5 ms·

I don't understand how Unity burns through up to a billion in revenue every single year, yet their engine still feels so half-baked and unpolished. Where's all

by Sakos 3y ago

I don't understand how Unity burns through up to a billion in revenue every single year, yet their engine still feels so half-baked and unpolished. Where's all that money going?

djbusby 3y ago
Lots of cash can be burned in meetings and by managers of managers. I'm sure my case is not unique here but, meetings that cost $100k are common at $BigCo. And there dozens of those per day.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  You have 5-hour long meetings with 40 people each costing $500/hr?
  - EwanG 3y ago
    Let me introduce you to the world of PI planning where two days of every quarter are spent with approximately 100 people (developers, program managers, etc) for each line of business to plan out the next quarter of work - even if 90% of it is continuing the work from the last quarter...
    - azemetre 3y ago
      Two days sounds lucky. I've been in SAFE plans where it took an entire week to plan things, it was unreal. Like you I met people I've never seen or heard of from the company all giving their input on software I'm creating. I'd never see them again until the next SAFE planning, only this time it felt like 1 SWE out of maybe 15 (yes there were only 3 teams of 5 devs, put 100+ in these SAFE meetings) contributed anything meaningful. Company wasted so much money, then the org shut down for spending $500 per customer per year in maintenance (this was a health insurance company) whereas the main company would only spend $70 per customer per year. You'd think leadership of the org would get fired for this but they were rewarded with other positions within the company to do the same thing. Unreal. Why do shareholder's put up with this? I guess the healthcare monopoly is the only reason to.
      - tter3 3y ago
        Half a day is spent on collecting and analyzing the confidence vote. The results of the confidence vote have no impact on the plan except as a baseline for the next PI.
      - KingMob 3y ago
        Ugh, I still shudder at our weeklong SAFe planning. At least I got a couple free trips to Europe for the meetings.
    - edwardsdl 3y ago
      … and inevitably three weeks later priorities change and it all goes out the window.
  - djbusby 3y ago
    Sometimes the meet has folk that are even more expensive (not me). Sometimes theres more than 50. Four hours of meetings, six hours of wall-clock Edit: some companies have >20k employees. My first years at MS (late 90s) had these "war room" like 2x a week, 50 people, multiple VPs in the room, 2h. But there were other groups doing their war rooms too.
  - spenczar5 3y ago
    AWS has (or had) a weekly 2-hour operational status meeting. It has over 200 people in it, a mix of distinguished and principal engineers, very senior managers, etc. That meeting easily crossed the $100k-per-pop threshold. Worth it, though, that was actually a pretty great institution.
    - paulddraper 3y ago
      > 200 people > 2 hours > weekly Kill me --- EDIT: also, 200 people for 2 hours is only 100k if average salary is $500k/year
  - Tangurena2 3y ago
    I was involved in a large software project with a large financial institution. Every weekday, there was an hour long status meeting. Based on what my company billed my time at (and presuming the other 40 companies billed their staff time likewise), that morning status call cost about $50k.
intelVISA 3y ago
Agile shaman took the wheel
- psunavy03 3y ago
  Agile done properly is literally the opposite of this. Big Important Exec spouting Agile terms they don't understand and cluelessly forcing top-down crap on the teams, more likely. Normalize your story points, prole! Daddy needs metrics!
  - torginus 3y ago
    Personally, I've never seen 'Agile' done well. Every project where we made good progress was engineer driven. We talked to customers about what they wanted so see and we created tasks and implemented them. Every project managed by a dedicated servant-leader Six Sigma Kanban certified Scrum ninja-coach project has been a bureaucratic shitshow, with constant cargo culting to agile priniciples and forced ceremonies.
    - _w1tm 3y ago
      > Personally, I've never seen 'Agile' done well. Every project where we made good progress was engineer driven. We talked to customers about what they wanted so see and we created tasks and implemented them. > Every project managed by a dedicated servant-leader Six Sigma Kanban certified Scrum ninja-coach project has been a bureaucratic shitshow, with constant cargo culting to agile priniciples and forced ceremonies. The engineer-led project sounds more agile than the latter Agile insanity.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    > Agile done properly No True Scotsmen would do programming this way!
    - psunavy03 3y ago
      Ah, yes, the classic internet tactic of making up so-called "fallacies" to avoid engaging with the other person's actual arguments.
animal531 3y ago
Their worst problem (compared to Epic) is that they don't finish projects. They'll want a new feature, for example new scriptable graphics pipelines which will allow them to modify the core rendering a lot easier. Ok that's fine, but then instead of implementing one they try to implement two, while at the same time completely ignoring the existing pipeline which everyone is currently using. The time to get the new pipelines working properly and onboard everyone is counted in years in this case. Those features they actually "finished", but there are so many experimental packages that just sit there forever, or work in a half-baked manner.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  They hired the TextMesh Pro dude Zoltran, what must have been six or so years ago, with the promise that he'd integrate TextMeshPro into the "new" UI system, which I was looking forward to. I was just recently reading Unity's web page about what's new in the UI system, which announced that TextMesh Pro is finally built in! That took a while. https://unity.com/features/ui-toolkit https://unity.com/features/ui-toolkit I really love TextMesh Pro and Zoltran's mesmerizing tutorials, I learned a lot about Unity reading his code, and he was totally into what he was doing and hyper productive when he was a highly regarded indie developer, but I got the impression (just guessing, no inside knowledge) that he was wasn't 1/100th as productive working inside Unity as he was on his own, or maybe they put him on something else than he originally went there to do. It's been my experience that user interface toolkits are often turf war shit shows. I hope he's doing ok there! https://www.youtube.com/@Zolran/videos https://www.youtube.com/@Zolran/videos i.e. the classic 9-year-old Unite 14 demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3ROZmdu65o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3ROZmdu65o
  - animal531 3y ago
    Oof, yeah the new UI Toolkit is another example of something that's dragging along. Even in their official docs they still recommend that you use the older system.

by Sakos 3y ago

I don't understand how Unity burns through up to a billion in revenue every single year, yet their engine still feels so half-baked and unpolished. Where's all that money going?

djbusby 3y ago

Lots of cash can be burned in meetings and by managers of managers. I'm sure my case is not unique here but, meetings that cost $100k are common at $BigCo. And there dozens of those per day.

paulddraper 3y ago
You have 5-hour long meetings with 40 people each costing $500/hr?
- EwanG 3y ago
  Let me introduce you to the world of PI planning where two days of every quarter are spent with approximately 100 people (developers, program managers, etc) for each line of business to plan out the next quarter of work - even if 90% of it is continuing the work from the last quarter...
  - azemetre 3y ago
    Two days sounds lucky. I've been in SAFE plans where it took an entire week to plan things, it was unreal. Like you I met people I've never seen or heard of from the company all giving their input on software I'm creating. I'd never see them again until the next SAFE planning, only this time it felt like 1 SWE out of maybe 15 (yes there were only 3 teams of 5 devs, put 100+ in these SAFE meetings) contributed anything meaningful. Company wasted so much money, then the org shut down for spending $500 per customer per year in maintenance (this was a health insurance company) whereas the main company would only spend $70 per customer per year. You'd think leadership of the org would get fired for this but they were rewarded with other positions within the company to do the same thing. Unreal. Why do shareholder's put up with this? I guess the healthcare monopoly is the only reason to.
    - tter3 3y ago
      Half a day is spent on collecting and analyzing the confidence vote. The results of the confidence vote have no impact on the plan except as a baseline for the next PI.
    - KingMob 3y ago
      Ugh, I still shudder at our weeklong SAFe planning. At least I got a couple free trips to Europe for the meetings.
  - edwardsdl 3y ago
    … and inevitably three weeks later priorities change and it all goes out the window.
- djbusby 3y ago
  Sometimes the meet has folk that are even more expensive (not me). Sometimes theres more than 50. Four hours of meetings, six hours of wall-clock Edit: some companies have >20k employees. My first years at MS (late 90s) had these "war room" like 2x a week, 50 people, multiple VPs in the room, 2h. But there were other groups doing their war rooms too.
- spenczar5 3y ago
  AWS has (or had) a weekly 2-hour operational status meeting. It has over 200 people in it, a mix of distinguished and principal engineers, very senior managers, etc. That meeting easily crossed the $100k-per-pop threshold. Worth it, though, that was actually a pretty great institution.
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    > 200 people > 2 hours > weekly Kill me --- EDIT: also, 200 people for 2 hours is only 100k if average salary is $500k/year
- Tangurena2 3y ago
  I was involved in a large software project with a large financial institution. Every weekday, there was an hour long status meeting. Based on what my company billed my time at (and presuming the other 40 companies billed their staff time likewise), that morning status call cost about $50k.

intelVISA 3y ago

Agile shaman took the wheel

psunavy03 3y ago
Agile done properly is literally the opposite of this. Big Important Exec spouting Agile terms they don't understand and cluelessly forcing top-down crap on the teams, more likely. Normalize your story points, prole! Daddy needs metrics!
- torginus 3y ago
  Personally, I've never seen 'Agile' done well. Every project where we made good progress was engineer driven. We talked to customers about what they wanted so see and we created tasks and implemented them. Every project managed by a dedicated servant-leader Six Sigma Kanban certified Scrum ninja-coach project has been a bureaucratic shitshow, with constant cargo culting to agile priniciples and forced ceremonies.
  - _w1tm 3y ago
    > Personally, I've never seen 'Agile' done well. Every project where we made good progress was engineer driven. We talked to customers about what they wanted so see and we created tasks and implemented them. > Every project managed by a dedicated servant-leader Six Sigma Kanban certified Scrum ninja-coach project has been a bureaucratic shitshow, with constant cargo culting to agile priniciples and forced ceremonies. The engineer-led project sounds more agile than the latter Agile insanity.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  > Agile done properly No True Scotsmen would do programming this way!
  - psunavy03 3y ago
    Ah, yes, the classic internet tactic of making up so-called "fallacies" to avoid engaging with the other person's actual arguments.

animal531 3y ago

Their worst problem (compared to Epic) is that they don't finish projects. They'll want a new feature, for example new scriptable graphics pipelines which will allow them to modify the core rendering a lot easier. Ok that's fine, but then instead of implementing one they try to implement two, while at the same time completely ignoring the existing pipeline which everyone is currently using. The time to get the new pipelines working properly and onboard everyone is counted in years in this case. Those features they actually "finished", but there are so many experimental packages that just sit there forever, or work in a half-baked manner.

DonHopkins 3y ago
They hired the TextMesh Pro dude Zoltran, what must have been six or so years ago, with the promise that he'd integrate TextMeshPro into the "new" UI system, which I was looking forward to. I was just recently reading Unity's web page about what's new in the UI system, which announced that TextMesh Pro is finally built in! That took a while. https://unity.com/features/ui-toolkit https://unity.com/features/ui-toolkit I really love TextMesh Pro and Zoltran's mesmerizing tutorials, I learned a lot about Unity reading his code, and he was totally into what he was doing and hyper productive when he was a highly regarded indie developer, but I got the impression (just guessing, no inside knowledge) that he was wasn't 1/100th as productive working inside Unity as he was on his own, or maybe they put him on something else than he originally went there to do. It's been my experience that user interface toolkits are often turf war shit shows. I hope he's doing ok there! https://www.youtube.com/@Zolran/videos https://www.youtube.com/@Zolran/videos i.e. the classic 9-year-old Unite 14 demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3ROZmdu65o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3ROZmdu65o
- animal531 3y ago
  Oof, yeah the new UI Toolkit is another example of something that's dragging along. Even in their official docs they still recommend that you use the older system.