Update: Unity office death threat was made by a Unity employee
(www.polygon.com)
from ram@lemmy.ca to technology@lemmy.world on 15 Sep 2023 10:58
https://lemmy.ca/post/5340118
from ram@lemmy.ca to technology@lemmy.world on 15 Sep 2023 10:58
https://lemmy.ca/post/5340118
cross-posted from: lemmy.ca/post/5340114
ghostarchive
Original Discussion^[lemmy.world/post/5057297]San Francisco police told Polygon that officers responded to Unity’s San Francisco office “regarding a threats incident.” A “reporting party” told police that “an employee made a threat towards his employer using social media.” The employee that made the threat works in an office outside of California, according to the police statement.
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And death threat pilled
I don’t know their motivation, but I imagine many people don’t want to see the project that they’ve been working on for years dead.
That, or an easy day off work.
They were working from another office per the article.
I’m sure they’re gonna be getting many days off work now
Even better than fake, it's self-inflicted.
The fact that Unity board of directors haven't fired the CEO shows that they are A-OK with this.
This is the problem with the shareholder mentality that’s ruining a lot of products and services. They don’t give a damn about the longevity of the company. They only care about money now; and as soon as things go sour, they’ll sell their shares and move on to the next company.
Taking your company public is like giving it cancer
I picture it as taking off in a plane full of their employees and customers, and climbing as high as possible. Then, as soon as the engines stall or fuel runs out, the execs casually jump out and pull the ripcords on their golden parachutes.
There should be law forcing major players in the market to commit for 10 years + when they buy shares above a certain threshold and when those 10+ years pass they should be forced to justify when selling. Might be dumb but just saying as things are the market/system will just rot on the daily. Shits corrupted to the core imo.
IPOs usually come out with something like that, investors who commit to not sell their shares for half a year or maybe a year. After that… it’s each one for their own.
That isn’t surprising at all. They gave him the job in the first place. And he’s trying to squeeze as much money as possible for them too.
Honestly, they’re probably in on it. Greed is all this is.
Absolutely, that’s why they all sold their stocks before they announced this
I know that execs have time windows they have to be in to buy and sell their stocks, and it has to be planned months in advance, but a massive TOS change like this doesn’t happen overnight or without buy in all the way to the top. They absolutely planned this, and I hope the SEC nails their asses to the wall over it.
yeah I’ll admit i don’t know much about how all this stufd works, but thanks to others i also found out about these rules. But imo those time windows are absolutely useless in preventing insider trading if they plan to do both things in the same time window anyways
I’ve been working on an indie game project for several years now and invested thousands of dollars into it. Fortunately, I had the foresight to use Godot for it, but if I’d used Unity instead I’d be completely screwed right now. Hell, I’m still using the 3.X branch of Godot because I figured that migrating everything to version 4 would be more trouble than it’s worth. Going to a completely new engine at this stage in development would be completely out of the question.
Good luck with your game! Is it something public we could contribute to?
No, it’s a commercial release. I’d been doing everything with placeholder art throughout most of development but I’ve recently commissioned some artists for some professional assets, and I think I’ll have enough to put together some screenshots and a demo video and get a page on Steam, etc. set up within the next few weeks.
It’s a Metroidvania with influences from cinematic platformers (Another World, Flashback) and immersive sims (System Shock, Deus Ex.)
I’m sorry to stifle your expectations, but if you’re working on that project on your own, you’re very unlikely to reach the 200k/year revenue necessary to trigger this new pricing scheme.
Could be stock options as well. I’d be shitty if part of my compensation was stock and I saw blatant mismanagement taking place.
Seriously, tf is going on over there at Unity?
People with passion wanted to work on a great project only to see how the vision was corrupted and turned into a monster.
Like, the regular employee isn't excited about shit changes either.
I don’t think “regular employee” should be used anywhere close to this story lol. Imagine your passion project being building something for someone else and when that gets upset you resort to death theeats against your employer? Jesus.
Edit: Lol when this story first came out the consensus here was that death threats were not cool, now that it’s an employee everyone is sympathetic? Alright, let’s spin this story to fit our bias, why not!
I’m okay so long as they just kill the execs.
Maybe it's different people with different opinions replying
That’s ignoring voting though, which is a good way to get the average sentiment of a community regardless of who is doing the commenting. Is it more likely that the community’s average opinion of death threats flipped overnight or that the new information changed the average opinion?
That's a fair point.
They are rebranding to Disunity.
Either someone hates to see their company burn to the ground and responded in an extremely immature way, or a higher up went "let's get this public town hall canceled in a way that people feel sorry for us. SIMMONS! MAKE A DEATH THREAT NOW!"
The former seems the most likely, but I always hold out hope that it's middle management being a dumbass as corporate's gonna corporate
The CEO and his cronies don't understand that people work for more than money. They think all people come into work just to do what is required to get money or, if there is ambition, to rise through the ranks and make more money or have ideas that make more money.
However, there are people, especially in projects like this, that are also there because they believe in something. Believe that they can help creating something special that helps people. Unity has it's dominance among other things because it's an easy to use and easy to learn tool that enables people to create games that would've otherwise had trouble getting into development.
If you’re doing something you love for a company you’re gonna have a bad time.
Are you working something you hate?
A lot of people are fine working what they love for a company, surely there are issues, but not all companies are batshit and ruin their product.
It’s not so black and white though. Passion jobs are often exploited because people will put up with it more and there is higher demand for those types of jobs.
Your best bet is to find something that is interesting and nice enough to keep you content and not bored to death but not so enthralling that you feel like working unpaid overtime or what ever. Bonus points if it’s paid relatively well.
Be passionate about your work! Right up to the point where you start disagreeing with how I am bastardising it… then you can fuck off.
Oh, I imagine working conditions there have gotten worse in recent times, too. The kind of leadership that fucks over their clients like this don't start with those clients. They treat everyone as a resource to be exploited, and employees are the ones they can abused most readily.
The public furor over the pricing model is the opportunity, not the motive.
Division, ironically
*insert picture of cat in overalls scouting over snow bank
youtu.be/KTa6fWgl7us?si=gotlanLsDBHSrT0c Hank: Peggy, it’s for you. It’s Dale. Peggy: Hello Dale Dale: YOU DONT KNOW WHO I AM BUT I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE
Pocket sand!
I don’t know who needs to hear this:
Unity sucks, but death threats are not okay.
If you really want to stop shit like this, vote in progressive legislators. So we can codify the fact that corporate actions influence more ppl than just the shareholders and their actions should reflect that.
Edit: thanks everyone for correcting me. I meant not okay.
FTFY
Haha I think you a word.
Freudian slip or really passionate about video games?
Maybe they’re just a fan of death?
…Or maybe they mean threatening death itself— As in, like “Stop killing my friends, Death, that’s really not cool, and I’m going to start stealing your Death-beers from your Death-fridge if you don’t stop”.
You’re gonna die!
But before that, let’s go see this unity, I hear she’s handing out good times.
You might wanna double check that one, chief.
Answering more to the spirit of the comment, just voting is not really cutting it. Even when progressives are voted in, most of them are too hesitant to defy corporate interests.
Of course, death threats for if a game is not as good as someone wanted is just ridiculous, and generalized death threats involving people who have nothing to do with the decision is a psycho attitude. But this? A disgruntled worker worried about their livelihood, directing it to the people in charge? People who casually find fit to destroy countless careers to get a little bit more money? I find it hard to blame them.
Sympathize with their plight if you find doing so worthwhile, but also recognize their response isn’t helping.
Would you rather change ‘but’ to ‘and’, or change ‘are’ to ‘aren’t’?
As requested by the CEO for cover.
“an employee made a threat towards his employer using social media”
Wow. That’s… probably against their internal social media policy.
HR won’t take kindly to that on their annual performance review.
“The customers love you, your colleagues respect and trust you… but upper management have expressed concerns about your comments around flaying them and their families alive.”
“let’s see…areas for improvement. 'Fewer death threats towards co-workers”."
There won’t be another annual review if the company stops existing
Problem solved!
Didn’t we call this yesterday? I am certain I saw multiple posters on here predicting pretty much exactly this.
Yeah, it sounded weird that it would be a gamer or developer, much less any “fan” of unity.
I had assumed it was a fabricated threat that came from “inside the house.” Now it looks like it was a real threat from inside. I can’t condone what the employee said, but I can sympathize with their plight. Not to mention that of all Indie devs whose workflows have likely been uprooted by Unity’s selfish move.
Yea this is a textbook PR stunt to look like the victims and people still buy it.
Three years ago after trying Unity for a month I chose to learn Godot instead. I see now how right that decision was. Well done past self. Have a future cookie.
I wish I could bribe past me with future cookies...
Leave one out overnight and tell your present self that they can have it in the future if they do x before tomorrow. If you succeed, then you get a cookie. If you fail, eat the cookie anyway. At least you tried.
For me the rule that has always worked is “bet everything on open-source”. It has always paid off.
When people at uni used Matlab, I learned R (before R-studio even existed) and python. I moved to linux as soon as I could. I never wanted to learn anything MS or Apple specific, or proprietary technologies such as visual studio, excel, vba, c#, SAS. I went on docker ASAP…
Now the world in my field runs on open source tecnologies, and I am the leaders of the “new stuff” wherever company I go.
On the long term learning open source solutions is always a win. Best case scenario it becomes the industry standard, worst case scenario it gives you the know how to master proprietary tools
For what it’s worth, C# is a ECMA standardized language (www.ecma-international.org/…/ecma-334/) and has a linux-based implementation (mono – www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/).
Though it is hard to overcome the obvious Windows origins of the first implementation.
Mono is becoming outdated now that dotnet just supports Linux.
(It took a lot from mono to do so.)
I was completely unaware! I haven’t been keeping up with the .net / c# ecosystem mostly because my job doesn’t make me. That’s both good and bad, I guess.
Good move. MATLAB is trash.
Eh, depending on your career Excel is worth a tiny bit of time given its pervasiveness and how powerful it is. But like you say, learning open source will make Excel a piece of cake.
If you think MATLAB is trash, wait til you see Octave!
C# and Visual Studio are pretty great now, and they don’t lock you into Windows at all. Most of C# is open source.
My experience is very different. I know a lot of c# developers, they are locked, even if c# now looks open source. They are locked as a mac user is locked to mac. C# is the most monopolizing language I know. Usually people know more languages, they easily move from one language to the other, from one programming style to the other depending on the task, they can easily learn different tools, different ways of doing stuff. All c# developers I know seriously struggle to move out of their conform zone, that is visual studio. To the level that many even struggle with vscode. And the way of doing things of visual studio is usually good for windows but it is the worst when doing more “modern” things, from ai to kubernetes
So your experience is that you’ve never heard of Swift and you haven’t heard anything about dotnet since Visual Basic in 2002.
Classic example of experience bias. “Well in my experience this is how the world works”
That’s a good rule. I only accidentally got into open-source, but now that I know what it is and what it’s all about, I am totally sold on it and will almost always choose open-source over proprietary alternatives.
I agree for the most part, but Excel is just so good.
They say “Excel excels at excel”.
I don’t use excel other than as a glorified calculator. I don’t use word as well. My department knows and I am pretty open when I do interviews. If the job requires to open more than 1 file Excel every 2 months, I am out. If I need to open a single excel sheet with VBA, they wasted my time.
Excel is fine, is what people do with excel that is not fine
What do you use for spreadsheets, libreoffice? I could see not liking a specific program but I love a spreadsheet and use them constantly. I use libre for ideological reasons but don’t find it as convenient for certain tasks as excel or google sheets.
Python/pandas, R or a real database depending on the task.
I don’t dislike excel. I dislike what people do with excel. And I dislike vba
I prefer Google Sheets over Excel but cannot tell you why.
Is it the UI? We use Google sheets at my work and I hate it. Missing formulas & formatting options that I like.
It works fine if you do the basics, but its not as full featured as I want it.
Really? My Google Sheets has so many formulas and conditional formatting. There’s so much I can’t do in Excel that I can do in Sheets :/
Also, adding checkboxes in Excel is a pain lol. They made it so difficult.
Preach it! One of my colleagues writes all his machine learning code in Matlab. Brilliant person, has done some incredible research, but can do anything with the code because no organization is going to bring Matlab into its clusters and pay for all the licenses needed to run it. So while plenty of presentations and papers have been written of this research, the actual process of letting people use it takes an additional army of Python developers to translate and test every new feature and enhancement.
This is what happens when you build your career around walled garden platforms. Inevitably, you’ll reach a dead end. Focus on learning tools that enable you the most. Open source will always win in the end, because it will never come with this very heavy piece of baggage that proprietary tools have. This is why the internet is built on Linux and not Windows.
Unity is the same way. When you build your career on a technology that a single company can strip from you on a whim, that’s a big risk. I really hope that Godot and other open source engines take off after this. It will be a painful transition for many developers, but hopefully it’s a lesson very well learned.
For me, it’s “learn everything”.
The best devs in XYZ language/framework aren’t the ones who are experts in XYZ, but the ones who are just good enough in XYZ and 15 other things that they see what XYZ excels at, and lacks, and how patterns from elsewhere could be adapted to supercharge XYZ’s strengths and mitigate its weaknesses.
I’m curious why you chose R as an alternative to Matlab instead of Scilab. Scilab is specifically designed to be a free and open source alternative to Matlab.
For my thesis I was writing some test software and when deciding which language to use Matlab was immediately ruled out due to the cost (and also the extra cost for the toolkits I’d need). I instead went with Scilab which now means that anybody wanting to reproduce my results can do so freely.
Because at the time I needed more the statistical and plotting part. Ggplot was not yet a thing, but R was already pretty nice for plotting and stat.
I was using other, lower-level languages for more intensive tasks, as I was working in high performance computing.
Makes sense, thanks for the response! It is kind of fun to have a mix of the higher level (like R/Scilab) and lower level (which I used Fortran for mine).
We all started with fortran the old times in hpc and scientific computing. Kids nowadays don’t know the thrill of retro engineering fortran code! /s
Honestly at this point I feel worse for the guy who made the threat than anyone else. Can you imagine what is like working with those sort of bosses with such exploitative tendencies and an utter disregard for an entire industry? They get to ruin countless lives but if anyone gets mad that’s the unacceptable one who is punished.
I’m pretty sure killing is a worse way to ruin someone’s life.
The number of people being ruined is pretty different though.
I get it, it’s a callous attitude, but I’m wondering if going for civility above anything else is really working out. I’d love for such situations to be settled with a reasonable discussion, but do they ever?
Not sending death threats is the bar set for civility these days?
He didn’t kill anyone.
.
Because a threat is not an attempt. Most likely they had absolutely no intention to carry through with it.
It's still bad but saying "I'm gonna kill you" is not the same as actually trying to kill you.
Obviously, but you don’t ignore it either. You don’t wait for a DUI to crash before doing something about the threat. Say you’d like to shoot the president and see if the secret service ignores you.
You said that he didn't kill anyone because he got caught first. Which implies that if he didn't get caught he would have actually killed someone.
They really aren't the same. It's a common fallacy on the Internet to lunge straight to the worst possible case and equate that to whatever it is you're arguing, but it really isn't the same. Sure, the secret service won't ignore you if you say you'd like to shoot the president. But will their reaction be the same as if you've smuggled a gun in to a press conference and are spotted actively moving to get near him? Obviously not, because what I said remains true. Simply saying "I'm gonna kill you" is not the same as actually trying to kill you.
Hold on, give him time to think of more strawmen.
Time is up!
Case closed.
Then why don’t they look for work at another company?
Making death threats is still a major dick move regardless of the circumstances.
It might have been wiser, but seems to me we got to a point we should be thinking of the circumstances.
Besides, that only would have solved their individual problem, IF they even managed it. The way the company is being run would remain the same. How it would impact all the people who rely on that engine would remain the same.
It’s “never acceptable” to threaten someone, but intentionally ruining countless people’s livelihoods is “nothing personal”. Something is off about that.
You can’t just solve a company’s culture by yourself.
You can either convince enough people to unionize, or you can save yourself.
Agreed but I can still understand the frustration.
It is, but all we have right now is Unity’s claim that this is what happened. We don’t even know the content of the threat, who made it, why they made it. All of that context could cast this in a wildly different light. I am very suspicious of Unity the company’s motives here in saying this when we haven’t heard from anyone else.
How can this be cast in any light that’s not negative?
Companies don’t just make up death threats.
They absolutely do when it benefits them and they think they can get away with it, I don’t know how you could make such a blanket claim without questioning yourself just a little bit.
And of course it would be negative, but I think there’s a chance the claim casts a negative light on the company, and not on the employee, who is as yet unnamed. As it stands now, any of the following could be true:
There’s more, and quite frankly it gets tiresome to see people jumping to defend when ploys like this have been the playbook for shitty companies since the invention of the company. I don’t know which of these things will be turn out to be true, but neither do you, and it’s so boring to see someone claiming they know the facts here for sure.
They literally do though to steer the conversation to one wherein they’re a sympathetic figure. Never hear of PR?
I think it was the police who found out it was an employee.
Unity employees have extraordinary working conditions and pay. It sucks that their hard work gets tarnished by stupid executives and poor PR but let’s not paint the employee as a victim here.
Or he is just fucked up in the head. That is a possibility too.
But they didn’t just get mad (if this is the full story). They sent them a death threat. I think there is a fine line.
I’ll bite: Death threats are not as serious as tanking an entire company and ruining thousands of lives.
(I don’t actually think that; I just feel like playing devil’s advocate today)
And I don’t.
Death threats are personal. Corporations can be boycotted.
A fair point. None of the news articles even give us any real, meaningful details as to what happened so we don’t know if it was just execs who were threatened or if, perhaps, there was a bomb threat or something. I wish we could see a screenshot of the actual threat so we could make a determination.
That’s gonna be spicy! 🌶️
This has been a hell of a week for Unity.
I can just see their PR team last night planning to spin Unity as a victim after the death threat, in an effort to stop the bleeding, only to find out it was one of their own employees.
the call is coming from INSIDE the house?!?!
Yeah it’s even worse than that. They knew it was from one of their employees but chose not to release that information because “PR”.
They can go spin on it.
A nice company has a great product and is well liked by its customers.
New executive manager comes in and thinks “how can I quickly get a huge bonus”? The answer always is implement new changes that will tuin the company in a year and a half, but that manager will have received his bonuses and is gone, leaving the company in ruins.
I can’t say 100% for sure that this is what happened, but whenever something like this happens, it’s just somebody deciding they want a quick buck
I dont understand how the board allows this behaviour, how do they not interween when an executive clearly is abusing the terms of the contract at the expense of the conpany
The executive was hired by the board or with the board support (CEO usually)
They did exactly what they wanted
The stakeholders want to cash out. A temporary bump to increase the company’s value with no regard for future prospects is great for them.
This scheme worked fine for thousands before him, so clearly board members are not an issue, presumably because they benefit from it.
They know exactly what they’re doing.
They’ve been collecting metrics for months and plugging them into spreadsheets to figure out exactly how profitable this will be, just waiting for the right moment to pull the trigger.
They knew it would be incredibly unpopular. They knew it would likely kill the company one day.
But the spreadsheet doesn’t care about any of that so neither do they. They sold off stocks then made the announcement.
When the changes go live, they’ll squeeze everything they can out of successful projects, who will be left in a position of “losing 50% to Unity is better than losing 100% from pulling the game”.
They’ll stuff their pockets with us much of that money as they can and when the spreadsheet tells them to, they’ll pull the plug and strip the company for parts.
It was the best thing for them and that was all that mattered.
Not to mention money can be made litteraly betting on the stock price swinging from the bad news. Calls and puts plan far enough in advance and automate/preset triggers via broker agreements and can even avoid getting nailed for the obvious insider trading a lot of the time.
They also made the announcement right after an iPhone announcement. Unfortunately, the iPhone was completely underwhelming, so the news didn’t get buried like they probably expected.
This shit should be illegal. If it isn’t already.
Destroying a company for your own personal gain is why America is falling under
It’s not going to change as long as the only people to vote for are “red neoliberals” or “blue neoliberals”.
$$$
They don’t give a shit if someone sinks the ship because they already have their lifeboat ready.
Soooooooo it wasn’t “the gamers” making the credible threats after all, even if I wouldn’t put it past the gaming community to make threats of this nature.
Why would anyone be surprised?
That Unity employee could have been put up to make those threats to smear the policy’s detractors for all we know.
That’s an implausible take. Loyal employees wouldn’t go for such a ploy and disgruntled employees … well, conceivably would take such action on their on volition.
True. They also could’ve just lied.
I wonder if/when someone can FOIA the police records. I really want to know now
I’m not sure if anyone at Unity ever accused the gamers, we all just jumped to the conclusion because that’s exactly the kind of thing the scene would do.
I’m pretty sure back when I made games, it wasn’t Unity employees sending me unhinged tantrums because a number was changed from an 11 to a 12.
Why would Unity go against the gamers? They are the one who are going to generate installations.
Maybe Unity thought it would be a good way to make some noise and keep Unity in people’s mouths.
The inverted Oscar Slap, that was supposed to keep the object’s name out of people’s mouths.
What even is “the gaming community” anymore? Basically everyone except boomers play games.
I think it is more than just people who plays games. It’s more people who play games and participate in community, which is a smaller percentage, though still probably quite big
What is a community? Recommended reading: Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson.
…There’s probably an ecological definition for “community” that you could try to transfer over… I think in cases where a large group of individuals don’t actually interact with all of each other either directly or indirectly, but are nonetheless relevant as a grouping because they share a particularly contextually prominent set of traits (E.G. “Plays Video Games”), then “population” might be a more appropriate term (if a bit sterile).
.
As always is the case. It’s a pr stunt
They should not be getting death threat from employees. They should be getting legal threats from the SEC, and prosecuted for insider trading.
Should should should should should
Nothing works within our government anymore.
And as shit goes down because no one enforces corporate, the rest of us suffer the consequences.
When upper managemeny does stock selloffs before sabotaging the value of the company, it generates distrust in the whole market if they are not prosecuted. Traders stop buying and the economy goes into recession.
I thought after some initial inflammatory headlines, ultimately the stock sale was a periodically scheduled sale. Has information on that changed?
Fun thing is though, if it’s a regular scheduled thing and you schedule your burn-shit-down announcement until after, wellllll…
I mean I guess you could time it once like that, but if that’s your plan, you could have just sold it all a year before you planned on tanking the stock when you set up the schedule and make more money. Or just not tank the stock.
Por que no los dos?
Now I’m just curious, did he do it to make the company seem like the victim or did he do it because he disagrees with what the executives are doing?
Or to get out of work.
I highly doubt we’ll get an answer to that question
Seems like unity knew it was an employee from the start and told the police as much, so probably the second