Comment by johnnyanmac
11 hours ago
>showed everyone else that it is possible to cut overhiring and still maintain business operations.
"maintain" is a strong word here. You can tread water for a while while understaffed, yes. But that's not a secret engineers were unaware of. The titanic took 4 hours to fully sink; same concept with a business as large as twitter.
Too bad the executives figured out that secret and decided they wanted to tread for a while.
>Gaming uses software but I wouldn't call it "tech" - I treat it as Entertainment/Media
Fair enough. I suppose games studios also use buzzwords when it makes them more money. It's a weird overlap because the specialization and rigor needed here is still above a lot of more traditional tech domains. But ultimately the boom/bust cycle reflects much closer to Hollywood than Silicon Valley.
>it doesn't hurt to dabble in side projects that can be monetized into indie games, especially if you have time on your hands and a decent amount of savings.
Not this time around, sadly. But that's my new 5 year plan when things stabilize. Use time after work to lay the groundwork for my own game. Whenever the next slump/crash is after this, I want to have something independent of these coporations to stand on.
> You can tread water for a while while understaffed, yes. But that's not a secret engineers were unaware of. The titanic took 4 hours to fully sink; same concept with a business as large as twitter.
The brutal reality is that engineering degradation doesn't neccesarily impact business outcomes - look at Crowdstrike following the Windows driver incident.
Companies purchase software because the alternative means building in-house. Even in a world with Claude Code and Cursor, that is difficult for companies that are not tech-first.
If engineering degradation impacts profit centers, then it is rectified ASAP. Sadly, a lot of dev work is maintainance work for which it is difficult to make a business case to justify staffing.
> I suppose games studios also use buzzwords when it makes them more money
Somewhat.
A major reason a lot of entertainment is trying to rebrand as "tech" is to demand better valuations a la Netflix, Spotify, Epic, and Valve but those are all platform-first plays that entered the IP later (excluding Epic and Valve ofc) not the other way around like traditional media is trying, and in a lot of cases traditional media was a loss-leader or prestige division of much more profitable Telecos or Tech companies (eg. from Sony Pictures eons ago to Apple Studio today).
The mechanics of VC and Entertainment do overlap somewhat, but the operational differences between the two are massive due to the need to monetize IP in a B2C manner in the entertainment space, whereas monetizing via Enterprise, B2B, and B2B2C is much easier.