Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says 'employers will see a stream of resumes of once-in-a-lifetime quality' after the company laid off more than 1,000 people
What an utter dick.
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/epic-ceo-tim-sweeney-says-employers-will-see-a-stream-of-resumes-of-once-in-a-lifetime-quality-after-the-company-laid-off-more-than-1-000-people/Open linkView original on lemmy.world628
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About as bad as the last company I worked at, a VP would say folks who were laid off were "promoted to customers".
I do hope there's a special place in hell for people like this, where they are spanked for all eternity with a soup spoon.
I suggest violence
Oh I left before I was "promoted". It was a hellish place and you'd definitely know the company if in North America.
Amazon? This was a running joke employees would say all the time.
Nope, but not shocking.
Wow. I’m sad this happens at more than one place.
“Amazon pays more cause it expects more”. Like fucking 20p more.
I mean, if retail that is an improvement.
This is the type of "dickery" that surpasses all measurements, the one that is, honest to god, trying to be nice.
In short, he's really, REALLY stupid.
You don't even get why he's being called stupid but let's address what you said first. Would you rather get a 6 months severance and a very little opportunities to get rehired is almost impossible or keep your current job? Unless you're stupid you'd rather keep your job. The 6 months severance with health care doesn't matter when you're being thrown overboard.
And he's being called stupid because he's throwing people overboard to keep his ship going and he's trying to pass it off as "they'll survive" like he's done nothing wrong. He'd genuinely would look smarter if he just shut the fuck up and take the layoff criticisms on the chin. But you know, much like Randy Pitchford, Sweeney loves to put his foot in his mouth.
Why does a capitalist apologist pop up every time people point out their shitty behavior? In fact he didn't have to lay a bunch of people off, he could have cut costs in other ways, such as, oh idk, his own ridiculous pay package. These people only fucking care about themselves. They would sell you out for a cup of coffee. Why do you insist on running interference for them and whitewashing their greedy antisocial behavior?
It's his job to navigate the company through this shit economy and he failed at his job. But his failure is put on the 1000 people who got laid off while he gets to continue sitting in his little castle acting like there was nothing he could do. If you want to ride his dick go ahead, I've got no sympathy for a failure who didn't learn the first time around (because it's not even 3 years from the last layoffs) and suffers no consequences for his failure.
The fact that he is complying with the workers' contract has nothing to do with the fact that his comment, and by extension he himself, is stupid.
That's supposed to be good? That's bare minimum.
Oh yeah Timmy? Who's hiring them in this industry, let alone this economy? Go fuck yourself.
Roblox? It's about the same thing as Fortnite, is it not?
a yes the child molester playground provider
Ai is going to bankrupt a lot of stupid business owners
At this point, the weeding is needed
Good, they'll have to sell off all their shit, and we can get lots of fancy stuff really cheap at their yard sales.
Those rich douchebags are always buying expensive guitars they never learn to play, that's what I'm targeting.
I too collect guitars, I like your logic here.
Brother! You can have all those Trump guitars. Don't bother leaving any behind for me.
The basics are still there: Food, Shelter, Water, Safety Fill one of those needs and forget about the fancy AI silliness.
Yes, before AI Fortnite was fulfilling one of those 4 basic needs, you’re right.
The person you're replying to is trying to say you'll be safer if you work for a company providing basic needs instead of something non-required, like gaming.
like Microsoft.
my company of 50 went down to 22 because of "AI productivity gainz" - then we had the biggest dip in client retention in its 10 year history and those clients that do remain all have massive issues with getting what they want and there are constant "fire drills" to keep them happy.
We just started using it a couple of weeks ago, I'm expecting this very same scenario.
Did management have anything to say? How was the dip in client retention measured?
EOY state of the Union report, 10Q reporting or whatever the eoy one is called.
Retention is the classic churn metric (lost/total)*100
It's simultaneously testing the waters and conditioning people to accept less.
The greatest employees in the world, for someone else to hire!
So he's...bragging about losing talent???
Seriously I got the best top ppl and letting them go is not the message you want to have.
Also a stream of game programmers learning basic security concepts and transitioning into cybercrime too hopefully.
They can start with companies they know inner-workings of.
I need to meet some of them and team up.
i'm surprised stories like these haven't been all over the news with constant tech layoffs
Everytime this dirt bag speaks, I wish I had more Epic accounts to cancel.
Just pirate their shit.
Not my cup of tea, for a number of reasons:
"the people who molest and murder children on islands wouldn't like it if I got something for free, so I won't"
When you live in society, you should obey the laws OR fight to change them. Pirating stuff is a weak form of protest.
...are you serious?
You're clearly upset with the leadership of your country. How does piracy change anything?
not pay money better than pay money
I don't really do it as a "protest", I do it because I do not respect the law and because being a criminal is cool, but corporations are "leadership of [my] country" and anything that deprives them of any money at all is an effective protest.
Let's take the absolutely-totally-hypothetical example of pirating Star Trek: Strange New Worlds instead of getting a subscription for Paramount Plus. Paramount is owned by the Ellisons, and Larry Ellison is closer to "leadership of [my] country" than anyone sitting in the White House.
so he cant get my $8 per month or whatever, that'll show him
He manages to toot his own horn and be completely tone-deaf in a single sentence.
Honestly, I do respect the decision to publicly declare that the laid off employees were very good. I've done job searching while laid off and it does suck the suspicion through which you're viewed by interviewers when they ask about it
When I did hiring our HR had some system that did this. It fucking sucked. It passed through so many shit candidates. I eventually ended up just going straight to the discard pile when I had to review applications.
I just don't get all this shit. I'm a programmer and for years at my last job I did most of the interviewing for candidates and had the final say-so for whether or not we hired somebody. I could tell in a 15 minute phone call whether somebody knew what they were doing or not and could make a positive contribution to the project.
Yeah, I found resumes to be a pretty poor indicator other than kind of "subconscious" things I started picking up on after a while. I doubt any AI or program could manage that though. I can't even quantity it myself. Talking to someone is infinitely better and I'd always try to get in as many interviews as I could.
My favorite thing about phone interviews was when I'd ask a question and the person would pause and I'd hear keyboard noises and whispering in the background. I was like c'mon dude, even if you get a job this way what the fuck are you going to do your first day at work if you don't know how to do anything yourself?
Yeah I think some people think laid off and fired are synonyms. I was just low seniority in my union
Massive software layoffs have been common for as long as I can remember. I think it's not that big of an issue to explain why you are looking for a job in that field. Oh your last job was xxx ahh they laid off x number of employees.
It's not a secret that most of the people laid in these things are just people on the wrong teams and nothing to do with their capabilities
No, employers will REJECT all those great resumes, because they're firing their best people, too.
All this uncontrolled giddiness about AI is entirely, 100% because they are so excited about the opportunity to FIRE as many disgusting human workers as possible. They have already declared the human workforce dead, and they are replacing us ASAP, often before our computerized replacements are even ready.
Remember all those racists chanting about being replaced? It isn't the Jews, or the immigrants, or whatever was in their pea brains, it's the AI/Robotics that absolutely WILL replace us.
They’re trying to realign tech and software developers from the cool, relaxed, high paid jobs of a decade ago to more “modern” (read: exploited) standards of work.
They're ecstatic that they finally have leverage over thought workers.
I agree with the first two paragraphs, but as for the third, I think you overestimate the capability of chatbots on steroids. I'd even go so far as to say that promoting the whole "imminent replacement for humanity" narrative is doing their marketing for them. It couldn't even run a Taco Bell drivethrough.
I get what you are saying, but the distinguishing characteristic of the new AI, over the past computer programs, is that it learns, and improves. Years ago, people used to laugh at me for supporting solar, because it was so inefficient. I just said the research will improve it, and today solar is an extremely popular, affordable, and growing option, especially with Trump's war profiteering.
Apparently in the AI world, they are expecting it's capabilities to double every 7 months. I saw a list of steps, with the industries that will be impacted with each step, and as each step doubles, it impacts bigger and bigger industries.
It's learning the basics right now, but humans are training the AI to the point that it will replace them, then the next level of humans will train the next level until replaces them, then move on to the next level to be trained.
In a few years, well all be replaced, except a lucky few who do the maintenance, but those jobs won't pay much, because if you won't do it for that pay scale, get out of the way, there are a LOT of unemployed people who will accept it.
It learns, sure... and it's already learned as much as it can from the entire internet, and still can't run a Taco Bell drivethrough.
Yeah, and in the cryptocurrency world, they predicted that Bitcoin would currently be worth $200k - $300k, potentially as high as 400k - 1mil in high-greed environments.
Instead, it is almost exactly at the value of their "Bitcoin Dead" level lol
I would give less credence to the opinions of people whose financial interests are vested in you believing AI is magic.
Humans are more than just chatbots. Therefore even the most advanced chatbot will never replace us.
Which is not to say that I think humans are the supreme possible intelligence, or that machine intelligence could never surpass us. I just do not believe that the current LLM's we have are capable of achieving anything resembling actual thought, just a decently convincing mimicry of it.
It's also not to say that I think no jobs will be lost, but I think they'll be situations like where a QA department reduces its workforce by 75% but then the remaining 25% are still expected to oversee the AI's output. It's still a shit outcome economically (though I'd also reference that quote, "Imagine how badly we had to fuck up to create a world where the robots taking all the jobs is a bad thing"), but it's not the same as actually rivaling us in cognition or intellectual capacity.
And a few years before 2016, everyone who bought Bitcoin was going to be driving a Lamborghini.
I still see more Priuses and Corollas on the road these days.
That's why they were talking about future capabilities, not current ones
I mean the structure of the technology itself. It's a chatbot.
And anyway, as far as future capabilities go, that's just their opinion. And as far as that goes,
Uh... you're misunderstanding what it's doing. It's not learning as we use the word.
It's figuring out what words probabilistically appear near each other. Like when you use the suggested word at the top of your mobile keyboard. You can write "sentences", but they often go off the rails.
They just get fed some keywords and spit back out words it has observed to be near those.
And no point are LLMs capable of making any analysis or decisions. They cannot perform any thought based work. At best it can copy past shit it's seen someone else figure out on the Internet. There are very few jobs out there that are entirely devoid of any decision making that these could actually be expected to replace (and have the company continue to function)
If you're thinking of the list that I'm thinking of: that is completely unfounded. They started with the premise "AI will be perfect in 2 years" and then drew a graph that looked good-ish. There is no scientific value to it.
Valid, but no matter what the timeline, it's going to improve over time, and companies are already committed to it, so they'll be prioritizing continuing R&D until it does what they want it to.
It's coming whether we like it or not, and it's going to be a bloodbath no matter what the final scenario is. Either the workers take the hit, or the companies do, and if the companies do, then the workers will take the hit anyway.
The workers are screwed no matter what.
Counterpoint: LLMs are a dead-end for AGI. And outsourcing tasks to a "sometimes correct, but very often wrong" bot starts looking like a not-so-good idea once you actually need to pay for the compute.
Valid, but that's part of what I mean. If it finally works the way they want it to, welcome to a 75+% permanent unemployment rate, and the worker is screwed. But if it doesn't work, the bubble pops, and the entire economy crashes, and the workers is screwed.
We're screwed.
It really didn't take him long to spend what little goodwill he got for punching Apple in the mouth.
I missed the memo there was goodwill.
The worst part of job hunting was tailoring your reaume to match a job posting for each job....just to try and get by the AI filters and get humans to look at it.
Once i learned how to fool most HR filters, i started to get calls from companies.
Its all a fucking game
Care to share?
Same here. Is it just listing a bunch of keywords?
What i did was eliminate a bunch of stuff that did not relatebto the position first. E.g. ai does not care you volunteer at a food shelter if the job is for carpentry.
Dont include it if the position doesnt require it.
E.g. dont put "proficient in Word" unless the request states "candidate must be proficienr in wors". Also if they ask for someone proficient in mail merging welcome letters from names in ms access..... then put exactly that on the C.V.
Dont just list software you know....parrot their requests back at them....thisis what i mean about tailoring the reaume to the position.
I went with skills first, Then a list of companies for work history without explaining what i did there except for 1 position that seemex to want a list of accomplishments at a previous job.
Extras tha might help come last.
Just the facts, leave the talking points for the interview. Thats the time to bring up your food shelter volunteer work.
Match the job requests in the CV to get past the non human filters first.
"I have optimized the streamlined AI driven deep learning model to predict our maximum net ROI for our start up company."
"I did linear regression to predict sales next month"
Any advice you have would be greatly appreciated.
He needs to be dropped into a deep well and forgotten.
The EGO on this man "because I hired all of these people, they're amazing. Pay no attention to the fact that I had to lay 1k of them off due to poor planning."
If they're so talented and experienced, then why'd you fire them for no reason? Surely the company expects to continue growing and will need more employees, not fewer.
Should have kept the employees and offered them as consultants, packaged as loot boxes.
Lmao, Rate the ex employees common to legendary and sell them off loot crate style
Upending the lives of all of these people is actually a GOOD thing for the industry. ~ Tim Sweeney
Bragging about leaving people who deserve better jobless, avoiding the use of humanizing language (mentions the resumes, makes sure not to mention "quality" people).
It sounds like a snippet from a bigger statement to me.
Weird you'd let all that talent go, then...
Right up there with the 30000 from Amazon.
Yes because everyone who got laid off is seeing once in a lifetime opportunities and not a lot of automated rejections based off of crappy LLM setups.
"I worked on the team that implemented Vulkan support for Unreal Engine 5, and have created over 200 shaders for AAA retail games."
"Sir, this is a Wendy's"
Another brilliant CEO decision that is definitely worth his massive pay.
I mean he could pay himself $1 a year and still be making a killing in dividends since he still owns over 40% of the company.
Yes, when I say pay I mean total compensation. Those people take cheap loans out against their equity.
That part wouldn't be part of his total compensation because it's not actually income.
But I'm fairly sure he gets dividends. Because there are other shareholders and they wanna get paid too. Much lower tax rate than when making the same amount in salary.
I worked on calculating the total compensation packages for a major investment firm. We're talking VERY large. They got most of their income in "internal shares" with long term incentive delays on them like 3 years.
That makes sense in many contexts, but not really if you're the largest shareholder in a privately-held company. Which is why I'm fairly sure most of his income is dividends. Does he use the loan trick to live a fancier lifestyle? Perhaps, but we'll probably never be privy to the information.
Living it right now. Me: "We've sold off or had resignations from ¾ of our engineering" Boss: "We'll rebuild".
Also Boss: "Our value is in our people".
No, more like the data crunching algorithms that ingest and evaluate the resumes will fine tune down to determining some kind of pattern or set of patterns, which describes what skill sets Epic apparently no longer needs.
Then, that data will be sold to some business intelligence / market strategy development consultant, who will then adjust their advice that they give to other tech clients.
Sweeney also fully knows this is what will happen.
Because he has similar consultants or perhaps an inhouse team, going over the same kind of data, that told him to let all these people go.
None of these C suite types actually do any advanced, in depth, strategic planning.
They have the BI guys write those up for them, like how the military has a set of potential war plans to be followed or activated when some set of cinditions are triggered, or a General decides its time to do it, or w/e.
The C suite folk, they're literally just a big social club, all they do is collude with or against other C suites.
Like... that's how this actually works.
It would be immensely easier and generate huge savings for big firms to automate their C suites, not the actual specialists or team leads with deep systemic and specific knowledge.
They're the most expensive employees, by far, and they are the most likely to act irrationally, with outsized negative impacts on the whole business.
... But thats not the point.
The point... is to pamper the C suite people's egos and wallets.
Yep.
That is the actual ultimate end goal.
Its a rigid class system, with an incompetent and haughty nobility... that just kind of pretends to not be that.
Techno-feudalism.
They spent decades putting an end to meritocracy so they could lord over us with unearned positions of power.
He doesn't say that they're good quality. Just, once in a lifetime quality. Interpretation is up the reader.
A lot of big tech companies have just said the people fired suck (I.e calling it "performance based layoffs) to hide that they've needed to hit the brake hard.
Combined with "...so we fired them on the spot", this should count as defamation.
I call bullshit. He's under the illusion that computer science and development requires geniuses like they did in the 1950's. Most are just working stiffs being bandied about by bad leadership who eventually throws them away after a series of bad management decisions.
Being a genius only takes you so far. A lot of projects need manpower for testing and debugging, and waiting for some genius with 23549 AI agents won't solve it.
A little irrelevant but I saw a reel saying Tim saves Amazon forests with his own money. Apparently he has bought a lot of land there only for the sole purpose of saving Amazon. Can anyone fact check this?
Apparently he bought it so he can steal endangered animals and make them fight in a "death arena" in his back garden. Please don't fact check this, just accept it is true.
Wouldn't be the first time though.
Tim Sweeney is...
...the Tiger King.
Season 3 coming to a Black Mirror near you!
I don’t know about the Amazon, but he does own huge amounts of land in North Carolina which he has protected and/or donated to conservation schemes.
Is it that thing where people get paid for not cutting the forest down?
Yes. Greenwashing. You pay someone who wasn't going to cut their trees to keep not cutting their trees, and you get carbon credits to offset your company's pollution.
You change nothing but get to brag about saving the world.
Piggybacking on this to say the vast majority of "a tree planted for every _______" schemes are also greenwashing bullshit, including Ecosia if I'm not mistaken.
Most plant monocrops with no regard for how a natural, healthy forest functions and generally take no care to make sure the trees actually reach maturity or even adolescence.
There are exceptions, some companies who actually do it right (though carbon credits are a bullshit poison concept regardless), but I imagine most big companies use the corner-cutting options.
You could?
But I guess I will.
I can't find any good source for him having bought Amazon forest. So that's probably made up. However he seems to be buying and donating to conservation wooded land in the Appalachians.
https://www.treehugger.com/fortnite-founder-sweeney-invests-millions-forest-conservation-north-carolina-4868672
https://www.citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2016/11/08/box-creek-wilderness-permanently-protected/93443704/
https://www.thegamer.com/fortnite-creator-epic-founder-time-sweeney-spending-millions-buying-up-protecting-forests/
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/etimes/trending/meet-tim-sweeney-the-epic-games-billionaire-who-quietly-bought-50000-acres-of-forest-to-save-it-from-developers/articleshow/129589611.cms
https://appalachian.org/sahc-south-yellow-mountain-preserve/
In that last one he is being thanked for a particularly large land donation.
I do have to give him a mole of credit for at least advocateing their quality. But tbh they should just have together into their own studio.
Same energy
oh, so he did it for the corporations? nice
Do the shareholders know? I mean actually though, are they watching? How do these CEOs not get removed for annihilating company futures based on speculative bubbles? Microslop is having the exact same issue with their guy... Can they just not see it somehow? How are they being bamboozled?
Tencent does not care.
ding ding ding!
Mass Hirings and Firings are all smoke and mirrors for the shareholders. You do a mass hirings to put on the appearance of growth and you do mass firings to put on the appearance of cuttings costs. None of it's real and the shareholders don't seem to care.
Remember back when this AI Slop jock jagoff was making great games? Feels like an eternity ago.
Unreal and Unreal Tournament, sure. I feel like all of their many sequels saw a continuous decline in quality, but the originals were great games. Can't deny that Gears of War has been influential. Epic Pinball and One Must Fall 2097 were good for a laugh for ten minutes, but I can't help but feel that they'll have aged badly.
Seems crazy to think that Jill of the Jungle, which is an awful game, is what lined their pockets enough to develop the Unreal engine, and they were riding on the success of that all the way up to Fortnite.
For some reason, I feel disgusted by his smug attitude.
As you should be.
Ugh, he's not epic.
Shouldn't it be Epics?
Nah, Lil' Timmy, your former employees are about to see a "stream of blood".
Yeah… I'm so happy I never made an accout…
And not a single one of those resumes will be from someone that has any loyalty to EPIC. Those employees won't give a shit about the company that pays them, just that they get paid.
So EPIC will continue to lose money by paying top dollar for the most unmotivated of employees. The ones who will collect a check to let management make all the creative decisions, and then leave once that inevitably leads to a dumpster fire. Rinse & repeat with the next place that'll pay more.
Jokes on the EPIC CEO for being so myopic he doesn't seem to understand the reality of this situation. That he's about to pay top dollar for the worst employees imaginable: the ones who won't shake the boat when its clearly already on its way to being capsized.
What are you talking about? EPIC is the one who fired these employees, not the one who is going to receive their resumes. These will be other companies.