Autodesk laying 925 people off
polycounter lvl 12
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/04/autodesk_announces_redundancies_for_ten_percent_of_workforce/
Due to a massive cloud strategy orientation, Autodesk decides to axe 10% of their workforce ...
All my best to affected people.
Due to a massive cloud strategy orientation, Autodesk decides to axe 10% of their workforce ...
All my best to affected people.
Replies
"The really bad part about laying off developers is the loss of mindshare about a product.
It takes years and years for devs to gain knowledge about a product. Then they are let go, then a new generation of developers come in who don't know the software. It takes them years and years to learn the software.
Meanwhile a customer logs a bug and no one knows how to fix it.
When I was there, we were on our 4th generation of developers. Some came and went, but there were huge swaths of code completely abandoned. No one knew how it worked nor even cared. There was very little code that people actually knew how it worked.
All those plugins that got acquired were bought, thrown in, and abandoned. No unit tests were purchased with them, None of them compiled at warning level 4.
Anyways with each layoff it diminishes the chance that any real rewrite of the software can ever occur. (Refactorings were strictly frowned upon, or you have to have political connections with management)."
from: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?p=8144782#post8144782
Can you please change the title?
with employees taking years to learn the software, the code uncommented and them not giving a shit for what have the code does id be firing people left and right too.
And speaking of which, and I the only one who is a bit pissed at how slow Autodesk is dealing with fixes with the 2016 releases or is it just Max that isn't getting shit done to it.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Ton/Autodesk_report
assuming his interpretations are halfway correct then some mid sized gamestudios should have more developers on internal toolsets than autodesk has e.g. on maya.
20% of 6 Million = 1.2 Million; lets be conservative and say average Maya developer is paid 40k/yr; that equals 30 developers... laying off 925 people would be laying off entire Maya developement staff 30 times over.
I for one can only hope that the Max team has'nt got a too severe hit, as 3ds Max's progress and future has changed from doubtfull and unclear to good over the last couple of cycles, since Eddie Perlberg took over the role of product manager
Different practices i guess.
Hahah what? To think a concurrent developper would go and write openly articles like that against them...
Ton really has an aversion for AD it seems...
When two investors decide they want your company there isn't much you can do (unless you find a bigger one). Either a bigger investor wanted a slice of costs gone or the other two have only just begun with "streamlining" the company.Unfortunately when big people start swinging their money-dicks, its people below who are going to end up as collateral damage.
Then again, I didn't seem to notice anywhere in the article what percentage of what was laid off or how the developers were affected. I'm going to guess some of those were sales and retail packaging jobs, customer support, etc.. Nevertheless, layoffs suck and hopefully everyone involved lands quickly on their feet!
Anyway, Autodesk Canada, which is basically M&E because they do all the CAD stuff in the US except Alias, was listed has having 643 employees when they submitted themselves to "best place to work in canada" http://www.greatplacetowork.ca/great-workplaces/best-workplaces-in-canada-large-and-multinational. Then there are animation developers in tons of other countries, like china, singapore, US, if you`ve been in any discussion with Autodesk you know. It`s not "20 developers" unless there were only 3 per country. Even if you questioned that number and went with the old adage of M&E being "only 10% of autodesk", then that would be 900 people (of a total of 9000 employees). They have a 300M R&D budget so they could have around 2000 engineer company-wide, but the vast majority of Canada employees is engineering because it's all about tax deductions and the head office is in California.