2y ago

Update: Unity office death threat was made by a Unity employee

www.polygon.com

Unity closes offices due to ‘credible death threat’

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/5340114

ghostarchive
Original Discussion^[https://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.

Technology @beehaw.org

ram @lemmy.ca

2y ago

Update: Unity office death threat was made by a Unity employee

www.polygon.com /23873727/unity-credible-death-threat-offices-closed-pricing-change

Technology @lemmy.ml

ram @lemmy.ca

2y ago

Update: Unity office death threat was made by a Unity employee

www.polygon.com /23873727/unity-credible-death-threat-offices-closed-pricing-change

151 comments

- 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.
  
  Honestly, they're probably in on it. Greed is all this is.
- That, or an easy day off work.
  
  I’m sure they’re gonna be getting many days off work now
  
  They were working from another office per the article.
- 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?
  
  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.
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.
- 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
  
  C# and Visual Studio are pretty great now, and they don't lock you into Windows at all. Most of C# is open source.
  
  For what it's worth, C# is a ECMA standardized language (https://www.ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-334/) and has a linux-based implementation (mono -- https://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/).
  Though it is hard to overcome the obvious Windows origins of the first implementation.
  
  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.
  
  When people at uni used Matlab, I learned R (before R-studio even existed) and python.
  Good move. MATLAB is trash.
  I never wanted to learn anything MS... ...or proprietary technologies such as... ...excel
  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.
  
  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'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.
- 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.
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.
- What even is "the gaming community" anymore? Basically everyone except boomers play games.
  
  What is a community? Recommended reading: Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson.
  
  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
- 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.
- 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.
"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
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
  
  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.
  
  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 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...
- Por que no los dos?
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.
- 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 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.
  
  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.
- Or he is just fucked up in the head. That is a possibility too.
- 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.
- 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?
  
  He didn't kill anyone.
- 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)
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.
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!
- 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
  
  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.
  
  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.
- They are rebranding to Disunity.
- Division, ironically
- *insert picture of cat in overalls scouting over snow bank
- 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
As always is the case. It's a pr stunt
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.
Based
- And death threat pilled
https://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!
As requested by the CEO for cover.
This has been a hell of a week for Unity.
That's gonna be spicy! 🌶️
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.
- death threats are not okay
  FTFY
- Haha I think you a word.
- but death threats are okay.
  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 might wanna double check that one, chief.
- Unity sucks, but death threats are okay.
  Would you rather change 'but' to 'and', or change 'are' to 'aren't'?
- 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.
- You're gonna die!
  But before that, let's go see this unity, I hear she's handing out good times.

151 comments