The jobcuts will impact about 10% of Meta’s hardware division, including teams working on Quest VR headsets and the Horizon Worlds virtual social platform.
It says it’s multiple studios, which I assume were acqui-hired. So it’s not just “VR developers”, but also UI designers, concept artists, QA, PMs, HR, IT, tech writers, community managers, sales people — maybe even localization, reception, janitors… who knows. The structure of these things can vary wildly.
That doesn’t seem overly crazy to me. They were trying to quickly build out an immature platform of an immature technology. Doing that requires entire divisions for hardware, software, research, marketing, etc. and for each of those divisions there’s all the associated staff of managers, hr, administrators, etc.
300 people working on hardware, 300 people working on software, 300 people working on various smaller aspects like basic research, marketing, quality testing, etc., and 100 people in associated staff like managers, hr, janitorial, administrators, etc.
I don’t think that’s reasonable. 300 people full time to release 4 headsets in the last ten years? 300 people to build a custom Android version and a shitty VR chat clone?
You may not think it’s reasonable, but the evidence suggests that it is. If 100 people could do it then the market would be flooded with high quality standalone vr headset systems.
There were over a thousand people working on it?
It says it’s multiple studios, which I assume were acqui-hired. So it’s not just “VR developers”, but also UI designers, concept artists, QA, PMs, HR, IT, tech writers, community managers, sales people — maybe even localization, reception, janitors… who knows. The structure of these things can vary wildly.
That doesn’t seem overly crazy to me. They were trying to quickly build out an immature platform of an immature technology. Doing that requires entire divisions for hardware, software, research, marketing, etc. and for each of those divisions there’s all the associated staff of managers, hr, administrators, etc.
Even then, I would think it would be in the low hundreds.
300 people working on hardware, 300 people working on software, 300 people working on various smaller aspects like basic research, marketing, quality testing, etc., and 100 people in associated staff like managers, hr, janitorial, administrators, etc.
Seems reasonable to me.
I don’t think that’s reasonable. 300 people full time to release 4 headsets in the last ten years? 300 people to build a custom Android version and a shitty VR chat clone?
You may not think it’s reasonable, but the evidence suggests that it is. If 100 people could do it then the market would be flooded with high quality standalone vr headset systems.
Valve did it with like 350 people in the whole company.
Valve’s system isn’t standalone, and wasn’t trying to create a whole new vr platform like fb was trying to do
Yes, it is, and yes, they did. It can run PC games standalone, and Steam VR on SteamOS is a platform they created.
(I’m talking about the Steam Frame, not the Valve Index.)
They were taking taking turns jacking off Zuckerberg (metaphorically of course … or perhaps …).
They couldn’t even get the people making it to play it in their spare time
Also kinda crazy, I don’t think it says that it was 100% of their employees who were working on VR.
So it could be considerably more!