The article makes an excellent point: you can really only demand "startup hours" out of your employees if you can offer "startup perks" (i.e. (a) an extremely favorable work environment, (b) interesting work, and (c) the possibility of the big cash-out).
Zynga has never seemed particularly strong at (a) and (b), but compensated with a heaping helping of (c). Now that's gone. If they're going to demand startup hours now, they'll have to get there by pressure and exploitation (which admittedly is nothing new in the gaming industry). There's always been something brutal and antagonistic about that company, and that's probably just going to get worse.
Also:
TechCrunch comment threads have one positive attribute: they make me appreciate the level of discourse here at HN all the more.
For some reason I have trouble loading TechCrunch comments, which I guess is a good thing.
On that note, I'm a little surprised they copy and pasted the Quora writeup. Might as well just link to it and call it a day as the rest of the writeup wasn't particularly insightful.
A problem with startups and startup hours is that in a startup, there are real existential threats, and this enables a class of narcissistic managers to present their own bikeshedding and ill-advised pet projects and unreasonable demands as existential issues.
If you're an entry-level engineer at Google and your manager tries to convince you to work a 60-hour week because of some existential threat to the company, you're going to say, "I'll gladly do that, but I want an EMG award and a double promotion." It's just not plausible that a sophisticated, large company would bet itself on the work of a low-level grunt and if it did, this would be one hell of a great time to ask for a promotion. But at a startup, for there to be an existential threat is plausible, and a lot of managers at startups abuse this (both down, in exerting long hours from subordinates, and up, in misleading executives).
I recently saw a 25-year-old on his first white-collar job, using existential-threat FUD arguments, convince the CTO and CEO of a $100m+ startup that the entire codebase needed a "rearchitecture" that turned out to be the worst idea ever-- botched in every possible way from political deployment, language choice, schedule and scaling. It was a complete and utter disaster, and possibly killed the company (it's teetering, the culture has been completely destroyed, and a number of that company's best people have left or been fired in the past few months).
Oh, I see, it's the developer's fault for going to a studio and letting them mistreat him so that he could try and hold onto his job. "Quit, and go do great things." Yes, because everyone who works for a scrappy startup and gets acquired has a huge nest egg, right? It's not like starting a company is hard?
Commentary on this stuff is utterly ridiculous sometimes. It's like it's coming from people who don't live in the real world.
The OP describes 12 hour days, 7 days a week with lots of broken promises and obvious failures to address issues, and all a Zynga employee can come up with in response is that it's an "exaggeration" and that it would be more appropriate to call the results "disappointing". So does that mean the employee isn't wrong and his team was abused and given little opportunity to rest after a long pre-launch crunch, and that Zynga staffers only 'slightly' lied about future value of stock to encourage people to overwork themselves? Maybe he only lost 5 pounds due to stress and malnutrition instead of 15 pounds? That's okay, right?
Someone whose employer is acquired doesn't exactly have any easy choices here either. He probably wasn't planning on working for Zynga, and suddenly being told that you're now a Zynga employee doesn't give you much time to find a job - and job hunting in games isn't easy in general. It's only natural to at least try and make the new job work.
It's not like there are no other jobs in the software field right now. If he was being mistreated at GM and is only qualified to work in a factory that's one thing. There are more software jobs than qualified workers right now. Quit, go get a job at a company that isn't the scum of the earth.
Quitting and getting a job at a company "that isn't the scum of the earth" is easy. Getting an opportunity to do great things is hard. Blue-sky R&D is dead, and very few people ever end up with the money to own their lives instead of renting them from a boss.
People work for the Zyngas of the world because they expect to be able to do great things after the big payday, but that rarely pans out.
Nice to hear Schap's style hasn't changed much. I don't want to sound too much like a whiner, because I'm writing this from my boats on the tropical island where I live now, but I was the first programmer to quit from his first company when he gave me the royal butt-chewing treatment for daring to take two hours off to visit friends on Independence Day 1996. He paid me $24K per year, with zero stock options or advancement opportunities, to work from 11am-2am every day of the week, to write a certain Super Nintendo game. There's worse I could say, but again, the point isn't to whine. Nobody has to put up with that.
It wouldn't be particularly good karma to dish dirt here on hackernews, and my prior description pretty much says it all. Fortunately I was only 18, and only stayed in that environment for about 3 months before quitting without notice (on July 5th, as it happened), while many of those who did stick with it and who succeeded in that environment, remain virgins to this day. It's all about which lifestyle suits you, I suppose. I can tell you that Schap once asked me how I liked Orlando, because it was where I could continue to live as long as I did good work for him (I lived there 13 years after I quit, before moving to the tropics).
And let this be a lesson to ALL. Never EVER work > 9-6 hours. Only on occasional crazy deploys. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow rarely comes, and enough horror stories show that. Don't be stupid.
If your employer sees your problems and genuinely needs the hrs and does everything in their power to assist u, that's different. I heard of crazy google stories followed by how google spent time and effort making their people happy.
I have spent the last few years doing automated continuous delivery, and the whole idea of crazy hours around deployment time is like a half-forgotten nightmare. I am happy to leave heroics to the firefighters.
I agree with the rule about never working crunch hours - it's helped me a lot to stick to it - but I know a lot of people who simply don't have that option: If they don't work those crunch hours, they get fired. I've only had the benefit of being able to do it due to job security, and not everyone has that. I have to imagine that would apply to most Zynga employees based on what I know about how that company runs.
I work long hours because I love what I do and I work with great people. Not because I'm expecting to get rich. I feel fortunate to be writing code, and making a difference and advancing a product. I'm immensely proud to think of myself as part of 'product.' I am grateful for the opportunities I have been giving and the faith others have placed in me.
I also love learning, and I get to learn something new pretty much every day. That's something a lot of people don't get in their line of work. I don't take it for granted.
Some people just need to grow up a little and think about their life. Every moment I spend at work is a moment I don't spend with my wife and daughter, so I am sure to spend it on something that is worth it for them and myself. A flash game that annoys me on Facebook isn't it, but there are people who thoroughly enjoy playing those games and others who love making them, that isn't me, but that's someone and I hope they find that work rewarding. I couldn't, so I don't do that work.
This type of stuff happened leading up to the bubble. Somehow the knowledge didn't successfully transfer from the people burned then to those getting burned now. Fuckedcompany.com sure tried.
This reminds me of the EA spouse article [http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html] which was regarding conditions 8+ years ago at EA. I thought the games industry had progressed since then - obviously not.
I don't understand people that bitch and moan about working long hours in the software industry, especially games. You can leave whenever you want, its a free will state. Would you have been bitching and moaning if all this happened yet you made millions? You lost so you cry? Seriously, been there done that, learned my lesson at EA, moved on and made sure I don't put myself in the same situation again. No one is putting a gun to your head.
You're right that no one is forcing the people to work the long hours. However imo programmers and gamers are often naive. Spending high school and college working alone or with friends of a similar mind-set can prevent someone from seeing the "real world" aka MBA-types who prefer making money to advancing interesting technology. So while no one is forcing the employees to work themselves into the ground there's still something to be said about cunning non-technical leadership taking advantage of 18-22 year old naive programmers.
The point of linking to articles like this is to encourage the next batch of hopeful teenagers to learn from other people's experiences and stay out of the games industry instead of having to learn the hard way.
Suppose you work at Zynga, and you're at the bottom-to-lower end of the hierarchy. Nobody with a C-title knows the name of your manager.
You're stuck working 10 hour days forever. What's the expected value on your equity? You obviously have some minuscule fraction. Are people really killing themselves over a $100k bonus?
Is this all based on the "pre-Facebook IPO" world where tech stocks were expected to triple in price over six months?
A $100K bonus could shave off a decade from a home loan. Even in the bay area. I'd work hard for that, but I would also have to like where I work even without the bonus.
Maybe someone can answer this. When negotiating equity, couldn't you red line the lockout period provision? Or is this set by law? If it is by law, how are executives getting around it?
There's a law (SEC rule 144) which says that if shares were not bought in an open market, they are locked up for 6 months after the event that makes them liquid (more or less). It's complicated, but generally you're rarely in a position to NOT need to adhere to it, regardless of what your contract says.
What I find appalling about the Zynga, the Facebook and the Groupon IPO is that people at the top who actually are responsible for the mess can cash out early whereas people at the bottom who have to rely on people at the top who already cashed out themselves. CEOs and founders should have to wait longest to sell their stock. This would protect not only employees who get stock, but also investors who bought stock early on. There would be much higher incentive to build an actually working company instead of having a scammy IPO followed by a quick cash out.
It's one thing if a company fails and everyone loses. It's another if everyone loses, but people who are most responsible get many millions.
I feel companies with tech cofounder often reward their programmers and workers far better than ones founded by business founders.
This is really terrible for them. A large part of your compensation is stocks, and to lose that suddenly while others cash our must be extremely frustrating. Each person should be able to cash out a percentage of their stock to be fair.
Zynga has never seemed particularly strong at (a) and (b), but compensated with a heaping helping of (c). Now that's gone. If they're going to demand startup hours now, they'll have to get there by pressure and exploitation (which admittedly is nothing new in the gaming industry). There's always been something brutal and antagonistic about that company, and that's probably just going to get worse.
Also:
TechCrunch comment threads have one positive attribute: they make me appreciate the level of discourse here at HN all the more.