Unity reviews

As a long long time Unity user, nearly since version 1 of Unity, I was super excited to work at Unity. Unity always stood out as a company for the indie devs, your ally, your partner, to help you get past all the barriers in the industry that small players face. But I think ever since it went public it has gradually eroded into a pure profit growth driven business. Leadership cares about nothing more than what will get stock to go up in the short term. They've hired so many people from other Big Tech Corporations trying to essentially colonize original Unity culture with Big Tech Corporate process and culture, and they are winning. Many Unity originals, Engineers that have been there since the beginning have left. They pushed out Joachim, the original CTO, the last Unity original and real engineer on C-Suite, so literally Unity leadership has been entirely usurped by non-engineer business types. The only places still managing to do anything good are those places with very high level engineers that still have substantial political weight to throw around and happen to be in a stream that can be argued to make the stock price to go up short term. But increasingly they must fight against pure business side that greatly outnumbers them with free time to play the bureaucracy game. If the narrative about their effort affecting stop price changes, they will be rug-pulled fast. Being an engineer that can do anything of value is like sitting in a middle of a circus. They are cycling through managers and product people just trying to find anyway to milk any more cash from anything in the short term. They have even in the past year started to cannibalize some of their own customers. Unity isn't even a good company to partner with anymore, the relationship will be predatory and extorting, tuned for short term stock inflation however possible. It's a sad thing but I think its just the fate of any successful tech company. The engineers build something of value. Gradually the company hires more and more business people until they overtake the company, then a company once driven by engineers and engineering innovation is now driven by excel spreadsheets trying to get the stock price to go up however it possibly can to let the current round of business people to get a decent cash out on their stock options before jumping companies again every 3-ish years or so. Even worse, in recent months in response to sweeping corporate policy changes, they've actually taken to firing people on the spot who disagree with leadership. A few of these got out in the news, but there have been dozens of them. They were not all justified. Internal slack and communication has become much more shut down compared to what used to be a very open and communicative company. Increasingly it is only "Yes Men" saying anything out in the open. The business crowd that's usurped all controls of the company are playing a hard ball game of thrones with power. A bunch of engineering illiterate suits super super paranoid that people will figure out what they are and call them out on it are now sitting at the top terrified, trying to milk whatever nonsense they can for another stock payout or bit of nonsensical media attention.

Big disconnect with uppermost leadership. Sometimes you wonder how people land in these jobs. The toughest part is that in terms of comp (especially equity) the top most make away like bandits while several layers below get peanuts in comparison despite being the foundation of the value. There seem to be a lot of people director through VP where it's unclear what exactly they do and what value they add. It's frustrating again because there is a lot of talent and a great product, but key players seem to be letting the broader company down.