Take with several grains of sodium, but there's a new Glassdoor review of Linden Lab by a senior software engineer who just exited the company:
I've been on many projects and have never seen one so badly run - yo-yo management, constantly shifting priorities, rarely a clear line of authority (instead, you get directives from multiple areas), constant employee turnover, and almost no oversight...
On the mostly plus side, our anonymous engineer also notes: "CEO [Ebbe Altberg] is great and actually kind of inspiring (the board of directors.... not so much)." His or her description of Sansar fits what I've also heard from insiders, and you can see the shifting of priorities in just how Sansar was just re-positioned from social VR to a cross-platform hangout space.
How can a CEO be both "great and inspiring" yet allow all of the bad things that CEOs essentially are hired to control?
Oh I know, the reviewer needs a good letter of recommendation from said CEO for his next job.
What a fiasco.
Posted by: jimjane | Tuesday, May 22, 2018 at 03:41 PM
The Sansar team supposedly has some of the previous SL team. But, my experience at a few of the meeting is the dev's I met know very little about SL. The experience the people gained building and working with SL does not seem to be transferring.
Those attending the meetings may know more about developing a virtual world than the devs.
Posted by: Nalates Urriah | Tuesday, May 22, 2018 at 04:21 PM
Wasn't this scenario apparent and predicable from the start?
They couldn't define the product beyond their hopes and dreams of making money and every lame attempt to define it has slithered away like a greased pig. It's nothing like WordPress. It's not ground-breaking. It's less interesting and less promising than Sinespace and even High Fidelity. It's an unfocused, financial tar pit.
The only thing I would take with a grain of salt is the praise for the CEO. I guess Carly Fiorina and Marissa Mayer could also be described as "inspiring" hot messes.
Posted by: Clara Seller | Tuesday, May 22, 2018 at 08:15 PM
Also from the Glassdoor review:
"Pay your people better. Love is not the answer and is easily abused."
Heh, still trying to socially engineer and scam their employees with the Love Machine too, I see.
Posted by: Dartagan Shepherd | Wednesday, May 23, 2018 at 06:43 AM
sansar has a great engine it makes me pick this virtual world over VRchat and the others, if it is just a bad management thing and indeed it might be : with a team that didn’t manage to even finish the most basic tools such as THE inworld scaling tool...then get another manager and look if the scaling tool gets fixed, Im not even joking >.>
Posted by: nahejd | Wednesday, May 23, 2018 at 10:30 AM
When I was in some Sansar product meetings, I witnessed a few things...
A. A Linden employee who didn't know what a HUD was. There was a moment of shock and awe silence and then some attending community users jumped in to help the Linden understand what a HUD was. I facepalmed.
B. Lindens who didn't know how users were using their tools and thus the attending community decided it would be a great idea to create a challenge where Lindens had to use the same Sansar tools the users were using and create something amazing with it. In the process, they could gain better insight as to their users experiences. I don't know if that ever played out, though.
Posted by: vwfan | Friday, May 25, 2018 at 06:15 PM
Basically LL and Ebbe hire people too dumb to know how expensive life in the Bay Area really is. When they find out and ask for more money, they are "laid off" or fired and replaced by a new batch of morons.
nuff said.
Posted by: jimjane | Friday, May 25, 2018 at 07:27 PM