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

ram@lemmy.ca to Technology@lemmy.world – 1067 points – Unity closes offices due to ‘credible death threat’
polygon.com

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.

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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.

…There's probably an ecological definition for "community" that you could try to transfer over… I think in cases where a large group of individuals don't actually interact with all of each other either directly or indirectly, but are nonetheless relevant as a grouping because they share a particularly contextually prominent set of traits (E.G. "Plays Video Games"), then "population" might be a more appropriate term (if a bit sterile).

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.

Maybe Unity thought it would be a good way to make some noise and keep Unity in people's mouths.

The inverted Oscar Slap, that was supposed to keep the object's name out of people's mouths.

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.

True. They also could've just lied.

I wonder if/when someone can FOIA the police records. I really want to know now

"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."

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.

Not to mention money can be made litteraly betting on the stock price swinging from the bad news. Calls and puts plan far enough in advance and automate/preset triggers via broker agreements and can even avoid getting nailed for the obvious insider trading a lot of the time.

This shit should be illegal. If it isn't already.

Destroying a company for your own personal gain is why America is falling under

It's not going to change as long as the only people to vote for are "red neoliberals" or "blue neoliberals".

They also made the announcement right after an iPhone announcement. Unfortunately, the iPhone was completely underwhelming, so the news didn’t get buried like they probably expected.

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.

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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...

I mean I guess you could time it once like that, but if that's your plan, you could have just sold it all a year before you planned on tanking the stock when you set up the schedule and make more money. Or just not tank the stock.

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 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.

You can't just solve a company's culture by yourself.

You can either convince enough people to unionize, or you can save yourself.

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.

How can this be cast in any light that's not negative?

Companies don't just make up death threats.

They absolutely do when it benefits them and they think they can get away with it, I don't know how you could make such a blanket claim without questioning yourself just a little bit.

And of course it would be negative, but I think there's a chance the claim casts a negative light on the company, and not on the employee, who is as yet unnamed. As it stands now, any of the following could be true:

  1. The entire story is fiction, made up by Unity to distract from literally everything else about them. Distractions are massively important to companies at times like this, and it's almost like clockwork that you find them making up distractions when they can't find a way to put a good spin on the press.
  2. There's a real employee who posted something on social media, and it was a death threat. The death threat was about the current news. Bad employee, hope they see some consequences. I am doubting this right now because we don't have any actual evidence of it, and because of point (1). Furthermore, the vagueness of this press announcement and the fact that "you wouldn't know him, he works in another state" gives them cover . . .
  3. There's a real employee who posted something negative on social media. It was not a death threat, and is being deliberately misconstrued by Unity to allow them to deploy point (1).
  4. There's a real death threat posted on social media by someone who sucks. That person is not, in fact, a Unity employee and the announcement to the contrary was either deliberate misinformation or a simple mistaken identity. IDK what this would say about the company, but gamers can be real shitty. If this one is the case, I hope that person sees consequences, but they probably won't.
  5. There's a real post on social media framed as a death threat, deliberately planted by someone at Unity to create a distraction, see point (1).

There's more, and quite frankly it gets tiresome to see people jumping to defend when ploys like this have been the playbook for shitty companies since the invention of the company. I don't know which of these things will be turn out to be true, but neither do you, and it's so boring to see someone claiming they know the facts here for sure.

They literally do though to steer the conversation to one wherein they're a sympathetic figure. Never hear of PR?

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?

Not sending death threats is the bar set for civility these days?

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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)

Death threats are personal. Corporations can be boycotted.

A fair point. None of the news articles even give us any real, meaningful details as to what happened so we don't know if it was just execs who were threatened or if, perhaps, there was a bomb threat or something. I wish we could see a screenshot of the actual threat so we could make a determination.

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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!

Maybe it's different people with different opinions replying

That's ignoring voting though, which is a good way to get the average sentiment of a community regardless of who is doing the commenting. Is it more likely that the community's average opinion of death threats flipped overnight or that the new information changed the average opinion?

I'm okay so long as they just kill the execs.

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.

Be passionate about your work! Right up to the point where you start disagreeing with how I am bastardising it... then you can fuck off.

If you’re doing something you love for a company you’re gonna have a bad time.

Are you working something you hate?

A lot of people are fine working what they love for a company, surely there are issues, but not all companies are batshit and ruin their product.

It's not so black and white though. Passion jobs are often exploited because people will put up with it more and there is higher demand for those types of jobs.

Your best bet is to find something that is interesting and nice enough to keep you content and not bored to death but not so enthralling that you feel like working unpaid overtime or what ever. Bonus points if it's paid relatively well.

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.

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.

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.