Perth Game Company CEO Takes IP By Night

snicho99 writes "A US owned gaming company has fled Australia, leaving unpaid employees and a massive tax bill. Apparently many staff have been working unpaid for months to allow their game to ship and hopefully the company to recover. Interzone's Perth (Western Australia) office was created with the assistance of a state government grant. Last week Interzone's (American) CEO entered the building at night and removed all the servers and IP so that Interzone could continue production at a new company they have opened in Ireland. The staff caught him on camera. More background here."

Comments

Call wikipedia

[bl8n8r]

There's a new poster child available for the "ConnivingBastard PrickManager" definition.

Re:Call wikipedia

[PopeRatzo]

This isn't such a big deal.

Here in the US, we've had entire industries do this to their workers. It's called "free-market capitalism" writ large.

The only interesting thing is that Interzone did this to technology workers.

Maybe it's time the techies realized that they are working class and not the professional class many have thought of themselves. And management really is out to fuck you over.

Re:Call wikipedia

[AmberBlackCat]

I think you're giving all types of engineers too much credit. Cars with no brakes, VCR's that eat video tapes, potholes, phones that can't operate in normal weather, bridges that fall in, exploding spacecraft, leaning towers... All types of engineers are every bit as much crap as you think software engineers are. They just get a lot more credit because they've been crap longer. But I'm not bitter...

Re:Call wikipedia

[jonadab]

> Here in the US, we've had entire industries do this to their
> workers. It's called "free-market capitalism" writ large.

Umm, except for the part about never paying them a dime for hours they already worked. The DOL would be all over them if they tried that one.

Moving the business overseas on short notice and leaving them all out of a job with no warning? Yeah, that part's totally legal, assuming the workers were employed in the standard at-will fashion. (Some workers do have contracts with their employers that disallow this, but that's a special case.)

But you do have to pay them for the hours they already worked.

Re:Call wikipedia

[Yevoc]

An increasing number of programmers over the years have started calling themselves engineers, and it truly bothers me. This source of ire came to a head 2 years ago when I needed to hire engineers that also knew how to program. Being in Seattle, 99% of the applicants advertised themselves as engineers, and while many of them were intelligent and very well versed in programming principles and practices, not a single one of them knew anything about what would be learned in engineering school.

Here are some examples of interviewing questions I made to lend understanding of the distinction I had to make between programmers and engineers:
What is a Fourier (or Laplace) transform?
What is a convolution?
What is an RMS mean compared to an average?
What is a duty cycle?
How do you apply Kirchoff's law to a circuit?
What is the time constant of an RC circuit, and what does it mean?
What is the resonance frequency of an RLC circuit?
What is the nyquist frequency?
What does a PID controller do?
What is a normal force?
What is Colomb's Law?
What conditions are needed to change 2 sandwiched diodes into a transistor?
Explain what a conduction band is.
What is a triple point for a material?
What happens to the orbitals of atoms as they are brought closer together?
How can you make steel conduct heat better, and what are the drawbacks?
What is metal fatigue on the micro or nanoscopic level?
What is Newton's Law of Cooling?
What does the Reynolds number tell you?
What is a Carnot engine and why is it special?
What should the flow velocity be directly on a surface experiencing laminar flow?

Programmers had a higher chance of answering the few questions at the top compared to the bottom, but one thing was painfully clear: those who had learned engineering knew most of the answers, and programmers calling themselves engineers usually knew none. This particular list covers many disciplines, but this list actually covers what you'd need to know as a COMPUTER ENGINEER to pass the fundamentals of engineering exam. Computer Scientists simply do not learn an engineering background to have this kind of knowledge.

As a practicing engineer that has seen programmers severely injure people, blow up objects, and burn circuitry due to their lack of engineering knowledge, the fundamental distinction I draw between an engineer and programmer is that a programmer mostly deals with concepts and ideas entirely created by humans, where engineers are forced to understand and deal with nature itself on an everyday basis.

To clarify this point, I usually liken programmers to mathematicians: Good ones are usually scientists and have to constantly utilize the scientific method to get their job done, and their work is constantly invoked by the world on a regular basis, but generally their work routinely deals with abstractions and hierarchies, and they can do their job quite well without understanding how the physical world works. Indeed, some of the best programmers I've ever known have built amazingly efficient "engines" without ever knowing how the physical components they rely upon are designed or operate on a physical level.

I will grudingly admit that there clearly is a fuzzy line between engineer and programmer, but it falls squarely within the Computer Engineering discipline. Some of us "code" in hardware, where the chip physics is our syntax, making us much more in the engineering camp, and some of us move entirely into the machine/instruction language regime, where an understanding of the computer science of creating an abstract algorithm and less of the physics come more into play, making those of us closer to computer science. By the time you get beyond chips reading machine language, the man-made abstract meaning of the 1s and 0s are what fill your mind entirely, leaving the physics to someone else, and that science of crafting a decently run representation is called programming.

The fact that you could go on to craft entire systems using black boxes that operate as you command means that while your efforts are certainly complex and necessary, it is not engineering.

Re:Call wikipedia

[PopeRatzo]

Also I'm not sure how much sympathy I have for anyone whose paycheck for a full year and a half consisted entirely of hopes and dreams.

You sound like you're ready to be in management.

Re:Call wikipedia

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Don't know why you were modded down for that, it's exactly right. It's not exactly bad news either: we own our own means of production (both soft and hardware) and have access to the marketplace. Basically the first time in history this has happened since medieval peasants were able to augment their income by producing handicrafts on their own looms. Ideologies have been formed and revolutions fought to put the means of production back into the hands of the people and here we are in that very position. People can keep their victorian megalomaniacal "engineer" titles, I'm more excited to be part of the new tradesmen class.

Why he gets away with it...

[Anonymous Coward]

(Assuming it's true) because people like this assume that most people are logical and aren't going to go postal on them so they can just walk in an do what they like. That's the price of civilization, you can bet he wouldnt've raided the office like this or cheated workers ouf of salaries if workers had reputations of smashing skulls in with bats.

Internet hate campaign

[Anonymous Coward]

There are times when internet hate campaigns get well out of hand, and end up causing huge amounts of trouble for people over trivial or non-existent issues.

This is not one of those times... Take it away, internet...

A previous irrelevant quote

[mdwh2]

Er, no, RTFS - he removed the servers.

This is the one time that referring to "IP theft" actually makes sense. He stole it, removing the original rather than duplicating.

Do people who commit piracy do so by going to the record companies at night, sneaking in, and removing their CDs?

Anyhow, where does anyone accuse him of stealing? Or are you just making up a straw man?

He took more than a copy...

[Anonymous Coward]

> "He just made a copy, nothing was lost. It's not stealing."

That doesn't really apply when you take the computers, too.

Re:A previous quote seen here on slashdot

[vadim_t]

Actually, the way I see it, the quote is completely right, even in this case.

The "IP" is irrelevant. The employees are owed for the time they worked, and nothing more. Even if you believe there is such a thing as "IP", the employees agreed it belongs to the company when they signed the contract, so it can't be "stolen" from them.

Having the CEO fire everybody and have another team continue development would have been perfectly legal. The only illegal thing is not paying the previous employees all they were owed.

Re:Other countries are interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that he's moving is not the problem. The problem is that his staff have been working unpaid in order for the company to recover.

I don't see what the problem is: If they worked unpaid by choice, then they're foolish, in my not so humble opinion, and here's why: Having been cheated before, I'd not trust even family or friends when it comes to my financial future, and certainly not an employer.

Work for free? Sorry, been there, done that, much in the same way as these people: I trusted the company's owner, believed him when he said that he'd reward me and the rest of us, if we were only patient and worked hard. It would all work out in the end, you see, and everyone would end up wealthy.

Yeah, right. The only person that ended up wealthy was him - he sold the company, and the people that had worked to build it up got nothing, and had no recourse, as we had nothing in writing.

As the saying goes: "Once burned, twice shy". I'm older now, and considerably more cynical, and I don't work for any employer for free, ever. The only thing that we have is our lives, and we cannot know how much time we have: Giving it away to an employer without recompense is foolish at best, because they never remember the sacrifices you made for them, and you can never get that time back.

Always keep that in mind when dealing with an employer: You're trading your life in exchange for money. Make sure that it's worth it to you, don't ever be surprised when someone tries to cheat you and don't let them do so.

Re:Other countries are interesting

[maxwell demon]

> The problem is that his staff have been working unpaid in order for the company to recover.

But that's retarded. They had little reason to do that other than some profoundly misplaced loyalty - they're apparently employees not company partners? Of course I may not be getting the full story, but working for someone without being paid and without keeping the result of your work (i.e. open source, in fact the whole reason open source makes economic sense is because you keep the fruits of your labor and other people also having copies doesn't diminish that) is dumb.

Well, working for free does make sense if you expect to get the money later. Basically they've given the company a loan. It turned out the company owner was not credit-worthy, though.

Re:Other countries are interesting

[Trahloc]

But that's retarded. They had little reason to do that other than some profoundly misplaced loyalty

The only reason the loyalty was misplaced was because the CEO screwed them. Had he honored their commitment and worked as hard as possible to save the company and then paid them back dues + bonus/stock their loyalty would have been dead on. Unfortunately they worked for a douchebag. I'm the first person to have no loyalty for a large mega corp but small shops require it. We can't function without the employees giving a damn about the company and the company can't function without giving a damn about their employees.

disgusting ...

[Lazy Jones]

even if he gets away with this, his new employees will probably think twice before working on unpaid wages for so long. Also, a publisher should certainly be wary of someone with such dubious business practices.

Re:Well, what do you know...

[Zumbs]

Given that the asshole fled to Ireland and started a "new" firm, the interesting question is the extradition agreement between Ireland and Australia. Unfortunately, the link to the Australia-Ireland agreement on this page links to the Australia-Indonesia page ...

Re:What the...

[jonadab]

If it were legal, he wouldn't have been doing it in the middle of the night. The company could have just locked the employees out and done whatever they wanted in broad daylight. Plenty of companies have been known to do that sort of thing when shutting down a location.

I mean, this is a CEO we're talking about. Those guys normally work 9-5, officially, on paper, and in practice this turns into more like 10-4, except on days when they're out of the office for "meetings" with other CEOs on the golf course. Working in the middle of the night is NOT part of the general modus operandi.

So yeah, if he was slipping in during the wee hours, there's a reason.

Re:Other countries are interesting

[toriver]

Game companies often hire people for whom that is their first job. They have not yet learned that companies are psychopathic abusers, and that your only loyalty is to yourself and your colleagues. Any kindness you offer to the company as such - working for no pay for instance - will never be returned by them.

Re:Not nice.

[TapeCutter]

He has committed tax fraud, the taxman is first in the line of creditors and has an extradition treaty with the Irish taxman. He will wake up one day in the very near future to find his bank accounts frozen.

The employees are the last in line when it comes to the creditors of a defunct company, once the taxman and banks have split up what's left the employees will get fuck all. The best the employees can hope for is seeing the prick behind bars which IMHO is a very likely outcome.

Hard Luck

[BlackHawk-666]

Hard luck there for all the people who just got scammed by a run of the mill business asshole. My theory is that they are all lying assholes, each and every one of them, and if you keep that in mind you'll find your dealings with them go much better. Just remind yourself as they speak that every word is carefully selected to make them richer.

Big tip - the day you find your pay hasn't gone into your account is the day you hit jobsearch.com or call your agent and let them know you're looking for paid work.

The business's responsibility is to ensure there is enough cash set aside against bad luck/planning/weather and enough cash flow coming through to ensure projects get completed. It's *their* responsibility, not yours...you write code, or run tests, answer the phones. If they've f*ed up enough to not have the money to even pay the people who write the product, then you have to wonder how else they are screwing up.

Re:Dr Siktastik

[Anonymous Coward]

I have some Irish neighbors and they say they moved here because of Ireland's lack of opportunities. Seems Ireland forgot the type of companies that you attract when you move the tax burden from companies to citizens. They were all happy about the new tech campuses that sprung up and then they all suffered as those companies moved away, in the blink of an eye, to some other country for another 1/2 point off their taxes.

"Investment credits", "business incentives", call them what you want. It's all just a race to the bottom.

Re:Other countries are interesting

[Atryn]

The only reason the loyalty was misplaced was because the CEO screwed them.

And a man's honor should know no geographic bounds, especially in this day and age. I would expect anyone considering business with this man (including anyone in Ireland, or elsewhere) to take heed and note that he is not trustworthy. I would also encourage such former employees to make the facts of the case known wide and far, as far as is possible without criminal libel or slander.

Re:Bunch of Asian Employees ?

[Atryn]

Example, you would know of austudy and abstudy, these are centrelink payments you get as a student. Now, in an equal society, why are these two different systems needed, why can't aboriginal students be treated the same as white students? They receive more money and more benefits than any white man could hope for in the same situation. Call me crazy, but that is racist, against the majority.

I don't know the Australian systems you describe but your summary makes them sound a lot like Affirmative Action here in the US. This is a tough question. There is no question that AA is prejudice and, depending on implementation, racist. However, as it is there to correct a past wrong, the hard part is deciding when it is still or no longer needed. We are struggling with this question still in the US, as evidence by the recent University of Michigan case on admissions.

One major issue here is whether the "need" for AA is perceived to be "over" in some areas (such as the North) but the opposite in others (like the South)... I waffle a bit on this issue myself. I'd personally prefer no law or regulation mentioning race (thus invalidating AA) but that is based on the assumption that racism and inequality is no longer an issue... which is only true in some places.

Re:Bunch of Asian Employees ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the thoughtful, balanced comment ... note that the perceived racial bias in the North vs the South has a lot more more to do with history than with current reality. You might be a bit closer if you differentiated urban and rural, but even that's an over-simplification.

How do you remove intellectual property?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you remove "IP" by night? "IP?"--like, intellectual property? You could remove code stored on a computer-readable storage medium, and the code could embody ideas that could be protected by IP . . . but "remove IP"? Eh??

Re:CEOs are better people than we are

[MMC Monster]

Why stop at one?

Tough titties?

[rsilvergun]

I notice when a business owner makes off with half a mil in a assets (unpaid wages) it's tough titties but if one of the employees had done the same thing to him the frickin' justice dept extradites his ass and throws him in jail.