I’ve been hearing rumours all day that Linden Lab laid off some staff, but it was very confused as to who they were. Rumours ranged from Team Shining, to the entire mesh team. I’ve been listening to the rumours and speculation, until someone definitive got in touch.
Someone has, and it now appears that two senior Second Life product managers got the chop.
The first is Sarah Hutchinson (AKA Esbee Linden), who is (or was, up until now) the product manager/owner of the Second Life viewer. The second is Charlar Linden, whose domain was content creators. Most of you will know Charlar from the mesh project, if not from many other areas.
A replacement product manager is supposed to be starting next week, but it isn’t clear as to which of the two roles the new person will be filling.
I’m really sorry to see Esbee go. She really understood SL and its users. But she was very silent for the past year, cancelled her user group and appeared not to be allowed to communicate with residents which is consistent with LL’s overall communication “strategy”.
I find it rather interesting that charlar had mad a fool out of himself in public not too long ago… and now he’s dodo.
Wow…that’s kind of heavy.
I wonder why Charlar got laid off. I know he’s been at the center of some user related discontent but not enough to get ‘em laid off I wouldn’t think. I imagine the chances are slim in getting some insight into this.
Tat, do you got any knowledge you’re allowed to, and comfortable with, divulging, about the reasons behind this?
All I can do is make guesses.
The first is Sarah Hutchinson (AKA Esbee Linden), who is (or was, up until now) the product manager/owner of the Second Life viewer. The second is Charlar Linden, whose domain was content creators. Most of you will know Charlar from the mesh project, if not from many other areas.
I have no judgement nor right to judge either of these people. I am usually sorry these days when someone loses a job; the job market is not great.
But considering their areas:
* I woulda sure fired someone in the viewer area, if not the whole staff.
* As a content creator, I’m not a happy camper. I don’t know a lot of content creators who are right now. In truth, over the past few months I’ve seen several content creators leave SL for other (more sane and less stressful) pastures. Now whether that’s the fault of this person, LL in general, or a combination of the two can’t comment.
What I suspect is that removal of personnel from LL can mean either they were incompetent… or were not a team player when it came to overall LL incompetency (ie, they were too competent and ethical and didn’t play ball with management). I once quit a lucrative job because the owner/boss was literally a pathological liar and incompetent buffoon who destroyed everything he touched. It happens.
So bottom line… no major surprises here, and pretty much a “meh” opinion.
@Tateru – is Torley still there – look at his last tweet?
@Hitomi I have no information on that at the present time. I haven’t heard much out of Torley for quite a while. Not SL-related, anyway.
I had a feeling that Torley had stopped with the videos, but the current help videos page seems to have search broken.
I know there’s a Tiggs Linden departure notice in-world. His player is based in the Boston MA office, and is moving to work at Turbine. I find references to, a couple of weeks ago, Tiggs and Charlar presenting details of the Linden Realms scripting at the Scripting User Group meeting.
Speculation: if LL is losing Linden Realms scripting experience, will that experiment/proof-of-concept be replaced with something else?
I posted a blog about Tiggs’ depature a couple of weeks ago. From conversations I’ve had with Tiggs, his leaving has nothing to do with Realms.
I wish them both the best and hope they are both back in employment quickly, Esbee left before and came back so she is definitely keen, I haven’t really had any dealings with either of them so can’t comment on how nice or not they were.
/me throws Chaffro a sock for distraction and makes sure my ankle armor is in place.
[...] posts news that Chalar and Esbee Linden have both been laid-off from the Lab. Sarah [...]
Turbine is actively recruiting right now. Hopefully all those who have worked to make SL better will find rewarding future paths.
It takes a lot of courage to brave the large number of people who are very passionate about SL and vocal about what they believe is best. It has to be extremely difficult to try and fit in with an apparently unorthodox culture at Linden Labs while also attempting to maintain or improve a functional platform for customers.
First, it’s time for kind wishes. Dealing with layoff is difficult. So, kind wishes and best of luck to both Charlar and Esbee. I’m not familiar with Charlar but have followed Esbee’s progress to some extent and the reaction to V2 must have been a very difficult personal experience for her. And more power to her for acknowledging that mistakes were made.
/me turns rant on
However, I think whatever happened with the Viewer 2 team was the ultimate responsibility of Mark Kingdon, and if he didn’t know enough about SL to make such reckless decisions as were made he should never have been there in the first place. He was theorectially “the adult in the room” but he didn’t seem to have a real interest in what the “life” in Second Life actually is.
Now for one more parting shot at Viewer 2 and now Viewer 3. This may be like flaying dead horses, but here it is. There is now two cultures in Second Life, V1 vs V2, or oldtimers who have found V2/3 to be too much to digest versus newbies who can’t get basic help except from other newbies.
Mentoring is a big deal in SL. And if you are writing instructions for doing something, you have to write in two languages. If anyone reading this has been on either side of this divide, you know how frustrating it is. And despite efforts to make V3 friendlier to V1 users, it is still infested with so many little mistakes (“share” is one of my peevs).
I’m oldtimer, but I’ve tried both V2 (lasted 2 hours) and V3 (lasted 4 days) but ultimately I couldn’t tolerate the inconveniences. Btw, Firestorm 3.3 (Phoenix config) is an interface I was almost ready to enbrace despite a few inconveniences.
/me ends rant
I support Linden Realms. I think it’s great introductory training for new residents. I did the game, gave my earned Linden$ to one of the newbies. I feel it’s well done.
It’s sad to see someone fired, but so much of what went on with mesh this past year has been really discouraging.
Ultimately, what has mesh amounted to? Prim equivalence/land impact is still a confusing topic and has certainly stifled a lot of desire to build significant portions of sims in mesh. Charlar rejecting prioritizing the mesh deformer stifled mesh as a useful application for clothing.
Just what did he have in mind for mesh? He seemed way too content with the useless metric of “at least one mesh is rezzed in a region”.
Hopefully Charlar can land on his feet somewhere quickly, but since he’s gone, I hope his replacement is someone much much more capable and willing to do his job so we aren’t crowdfunding something else in a few months. We need a ‘the Willing’, not a ‘the Terrible’.
@Yordie I never took to Viewer 2 but Viewer 3 is a huge improvement, IMO.
It seems there are more people being laid off than those two:
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/EVE-264?
It´s always sad to see people go so good luck to all that have been laid off. I don´t envy anyone working for Linden Lab…
Those are the two that we know about. I’ve got my eyes on a couple more names, though.
Yes, I was very enthusiatic about V3. I tried it for four days but just finally gave up because it just wasn’t enough. I think the tipping point for me was when I realized I couldn’t drag an item to a profile to give it to some one. It wasn’t intuitive to me what the heck “share” was. I didn’t what to share the item, i wanted to give it to the person. This was just the final irritation for me. hehehe. i know, i’m persnicketty.
@Tateru
I prefer V3 for any V2 based TPV. It IS a huge improvement, tho it still lacks some of the essential usability benefits TPV´s offer.
I, too, went pretty much straight from 1 to 3, which fixed most of the damning issues in 2. Most, but not all, but on the other hand, it has added a lot of other nice things by now.
The “Share” has always grated for me, too, and since it came up here, I have re-opened https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-17873 which was closed with the “we didn’t look at it for a long while, so we might as well close it”.
As for dragging items to people’s profile, I considered that a major loss when I first hit it, but then realized that I practically always wrote an IM to people I dropped items to anyway, so dropping the item in the IM window was actually more convenient, even if initially somewhat obscure.
Basically she was responsible for production, front end back end, solving problems, weekly updates.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahkuehnle
In basis she was the production manager of the product… and she just didn’t deliver. Perhaps she could listen very well to a certain pool of dominant users of SL, however wasn’t able to turn SL over to average users, specially not under the current CEO’s policies of rapid updates.
It is high responsible position. If she needed certain talents she should have resourced them. Or if she didn’t accept the new quick update policies she could have searched for another job somewhere else.
To fire somebody with a standing like her always is sad and i do wish her all the best, really.
But perhaps the direction of producing LL’s major product (SL) really needs another shift which includes the CEO.
It is well known that SL’s viewer performance was cut by half for too many since V2.8, major problems with AA, shadows and collada, etc. The viewer software went even more bad and major issues remained unresolved.
The consequence is that SL has declined even more since only a handful of people with high spec computers are able to use SL or stay committed to an older (faster) viewer. The latter are older users.
And SL really does need a continued renewed user base to not become a dead track in the social media stream.
I suspect the CEO is next to go this year ends, he doesn’t deliver either.
What i just do not understand is why a guy like him is hired as he said himself in an interview: “i am a traditional kind of guy”. Certainly he seems to have a substantial professional track record at EA, but that means too little. Being traditional means: “i don’t have a large tank with new ideas”.
What a strange contrast with what SL is to be.
I think it was 2.6 or 2.7 that marked the Viewer going pear-shaped. Remember the complaints about Mesh slowing everything down? I did some rough comparisons, and the 2.6-beta Mesh code, in Kirsten’s, didn’t wreck frame rates. Cool VL Viewer, when it got Mesh, was also based on that code, and raced through rendering, whether Mesh was part of the scene or not. But people were complaining at length about Mesh, and their experience was the 2.7 Viewer. It was a slug. And then it was revealed that there were serious problems with the interface between Viewer and OpenGL drivers.
I looked at that LinkedIn page. Esbee Linden, is it? It’s all very up-beat, and if you don’t know much about Linden Lab, you wouldn’t notice how tightly her career has been tied to Viewer 2. And, if the Viewer 2 team didn’t keep on top of the Open GL situation, she is the one who was in charge. Some of the other stuff, it might have a rather negative interpretation by users.
It’s a CV, and while CV’s shouldn’t lie, they can be very economical with the truth. For instance, the string “success” doesn’t appear anywhere on the page, and this is from somebody who won industry awards.
I don’t have the knowledge of the products to judge Rod Humble’s previous career, but I’d suppose it was to do with managing a large project, changing according to user experiences and feedback. SL isn’t quite the same as an MMORPG, but they both need sustained maintenance and creation. So, not obviously bad.
But user generated content and software, that’s a very different thing to hiring a team of artists for a new “level” in World of WOWcraft.
Well, Wolf, I think that Linden Lab and “user created content” aren´t compatible anyway, and never really were. Most probably Linden Lab and the “average user” never really were compatible. Rod, if hired to change this, will have a tough ride after all these years of disconnection, failed strategies and misunderstanding.
[...] Esbee and Charlar Layed Off [...]
@Torben, that JIRA is not visible even after login – perhaps a summary would be in order?