- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
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“sharpen our focus and improve the way we work together to bring more agility to our organization.”
Ahh yes, watching co-workers get laid off does wonders for improving the way you work together with the people still there.
It does make you work harder… at finding some other job:-P.
Not exactly a stellar market to be looking in. Chances are that you’ll be trading down, especially if you’re in some level of big tech, like Discord arguably is.
What a load of PR wank
Right? Sharpening focus and working together have zero to do with how many people you employ.
This was about profits. It’s always about profits.
Or maybe if has something to do with the limited availability of VC money. If you can’t find people to throw free money at your company, you need to figure out a way to actually make it profitable. You know, like a normal business…
After 15 rounds and 995.4 M$, maybe it’s about time.
Trauma bonding exercise!
“The beatings will continue until morale improves!”
But no execs, I assume.
At least not without a golden parachute.
Here is your reward for fucking up
The execs I know yell at people. They somehow get rewarded for having temper tantrums.
deleted by creator
It’s not like the management has let people, who still work there, add or fix anything. It’s been nothing but Nitro promos, and animated profiles. Huge shame that people got laid off like this
“Heres your hourly reminder to rent worthless garbage we want you to pay monthy for, per server”
God forbid they offer goods and services in exchange for money
The market decides. And the market seems to have decided that their goods and services are not worth exchanging for money.
Discord is one of the few companies that don’t shove 3rd party ads down your throat. But they do advertise the hell out of nitro. And yeah, I don’t find nitro interesting enough to pay that much.
I used to occasionally pay for nitro due to the same reasons and the decent privacy policy–until they changed it early last year (or was it '22?) There I did a 180 and am anti-Discord now.
Aaaaaaand discord introduces ads
I pay for it.
The cost is worth the extra quality when working with others over screenshare etc. The community management features are useful. A large portion of my workflow is aided by discord and GitHub, both of whi h I pay for premium features.
I don’t expect them to provide these services for free considering the huge boost they give to productivity. Expecting them to be free is naive.
I would if their features worked consistently for me. If I’m paying a monthly subscription, the app better not have major bugs in the key features I use. With my hardware configuration, screensharing is a blurry stuttery mess, their mobile app is a complete shitshow that can’t even layout elements correctly or display the correct channel without having to restart the app every few seconds.
It doesn’t help that their support seems to be ignoring reports of these issues from people.
There’s a difference between “offer” and “push”.
laughs in Matrix
To be clear, I’m not defeneding this pratice but explaining it. This cycle is how large businesses operate to foster growth over time.
- Lay off people to tell stock holders they are becoming more efficient.
- wait
- Hiring spree, announce new features, new directions, hype hype hype
- wait
- Lay offs! Trimming overhead! Streamlining! Much efficency! Good business!
- wait
- Hyyyyyyype! Discord announces a plan to replace iMessage, Email and the entire concept of texting! Triples their staff! Such hype!
Rinse, repeat
It’s horrific for the employees and a scathing indictment as capitalism as a whole. But, this is how large businesses work, not nessecarily a massive corporate slip up.
Here is a lawyer explaining the “dance steps” that the game industries is doing as of late.
That may have been true during the lavish times of ZIRP, but I wouldn’t expect to see this dance any longer, at least until money is cheap/free again.
Money is always cheap for capitalists. Even the hardest of times is only hard for people without money.
This shows a complete misunderstanding of cheap money
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Here is a lawyer explaining the “dance steps” that the game industries is doing as of late.
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
UNIONIZE
Damn, this was very insightful. Thx for sharing!!! 😁
Y’know, they were going crazy over the top implementing unnecessary features… Maybe they actually did have too many employees doing useless things, but they should’ve instead had those employees focus on performance instead
You hit the nail on the head.
I see this so many places - nobody asks “how big does this company need to be”? This is the problem with public companies - they are caught in an endless growth trap. Private businesses at least get to a point where a) growth has to happen sustainably because often there isn’t endless money available to invest and b) once you’ve got one private jet, as owners, do you really need another?
Reddit was no different. Maybe it would have been better for us all if it was a much smaller team and just careful tendered like a garden that had filled its plot.
But isn’t Reddit still private?
Well yeah, but we both know they are behaving like a company heading for an attempted IPO.
But that’s why I don’t think the private vs public company distinction is what matters. When it comes to private, there’s a whole class of private equity owned companies that some people won’t even consider working at because of the reputation their cost cutting and flip mentality is. It’s not a black and white private good public bad because only one has public share holders and exchanges.
It’s definitely not as simple as my quick comment on Lemmy pretends, agreed.
Probably trying everything they could to get more $$$ but it didn’t work out so… bye.
The one writing the change-logs should stay though. Hilarious.
But yeah, featureitis usually comes from employees sitting on their hands. I mean, I keep telling myself, just because I only use two features, doesn’t mean everybody else does… But I strongly feel that nobody really does. Chat, video, voice, done.
You think you could put “improved performance and fixed bugs” on the brochure but if it’s not something with ~A.I. then it’s not gonna help sales.
Unity, Google, Discord. All within a day or two of each other.
For every number of employees laid off, a VP level employee must be fired. Those employees didn’t hire themselves. Someone came up with the idea.
If companies don’t do this they’re not attacking the root of the problem.
They coordinate to create a glut and push all their wages down. Computer touching wagies and so socially stunted they’ll never form effective union. If they did, they would jusy defect out of greed.
Computer touching wagies and so socially stunted they’ll never form effective union.
The industry is so niche, the technology is so heavily customized, and the people so idiosyncratic that I think forming a union shouldn’t be that hard. The real dampener is that the pay for these jobs is always far above the median. Five years of experience and you’re reaching towards six figures. Ten years and you’re well over the line. And in Silicon Valley, the sky is the limit. A master’s or phd in your field means you’re looking at $200k, $300k, $400k…
If there’s a big drop in wages (and considering the real estate prices in the neighborhoods where these businesses exist) something’s got to give. Maybe you get unions. Maybe you just get a bunch of businesses collapsing on themselves Twitter-style and forcing people back into the “indie company-in-my-garage” model. Maybe everyone becomes contractors.
But this isn’t sustainable in any serious sense.
and considering the real estate prices in the neighborhoods where these businesses exist) something’s got to give. M
I work in aerospace, we got unions back in the 70s and never let them go. For what the job actually is, it pays pretty good.
Aerospace pay is good, but it used to be a whole lot better. The salaries definitely haven’t kept up with executive pay, even if they’re multiples of the regional average. I’ve got a friend who went into aerospace and bemoans how he’s living solidly middle class in a field that used to put you squarely into the top 5% income bracket. Funny to see someone complain about earning a quarter million a year, but when buying a starter home costs twice that…
Oh I make 3 times less than that. But I slack off in a proportionnal manner !
Plenty of slackers in the aerospace industry. Don’t let that hold you back.
I will be the slackiest of them all !
Programmers are already ridiculously overpaid lol
Also twitch. Yuck…
Probably some great devs on the market for anyone hiring though.
Yeah, no
All devs must go through at least a year of unemployment according to these mofos
Year end business review
Bold of you to think that the VP level employees don’t get big raises in exchange for laying empoyees off.
I think it’s an unfair and naive assumption to think VPs all keep their jobs. I’ve seen some pretty nasty game of thrones plays by executive leadership during layoffs due to consolidation of teams and remits. Someone might get a bonus that doesn’t deserve it, but someone is going to get let go at a high level (albeit with a generous severance not offered to the rest of the employees).
Also, when new senior leadership comes in, it’s not uncommon for them to let heads roll at the leadership level to fill out the team with folks they know or trust. I’m not shedding a tear about where those folks will go on to find similar employment, but I think there’s a misconception about how safe those positions actually are.
I guess I’m jaded because I’ve seen far too many times where it’s the worker bees, the people who actually put the work in and get things done, getting the sharp end of the stick. I would be surprised if the 17% of employees Discord laid off actually included VPs.
I hear you. You are going to see a lot more worker bees than VPs laid off in part because there’s a lot more worker bees than VPs.
per https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/discord-layoffs-citron-overhiring-gaming-18603308.php
The notice, required when companies perform mass layoffs, said the employees would officially leave Discord on Feb. 2. Dozens of engineers are among the casualties, as are several trust and safety employees, product managers and data scientists, according to the notice.
Depending on how the structure is laid out and what product areas were cut, I’m guessing up to the director level would be impacted.
Tech CEOs: we need better numbers. Fire a bunch of people! Ahh there we go. Now we’re flush with cash. Well, my work here is done.
And gut the r&d budget. That’s future CEO’s problem.
Now where’s my golden parachute?
The Jack Welsh way…
That guy is literally, not figuratively, responsible for most of the shitty things that companies do now.
That will cause some discord
Now how to move the gaming community to Matrix or XMPP.
You don’t. Gamers, are generally happy to bow to their corporate overlords for some reason.
Source: am a gamer. And I admit I do put up with some of that bullshit too.
I think that behaviour pattern has it’s roots in the perceived dominance of Microsoft windows in the gaming sphere - we can fix that by encouraging people to game with linux.
Yeah I was thinking about exactly that when writing this comment. Windows is one of these things I’m currently putting up with.
I’m planning on building a new PC though, and since I love my steam deck I’m wondering if I should try going full Linux with this one.
Would love to if my favorite games weren’t all EAC locked on linux
I just don’t run spyware
Why? Discord is still as functional as ever. Why would I move platform?
Because it locks you out from even seeing the mods and stuff if you don’t have an account. Old time forums were better.
Before you do that, can you fix screen sharing on Linux?
I haven’t used Discord in a while so YMMV but I used to use WebCord and screen sharing worked pretty well IIRC. It uses an up-to-date Electron version which has better support for modern desktop Linux protocols. There are probably plenty of other alternative clients that just repackage the web app with better Linux support. There’s also gtkcord4 which is a native Gtk client, though definitely not as polished as the official client.
It does support it, but not the audio :/
Try vesktop!
Oh wow, it actually works! Thanks! But there are issues with EasyEffects (it’s being worked on) and low framerates during streaming (also being worked on). But it does work
Man I know Wayland is the future, I just wish the future was better.
Discord went the way of Skype, it’s just a bloated fustercluck now. I don’t use it often, just once a month or so to keep up with a group of old friends, and every time I fire it up it has a new update bringing features I don’t give a rats ass about.
So the nitro subscription is gonna up to increase profits?
They’re going to dedicate their entire next year’s budget to introduce a new kind of emoji, though.
Gotta have all the new DLC/cosmetic stuff.
🫄
Right after they ruined the app’s UI?
Mobile UI is atrocious after the recent upgrade a couple months ago. Wish I could go back.
you can download an old APK on Android, or sideload on iOS. I have one with the early 2023 layout and one with the pre-2021 layout just because. none with the new update
Leave a bad review. I did get halfway back.
That’ll teach em!
Download an APK of an older version and disable auto-updates.
The API still works well so the old client doesn’t have any issues.
A wave of enshittification has struck Discord
Sorry to say it, but it has always sucked.
Nah. What sucked was having to type in IP addresses just to talk on voice.
Absolutely. For some crazy-ass reason my job transitioned away from Teams (I get it) and Slack and to Discord.
Discord is garbage for this type of work environment. Maybe it works for some? But it just doesn’t make sense.
lmao.
Discord is surely very good for work-related trade secretsMy company has been using Discord for work and at first I was excited to try it (coming from Slack companies), but I had to realize that it’s very unfit for work. The only thing that’s better is the visibility of threads. We are moving to Slack now, thankfully.
I used Discord for work and it was great for voice channels. We used slack for channels where we needed to share text and images, worked quite well. Main problem was that many people at the company were not really from the internet in the sense that they had no Discord etiquette whatsoever.
My stress levels skyrocket whenever I’m using Discord. The quality of the voice is nice but having to constantly reconfigure the settings to make it work fine and the unintuitive UI stresses me out.
I have basically disabled all input settings in the app and configure the input before it reaches Discord for consistency. Still it sometimes messes up things amazingly.
Yeah I use the Steelseries sonar stuff because that makes it so that inputs never change. When my headset turns off it redirects the output to my speakers and when I turn the headset back on, it goes back to it. Virtual audio devices are very nice in general lol.
Small company: yeah, we hired too many people, need to let go of 170.
People: such huge cuts, not touching them anymore
Large company: we’re laying off the entire staff of pre-Elon Twitter worth of employees in this one department because they didn’t make us enough money.
People: good, your product sucked anyways
I mean, I wouldn’t exactly call a company with 1000 employees “small”. It’s not the behemoth that something like Google is, but like… that’s a good chunk of people.
