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More On Why It Stinks To Work At Zynga
bdking writes "If a recent internal survey and reviews left on glassdoor.com are to be believed, working at social games company Zynga isn't much fun. Zynga's competitive, metrics-driven culture may be scaring away potential acquisitions and forcing out employees seeking better work-life balance and less stress."
The most visible citation is this: http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html
There's likely similar stories out there, with a little help from Google.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EA_Spouse
Anything on EA's conditions?
I haven't heard anything about the working conditions at EA aside from jokes.
I haven't seen much lately, but in 2004 it was alleged that EA sucked the soul (or at least any semblance of work-life balance) out of its employees... http://news.cnet.com/Electronic-Arts-faces-overtime-lawsuit/2100-1043_3-5450316.html
They settled a couple of years ago for millions, no word on whether conditions have improved. http://articles.latimes.com/2006/apr/26/business/fi-ea26
geek. lawyer.
The best part of the (sorta) linked article is that the author of EA Spouse now works for Zynga as Lead Systems Designer.
That poor couple just can't catch a break!
the wikipedia article uses her linkedin profile as a source. according to that, she no longer works at zynga.
This crap reminds me of those people who parrot those stupid McDonalds Hot Coffee stories completely oblivious to the actual facts of the case.
Electronic Arts is an amazing place to work. The company is huge and has many studios and I have friends who have worked or do work at most of them over the past 15 years. If you don't mind the more corporate type of game company, EA is a dream job if you are someone that is important to game development: engineers and full-time artists.
If you are some low talent part-time artists brought on to do grunt work or some talent-less low level producer, yeah, you don't get treated very.
Shock.
Actually, I'm a software developer in a global organisation with 3600 permanent engineers plus contractors selling millions of products per quarter globally. I do C and C++ on Linux with TDD, shell scripting, Perl, Ruby... you name it. I've done a bit of scrum mastering myself and have been doing scrum for over 4 years.
If done properly, it works. And we always meet our deadlines, always, with the planned quality a feature set. I've never had to work more than 4 hours unplanned overtime in a week in all that time, and those occasions are only 3 or 4 times a year.
I've worked at mad 80-hour a week places before. They're a complete shambles, run by idiots who treat the engnieers like dirt. I'll not be going back.
Stick Men
From what I'm told by a friend in the business, it's still common for devs to hop from studio to studio on loan or being laid off from one place to the next because they finished X project. What I hear is that it's a crap shoot if the studios will keep you after release.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
As much as I don't like Zynga at all, I'm going to have to ask you to explain how what they're doing is writing human Skinner boxes. Please do so in a way that does not include the output of the video game industry as a whole, or, in fact, the very concept of risk and reward, as an abstract Skinner box.
Note that no credit will be given for any answer that asserts microtransactions to be the primary differentiating factor. Demerits will be handed out if the answer asserts microtransactions to be inherently evil, as that is not the topic at hand.
A great game (that is not a Skinner box) should have the player constantly facing new problems and asking, "How can I solve this? What tools have I got? What have I learned from previous challenges that I can apply here?" Portal is a good example of that kind of game. Some games involve insane amounts of repetition but also involve reasonable levels of new problems to solve (WoW might fit this category). Zynga games just have the insane repetition.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
The reason is because we're legally exempt employees.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exempt_employee
A union of programmers would be unstoppable.
You're right that that's the correct solution. But it would have to be an international union in order to function, and would (like other unions have in the past) have to make extraordinary efforts to prevent scabs from coming in and breaking the union.
Plus there are a lot of programmers out there who hate unions for reasons which have nothing to do with enlightened self-interest.
I am officially gone from
Burn-down charts are supposed to measure time remaining, not time spent working. They are most useful for avoiding situations where you suddenly realize that the project is behind schedule, at least short term. They are also intended for the team as a whole, not individuals (emphasis on the team is one of the core principles of Agile).
If you're tracking time worked as part of scrum, you're (probably) doing it wrong.