We're moving away on all fronts from what made Unity unique and different from companies like Unreal. I remember when our mission was still to support small indie devs in bringing their vision to life. That's not the case anymore, it's all aggressive marketing over product quality.
Since we became a public company, every move internally and externally has been towards less transparency to users and internally and more corporate obstacles like more middle management and a centralized undemocratic environment.
Unity now makes it mandatory to install spyware and tracking applications on your work machines. Until last year, your machine was your machine and the company treated you like an adult capable of securing a laptop. They tried to roll this out without even notifying people at first, which directly went against our value of transparency.
Development is in chaos. We have far too many tech streams between the core editor and packages, releases can happen any time and you'll never know if a package released from another team will break the thing you're working on. Communication could be improved by a lot. If we had a vision it would be one thing, but right now we have a few different competing visions and that weaknes us overall.
Resources allocation is another problem for both human resources and teams funding. Critical systems are supported by tiny teams and non essential but flashy systems get most of the monye.
But the biggest disappointment to me, as a long time Unity employee, is how the company has started dealing with serious internal issues. Before, if you had a problem with someone, you could talk it out and resolve it and HR would help you mediate if necessary. Now, if something serious happens, like prolonged harrassment or abuse, we have an HR department whose only job is to protect the company and the abuser. Sure they tell you the spiel that they will talk to the abuser and coach him or her on how to be less toxic, but then the toxic behavior doesn't stop and subsequent complaints fall on deaf ears. They even try to discredit you or convince you that the problem lies with you, the complainant, and not with the person whose behavior is actually the problem. Gaslighting and isolating victims also supports this practice. How a company handles these unfrequent but serious incidents defines who that company wants to be. At this stage, Unity has failed some of its most vulnerable employees and that, more than anything, says a lot about how much gas changed.
