Pretty decent. When I was laid off last year from a company that supposedly has a reputation for taking care of their employees, I got 1 week per year of service, which was 8 weeks.
Shopify is my guess; I was part of that layoff and the timing lines up. They had those exact terms and paid them out in addition to WARN act minimums contingent on signing of a severance agreement. I had the same offer but declined due to issues I had with the severance agreement.
> I had the same offer but declined due to issues I had with the severance agreement.
Is it too prying to ask what that means in terms of your outcome? Idk what the WARN act is, and I understand that my question may be neive or too personal to post an answer to publicly, but I'm curious what the alternative to signing is/was and if the answer is generally applicable or specific to the company/agreement.
Not at all—I would not have mentioned this if I was unwilling to talk about it.
The WARN Act[1] is a bit of federal legislation that applies during mass layoffs. There are some variations from state to state, but it generally ensures anyone caught in a mass layoff (50 to 100+ people) is required to receive either 2-months advance notice or 2-months salary+medical benefits.
When Shopify performed their layoffs, there were subject to WARN payouts as they did not furnish 2-months notice.
The severance agreement they gave me and others paid out an additional 8 weeks + 1 week per year of seniority, contingent on signing.
I declined to sign, which was painful, but my main concerns were over two clauses:
* a non-mutual NDA Shopify was unwilling to change to a mutual NDA.
* a provision to appear in court on Shopify’s behalf, uncompensated, for an indeterminate about of time, whenever requested.
There was a lot of other oddness about that whole layoff I’ll leave out here for the sake of brevity, but the whole process was quite the shitshow.
Curious, what would be a severance package HN would be satisfied with? I suspect the average US employee would be stunned to hear an offer of 6 months.
So much negativity around these statistical outliers. The majority of companies in the US don't offer severance and it's very rare in some industries. Not saying that it's fair, but name and shame? Maybe we're living in different worlds.
Given the gauntlet that is modern tech interviews, 3 months. 1 month severance isn't an issue in a market where you can grab a new gig in 2-3 weeks. But all these places want 5 rounds of interviews.
Is so standard in the USA, it's not the standard in any other place on Earth I worked at (Brazil, USA, Sweden). Even in Brazil you'd get at least a few months of severance.
"half a week’s pay for each full year you were under 22
one week’s pay for each full year you were 22 or older, but under 41
one and half week’s pay for each full year you were 41 or older
Length of service is capped at 20 years."
And also it's pretty shit because it's capped, so for most software devs it won't be anywhere near what their actual salary was:
"If you were made redundant on or after 6 April 2023, your weekly pay is capped at £643 and the maximum statutory redundancy pay you can get is £19,290. "
This is the money the government will pay you rather than severance from an employer.
Redundancy also comes with a required notice period that the employer must pay you through as well. And there’s a bunch of other rules around how people can be selected for redundancy.
I got laid off when Realtime Worlds went into administration and only got the statutory pay until years later the company was wound up and I got a follow on measly cheque from them for part the money they still owed me for the notice period.
"Your redundancy pay is called a statutory redundancy payment. It is calculated based on your age, weekly pay and number of years you’ve worked for your employer. You are also entitled to a paid minimum statutory Notice Period. It’s your employer’s duty to pay these, but your payments are capped"
If the employer can't pay (as in my case) this is also the money the government will pay in their lieu. Which is why it's so shit/capped. Normal payments from employers are generally more in my experience.
The UK has an awful standard living for how wealthy it is.
For example, if you happen to be classed as a "worker", rather than an employee, you do not have a legal right to leave work or take time off to care for a sick family member or pick a child up from school.
Yep. And there are many many many other examples like this - for instance UK employee protections are quite good.....unless it's your first 2 years of employment. In which case you get almost nothing - within the first 2 years you can be let go without any reason, and it's not redundancy either so it doesn't trigger all kinds of protections - it's just "it's not working out, bye" - same as US, or worse actually in some ways.
Yeah to be honest, a half-year sabbatical with time to job hunt non-frantically is a luxury I've never had. I love my current job, but I would probably look at a half year severance like a vacation.
Sorry for the intrusive question but if you make software engineer level salary how is it that you don't have multiple months/years saved to mitigate for those possible layoffs?
Or did we all fall for the lifestyle inflation trap that comes with high salaries?
I'm probably a pessimist/realist but I have always lived way below my income and saved as much as possible because it really feels like the cash cow that software engineering is is eventually going to end. Layoffs are always looming. When that day comes, I want to relax as much as possible and not have a deadline to find a job,
It is primarily psychological difference. I have 10 years of expense as savings. But that is tied in my retirement/emergency/child education plans. If I stop earning for 1 year, I'll be dipping in them which will create a pressure.
It's relative, but having to dig into your 401k isn't an attractive alternative, one I'd only consider in truly dire straits. You are capped in how much you can put in a year so it's not like a savings account you can aggressively make up for after getting hired.
I'd much rather resort to temp work than dig deeply into my future if I had a choice.
1. I'm not a software engineer, and don't live in or near the valley.
2. I'm married and I have two kids. It's amazing how fast multiple years of saving disappear when you have daycare.
Just to give you an idea of what childcare looks like: It's a very reasonable question whether we should pay for childcare, or hire a full-time staff member for the household to watch the kids: The price is about the same.
Yeah I get it. It's not easy. As a rule of thumb we are still aiming to live with 70% of our household income even with a kid so to mitigate for one of us being laid-off unexpectedly.
I guess it is a trade-off. We could live slightly better in a bigger house but I don't want to stress and be in a tough spot if one of us lose their job. That mental sanity is worth 30% of our income to me.
How are the people making 65k as a household (median income per household in my state) managing this?
I don't even understand how 2.5k$ grocery per month is possible.
We are 3 in our households (young kid) and probably spending closer to 1k$ per month groceries and eating super healthy/organic.
Same, my rule is my gross yearly salary or 24 months all recurring expenses whatever is larger. I try to set my lifestyle to where the 2 years expenses are 70% of gross salary which is honestly not terribly difficult as a dink.
Peace of mind for the cost of "only" making 4.65% interest is well worth it to me.
Can you explain? Unemployment is still very, very low and there are hundreds of thousand of open positions out there. Not sure about game companies, hence my asking.
Not just gaming. Tech companies have been shedding jobs like crazy and slashing hiring. Pretty much every day there is news of some company slashing hundreds or thousand of jobs. Anecdotally, its not unusual to take 6 months to find a new job at only 2/3rd the previous salary.
Tech companies are definitely still hiring too though. My company is and I have no shortage of recruiter LinkedIn mail with leads should I need or want to find another job.
I read an article about this recently, but can’t find it to officially cite it. However, the thrust was something like this:
Despite unemployment being low, the reality is that many of those “thousands of positions” are either geographically-distributed duplicates of the same position, eternally-open cattle calls, or open-but-basically-a-formality for either getting a visa or an internal move. This makes the number of actual openings quite opaque, yet much smaller than it appears.
Yeah, that's my feeling. I see plenty of positions and still get maybe 5 calls a week for work. But it really does feel like most aren't even looking at my resume, nor do recruiters get much farther through a hiring manager.
Of course I could simply be unlucky and swamped by other more attractive candidates. Apparently seniors are swamping Junior roles, so maybe I'm just competing with a bunch of staff/principals now in mid/senior roles.
I don't think these numbers are for tech only anyways. Further, it seems like the high demand is around service jobs and not white-collar office jobs either. So it's probably easy to find a job, but you are gonna be selling donuts, not produce art for video games or earn 400k+ building apps.
I got laid off and my "severance" was the minimum mandated WARN act period and "don't mail your stuff back to us." Of course, the layoff happened the month before equity vesting and annual bonus happened.
Did you look into unemployment benefits? I've never done this but I had acquaintances who looked forward to getting laid off because they'd get unemployment payments from the government for up to 6 months so they saw it as vacation. All they had to do was lie about looking for a job. This was quite a while ago so things might have changed.
PS: not saying you shouldn't have gotten a better severance package.
Unemployment never pays your full salary, and how much it even scales with your salary caps at a number much lower than is relevant for about the top 75% of software engineers in most states. Assuming you're not straight up lying, then the people you talked to likely derived considerable security from their savings and future job prospects, or possibly even other exogenous factors such as supportive families or income-earning partners rather than unemployment benefits alone
I agree that it's wrong and was shocked when a friend brought up that's what they did and several friends chimed in "me too".
Unfortunately, tons of people in the world really don't care about wrong, they only care about what they can get away with? Their argument was "I paid the unemployment tax, I should be able to take advantage of the benefit". But I agree, the point is not to use as much as possible. It's to use as little as possible. We can't have nice things because lots of people will abuse the system.
The layoff announcement mentioned that the 11% staff laid off is global. It's possible a lot of people laid off are actually in China, since Tencent owns 100% of Riot Games. There is a trend for Chinese companies to not hire workers that are over 35 years old, so some of these employees might be unemployed for a long time. Also, Chinese economy is in the crapper right now.
Most are fairly high cost living locations outside the US (ex: Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul, Paris, Dubai). Mumbai and Sao Paulo are not cheap for India and Brazil.
Yeah they kinda just invest and stand back (with west investments at least?), maybe they are conflating tencent with netease. Are they the same parent organization…? Am i a tencent subsidiary?
Every year Riot releases a new cinematic for League of Legends to celebrate the start of the season. Last year they released the worst cinematic in all of their history. This announcement makes me wonder if their sudden rapid growth was at least partially the reason for why they ended up shipping such a bad video.
In the last year Riot also started to sell severely overpriced skins, despite a lot of outrage from the community. With their lootbox system you basically only guaranteed certain skins if you spent like $200, which many players complained was inaccessible for them. Maybe this was a sign that financials were not in a great place for the company.
Is not being able to buy a skin some kind of tragedy? It's a luxury item at any price.
I'm sure there is a kid somewhere crying into his controller because he's been rejected by his online friends because he's using the default skin, but I think he's learning a valuable life lesson.
It's a potentially negative financial marker to the success of their business model of selling skins if their skins don't sell, I don't think there's any more sentiment to the statement beyond that
Given that the marginal cost of a skin is zero, and assuming they're not incompetent at evaluating the price elasticity of their sales, $200 is probably where they maximise profit.
The comment I was replying to didn't say they weren't selling, just that they were unaffordable to many people, so I don't really know what you're referring to.
Maybe it's a negative to alienate your customers in this way, or maybe it works financially to make skins just out of reach and 'aspirational' for most gamers.
First watch the 2022 cinematic [0], to get an idea of what they normally ship. Then watch the 2023 cinematic [1], to see how badly they messed up. And just to drive the point home, compare it with the 2024 cinematic [2] which is a return to form.
If you look at the 2023 cinematic in a vacuum it might seem generic and uninspired, but then when you compare it with the 2022 and 2024 cinematics the quality gap becomes apparent.
Wow, what a great post, thanks so much. I don't know a single thing about LoL but yeah, shipping what is essentially a single tracking shot through a pretty static environment vs the complex, choreographed scenes with characters fighting etc. Pretty big difference.
One thing to note is they used a different vendor than usual. In most recent cases, Unit Image do their cinematics, but weren’t the ones for your 2023 example.
Likely came together last minute and their preferred vendors weren’t available.
> In the last year Riot also started to sell severely overpriced skins, despite a lot of outrage from the community.
They learned from Valorant. It has extremely overpriced skins from the beginning too, and the outrage lasts a single post on Reddit once every few months and is downvoted by fanboys. They just don't care, people will buy them anyway, most people will forget in a moment. I'm guessing they have data from Valorant that simply shows they make more if they just aim at whales. I doubt they would just raise prices without giving it a real thought.
> This means we’re eliminating about 530 roles globally, which represents around 11% of Rioters, with the biggest impact to teams outside of core development.
I wonder if it actually had to do more with esports pulling back quite a bit this last year. Riot was leaning into that pretty hard for League. That had to factor in for a large chunk of the headcount for layoffs.
I just can’t imagine they’re cash flow negative given how popular League and Valorant are, but maybe they’re seeing enough of a dip in their numbers that they’re trending in that direction.
Breaking records does not mean profitable, having first hand knowledge of the situation esports (for Riot) is still very unprofitable -- the way that they try to measure esports profitability is by player increases/purchases after the events occur and leading up to the events and sponsorships of course.
esports does not bring in new players, it mostly brings back churned players or excites current players. The financial model for existing players versus new players is very different.
If that's true, then this is the weaseliest way to express that:
> The adjustments we're making aim to focus us on the areas that have the greatest impact on your experience while reducing investment on things that don’t.
Given that the layoffs are hitting artists and content developers more heavily than the programmers, it is unlikely that Section 174 is the motivation for these layoffs.
Not making payroll because you go cashflow negative makes Boards and C-suites tremble in fear because of the whole “piercing the corporate veil” concept that makes them personally liable for not making payroll.
So you layoff 10% to save the other 90%.
Because otherwise you’d have put 100% of your company out of a job + knock on effects to local economy, being sued, prosecuted for all sorts of things etc etc
It's absolutely wild how good Arcane is, especially considering League imo has the absolute worst aesthetic quality of any popular game. I'm glad they didn't let any of the art directors for the game (does the game even have art directors?) meddle with the show.
We know it has somebody with a foot fetish. Look at the footwear of all the female characters (at least the ones made before 2016, I haven't played it since then).
I did try to watch some recent games and while it looks like the gameplay itself has improved since then, the effect visuals have somehow managed to get even more blended and difficult to read. How do they manage to fail this badly at it for so long?
> We know it has somebody with a foot fetish. Look at the footwear of all the female characters (at least the ones made before 2016, I haven't played it since then).
ehh?? On the character models or splash arts? I've played for a long time and have never heard anyone else say this, outside of the French Maid Nidalee skin[0] which is obvious foot fetish bait. The most notable foot-related art commentary was always around "pizza feet" which was the low-poly, pizza-shaped feet of the character models.
Women wearing heels in wildly inappropriate situations is pretty common media. The number of times I have seen some secret assassin, bodyguard, super hero archetype wearing impractical footwear seems to outnumber the times they are wearing an athletic shoe.
What’s with the vilification of people with a foot fetish anyway? Seems like they’re always getting called out, ragged on, and otherwise treated as filth. Its just the human body, idk what the big deal is.
I think it's exposure. It's a relatively low-taboo fetish, and (unlike most others) it's acceptable/possible to post/find feet on traditional social media. It's possible to post feet pics and accidentally find yourself engaged with a sexual subculture you were not intending to encourage.
I don't recall vilifying anyone because they had a foot fetish. I do, however, think it's ridiculous to push your fetish into the official art direction of virtually all the female characters of an entire game.
Closely related, but not a duplicate. This post explicitly calls out services and products that will continue to be supported, like world's, musical collaborations like KDA, the Arcane anime, and upcoming Project L.
Everyone overhired the last 3 years thinking the good times were forever. They’re probably overloaded with roles they don’t need anymore and have needs in other places so it really doesn’t make sense to keep folks.
I assume video-game sales went up during the stay-at-home pandemic years; with that now behind us, this isn’t surprising at all. In fact, I’m surprised this didn’t already happen a year ago.
It did indeed start a year ago. Main reason it's ramping up so rapidly in the last 6 months is that games were released (in what many would consider an amazing years for games in 2023) and layoffs tend to happen a bit after shipping (to get launch bugs). But with the current economy the layoffs are more severe.
Another less talked about point is GaaS. Many, many studios were trying to ramp up games with continuous revenue streams, and that needs a big investment and risk. It's not ubcommon to launch 10 GaaS expecting 7 to fail and 1 to easily pay for the other 9's developments. That's a great strategy with free money. Awful when you need to weather a storm. And now we're on that storm. Even studios with successful GaaS have to reel back, so most games in development are SoL.
So, not surprising but the volume this year is immense.
> Everyone overhired the last 3 years thinking the good times were forever.
It's very convenient that this isn't measurable and if you asked anyone in the industry at the time they most likely would have said "We don't have nearly enough" people.
I don't like the term "overhiring" in these discussions because it implies that these studios didn't estimate the costs of development and see layoffs as a mark of failure.
Neither are true. They took a gamble with low risk and the low risk became normal risk. Layoffs often come with a small stock rise, so they aren't even shamed by shareholders for trimming down. It's devastating for employee morale but that's rarely a factor in these decisions.
We'll see how long that lasts. That's the shitty part of these layoffs: as soon as the negative PR dies down hiring resumes for less tenured employees that aren't as expensive (fewer stock grants, lower starting salaries). No matter how they phrase it in their letters this is always about making more money and dropping expensive employees is one way they'll do it.
In general, the more direct the impact of your role on short-term revenue, the safer you are when your company starts sacrificing people to the gods of quarterly accounts.
Ancillary service workers always get hit badly, but good salespersons are often safer than good engineers.
Only if their salesperson manages to hit their number very quarter without fail. I've seen people blow their quota out of the water in Q1, and get shitcanned when Q2 is quiet.
This is true with all layoffs. If you can't explain your direct role in creating your product/service, you're going to be higher on the chopping block.
Sales, marketing, HR, admins, PMs, etc. are usually the first to go because they don't "keep the lights on" and it's hard to measure their impact.
While it's true that it's also hard to measure a single engineer's impact, it's scarier to fire someone who may be expensive to replace and who may take institutional knowledge of the inner workings of the product with them.
Sales does not belong on that list, since their impact is the easiest of all to measure ($$$).
Also, top-down layoffs tend to target expensive staff with large paychecks, without accounting for institutional knowledge or intangible value delivered.
Easy to measure isn’t always good. If the org tends to sell $5m per sale person and they try to scale it by hiring it might just fall to $4m per sales person. When things go under the microscope, they’ll want to put that back in balance by reducing heads.
If you generate the same number of leads, do you need 300 salespeople to convert them? Or could your top 100 performers do it? Do you need separate salespeople for each product or can one person sell it all?
At the trough of interest rates, big companies had insane numbers of salespeople touching each deal (easily 10+ at some orgs) because they'd over-hired and the forced people to hyper-specialize to justify it.
Is it though? Without products there are no sales at all. A compelling enough product will sell with no marketing/sales effort, so sales is really only whatever that baseline is + (extra units sold from sales and marketing efforts - cost of sales of marketing). I would think this is actually quite hard to measure, you also have to normalize against many external market factors and behavior of competitors.
> A compelling enough product will sell with no marketing/sales effort
would it? maybe you are talking about video games and a good enough game would sell itself. But for other businesses sales / marketing / ads do matter. Imagine you provide a 50% better service than your competitors, but you target audience never reaches your page because they are bombarded with google ads of your competitors
How do you know who they're firing? Nobody knows what "core tech" is. They are clearly getting rid of people in LoR. And game companies aren't bloated with sales people.
Corporate greed? Unfortunately game companies often don’t recover as well from layoffs due to the completely unpredictable nature as to whether a game will be a success. Maybe Riot learned the hard way that you can’t just throw talent at a genre and expect to continue massive growth?
Has anyone noticed that there are now 78 comments on this post and no Rioters checking in? Have I missed something?
On any HN corporate layoff post, we should expect some volume of named company FTEs or impacted folks commenting. There seems to be a pattern here that has been ebbing and flowing over the last few years.
Should this be a titled phenomenon/effect? I see at least 3 options here:
1) Named company employees do not read/post on HN (if true, is this HN content? divergent topic...)
2) Named company employees are coerced or otherwise compensated to not comment on these matters, even if they do not directly impact them
3) Named company employees do not care about this n% layoff and are withholding comment
The layoff announcement mentioned that the 11% staff laid off is global. It's possible a lot of people laid off are actually in China, since Tencent owns 100% of Riot Games.
It's doubtful that these Chinese employees are chatting about it on hacker news, since it would draw attention of the authorities. Also, there is a trend for Chinese companies to not hire workers that are over 35 years old, so most of these employees are probably in shock on how they would pay their mortgages and support their parents at the same time. And Chinese economy is in the crapper right now.
I always assumed, perhaps naively, that gamedev folks skewed younger on the whole due to work life balance and burnout, whereas this site skews a bit older. Maybe just a demographic mismatch?
Games has a more developed culture of not talking outside the company in public spaces mostly around in development games but that tends to extend beyond that as well.
> Our strategy will more tightly integrate esports, music, and entertainment with our games. Esports isn't just about competition; it's about the highs, the lows, and the communities that flourish around the games.
From my perspective, Riot Games began a course for the rocks the moment they started chasing esports and "meta". Imagine developing a game where you apply punitive actions to players for selecting game play paths you openly allowed them to pick. "Oops! you're having fun slightly wrong so enjoy this ban". I could get over some of this in support of high stakes gameplay objectives, but if it's all the time at every level it's like a cancer. The exact moment I stopped playing League of Legends was the day they released the patch that said we could no longer stack items. I felt the fun go away like a light switch being flipped off.
I am done with consuming games as of 2024. I used to game more than I worked not too long ago. The MBAs and related types have completely sucked the fun out of the room. I feel for the developers and artists who will be job hunting this year. Their leaders have failed them on many levels and over such a long period of time. LoL was the game to play for a solid decade and there isn't any obvious reason it couldn't have continued for another.
Blizzard and Overwatch are a carbon copy of this if you need one. In this case, the original game didn't even survive. They had to increment the integer and completely kill & bury the original title to justify their insanity to investors. The only viable path I can see at this point is to start a game studio from the ground up and avoid all external capital by burning gigantic piles of my own cash. Fun at all costs.
The economy isn’t doing so well and it’s not going to correct itself any time soon. It’s not really that noticeable on the larger scale but any company that produces anything non-digital is still having supply line issues. Not as bad as a few years ago, but still bad enough to cost the global economy a lot of potential growth.
Then there is the higher interest rates, which in themselves are an issue for the economy. Not so much because companies “need” to borrow money as such, but because the ridiculously low interest rates made it easier to make more money since you could fund things with money you didn’t have, since it was basically free to do so. A lot of places even sort of dropped the ball on this, not locking in the rates on their loans because, well, because we’re collectively rather stupid, so many organisations are looking at making deals with banks to find some reasonable place to land these loans in a way that doesn’t hurt anyone too bad.
There is more to it than that, but the over all result is that a long with the inflation (which may have stopped but it’s not like prices are dropping just because they paused increasing) wage stagnation and so on, is that there is a lot less purchasing power and willingness both in the investment and in the consumer markets.
You can say that companies over hires during the COVID lock downs, which isn’t really wrong, but we’re also sort of in a recession that we have collective agree not to talk about. Partly because it’s a weird recession considering the job market is hot.
Is the economy bad? Seems fine to me. In general a “bad economy” seems entirely made up. It’s not like the money just disappears. I think it’s a concept invented to facilitate wealth transfers.
Well it depends on how you look at it. We’ve had to say no to several projects due to high interests rates and global supply lines, and we’re hardly the only company to be in that situation. So on one hand it’s not like we’re not still making money, we’re just making around 90% less than we could’ve done if the supply lines were still capable of delivering the stuff we need and if we were capable of doing projects where a good part were funded by loans on top of investor money.
The net result is that we’re around 2000 fewer people than we planned to be in 2025. Again, not that we aren’t generating money, because we’re still on black books, but far, far, less than what we wanted and it’s not likely to change in the foreseeable future.
One of the major reasons the job market is still doing just fine is because the larger generations are being replaced by much smaller generations, so there are simply fewer workers in the total pool. If there weren’t things wouldn’t look this bright.
Tencent has lost a lot of value in the past few months and has had a terrible year overall. The value has disappeared.
> I think it’s a concept invented to facilitate wealth transfers.
Well, if you transfer a bunch of wealth upwards, it's going to have negative consequences that travel downwards. Those who receive them may describe the economy as "bad." Which not only describes a current state, but probably mostly encodes their lack of hope for any type of future mobility that may change their circumstances.
Tencent lost a lot of value because China decided to crack down on a number of Asian business video game business models last year, and this directly affected a large portion of Tencent's portfolio.
However, according to their Q3 filings (Q4 has not been filed yet), their video game revenue is actually up and they specifically cite the performance of Valorant.
So the issue for Tencent wasn't Riot Games, it was its Chinese developers.
More recent news shows that the "government official" in charge of introducing this new rule was fired and the rulemaking abandoned.
Their total value loss has occurred solidly throughout 2023. No part of the year was particularly good for them, and the regulator news doesn't seem to have had any unique impact, at least looking at their OTC chart.
They fired the person that announced the rule not any of the people that actually came up with it! AFAIK whilst there’s going to be changes the rules will be along similar lines.
FWIW, severance is usually a lump sum, so it absolutely benefits the employees to wait until the new year because the severance will likely get taxed at a lower tax bracket.
