this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2025
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I'm sure that the new Saudi owners and Jared Kushner will be looking into hacking up human developer cost by any means necessary.

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[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 155 points 4 days ago (20 children)

Oh man, this is hilarious from the outside because I've worked for private equity before. They are the biggest hype bros that exist. They are in their own reality every time. They can see something as small as a random tweet and think that it's the truth. There's no way this goes well for them.

2 examples. Long story but if you want to hear how smart "Private equity" is in tech, here are my two anecdotal experiences:

First, I was an engineer on a project that we were wrapping up a major "V2" rewrite of. We were weeks from finishing this now year long project. They came and asked "How long until released" and I said a month until clients can start using the beta. (Padding a week or so just in case). They didn't just come back and say "You have a 2-3 weeks", they came back and said "You have 1 week because we have signed contracts saying that it'll be ready by then". What. I was the head engineer. On whose authority did they do that? Who told them it would be ready? Of course no one, they just said it should be done, engineers lazy, they super smart. The project isn't done in time of course, clients pissed, and they fired the dev team. I hear a year later the entire org had shuttered. They pissed away the entire investment.

Second, again working leading up a major project, a whole new idea in the fintech space. Team is jazzed. We push for 9 months and we release - zero bugs, not a cent lost, we test scaling and we should be able to handle millions of users - we're ready. We release to.... zero fanfare. None. We had no idea what was happening, we're engineers so we're used to it but no one cared. Turns out we were being acquired! Hooray said the investors! So much money! The other company claims to be doing what we are already... interesting since we had a novel idea. So we merge, and we decide to do a bakeoff (test each product against each others). Ours of course passes. Theirs tips over after 100 users. Ruby on Rails monolith, they've never had more than 100 users. Turns out they just slapped some stuff on a postgres database and called it a fintech product. Business investors at the top high five, show off how much money they're going to make. Same thing, our loyal customers who were excited for our product got pissed and left. They lied to everyone else about the product just like the other place, the lies eventually caught up, and the stock tanked. Now they have two worthless companies. From what I heard they didn't make a single sale in Q1 or Q2 of this year, and are shuttering the offices and moving engineering to India. Typical big brain business move.

Never work for private equity. If you ever get bought by private equity immediately start planning your exit. This is a card game to them, they're sitting at the table in Vegas and are doing anything they can to make it look like the company is valuable just long enough to con someone else into buying it. If they make any profit it will go to them, the company will not see a dime of it. Your budgets will be less than shoestring, you will not have bonuses or dinners out, everything goes to them. You immediately are replaceable, with any, and I mean any developer or AI bullshit being able to replace you. Everyone at EA should be looking for new jobs right now.

[–] FarceOfWill 26 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I'm imagining that picture with ea as death visiting Westwood and bioware etc.

But to the left you see ea death is in its own room and opening the door is the figure of private equity. A bloodstained tzeentchian nightmare screeching from the void.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

If Bioware wasn't already dead from the corporate bullshit that was Dragon Age 4 (and that comes from me who still found enjoyment in DA4), then this is. I doubt that Mass Effect 5 game will ever see the light of day.

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Kinda. But that's like saying Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel was 3, and 3 was 4, even though 4 just came out, and isn't 5.

Ostensibly, they're actually working on ME4 which would be labeled thusly.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

We have no official name, the bloggers and media are calling it Mass Effect 5, it's the fifth Mass Effect game, this is just pedantics now. Until there's a title, Mass Effect five is perfectly fine.

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

Except I've only seen it called Mass Effect Four.

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