
Anonymous Is Going After Zynga For Mistreating Employees - psycho
http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/28/anonymous-is-going-after-zynga-for-mistreating-employees-and-is-prepared-to-leak-documents/
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Alex_r
As a current zynga contractor who is losing his job there next Friday, I have
to admit I have mixed feelings about this.

Firstly, I don't see the employees being let go as victims, most are getting 3
months severance. Secondly, I don't think there is any real evil going on by
Zynga; they accidentally hired more people than they can afford, it sucks as
I'm one of them, but I fundamentally agree with the notion of at-will
employment in the US.

~~~
taylonr
How do you "accidentally" hire more people than you can afford?

I could see two people both hiring a janitor without realizing it, but not
"accidentally" hiring a lot of developers, designers or whatever else.

~~~
codeonfire
You are a middle manager. Do you say "bob in the other department hired 5
people, so I guess I'll stick with the three I have"? Nope. You go straight to
your VP and say a rival VP just got five guys, where's mine. If hiring is
decentralized and no one is concerned about costs you end up growing
exponential.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
That sounds like what would happen at Strawman, Inc. I've worked at a bunch of
companies, big and small, and have never seen hiring justified like that.

Now, getting people and teams transferred once they are hired? That's a whole
different story.

~~~
codeonfire
What do you propose caused Zynga management to vastly overhire and conduct
layoffs?

~~~
jrockway
They expected faster growth than what actually happened. It's possible that
the CEO approved each individual hire and they still could have overhired.

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m0nastic
I would be shocked if this isn't actually just a post-rationalization for
previously completed hacking activity (which has been the majority of their
previous M.O.)

~~~
bpatrianakos
Thanks for saying this as sometimes I'm afraid that Anonymous gets too much
respect around here. You mention their M.O. which seems to basically be hack
something, release tons of private or damaging information then say its
because the people they hacked were evil. In reality its a bunch of bullshit.
If they had hacked the American Cancer Society or even Piratebay or Wikileaks
they'd come up with some reason they were evil.

Shit was cute at first but now its just looking like a reason hack for its own
sake. And the whole grandiose "Hacktivist" identity they've garnered is now
looking more and more like its also bullshit.

~~~
angersock
Right, but they __didn't __hack the ACS, or Piratebay, or Wikileaks. That's
worth keeping in mind.

~~~
redthrowaway
No, but there _was_ the Epilepsy Foundation, back in the day. I tend to draw a
distinction though between Chanology, /i/, Op Payback, and OWS flavours of
Anonymous, despite a great deal of overlap in the people involved.

This idea of Anonymous being (or seeing themselves as) a force for good is
actually pretty new. I'm thinking it can probably be traced back to the
financial blockade against Wikileaks and the response thereto. Coming just as
it did after the resurrection of Anonymous during Op Payback, I think the
response to Wikileaks' trials probably brought in a lot of new people with a
much different set of ideals than those who came before.

~~~
lmm
Epilepsy Foundation was widely speculated to be a Church of Scientology false-
flag operation. Don't know if anything was ever proven either way.

I'd say the idea of Anonymous being a force for good goes all the way back to
the Hal Turner raid. Before then it was all about spoiling other people's fun
(Habbo Hotel etc.), but after targeting this white supremacist (basically by
accident) suddenly people realised that maybe this power could be directed
against those who really deserve it. Chanology and all the rest of it came out
of that.

~~~
ProblemFactory
> Epilepsy Foundation was widely speculated to be a Church of Scientology
> false-flag operation.

A curious thought: are false-flag operations even possible with Anonymous,
which is a label anyone can take, not an organisation?

If Church of Scientology decides to hack Epilepsy foundation and call
themselves Anonymous, _then they are Anonymous_. And hacking to troll and
upset some group of people is certainly within the usual motivations of
Anonymous activity.

~~~
lmm
>A curious thought: are false-flag operations even possible with Anonymous,
which is a label anyone can take, not an organisation?

Meh. Ultimately Anonymous does describe a particular cluster of people and
behaviours, however loosely affiliated - and rightly or wrongly, they do have
a reputation to discredit. When one incident is an outlier both in terms of
action and (alleged) perpetrators, I think it's fair to call it a false-flag
operation.

>hacking to troll and upset some group of people is certainly within the usual
motivations of Anonymous activity.

Absolutely, but hacking to cause actual physical injury is far less so IME.

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DigitalSea
The inner nerd in me would love the opportunity to take a peak at some Zynga
game code, but the exterior sensible adult in me has mixed feelings about
this. The employee's weren't terminated without pay, the employees are being
gracefully compensated, I don't see what Zynga have done wrong here other than
failing to predict how many employees they actually needed. Any company
regardless of money in their bank is entitled to make their own decisions and
trim excess staff, it's called business and I am sure even a profitable
company like Apple if in the same situation would do the same thing.

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TheGateKeeper
So releasing employees from their _ahem_ employ is mistreatment? These kids
need to stick their noses back in their schoolwork.

~~~
codewright
More likely this is a build-up of many offenses, like Pincus' past threatening
to fire employees if they didn't surrender their stock.

Pincus is a scum-bag of the first order and is ruining startup employee
confidence in the value of their equity. He's poisoning the well for the rest
of us.

Anonymous is silly in their own way, but you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss
things or actions you don't understand.

~~~
h123b
Actually, you don't understand Zynga since you're relying on rumor and
hearsay. I've worked as Zynga. Things aren't as black and white as you think
they are.

~~~
georgemcbay
I don't think he has to have worked at Zynga to understand the problem. Zynga
is hardly the only one, but they are one of the biggest of the new crop of
startups that grew huge and IPOed to the benefit of very few employees.

Back in the "old days", even when you move the "old days" up to include
Google's IPO, a company with such a massive liquidity event could be expected
to result in a lot of wealth spread out among early employees. Even
receptionists, chefs, etc could cash out big paydays.

With the way things are now, companies are often structured such that unless
you're a founder with an ironclad paper trail of equity ownership, you
probably aren't going to be walking away with much more money than what you'd
get from a particularly good yearly bonus at a large company, and that's
absolutely best-case. More likely is that a liquidity event will occur where
nobody but preferred stock owners will see a single dime.

This perception is absolutely a problem for the overall startup ecosystem and
plays into why everyone involved wants to be a founder and not just an early
employee and this in turn plays into why all these startups all these founders
are founding are having massive problems hiring non-founder employees.

As a potential startup employee, your biggest concern shouldn't be whether the
company fails spectacularly. Failure sucks, but that's easy enough to get past
psychologically. Your biggest concern should be what if the company is
extremely successful and you get screwed anyway. Because while this is
statistically less likely than spectacular failure, it is much harder to deal
with and more common than a lot of people think.

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tylerc230
All this will do is hurt Zynga employees further. Releasing sensitive data
about a company will push the stock price down further. Most employees have
equity in the company. Equity is (was) one of the major incentives for working
at Zynga. Zynga is not forcing anyone to work there. If employees feel
mistreated they are free to go work elsewhere. I say all of this as a former
Zynga employee.

~~~
rhizome
Zynga's stock price is below book value, and it hasn't been an incentive since
about 2 days after IPO. The employees have already been hurt by the company
themselves much worse than any outside influence can at this point.

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ambiguator
I don't see the evil in a company needing to lay off employees after shipping
a bunch of games that didn't do so well.

Zynga should be more careful the next time they hire somebody wearing a Guy
Fawkes mask in their profile picture.

~~~
objclxt
I think that if Anonymous want to protest dodgy labor practices there are
certainly far more compelling targets in the US.

However, I would say that if as a CEO you're laying off 5% of your workforce
due to poor company performance you should really evaluate your own
compensation package, because as a CEO you're meant to stop that kind of crap
from happening. I doubt that's going to be happening for Marc Pincus.

~~~
paulhauggis
"I would say that if as a CEO you're laying off 5% of your workforce due to
poor company performance you should really evaluate your own compensation
package, because as a CEO you're meant to stop that kind of crap from
happening"

This isn't really true. A CEO is there to make sure the company stays
profitable. Sometimes, cutting a percentage of the workforce achieves this
goal.

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diminoten
So they're going to cause Zynga employees problems (who, after all, will have
to deal with the fallout) in an effort to protest the fact that problems have
been caused for Zynga employees?

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mdonahoe
I am guessing that Zynga games don't have a lot of security, and that a
targeted attack would be disastrous to their players and analytics.

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Jach
The gamers I know (who are the only people I know with an opinion about Zynga)
would like to see Zynga no longer exist as a company, which entails all the
employees having to find a new job. What's with the sudden sympathy for the
employees?

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maak
Tackling the big issues...

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beatgammit
I'd rather Anonymous go after Zynga because they use flash. It's about time we
get some quality client-side code that doesn't eat 100% CPU just to plant some
seeds on my stupid little virtual farm.

Another legitimate motive is to reduce the amount of time people waste on
*ville. Even if they just DDOS, that means 2+ hours more productivity per
person! That leaves bored programmers with nothing to do to waste their time,
and we might just get some quality games out of it!

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aes256
Anonymous is now composed of jilted Zynga employees?

~~~
snuze
My first thought exactly!

To claim that Zynga employees were taken advantage is like claiming that the
bankers were taken advantage of during the 2008 collapse.

If you don't like your employer, find another one! These guys work in San
Francisco, plenty of jobs to go around.

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citricsquid
These sort of news posts should be a game, take an article like this and put
the top comment against an article about SOPA or any other internet
"oppression" policy:

From a "Hacker Advocate" at Spotify

    
    
        The internet needs policing
    

Really?

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hkmurakami
_> The offensive has been dubbed “#OP MaZynga”_

A pun for Mazinger[1]?

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazinger_Z>

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JohnHaugeland
Getting really tired of how internet news is acting like mob vigilante justice
is a good thing.

~~~
debacle
Calling it vigilante justice is giving it too much credit.

------
leoedin
Meanwhile at Walmart employees are receiving great treatment.

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EliRivers
At which point do these guys simply become a lynch mob?

~~~
flyinRyan
They're not now?

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michaelochurch
I have mixed feelings about this. Laying people off, for business reasons, and
providing three months severance, is not worthy of this kind of attack. Most
of these people will get better jobs. Companies commit injustices against
their employees all over the place, and Zynga is justifiably disguised, but
this isn't a case of that.

I think the _general precedent_ of increased employee empowerment (by
increasing the consequences, currently at zero, of treating employees badly).
I'd like to live in a world where employees have some power and a few hiccups
or overactions on which I don't agree with all the details is something I have
to accept. So that is to the good.

I don't think they deserve this for laying people off. Every company has to
lay people off. The clawbacks, on the other hand, earned Zynga this.

~~~
flyinRyan
Exactly. Zynga should have been punished back when they did the clawbacks and
the CEO made that idiotic statement about the "Google Chef". Not now that
they're behaving pretty nicely (3 month severance? In the US?).

