

Former Zynga Engineer doing AMA on reddit - mbrzuzy
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/pc6j9/iama_former_fulltime_zynga_engineer_quit_6_months/

======
physcab
I'm an analyst for a gaming company too, so let me offer my perspective. I
consider myself to be an ethical, non-creepy person, and I disagree with what
this person says.

Yes, gaming companies are extremely data-driven and they measure everything
they can. I'm in charge of dashboards that have over 300 KPI's (key
performance indicators) on them. What do we measure? A whole lot of shit.
ARPU, ARPPU, HC (hard currency) spend/gained, SC (soft currency) gained/spend,
Retention, DAU, Spend DAU, Gained DAU, Downloads, Activations, plus funnels
for every page, every user action you can think of.

Do I think measuring all this is creepy? No. Why? Because when I come in the
morning, I look at my stats. I'll be able to tell within an hour if the build
the engineers shipped the night before had a bug that affected 30% of our
users in a certain location. I'll then report this to the Engineering team,
they can create a hotfix, and users can be happy again. Engineers are happy
knowing that we have actual data to validate and confirm their gameplay
suggestions (made during scrum/sprint planning sessions). I also report
monetization metrics to the VP's. They want to know if the boatloads of money
they are spending on user acquisition are actually paying off. And the PM's
want to know if users are playing the game, or how far they get into the game.

Yes, we maximize for users who spend over $10k. These users even have names.
They're called "whales" in industry parlance. Why wouldn't you want more of
them in your game? This is a business afterall. I feel just as bad as the next
person wondering whether some of these "whales" are addicts. I don't want to
be creating products for addicts. But what if these users are just rich people
who have tons of money to spend off the cuff? There's no way we can know
because we never get that data. All I see is what's reported in ItunesConnect.

Do we ever record any personally identifiable information? No. Do we ever sell
or distribute this data to outside parties? No. Can any of this data ever be
used maliciously? No.

Personally, I like the way game companies work (hence why I work in the
industry). It teaches you to measure everything. You make decisions quickly.
And no one can argue with the facts. You'll know real fast whether the product
is shitty and you can do an about-face, gather the troops, and push out
something new.

~~~
plinkplonk
"when I come in the morning, I look at my stats. I'll be able to tell within
an hour if the build the engineers shipped the night before had a bug that
affected 30% of our users in a certain location. I'll then report this to the
Engineering team,"

Why aren't the engineers doing this themselves? (Honest question, not snark)
Analyzing performance/results data is (should be? :) )part of all engineering.

~~~
physcab
They do. But sometimes these bugs are less obvious and hard to spot without
data. In this particular case, it was an animation bug that occurred during a
tutorial of a game, whereby the animation caused the game to crash, but only
on a subset of older IPhones and under certain memory conditions. So even
though the build got through QA, it was tough to understand what would happen
out in the wild. Well, on that morning I noticed that a large percentage of
our users were starting this particular tutorial step but not completing it.
And since all of our data is cohorted by both install date and build version,
the engineering team knew exactly where to look to fix the issue, despite no
knowledge on my part of a bug ever being introduced.

~~~
plinkplonk
That is a great answer, Thank You.

Now to pick your brains a bit. :)

What are some good resources for engineers to pick up some advanced analysis
skills (specifically to do the kind of work you do)?

Is it as simple as going back to college to do some courses in Advanced
Statistics? Any particular sub branches of stats/math to focus on? Any good
books you can recommend ? Thanks in advance.

PS: I work in Machine Learning,and am fairly knowledgeable in maths/stat but
often have difficulty recommending the right sequence of books,courses etc, to
people who want to follow a similar path - it doesn't help that I am entirely
self taught - and often have to mumble vague generalities like "learn all the
math you can and learn to code really well" etc. Recently I am getting
questions about how someone can get good at "data science" and "behaviour
analysis". Just wondering if there is a standard learning path for something
like "casino science"

~~~
physcab
I think learning statistics definitely helps. Simple things like averages,
stdev, probability, etc will help you. Also a healthy knowledge of SQL goes a
long way.

But more importantly, its learning how to be a detective. For example, I'm not
strictly a math person. I also know Python and PHP and use it to write scripts
when I need to validate a theory, often working with raw logs.

You also need business acumen. Analysts are like consultants in that they work
with a variety of teams and stakeholders. Everyone wants to be sure that the
decision they're making is the right one, and data can help them do it. So you
need an understanding of what the core issue is, how the stakeholder wants it
solved, and the engineering capability to get it done in a timely fashion.

One of my favorite books is Collective Intelligence. Its a soft-intro to
machine learning, and having read that and gone through those exercises along
with taking a formal class on machine learning, has helped me see the
importance of statistics applied at web scale.

EDIT (to the PS): I don't think there's a standard teaching for data science.
Everyone screens for it differently. If you apply for a job as a data
scientist at LinkedIn for example (I did) they'll expect you to have a fairly
formal CS background and will throw you questions any good software engineer
should be able to solve. But they also ask you questions like "design a news
feed" or "whats a good algorithm for a spam filter and how do you score it" or
"how do you make an algorithm work with little data". I think "data science"
is actually learning how to apply statistics at web scale problems, so my
advice would be to look at things like recommenders, spam filters,
classifiers, NLP, etc.

------
alagu
Ex-Zynga engineer here. I could see a lot of hatred in his post. Couldn't see
credibility.

Creepy stuff:

 _Spying on players. Getting intimate gaming data, their habits, their
networks, and how to effectively monetize given X._

This never happened. Zynga doesn't do behavioral targeting at all.

Creepy/bad stuff in my view:

All decisions are short-term. Let us build X games in Y months.

Bad code quality. There is a team which optimizes for the bad code written by
engineers at high speed.

Good stuff:

Speed - They are really aggressive. And they never think twice to throw away
something if there is a better alternative.

Decisions - Right or wrong, decisions are made with least and things progress.

Meritocracy - I wouldn't call it pure "meritocracy", but when they know you
are a smart guy who can ship stuff, they'll love you in $ and positions. I
know several young people at VP/GM positions.

Data-driven - I see this as huge plus. Lot of companies are clueless because
of not enough feedback-data. A/B testing, phased rollout, metrics are
mandatory for any product/feature.

Zynga is 100% data driven. Zynga is not a tech-company, it is a product-
manager-company. Product managers are more statisticians than PM. All
decisions are from numbers.

~~~
cbs
_Zynga doesn't do behavioral targeting at all._

This statement seems fundamentally at odds with the following. Could you
explain further?

 _Data-driven - I see this as huge plus. Lot of companies are clueless because
of not enough feedback-data. A/B testing, phased rollout, metrics are
mandatory for any product/feature._

 _Zynga is 100% data driven. Zynga is not a tech-company, it is a product-
manager-company. Product managers are more statisticians than PM. All
decisions are from numbers._

~~~
alagu
Data-driven: How many users are engaging with feature X, how much are they
spending on item Y, how many users click button Z.

Behavioural Targeting: User "A" loves lot of "Strawberry crops" let me show
him more of that.

~~~
cbs
So the difference is making changes to optimize for a subset of users vs.
optimizing for the aggregate?

~~~
alagu
Yes

------
aymeric
Shame the person doing the AMA doesn't express himself better, he loses a bit
of credibility.

I can't tell if his answers are given out of anger against Zynga or if they
are a reflection of reality.

~~~
majorlazer
I agree. Seems like he has a lot of hate built up inside him:

"Google and Apple teams are total cunts. Fuck em, and their hipster bullshit."

Followed by:

"I like Google as a whole, but they hire too many wanna-be-devs. And their SC2
team can suck a big herpes-infested cock. FUCK THEM."

Hard to take this AMA seriously.

~~~
copper
I do hope you didn't miss this gem :)

> Brogrammers are mostly Silicon Valley / Harvard type douchebags who got into
> programming. YCombinator drop outs. Years of experience in managed and web
> languages, but who have no idea how to setup a build system nor work in
> native code.

~~~
Stormbringer
I have a new favourite word

~~~
SkyMarshal
If you're new to the term, observe: <http://duckduckgo.com/?q=brogrammer>

~~~
wyclif
I believe you mean this, bro: <http://youtu.be/Qi_AAqi0RZM>

The best 15 minutes you'll ever spend on your career, almost as important as
your dubstep collection.

~~~
SkyMarshal
I almost linked to that, but wanted to share the love with the other bro's
sites out there too. That vid is in the top of the search results I linked,
it's all good.

------
dotBen
I'm concerned Zynga will work out who he is and decide to retaliate a) out of
spite and b) to re-affirm a culture of fear to keep other ex-employee's quiet.

He mentioned he quit in August (I wonder how many engineers quit in August?
Single digits?) and uses curious language quirks like "[they gave] nay fucks".
As a Brit he sounds potentially British to me.

I know people in Zynga's management - they'll relish the opportunity to fuck
this guy for contravening some part of his NDA. I'm sure Dani is pissed.

If you are going to 'whistleblow', people, be careful.

~~~
robryan
He also mentions a bug he supposedly fixed, which would make it very easy to
work out who he is internally.

------
bryanh
Interesting comment about data-driven decisions and creative processes at
Zynga:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/pc6j9/iama_former_full...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/pc6j9/iama_former_fulltime_zynga_engineer_quit_6_months/c3o81fy?context=1)

I've often wondered, how do you balance the two? When you have that much data,
wouldn't it be insane to go by what any single person thinks is "good design"?

~~~
bryne
That's part of the point. Zynga is disrupting the risky, hits-based game
industry by attempting to remove as much risk as possible from the equation,
and this extends down to (game) design by data.

------
jrockway
What I find most odd is all the talk about contractors. It sounds to me like
being a contractor at Zynga is the same as being a contractor at every other
company on the face of the earth. In exchange for not getting benefits or job
security, you get a higher hourly rate and overtime. Nothing evil about that,
just a reasoned financial exchange. If you don't want to be a contractor,
don't accept their job offer!

~~~
potatolicious
I used to work for a company that (over my time there) seemed to use
contractors more and more, and the justification was always to cut costs. I'm
highly doubtful that their hourly rates were as high as one might imagine a
temporary position to be.

I wasn't privy to all the details, but the impression seemed to me that it was
a cost-cutting measure (no benefits for comparable pay), and a hiring-cap
dodger, since at this company they didn't seem to count.

The increasing use of contractors-as-full-time was part of the reason I left.
I personally knew two people who were getting strung along by HR with vague
promises to turning full-time, and one who was unceremoniously let go when he
was getting close to the legal limits. This seemed like a regular occurrence.
I hated working next to people who had no benefits, no job security, and were
doing precisely the same work as full-timers.

~~~
Duff
Most bodyshops due hard-line negotiations with the employees.

One particularly nasty one that I ran into would arbitrarily delay payment to
employees for 90 or 120 days, unless the employees agreed to pay 10% for a
weekly paycheck. The bad ones are even nastier to folks on temporary work
visas.

If they are a good place, they will pay people whatever the fully-loaded cost
of an employee is. Contractors aren't getting rich.

------
spitfire
Finally we have a good term for these guys - Brogrammer.

Brogrammer - Brogrammers are mostly Silicon Valley / Harvard type douchebags
who got into programming. YCombinator drop outs. Years of experience in
managed and web languages, but who have no idea how to setup a build system
nor work in native code.

~~~
rdouble
I dunno about his assessment of Brogrammers. Engineering departments have
always had a sizable Bro contingent. The typical male Stanford CS student
could very well be the paragon of the programming Bro... and they are usually
pretty good at what they are doing.

Maybe he's getting Brogrammers confused with web dev scenesters. Awesome
Tumblrs, lo-fi keytar side band, scruffy hair, interesting glasses, polaroid
cameras. I don't know if those guys have a name yet. Hipster is too
easy...it's never really been "hip" to have a desk job.

~~~
spitfire
I think that might be what he was getting at. In my mind both the groups sort
of meld together as "non-engineers".

If you can't handle a pointer, you have no business being near a compiler. If
you don't know why you (usually) don't want to handle a pointer, you have no
business calling yourself an engineer.

~~~
rdouble
I guess my comment reads a bit snarky but i didn't mean to be disparaging
about anyone's engineering relevance, just that they are different kinds of
guys.

~~~
spitfire
I didn't read it as snarky. I'm just a snarky old crusty sailor.

------
mathattack
Seems to me that Zynga is just operating like a credit card company. This
isn't a judgment, I just find it have an emotional response towered MasterCard
or Visa. They also do a lot of data analysis, only care about their best
customers, and copy each other at every turn. I still use them.

------
atomicdog
I think he may have coined a new term

>Brogrammers

~~~
rit
Not a new term at all. See:

[http://www.quora.com/Brogramming/How-does-a-programmer-
becom...](http://www.quora.com/Brogramming/How-does-a-programmer-become-a-
brogrammer)

