this is now his reality. Uncredited staff writer.

KerrAvon 3y ago
“Random white guy got laid off” does not automatically mean “he was fired because he wasn’t black.”
IE6 3y ago
curious your POV of the situation where someone who doesn't look like you gets laid off, still DEI at work or ???
RichardCA 3y ago
If you check the Glassdoor page for WDAS you will see that situations like that are the norm. Occam's Razor is satisfied without the need to stand up a DEI strawman. But I'm still sorry about your BIL. I have friends who have met similar fates, sometimes with great loss up to and including divorce / breaking up of families, and exacerbated stress leading to severe medical issues. It's normal in the Los Angeles technical job market to know someone who has been through something like that.

bhouston 3y ago

Pixar is struggling. Unclear how much is related to Disney+ strategy (where they release via Disney+ rather than in theatres) and Covid restrictions, but its recent releases have struggled financially (numbers from Wikipedia): * Onward - $140M * Soul - $120M * Luca - $50M * Turning Red - $20M * Lightyear - $226M It used to be that Pixar films regularly got past $1B in revenue. This new reality where they gross very little is strange. And this new reality likely means that Pixar has to reduce costs.

lawn 3y ago
It's disappointing because both Luca and Turning Red were great, and Soul wasn't shabby at all. Haven't seen Lightyear and Onward was boring.
- jcranmer 3y ago
  The Luca and Turning Red numbers are very disappointing, it seems, because they didn't receive any theatrical release in the US. Comparing them to Coco's numbers, it seems from the countries they did receive a theatrical numbers, they'd post several hundred million in revenue in non-COVID times. Onward snuck in just before the COVID lockdowns, so it does represent a "real" box office bomb compared to Luca/Turning Red.
  - radicaldreamer 3y ago
    Onward was in theaters for only a few days before the lockdowns started. It was actually the last movie I saw in theaters prior to covid.
- theGnuMe 3y ago
  I enjoyed Lightyear but it sounds like I am the exception. The plot was a little too complicated for a kid though and my kids don't ever want to rewatch it. In contrast my kids loved the new Mario movie which I thought was not very good. However, we all liked the sonic movies so... <shrug>.
BlackjackCF 3y ago

yieldcrv 3y ago

what dictates whether layoffs are news? this was the most non-news layoff I've seen in some time and I don't understand why we are pretending it is a conversation piece, especially with this title. discussions about corporate loyalty of lack thereof... what? the incident in the title was 2 and a half decades ago and even then, why get married to an organization? that sounds like a sure-fire way to contribute to wage gap for your demographic "people don't leave jobs, they leave managers" well, you clearly haven't met me and everyone I know.

mynameisvlad 3y ago
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  I don't think it is inappropriate. I was clear about what I wondered so the discussion would be around that.
  - mynameisvlad 3y ago
    Your first two sentences boil down to "why is this here?" > what dictates whether layoffs are news? > this was the most non-news layoff I've seen in some time and I don't understand why we are pretending it is a conversation piece, especially with this title.
    - yieldcrv 3y ago
      okay, let me know if you’d like to discuss what dictates that

jjk166 3y ago

Admittedly she didn't save Toy Story 2 through skill or foresight or any other quality that would make them an exceptionally valuable employee, it was just luck that she needed an extra copy at that time for unrelated reasons. Not to say that Susman is a bad employee, obviously she remained employed there for decades more and was promoted repeatedly to high positions, just that "saving Toy Story 2" is likely one of the least impressive parts of her resume.

vlovich123 3y ago

Didn’t Pixar throw away that copy and restart from scratch anyway? > But there was another twist. After all the efforts to save Toy Story 2, most of the original version of the film ended up being chucked out anyway. Bosses didn’t think the movie was good enough and it was remade. So I don’t see how saving a backup of a version that was mostly thrown away saved the movie. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/lightyear-toy-story-2-deleted-b2017238.html https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/...

globular-toast 3y ago

Wait, so, a person "saved" the film by simply having a backup. Was it this person's idea to keep backups? It doesn't seem to be so. In fact, the backup was several days old. I wonder why this person would be given this honour. I wonder... I also wonder if people just expect such a person to have a job for life after one such "heroic" performance. I wish I could be so lucky.

dang 3y ago

Please don't editorialize titles. (Submitted title was "Pixar lays off animator who saved Toy Story 2 with car full of hard drives") From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

SeanLuke 3y ago

Dave Smith founded Sequential (Sequential Circuits) in 1974, produced the groundbreaking Prophet-5 synthesizer, and invented MIDI, which had a profound impact on the electronic music industry. In 1987 Sequential went belly up due to some bad business decisions, and its intellectual property was largely purchased by Yamaha. Smith went on to develop some groundbreaking synthesizers for Yamaha and Korg. In 2002 Dave Smith decided to make synthesizers on his own again, but as he did not own the name Sequential any more he resigned himself to naming his company Dave Smith Instruments (or DSI). In 2015, after talking it over with the head of Roland (another major Japanese synth manufacturer), the President of Yamaha decided to unilaterally give Dave Smith the highly prized Sequential trademark (and sequential.com) back. It is my understanding that Dave didn't even know they were going to do this. They just gave him the intellectual property as a gesture of goodwill between synth manufacturers and in recognition of everything he had done. DSI was promptly renamed Sequential. Pixar could learn something from this.