| "but most of my team had new jobs lined up
| by the time they left the building anyway."
I've never experienced this. Does this mean that they were already looking, or that they were able to immediately call someone up and get a job offer on-demand?
Edit: To be clear, having 'a job lined up' to me means that they already at least have an offer, rather than just a bunch of emails from recruiters and/or people looking to hire them. It seems really amazing to go from laid off to "have a job offer" in an afternoon. I could definitely see laid-off-to-interviews-lined-up in an afternoon though. Am I being too specific in my reading of this?
If it's anything like San Francisco, once word spreads that a gaming company is shuttering, there's pretty much a "land grab" from the other local companies for talent.
Especially at a company like Zynga, that at least as far as I know, had a fairly rigorous interview process. It's a chance to get a pre-screened engineer, possibly on the cheap.
understandably a company would want to pay less for higher quality work, but at the same time if the process was rigorous and assuming many tech recruiters are also trying to poach the employees - i would think 'on the cheap' wouldn't really apply given supply/demand here
It is on the cheap in the sense that they wouldn't expect to screen such people as much. It obviously isn't free, costs more than hiring from within, but cheaper versus trying to gauge recent graduates and the like.
Every time one of these things happens, I actively see (employed) game-dev buddies on Facebook publicly advertising jobs at their present companies to their newly laid-off friends.
Game developers are still a pretty tight-knit group. It's not like getting laid off from a Wal-Mart.
There are a zillion people trying to get into games. This actually makes it hard to find those who have actually made games. So when a (relatively) known quantity becomes available, there are immediate opportunities.
I have been approached by this sort of situation before with a "Hey <name>, if you ever change your mind, we have 3 places we could use you the next day. Call me if you ever change your mind about working for <your current employer>".
It's all about working with a range of people who value your skillset, and having a skillset that's valuable to a lot of people in useful ways and not setting off alarm bells, and understanding truly what other companies do (so they know you know what you'd be getting into without a lengthy interview/whatever process).
Giving talks at conferences, user groups, and helping people randomly (small amounts) for free on places like mailing lists builds tremendous goodwill in this arena and demonstrates your mannerisms, knowledge, and community relationships to everyone observing it.
--
On the other side of it, I have a list of people if I know they sound unhappy in their jobs or got laid off or fired, I'd thrust them in front of 3-5 people in front of my network INSTANTLY as I know they're not the sort of people you get by any other means. The golden handcuff type employees.
"It seems really amazing to go from laid off to "have a job offer" in an afternoon."
Really depends on how small the particular world is. When I was in Hollywood, it wasn't uncommon for a high-level exec to be fired from Paramount one morning and walk into work at Warner Bros the next day. Of course, that business is particularly incestuous, everyone knows each other, and the same people trade jobs the way schoolchildren play musical chairs.
Of course, things are probably a little bit more rigorous in this case. There might be a big talent grab in the wake of mass closures or layoffs -- but it seems unlikely that just anybody walks off with a legitimate job offer in supershort order. Known commodities and highest performers? Maybe. Those with great networks and recruiter relationships? Also possible. Anyone else? They'll get some halo and attention from the announcement, but they're not going to auto-convert that attention into an offer in a few hours. I suspect the part about "...had new jobs lined up by the time they left the building" is a slight exaggeration.
Both? I've been in situations where a company implodes like this, and employees at the company are often already being head-hunted by previous employees (who departed during a prior round of lay-offs, or who left of their own volition before the company fell apart) before they are fired.
While it's often something of a surprise when you finally do get the axe, you usually have a sense of impending doom, and a feeling that bad things are going down, before it happens. Projects stop getting traction. Upper management stops caring as much about what you're working on. Everyone becomes very apathetic. You get a rash of invites on LinkedIn, and people start updating their resumes.
So, it's rarely a complete surprise, and people often already have some idea of where they're going to go, or are ready to start looking.
"You get a rash of invites on LinkedIn, and people start updating their resumes."
When I was working at chumby industries and it was imploding, it occurred to me that somebody could probably write a really good predictor of imminent company failure by scrapping LinkedIn data and watching for sudden surges of activity from people working at the same company.
I'd be surprised if someone (or multiple someones) doesn't already have something like that running, even if just for their own private purposes.
I believe (subscribed) recruiters can already search by which profiles have been most recently updated. Just keeping track of that info plus the linked company would be enough, particularly if they expose it via an API.
Can you subscribe to some kind of 'firehose' feed on LinkedIn that lets you get to that information? Or do you have to be connected to each and every person?
(BTW thanks for Chumby while it lasted. Great product.)
I never really looked too much at the LinkedIn API, I suspect for the idea to work well you'd probably need to scrape data from the frontend and preferably be connected to a few "super node"-esque people (recruiters, etc).
(You're welcome for what bits of chumby I touched. Of course I was just one developer in a team of wonderful developers and hardware designers. It was a great job and a lot of fun. I still haven't decided if we were a bit too late (introduction of iPhone and Android) or too early (explosion in hackable maker devices like Raspberry Pi). I guess a bit of both.
Presumably, when a company is laying someone off, ex-employees don't have to worry about non-poaching agreements they might have in place with the employer. The easiest person to hire is someone you've worked with in the past and liked, and the easiest job to pick is one working for/with people you know.
It happened to me once. It was a weird surreal experience. This was back in 2001. Company went under while I was flying across the country. I learned about it as I left the plane at my destination.
I ended up accepting a new job offer later that day and rescheduling my return trip. It's still weird for me to think about that.
Probably not on demand. Some would have already been looking. Some people never stop scanning the employment horizon either because the bore easily, as a safety net, or in case something higher paid wafts past. Others will have found something during their notice periods. Some of the best may even have been head-hunted by people who know (or know of) them or their work and not had to look at all.
Networking and contacts (and I mean legitimate networking) really play a big part in your overall success.
Networking and relationship building is huge. I got laid off from my previous $DAYJOB back in Jan '12. I showed up at the office at ~9:30am, got called into my manager's office almost immediately, left by 10:00am, made 2 phone calls from my car on the way home... by ~3:00pm that afternoon I had a new job all but lined up (had to interview and everything as a formality, but the job was essentially offered already).
Why? Because I take networking seriously, get to know a lot of people, participate in a lot of groups, do some public speaking, organize Meetups, etc., and more than a few people in my area know who I am and what my skills are. And I also knew exactly who was looking for the same reasons. So the 2 phone calls I made were extremely targeted, as I specifically knew those firms were looking to hire.
Now it might not always work out that way, but I absolutely endorse the idea that networking is crucial.
Are you trying to distinguish relationships vs. contacts/acquaintances here (i.e. "knowing people professionally" vs. "knowing people from going to a couple of meetups")?
That's why it's a good idea to maintain good relationships with recruiters on LinkedIn even when you're not looking. I recently went through the process of losing my job (more accurately, a job I had been offered and had accepted was rescinded mid-relocation). Thanks to existing contacts, I called some people, told them I had changed my mind, and had multiple interviews that day.
There's also many other companies not on that list too. If you're a smart engineer in NYC who wants a new job, if you really want to, you could totally play offer letter Pokemon on a pretty short time scale. ("Gotta collect em all!")
Psa: if you're a smart engineer in NYC and you're not being paid market rate, please get a new job now, your equity has a median value of zero anyways. The lowest I've seen a smart junior engineer take at a non startup was 90k, and that depressed salary is sortah compensated by the mentoring learning opportunities at that organization.
Making a lot of assumptions about the job and yourself, obviously, but that strikes me as a $150K position, if not higher. I've seen a few roles like that go for $180-200K total comp in the NYC area.
It may a little bit of negotiation finesse (or more realistically, holding several offers in hand at once and willing to play them against each other).
Hmm... that sounds sky-high. Couple of my friends are working for startups in the NYC area, and making $60k (they're all recent graduates). They're really smart and really good at what they do.
A lot of my acquaintances are working at those various Wall Street firms earning about $85k.
Finally, I have a friend who switched to Google NYC after about 9 months at a Wall Street firm (at $85k). Google started him off at $150k. But um, that's Google...
I didn't know people made so much in NYC. I thoughts these $200k jobs were only found in the Californian wonderland of Silicon Valley :-/
I even have a friend who did Computer Engineering (not CS) at college, and found a job involving low-level assembly/C programming for embedded systems. The company said they'd pay him $18/hour for the first few months; and if they liked him, they'd hire him for real at $60k. Phew. (This company is actually in Long Island.)
I'm always bemused by the sky-high consulting rates & salaries I hear on HN. I'm not sure if I live on the same planet...
Seriously though, $60K in NYC is extremely below market for almost any type of programming work. The only scenario I can imagine that happening is if you're writing VB6 Excel macros. Hell, even that in NYC is probably more than $60K.
$85K is also very below market. In fact, unless you're working in a niche that's extremely under-demanded, anything below six-figures I'd consider very suspect. If you have experience with something in demand (web, mobile, data, etc) hitting six figures should be a matter of course, and anyone giving that type of work for below $100K in NYC is ripping you off (or giving you an oil tanker of equity).
Embedded is a different ball game - demand for that type of work is pretty low in the NYC area. If you are proficient in standard enterprisey stacks (.NET, Java, etc) or "Valley" stacks (Rails, Node, etc) you can make quite a bit of money here.
Google NYC pays on the high end, but they are not a huge outlier. Remember that they are competing for the same talent pool as everyone else who wants capable hackers. I've seen plenty of startups and companies play in the mid-$100Ks range.
My email is in my profile. Feel free to drop me a line and I can put you in touch with a couple of recruiters I trust (and aren't slimy).
Thanks for being real and talking about figures guys, a lot of people on HN skirt around the actual #s but say things like "You are being paid well below market value" or similar. On a number of occasions I've seen salary ranges posted pertaining to SV but always brushed it off. When I came into the NYC tech field I started out below market value but aggressively negotiated my way up after talking to a few people.
All I can say about those who make 60-90k is good luck, it's harder to work your way up to the rate that you deserve organically starting at that low of a rate.
sounds about right, also really really depends on the scope of the role, size of the org, and what kinds of specialist/domain knowledge related to the tech/biz are needed.
I live in the Denver/Boulder area, and I'm 90% confident that if I were laid off today I could have an approximately equal job in less than 3 months. I wouldn't say I have a new job lined up, but somebody could spin it that way.
Also, I'd imagine people from a well known company like OMGPOP, in a big tech hub like SF or NYC, would have an easier time finding something new.
I used to live in Denver, and today I live in San Francisco. I can tell you, this story is not an exaggeration. When I was in Denver I did PL/SQL and C# types of things. Today I do Python and Javascript and basically standard technology things. I can tell you, there's a vast difference in Denver vs San Franscisco. You drive down the streets of San Francisco and you see signs saying, "Developers! We freakin love you, come work for us!" You ride the subway, and there are signs for game companies hiring developers. Really: it's not like Denver, honest.
A couple of weeks ago I saw a billboard truck driving in Redwood City that was trying to get developers to consider working for Walmart.com. If you like big data... they have it.
In any town with a lot of programmers (e.g. Bay area, NYC, Seattle, Boston,...) lots of people know each other and socialize. You'll go out drinking with your buddies and they'll say "company X just got a new contract - you to work with Alex at company Y didn't you? I'll bet if you called he'd be interested."
I was surprised to hear 3000 people were making those Zynga games. Doing what exactly? Pls I'm genuinely curious.
These social games seems so lame to me that I can't think of any reason why someone will even think of building a public company on top of it. You simply cannot meet investors' quarterly demand when your success is built on being "flavour of the month" business model.
I don't have anything wrong against Zynga or its founder and so I don't wish them failure but this should have come as a common sense that they should have stayed private and stayed lean (both in taking VC funding and the number of employees)
They have a few dozen games of varying popularity. The bigger ones need a non-stop flow of new content to be created. Zynga was very good at creating new tasks and items constantly, so there was always something to do and something new to collect. It requires new story lines, artwork, mechanics, localization, and support. Many of the games don't overlap, so each game needs much of its own team.
> You simply cannot meet investors' quarterly demand when your success is built on being "flavour of the month" business model
Sure you can -- just look at any company that's in the entertainment business. All of their products, from pop songs to to supermodels to blockbuster movies, have a limited shelf life and require hit after hit after hit in order to sustain the business. They stay ahead of the curve by casting a wide net, having a team that is good at selecting the hits, effectively bringing the product to maturity (like producing an album or movie), and marketing the crap out of it.
Zynga may have made many mistakes along the way and probably got too large to quickly. But they not the first nor last company that got a couple of major hits and were backed to produce more based on that record. Do it well, and you have Pixar. Do it poorly, and you join the massive pile of overhyped one-hit wonders.
I just had a funny vision of what their task management system might look like. With managers planting work items, and having to harvest them when the developers are done :P
I don't know exactly how many games Zynga has but I just did a quick check at zynga.com and I counted 33 games. hence on average 90 personnel per game? I think that is ludicrous especially considering the fact that the developers of Tiny Tower (which accused Zynga of a rip-off a couple of months back)build their game with 7 developers
Tiny Tower doesn't have regular content updates, and TT is relatively simple compared to the *ville games. Plus Zynga is not going to have every one of their employees working directly on a project. They have in-house accountants, marketers, recruiters, etc. I'm guessing Nimblebit goes to other companies for some of those services, and goes without for the others.
To your questions above, my opinions. I'm no expert, just have some experience there.
1) The massive staff is due to massive success initially, then massive management mistakes continually, from the top down the chain. That's not to say there aren't great people fighting the good fight; There are many intelligent and capable people, but there's also a great deal misalignment of interests throughout the organization.
2) I think most of the games are pretty lame as well. I don't understand why Zynga customers pay for the games in most cases, but they do. Millions of them do. Zynga is very good at catering to their audience and giving them what they want but...
2.5) Typically what happens is a studio will operate trying to make the most profit in the shortest time, burning out its users with cheap grabs because that's what the higher ups demand. A lot of people in the trenches love games, and want to make great games, but get mired in the moment and vague demands from on high.
I don't think social games are a fundamentally flawed model. Some of Zynga's own games had massive retention and monetization per user, but didn't scale. I think it's an equation no one has fully down yet.
Hey, you can answer something I've been wondering about.
What portion of people at Zynga genuinely like the games they're making, and what fraction think they're terrible?
I ask because one writer in Hollywood mentioned that she was surprised to discover that the people in charge actually like the dreck they shovel out. Her theory was that having real taste in Hollywood was a handicap to career advancement. I was wondering if Zynga was the same way.
I worked closely with 3 studios, pretty closely with maybe 5 total. A studio tends to be about 50 people, maybe as big as a hundred.
In those, there were many people that liked their job. By job I mean, the challenges, the scale, and environment. I only met a handful that were jazzed up about the game they were working on... and that was usually the most heartbreaking, because they just never had an opportunity to change things for the better as far as game design, or the art. There are two specific people I know as exceptions, that are tenacious as hell, and made concessions only when absolutely necessary. Total respect for them, but they're still pretty beaten down and discouraged.
Intermittently, a lot of people got excited about games. Overall a lot of people derided the games they were making, a lot of the time.
Thanks for your input. I really appreciate it. However, I also don't think social games are a flawed model. Just that it's a model that I don't believe will survive on the public market and that's why I think they should have just stayed private.
Games take incredible man hours to create, not so much on the engineering side, but on the design side. Copywriting, UI, animation, integration, and game design are all very labor intensive tasks that are performed by highly skilled individuals.
Even on the engineering side, the clients can often take a long time to develop compared to a normal app. As opposed to using Bootstrap or UIFramework, almost all game UI's are "hand rolled" from scratch, and often have odd quirks in their design that can lead to a lot of extra testing. Games in general, whether poorly made games, or well made games, are a huge sink of labor.
I am curious too, they can't fix a game in 6 days when it breaks.....
The games they deliver are full of bugs and inconveniences (ie. game with quests; each new quests is automatically accepted, and there is a limited amount of quests that can be open, and you cant cancel quests)
My theory is that's because the people playing aren't seen as customers so much as veal calves. Zynga isn't trying to make things that are fun; they're making things that are lucrative. Quality is useful to them only to the extent that it improves addictive potential.
If you've ever spent time in lower-end casinos, they're pretty seedy. But nobody cares as long as they get their fix. And, of course, "crack house" is not a synonym for a nice environment to consume your quality product.
only a percentage of those people are engineers working on the client facing component (i.e. the game). More over, people consistently underestimate the complexity of building games, including the PM's in charge of getting the game out the door.
Just like 9 woman don't get you a baby in 1 month, having more devs won't get your games to market and bug free after certian diminishing returns. Too many cooks in the kitchen and all that.
They don't even have people who tell the people they know about the problem and they are working on it.
I am wondering what they did do with those 3000 people.
I bet all the execs got well paid for their terrible efforts though and they will slide into new positions of power regardless of their merit. We need to take our industry back from the leeches. The near-sighted execs with nothing but paper accolades and networks of cronies.
There isn't anything to "take back" - other than Government sponsored monopolies or price ceilings/floors, the market is OPEN to you! There are many competent people building amazing companies, incompetent people getting paid well, competent people getting paid badly, competent people making lots of money and being fair with their employees. This (corporate) world is less black and white than you're making it out to be.
Realizing someone is performing or behaving poorly isn't a bad thing at all (it's how we learn!) but sitting on HN declaring that the nebulous "we" needs to "take back" our industry from leeches is absolutely ridiculous. Like the other commenter said, go build your own company! If you truly are more competent, fair, and mindful as a leader THOSE TYPES will flock to you.
It's what I'm doing. It's what many entrepreneurs I know are doing.
It's worth pointing out that programmers are in demand and highly paid and there is nothing forcing anyone to work with "leeches". In addition to having people "flock to you" there's also the option of joining the flock. Most people would kill to have our market power.
One could argue that the system is currently set up to benefit executives (who often end up winning, regardless of whether the company loses) at the expense of shareholders and/or the general public. One could argue that this is a problem that market forces can't fix, and therefore that a regulatory solution is called for. One might refer to this sort of regulation as "taking back" the unfair advantages the executives currently.enjoy.
Suggesting that we all are free to become executives and take part in the problem may be true, but it doesn't fix the problem or eve address whether one exists.
Shame on the shareholders, then, for letting that happen. In the case of Zynga, why did they buy stock? Was it because Zynga was an amazing company with brilliant technology, a solid executive team focusing on long term fundamentals and sustainable business practices? Or did most of them invest because the stock price was going up and the business had buzzwords like "social", and so they jumped in like sheep to try to ride the gravy train?
There's truth in what you say about the system rewarding the lazy. But that's fundamentally because of the stupidity and laziness of the shareholders. There's still opportunity in this turbulent system though to pick winners, and be a shareholder that rewards competence and punishes incompetence.
But that's fundamentally because of the stupidity and laziness of the shareholders.
It's kinda cute that you believe that, and are prepared to go to any length to blame immoral behavior on anyone you can find other than the people engaging in the behavior.
Also, beyond the initial purchase of the stock -- which may be well before any signs of trouble -- shareholders can easily be made to have zero power; even the power to replace directors through shareholder elections can be taken away:
"My shares count more than yours", requiring an ousted director's approval of his own ousting, plurality voting which allows directors to remain even when they can't muster a majority... the list of tricks goes on and on.
I am not normally the type to say this, but: in the case of corporate governance, the system is now actually rigged against shareholders. Much larger changes than just "don't buy stock in a company that will later go bad" are needed.
But that's fundamentally because of the stupidity and laziness of the shareholders
Absolutely, I agree 100%. Our Democracy as a whole suffers from the same problem. That doesn't imply, however, that the problem can't or shouldn't be fixed by someone other than the shareholders. Our society may decide that it would be a better one with some checks and balances in place to keep shareholders from shooting themselves in the foot.
Note that I'm not arguing, one way or the other, that there's a problem or that it should be fixed. I'm simply pointing out that You can start a company too! and even It's the shareholders' fault may be true statements but they don't address whether the problem should be fixed.
Now why should it be any different? There are a few companies experimenting with different hierarchies, hierarchy-less, and different role/position value assignments (tied somewhat with hierarchy), but in general I think pitch-forking the "1%" is just the "herd entitlement".
If you're on the bottom and don't like it, then get on top; this day and age that is actually possible. In history prior, you had to be born into the right name or granted a monopoly by the empire or king in order be "financially independent" (or thieve). In the USA you just had to have a great idea and the persistence to get people to buy into your idea.
NOW all you need is an internet connection, some free software, time, and some free fucking education to build financial independence.
Income mobility is actually lower in the USA than in Europe, fwiw, and most startups are founded by people from middle-class or better families. Part of the reason is that the free education is, especially in poorer areas, not great: high-school computer curricula are in a sad state. Another part of the reason is that people with a family safety net find it easier to start companies. A third is that family connections help, whether it's for "friends & family" rounds of funding, or for product introductions (see: Bill Gates).
Oh I'm sure there are difficulties in our day and age, I don't mean to trivialize it - but the idea that "people being paid $20M a year while I write code and get paid $140K a year is unfair" strikes me as ridiculous. The resource available to people in the modern time is far richer and available than any other time in history.
Sure there are a lot of hurdles, but if you want to be that executive being paid millions, you can do it - whether you're a programmer, a writer, whatever.
Following your reasoning, there is no reason to criticise any entitlments. "MEPs have huge salaries?" "Mayors are giving social housing to their families?" "Government Railway employees get gold-plated pensions?": "Stop complaining! Just become one of them!"
I'm curious. Do you only say "stop complaining" when it's an issue you don't personally have a problem with? Or do you legitimately believe that no one should ever complain about anything?
If you don't think an injustice exists, wonderful, you should argue that point. Something like "Stop complaining, because..." Or don't argue that point and don't participate in the conversation. But the endless "stop complaining because I personally don't have a problem with this" is highly annoying.
I guess I'm not getting what you're not understanding, Ixiaus.
If you accept the premise that an injustice exists, of what use is it to argue repetitively that one should "get on top", if one has a problem with it? You seem to assume that the OP is saying "It's not fair, why can't I be on top??" when he's not arguing anything of the sort. Not everything is about winning.
Is it possible that you're presenting a clever, sardonic caricature of an entrepreneur, and the joke went completely over my head? If so, you got me! Good one!
Oh I understand clearly, there are lots of people on here complaining about injustices and that someone needs to fix them. I'm telling them that they are being ridiculous and should just go do what they want to do and that no one (including the "leeches") is stopping them.
I don't accept the premise that an injustice exists. Someone being "on the bottom" isn't an injustice, it's a social role. It's a social role that if someone doesn't like being there, they can decide and act to elevate themselves into a different social role (one with more power? one with more freedom? one with more money? one with no attachements? there's a lot of different social roles in our society - none of them are being done an injustice but by the people that stay within their role and complain about it).
I never said anything is about winning. Everything is about how happy you are, clearly the OP is unhappy about something and all of the words written so far saying "stop complaining, go build something yourself and exemplify the morality you think is right" are totally spot on.
Yeah, you're right: the problem of executives getting paid too much? Investor problem. The problem of stupid programmers getting paid too much? Investor problem. Can regulation solve it? I doubt it. When we get down to it, it's not like there isn't an abundance of regulation on companies going public and releasing projections anyway.
But as a programmer, it's easy to avoid: Avoid buying into risky IPOs. Whee.
Are you a good programmer contesting that the system as-is reduces your pay or your options for meaningful employment with fair pay? I doubt it. If anything it makes it harder for "good" places, which would like to employ you meaningfully at a fair value, to hire anyone-else, increasing your odds.
Now, if you're a good place who wants to hire good programmers and these stupid places compete with you raising your costs, that's another matter, and it really must stink for you... but it still sounds pretty implausible to regulate this problem away. If investors are going to be stupid about throwing around their money at the wrong companies, I expect government bureaucrats to be exactly as stupid about trying to hammer down the wrong companies, and now you've just made the whole process of being a company more risky and capricious for everyone.
Another might argue that markets quite often fail, rather than produce the efficiencies they should in the ideal world, let alone the socially optimal results.
That's what we're talking about when we say that market forces may lead to inefficiencies. Few people deny the existence of market failure, but too many people advocate for government regulation to fix market failure while denying that precisely the same phenomenon occurs with government. It's appropriately called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_failure.
Start your own company then and set an example instead of criticizing others.
Edit: Thanks for all the upvotes/support. To those who see this as legitimate criticism, really? The OP elaborated on nothing - no constructive criticisms were made. Instead, it just sounds like pure anger and naïveté on my end, alluding to all entrepreneurs trying to make it/who have made it as "leeches" and "near-sighted execs" that have "networks of cronies." Stay classy.
Is it not legitimate to call out piss-poor management and cronyism without also "setting an example?" Does this mean that only people at the helm of $1b+ companies are able to criticize Zynga's pathetic ineptitude?
Not sure what your aggressive reply accomplishes; at least OP has sparked discussion to point out a major flaw and source of Zynga's downfall.
Bullshit. This kind of passive-ad-hominem is worse than worthless. If you disregard criticism of actions by people who aren't taking those actions, you're left listening only to people who are actually doing those things... and guess what? They're probably not exactly railing against their own paradigms.
Talk is only cheap if you're lapping it up in bulk from poor sources. If talk were always cheap, advisory boards and mentors would never, ever provide any value. So by all means, throw it away; disregard people based on who they are and not what they say. It's your own loss.
Just have the decency not to mislead people who are looking for guidance with your own cheap talk.
Your parent is referring to perhaps (similar to) talking heads in a way that they get on TV not knowing all the facts or reasoning and state after the fact what should be.
But even if they state "before the fact" there is not a complete record of their thoughts on everything as being vetted as correct (success has a million fathers etc.)
So you can go back and say "see I said this was a bad idea" but what about the other 20 things someone says that you don't have the same outcome? You can just cherry pick. There is a common stock ruse that works this way. You call people up and say "I'm giving you a tip don't buy now". Then next month you call back all the people that you gave "tip a" to but not failed "tip b".
That said there is much to learn from criticism no matter where it comes from or what their axe is to grind etc.
that is not true. some failures are predictable, egregious, and symptomatic of cultural rot. what was easy was knowing ahead of time that Zynga was a terrible company. "skin in the game" is a meaningless cliche.
do I need skin in the game to create a histogram? to do multiple regression? to get a hunch that something is foul? judgement and critical thinking have nothing to do with skin in the game. business is not lacrosse.
While the site is responsive and making the window small so the left menu goes away fixes it, resizing to any amount larger than that results in some of the text being hidden off the right hand side.
Thanks! I'll send this to Randy who is in charge of the website now. I'm pretty sure we're in agreement, him and I, that the left menu is possibly a bad idea and we've struggled with it.
Criticism can be legitimate, constructive analytical criticism can be enlightening (studying what went wrong). Claiming that all of the execs made a terrible effort and implying that it is "unfair" they are being paid well (maybe they aren't being paid well!?!) is silly, unless of course he's an insider. Even if he was an insider, it would still be silly because of its emotional content which is what the commenter above you replied about: if it bothers you, go build your own company and exemplify all of the character and ideology you uphold as "ethical" or "moral".
His comment wasn't aggressive either. It was firm. Zynga's major flaw isn't "cronyism" or "leeches" as far as I can tell; its major flaw happens to be a confluence of bad choices and poor insight; I however, do not know enough to actually constructively criticize the company and its leadership.
I know this isn't exactly a constructive post, but...
https://www.google.com/search?q=why%20zynga%20sucks&hl=e...
isn't exactly short on results. The company and how it is run are fairly widely considered examples of everything that can be wrong with social/mobile game development.
Edit: no, that's too mean. But I like people who take risks, and I get defensive when people snicker at failure from their armchairs of hindsight. We should learn from failures, but not rush to say, "he failed, what an idiot!"
I'm curious how you know so much about me. How do you know what I've done? I've already started my own companies bud and sold them, twice. I'm working on my third now after just building a startup with some others called Brabble. Here it is: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/brabble/id570281083?mt=8
To the post below: BKRGB which was an signage platform and ShaiSoft, which sold networking library software. The rest of the details are none of your business sir. I like how you belittle me because my numbers aren't big enough on the Brabble app. I've heard all this type of BS before. Don't listen to me then. Just keep attacking other developers for trying.
BTW, we have a NASCAR running this on June 7th in the Party in the Poconos 400 with our logo on it. Keep an eye out for it. We're just starting.
I'm curious how you know so much about what's happening at Zynga. You haven't supplied any evidence at all to support your speculation that undeserving people are benefitting. I'm not particularly up on the situation either, but it looks to me like the OMGPOP people had a one-hit wonder and timed the sale of it perfectly. Do you have any basis for your accusation that cronyism played a role?
Hey, that's great. I hope Brabble succeeds, and the next one and the one after that. Perhaps, someday, one of your ventures will fail. You can minimize the psychic pain by learning not to equate business failure with bad intentions.
BKRGB which was a signage platform I built last year with a partner and sold and ShaiSoft, which sold networking library software that I sold in 2002. I'm not rich because of it but I have tried and succeeded.
It's interesting how you belittle me because my numbers aren't big enough on the Brabble app. If I had bigger numbers could I criticize then?
Criticizing it is totally okay. What the OP said though was much more than "constructive analytical criticism" - there was a lot of emotion and ambiguous assumptions built into his statement that make very little sense.
Not saying you have to be a robot (I've been emotional about all of my comments in this thread), but there is a point at which emotional logic in an argument clouds the true purpose of the argument.
In this case, the purpose was to criticize the company and its leadership - there's nothing wrong with that, but mapping a projected idea of "unfairness" into the criticism (unless unfairness actually HAPPENED to you within the context of the subject being criticized) then you're clouding the soundness of the criticism.
I agree. I should have posted a fair criticism and a plan to change it.
I think what I believe is unfair is how executives are unfairly rewarded regardless of company performance in a lot of cases because the company has signed a contract that basically indemnifies them of all responsibility. Now don't get me wrong, these contracts are necessary to protect all involved, but I feel that there should be no reward for failure. Yes, let the executive walk with something, because they stepped up and took a chance. But do not give them so much it's practically a reward for failure.
I'll have to think over how to fix the rest and try to provide some insights in the future. My goal would be to make the situation more fair to all involved and acknowledge that even though employees haven't put millions up they have in fact put their livelihood on the line.
There is nothing I dislike more about Silicon Valley than this attitude. Yesterday I saw someone tweet "funny how people who criticize startups usually aren't the ones starting them, might be something to that..."
Or maybe we could realize that this creates a ridiculous logical fallacy on the level of "only god can judge me". Who decided that the only people who can criticize obvious mistakes, shady behavior and being a downright bad person is literally immune to all criticism from 99% of people? How on earth does even a single person think this is passable logic? I get that being a founder is hard, but saying that people literally cannot criticize founders unless they themselves have started a company is absolutely absurd. I cannot believe you and others would lack the self awareness to realize this...
"alluding to all entrepreneurs trying to make it/who have made it as "leeches" and "near-sighted execs" that have "networks of cronies." Stay classy."
Just saw this edit. I really don't know how you managed to read it like that. But yeah, there you go, just create a strawman, tell others to stay classy and smugly believe you're right and you'll never have to actually deal with the idea that you might be wrong.
"We need to take our industry back from the leeches." Hence, my recommendation to create his/her own company as an effort to "take back the industry."
I never mentioned or implied that one would need to be an entrepreneur in order to criticize others in this field. And if you are going to criticize others, do it constructively, which the original OP obviously didn't do. Thanks.
That's correct. Which makes me wonder if rant = criticism + emotion? If yes, then he/she who rants does make good for an entrepreneur but only if that quality gets toned and put into action.
I believe there would exist some analysis/research around this already. For there does seem some evidence of great companies been built by people who were hurt, emotional or egoistic about their shit.
Ex-Zynga here, and that's exactly what I've done. We're prioritizing profit sharing over equity, so as the company does really well (as Zynga did in the years prior to their IPO), all employees who contribute will be making a lot of money, not just the founders.
It's legit because IMHO there is a pervading feeling across the industry that we are being taken advantage of. Ask around, I can't be the only one that feels as if there are a bunch of hanger-ons who learn the bare minimum about tech and want to share in the riches. Look around you.
Well, the core problem is that the freemium model is not sustainable for most businesses. There are very very few companies that can remain cash flow positive (let alone making large profits).
The execs get paid well because the owners of those companies assume (rightly or wrongly) that the execs performance determines the outcome of the business. The average engineer working in that company is assumed to not have such power (which is true for a lot of companies).
BTW If any company started holding up salaries of their employees dependent on profit, nobody would join that company !
> BTW If any company started holding up salaries of their employees dependent on profit, nobody would join that company !
That's a pretty bold statement. Any particular reason you think that's true? I don't think profit sharing is that arcane of a concept. Unless you're talking about the extreme of no salary, only profit-sharing, in which case, yeah. But that's not what execs get, either.
I disagree on your last statement. I think that if a reasonable base salary were provided and profit sharing was done well and was truly equitable (i.e. not more than an order of magnitude different from 1/n of profit for n employees) then it could be quite attractive. It's all about trust and track-record.
Freemium does work in the medium term if you can generate enough value in your networks and data as an asset to grow your valuation. You obviously do eventually need to stop recapitalizing and monetize at some point. I would argue that a lot of companies should do this a much earlier point in time, rather than growing without reasonable bounds.
A counterexample to you last point is being a startup founder. For these folks, until you prove your concept to investors and/or go cashflow positive, your salary is completely dependent on profit.
Freemium model is setup so that it drives unsucessful companies to abuse their users for more data or in the case of microtransactions it leads to them employing psychological tricks to get the "whales" to spend more and more while the long tail continues to enjoy the service for free..
A startup founder is the owner (part or full) and is not a regular salaried employee. Hardly a counterexample...
I agree with the first problem with the freemium model, but not really the second. You don't necessarily need to rely on psychological tricks if you can provide premium services of actual value.
I didn't understand your reference. Is the story here that (1) Shay Pierce wrote a column for Gamasutra about why he decided not to work for Zynga after they acquired OMGPOP?
And then (I had to dig in the comments) (2) as that column was circulating, OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter supposedly sent the Twitter message "What's so interesting about success is the number of failures who try to ride on your back. Shay Pierce is just one of many..."?
It would be interesting to see if Dan Porter still considers OMGPOP a success under Zynga?!
That flippant tweet should have not happened, considering that the sale was pretty much a very successful exit for Dan Porter but not necessarily a great success for any of the OMGPOP people.
I want to know what kind of thought process goes on company/individual's mind when they decide to do an acquisition like this, for $200M, which doesn't make enough money to justify it.
You would think when you are throwing around that kind of money, they would do some rudimentary research?
How much money was omgpop making at the time of the acquisition?
MP: "FUCK! OMGPOP's drawsomething is the number one game! COPY IT!"
varucasalt.jpg
Legal: "Mark, uh - I don't think we can copy that one"
MP: "WHY?! - We've done it with everything else!"
Legal: "Yeah - but this one's too big, too successful. If we copy the number one game, it would be too obvious."
MP: "How much to buy it? I WANT IT!"
/stamps foot
---
I picture an internal battle around wanting to copy it and realizing that there was no way to copy them without a PR nightmare - so they opted to purchase them for an insane amount... even though that amount was not reflective of their ability to maintain or succeed with future releases.
"They have a huge hit, and no money in the bank. Let's acquire them now, before they raise money, for relatively cheap, so we don't have to sink time and resources into developing a clone ourselves."
It probably went something like this: Zynga is in the hit-driven games business. Engagement around games has shifted to mobile, and Zynga is weak in mobile. Draw Something could have potentially been a new big franchise, and given the current state of affairs at OMGPOP, was probably already up for sale. $200M is not that much money to a company like Zynga, especially when they are handing out stock and not all cash. Add that to a little hype, and you've got the makings of a deal.
Zynga might have simply bought the userbase. Divide the paid $200mil to the number of users OMGPOP had at that time and then compare it to the amount you expect to gain per user once you have them consuming Zynga stuff.
Of course, this thought is not always what actually happens, but Zynga might have been desperate already at the time for new distribution channels, that they agreed to pay a premium for that bundle of users.
I think it's a testament to how quickly the business is changing and how increasingly broken the conventional wisdom surrounding investment and acquisition is becoming.
If you look at the way business worked in, say, the '80s most companies that became big did so by selling stuff, and having positive rates of return. And the general trend for a company that was growing was for it to maintain that growth for several years, or at least retain that level of business. But today business is far more ephemeral. Revenue can be far more sporadic, monetization can be far more complex, and the valuation of a "customer base" can be much more difficult because of that.
So you can get these flash in the pan products that produce millions of dollars in revenue for a few months but then maybe they go away just as quickly and aren't worth anything later. It makes for a weird market, and it makes for an even weirder industry, especially when things tend to be organized around "empire building" and such-like.
I suspect that in the future there will be more and more of a focus around project-based business services rather than organization-based services. Kickstarter, I think, is an example of this.
Highly speculative publicly-traded businesses have been around as long as there have been stock markets and aren't new at all. Historians have suggested that in the 1850s/1860s more money was made selling shares in mining companies than was ever mined out of the ground. In the 80s you had the S&Ls and the post-deregulation airlines. Then the Dot Coms and Enrons of 2000 era. Everyone just tends to conveniently forget, because the companies disappear and our memories are short.
The book Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy by William Janeway has a fantastic history of speculative bubbles and venture capital, and then some. It's a tough book to read if you don't have a background in finance and econ, but it's well worth the effort if you want to understand Western capitalism in practice.
I haven't checked, but I assume the OMGPOP deal was stock. If your CEO was selling stock like mad and your stock is currently worth a fraction of what it was valued at when you did the deal that is a strong piece of evidence that you never believed you "spent" $200MM. If you recast it as a $40MM deal (based on current valuations, iirc) it puts it in a different light. The instagram deal was similarly artificially inflated.
It seems a lot of these companies don't perform proper due diligence. As someone who went through the first dot com bust, I would've thought many of these companies would know better - I guess not.
At the risk of being (rather) trite, I would suggest that old saw, "Follow the money."
Someone was incentivised (for lack of a real word) to make this happen. I would look toward short term incentives and/or compensation.
Without getting into issues of culpability or "guilt", at a very basic level I can't help viewing the repeating series of these instances as simply being another form of "pump and dump".
They keep happening, because someone (or, a certain kind/role of someone) is making money.
How much money was omgpop making at the time of the acquisition?
That's probably an overly simplistic way of looking at it. OMGPOP had very little money in the bank but had just gotten a runaway hit with Draw Something. So they were a prime target to take over
Talking to users? I don't know if you saw anyone play Draw Something, but unlike every other social game I've watched my wife play, she seemed to talk about it as a horrible chore after the first two days.
There are too many people commenting on Techcrunch that are almost rooting for Zynga to fail and/or finding it amusing -- there are a still good number of people working at Zynga (with families and livelihoods at stake) and I hope they can right the ship and figure this out.
I'm pretty mixed. I have friends working there, but I think Zynga is a blight on humanity. I feel the same way about casinos and tobacco companies: they are essentially exploitative. So I hope that their ships all sink, but that the people working there get in lifeboats and land on some wholesome shore.
Valleywag put together the following list of luminaries who were hyping Zynga a few years ago(1):
- Michael Arrington
- Kleiner Perkins partner Bing Gordon
- John Doerr
- Fred Wilson
The NYT ("Will Zynga Become the Google of Games?") and San Francisco Chronicle ("[Pincus] was indisputably farsighted in recognizing the opportunity") are also on the list.
Sheryl Sandberg and Business Insider are named as well, but the quotes attributed to them don't seem to be in the same league.
To be fair to them all, it reads like a who's who of the VC world from Brad Feld and Reid Hoffman through to Andreessen Horowitz, Softbank, and Union Square Ventures. I'm not sure any blame could be laid at their doors though, it was an exciting and high growth company and that's exactly what they tend to invest in (and what gets celebrated the most around here on HN.. growth > profits, a "startup" isn't really a startup unless it's growing fast and all that, etc.)
Which is exactly why this is an appropriate place for introspection and even harsh criticism of what has happened. Two years ago people calling this event would have been "haters" - and because of the difficulties of forecasting, it was reasonable at least to say "we'll wait and see."
But now we've seen. The question is whether we will treat this as a freak accident purely unique to Zynga, or learn something from it. First, though, we need to allow that discussion rather than just saying "just make your own company if you think Zynga was bad." Really?
A16Z gets touted as an order of magnitude smarter than the rest of the VC's out there, and my opinion of them has dropped after looking at their portfolio's recent performance. Yes, they have made lots of money, but that firm specifically was supposed to be about recognizing long term opportunities, and not just following growth and fads.
Of course, its always easy to comment with the benefit of hindsight.
More people stopped playing because they got bored. The fickleness of the public is the real danger in games like these, not the idealism of a few (which is a tragedy, as the latter would likely lead to much better games)
Is it really fickleness? Even hardcore games have a relatively short shelf-life. The only real exceptions are games like WoW which have been able to maintain some staying power.
For nearly everyone else all the money is made in the first few months after which it disappears into the bargain bin. It seems like social gaming is no different.
Longer-term successes do occur(Minecraft, the Sims, League of Legends are some of the biggest ones from the past decade or so) but the industry tends to quietly ignore them because they don't fit well into established models and formulas. The "blockbuster hit" model itself is a legacy of games being intertwined with the early-adopter consumer tech business, and has lately been challenged by an array of slower-growth stories that are essentially community-oriented service businesses.
You're talking about the wrong gaming space. You're talking PC. On the mobile side things are just as fickle (things go in and out of fashion,) but there are mainstream long-term successes: "Angry Birds" being the first among them.
OTOH, I genuinely stopped playing because of Zynga. Not out of some reflexive hatred, but because they started using push notifications to advertise upgrades/other games.
I don't really consider it fickleness when the casual game market is aimed at 'non hardcore gamers who want simple non challenging experiences that require no commitment and little depth' by definition.
OMGPOP was only about Draw Something, which faded as fast as it grew. Zynga's mobile focus needs to be around making its most popular games more mobile, or building new "mobile-first" games. Aside from Words with Friends, their most popular games like Farmville have failed to get popular on mobile. Why not? Mark Pincus would like to know, too.
Maybe. Then again, if the acquired individuals saw nice retention bonuses and pay outs on their equity that gave them some sort of (even limited) financial freedom, maybe they were the geniuses.
I have no idea just how miserable it would have been working at Zynga, but working for a year in order to get three month's of severance doesn't sound too awful to me.
I worked at Zynga for a year + some months. It's actually a good place to work. You learn a ton about social / viral games and monetization, make really good contacts, get paid at or above market salary, eat really good food, and get all the other startup perks. And, you're still doing game development so it's not like your skills don't transfer.
I don't regret working there at all. I just wish the stock hadn't of tanked and the game I was working on hadn't of been a failure =P
Zynga could possibly turn it all around if they achieve their goal of bringing real-world currency to their gambling games in the US and on facebook. That is a very tough road to navigate though given the current US climate regarding gambling. Globally though it might be an option to rebuild the company.
I never understood this acquisition in the first place. I was surprised to learn that OMGPOP actually did produce more than one game[1], but I had previously only heard of Draw Something, which my wife and her facebook chums had already grown bored of by the time Zynga came knocking last year.
Forgive my naivety, but don't these things have to get past a board of shareholders with a public company like Zynga? This isn't just a hindsight-is-20/20 kind of thing; IIRC the general consensus at the time was that it was a risky, ill-advised acquisition for a potential one-hit-wonder company.
Not really sure what your point is here... are you questioning the initial acquisition of OMGPOP by Zynga or what Zynga decided to do with OMGPOP after the acquisition? The former has already been discussed at length and is a dead horse. Now is the time to discuss the latter.
It seems like a lot of their employees had the wool pulled over their eyes.
An acquaintance of mine who worked for Zynga up until a few days ago spoke fondly of her position and the company's prospects. I issued her a warning months ago. I think it just goes to show just because you have kids/mortgage/bills, etc you should always evaluate who you are working for.
Does anyone know the specific tax implications of a write-down of a bad acquisition? In this case and in HP's case it's truly hard to believe that the assets acquired are that severely depressed and I would like to know how this affects taxpayers via reduced taxed obligations of the acquirer.
I guess I'll have to get to work on the Draw My Thing-type browser game I'd been working on a while ago now if OMGPop's going. Me and some friends liked that game a lot.
My implementation used javascript, php, and canvas, but I'm considering learning ASP.NET by making this with it. Any thoughts?
I lost respect for them when they began blatantly duplicating the hard work and ingenuity of indie developers just to make a few extra bucks. Why bother thinking when someone else has done it for them?
I uninstalled all Zynga games and blocked all FB entries as soon as I found out this was a common pattern for them. I also shared that knowledge with my largely non-techie social network so they could see the kind of company they were supporting.
Edit: To be clear, having 'a job lined up' to me means that they already at least have an offer, rather than just a bunch of emails from recruiters and/or people looking to hire them. It seems really amazing to go from laid off to "have a job offer" in an afternoon. I could definitely see laid-off-to-interviews-lined-up in an afternoon though. Am I being too specific in my reading of this?