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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."
This reminds me of something one of the teacher's assistants at my college had said. He'd done a paid internship at Zynga and the president at one point had said to the developers (it's been a few years so I'm paraphrasing) "You are not smart. Your ideas are not innovative. You're not here to make the next greatest thing, you're here to rip off what already works and tweak it so we can maximize profits."
It's best when you write -2000 lines of code during the day.
If you're the founder and CEO of a company, what else can you do when you get tired of your job? Selling the business is often your only reasonable exit strategy when you just want to change jobs or retire. For smaller companies, it can be the only real paycheck the founder will ever get.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The truth is somewhere in the middle. When everyone in the video game industry is used to 80 hour weeks (or worse) during crunch, then you've got a systemic issue or poor management. They haven't found a working business model where they can adequately staff and make budget. And given that consumers constantly expect more for less, and expect AAA titles to compete price wise with iPhone games. So management does need a better strategy for how their run their departments/businesses.
However, I question your claims of 3,600 engineers and never requiring unplanned overtime. It is impossible to plan for every single contingency. Things break and go wrong all the time in the universe. If you never, ever need unplanned overtime, then you must be severely overstaffed.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Chronic OT is always a sign of either ineffective people managers, or a broken corporate culture. Always.
As some times people end doing the work load of 2-3 people?
I think GP answered your question. If your company needs 10 people to do a job correctly, and has hired 4 to do it, the fact that those 4 have to work ridiculous hours to get the job done is not a problem with those 4 people.
I am officially gone from
In my somewhat-out-of-date experience, _well designed, planned and managed_ medium to large projects can often be more predictable than smaller ones, as the stochastic variation of the many small component projects (some run early, some run late) can average out.
Unfortunately there is also a body of evidence that the larger the project, the more likely it is to fail - as of the beginning of this century, at about $5 million the probability of failure was getting over 90%. I don't recall the definition of failure very well, but I think it was being so seriously over budget and behind schedule that the project got cancelled.
I ran one project where we got budget approved for six engineers and two years, for converting a multi-language, multi-platform system with several bleeding-edge components and (IIRC) 300,000 lines of code. And within a week the marketing team had promised delivery of a working system in two months to General Electric. Then our budget got cut to two people. This was essentially the final straw, and I left the company. I learned later that, with the connivance of the department at GE, the company delivered two non-working systems so the customer could sign off on delivery. Then they spent the two years hacking up a POS, not converting but merely porting things, smooshing things together and finally trying unsuccessfully to make it work. I think GE finally sued them.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Actually, you're quite confused about two very, very different terms here -- which might be understandable as European political systems are impressively more complex and varied than the "Two Parties - plus various nutjobs" system that seems prevalent in the United States (from a European point of view).
You have to understand the fundamental difference between socialist -- which is the political system that Karl Marx described as the dictatorship of the masses to break the hold of the few over production -- and social democrat, which realizes that dictatorships are bad, but also that having more should mean that you can also do more for those that have less.
Further more, there are conservative central parties -- that mostly believe that social responsibility is a worthwhile goal, but should flow from moral responsibility and incentives instead of direct governmental pressure. Then there are right-wing conservatives, that are mostly like the central conservative parties as far as their social approach is concerned, but put more pressure on morals, up to reaching semi-tacit demands for more socio-moral homogeneity. In themselves, these conservative parties are not actually economically more conservative. At best, they are more open towards working WITH big companies to reach a particular goal instead of AGAINST them.
But mostly, the economic outlook depends more on whether you adhere to the more liberal wing of your chosen political stream, or the more social/rightist (as in rights of the people, not right as in right vs left).
In Europe (and especially Germany from which I hail), you can be a liberal conservative, a social democrat, a liberal, a conservative, a green, a leftist, a socialist, a communist, a liberal-economist, a rights-liberal, a rights-conservative, an extreme leftist (note: != socialist or communist), a green, a leftist green, a liberal green, a conservative green, a liberal social democrat with ecological interests (a.k.a. green); and so on. Ohh, and you can of course be a neo-fascist, if that's to your liking.
And the best: Depending on where you live in Europe, all these streams (except for maybe the neo-fascists and extreme leftists) are represented by parties that have between 10-25% of the popular vote with actual voices in the respective parliaments -- and sometimes governments.
Compared to the US-System, Europe is a melting pot of political ideals, where you can be in a conservative party which collectively tries to keep Nuclear Reactors running while allowing gay marriage, wanting minimum wage, and trying to introduce religious lessons in school. The same applies to leftists, liberals, greens, etc. to the same degree.
Isn't having a (non-exclusively) plurality vote system great?
I worked at EA as a programmer from late 1999 to late 2001, or rather at a company that had been been bought by EA a year or two before i started working there and was gradually brought more and more under the EA umbrella during the entire time i was there.
I was one of eleven programmers on a millon+ unit game and its expansion. Only seven of us were actually working on the game full time, though admittedly we had the benefit(?) of a lot of legacy code from the previous game in the series.
I got paid considerably less than a six figure salary. I don't remember the exact number, but i believe i started out slightly below the median five figure salary and ended up slightly above the median five figure salary by the time i and a lot of other people were laid off, shortly after finishing the expansion.
I don't remember exactly which point we started working 80+ hour weeks, i might be able to dig up some old references in emails and such if i start checking, but i know it was for several months before the release of the main game and at least a month before the release of the expansion.
After getting laid off by EA i then went to work at another game company that wasn't as successful but had pretty much the same practices. After getting laid off by that company (again after finishing up two products in two years) i ended up getting a "boring" job working on business software. Except now i'm an hourly employee and i get paid more than i did in the games industry (though still not six figures) and i've been here for over five years without a single round of layoffs. On the two occasions where overtime has been required it was for _far_ less than 80 hours a week and and it was only for a week or two each time. And wonder of wonders, i got paid time and a half for that overtime! (Funny the correlation there, the company demands less overtime when it means paying me more.)
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