Slashdot Mirror
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."
According to the article, PopCap turned down their offer and went with Electronic Arts instead, because they thought that working conditions would be better at EA. Yes, read that last part again: they would rather deal with the working conditions at EA than work for Zynga. That's pretty bad.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Metrics can be used for comparison, it's just that most of them aren't good for measuring performance and that when you incentivize people to produce large scores for certain metrics, they'll start to cook the books.
For example, lines of code per hour is an absolutely terrible metric to measure performance. It does not take into account the type of problem or how difficult it may be to engineer a solution for that problem. Also, once it becomes apparent that people rewarded for producing a larger number of LoC per hour, they'll start to produce more lines of code, whether they're necessary or not, often to the detriment of readability.
There's nothing wrong with measuring things like this, and many software development methodologies use metrics such as LoC to provide feedback for the project, but in no way should they be used to evaluate employees. Many of the attributes that make up a good employee cannot be quantified by simple metrics. Metrics are just another tool. Using them correctly is necessary to get anything meaningful out of them.
I'm shocked, *shocked* that a job involving writing human Skinner boxes masquerading as games is less than spiritually satisfying.
I'm equally shocked that a company whose business revolves around getting money from people via human Skinner boxes masquerading as games might be a bunch of worthless dicks and not that much fun to work for.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
There's nothing wrong with measuring things like this, and many software development methodologies use metrics such as LoC to provide feedback for the project, but in no way should they be used to evaluate employees.
Evaluating software developers is hard. So, just as companies would like to use software generating tools to de-skill the programming positions, they'd also like to use metrics to de-skill some of those pesky high-paid management positions. Both attempts to substitute automation for human skill work about equally well ;-)
It's best when you write -2000 lines of code during the day.
Metrics are one of those things that sometimes set me off. The main problem is, you have to know what you're measuring. You're measuring number of lines produced per hour? That's fine. But do you know what you're measuring? You're measuring the number of lines produced per hour. You aren't measuring the quality of the code or the productivity of the programmer. The number of lines that a programmer produced may have some relation to the programmer's overall productivity, or it may not, so you are *not* measuring overall productivity with that metric.
Same goes for other metrics. Know what you're measuring. Don't rely too much on a metric to give you a value for something that it doesn't measure.
A friend from church mentioned to me a while ago that Zynga had been trying to recruit his son, a 16 year-old junior in high school. That really made me wonder about the company. The kid's smart, no doubt about it, and a decent coder (his code is functional, but not particularly clean or maintainable -- pretty typical for a bright novice), but I can really only think of one reason why a company would want to hire a 16 year-old, put him up in an apartment in NYC and make him write code full-time: To exploit his willingness to work insane hours for peanuts until he burns out.
If they really thought he was brilliant and a great long-term hire, they'd offer him an internship and help pay for his college education in exchange for some work now and a lot more work after he gets some CS knowledge to go along with his coding skills.
His parents refused to let him go... they didn't like the idea of turning a 16 year-old loose on his own in NYC, for some reason. I'm encouraging him to apply for a summer internship at Google. Most of those go to college students, but I think he's good enough to make the cut, and a summer internship will pay him well for a great learning opportunity without compromising his continuing formal education.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
If my company paid me solely based on how many lines of code I can write in an hour, then I would spend half an hour writing a code generating program, and the rest of my career there justifying more hardware on which to run my program.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
The difference is that in capitalism you have the choice of not working for such a company
And this is the largest problem with those that religiously worship capitalism. Whether or not you have the "choice" to work for this company is irrelevant; the fact of the matter is that this bullshit should not be allowed, period. When you start to allow companies to act like total assholes because "people have a choice," then if they get successful, then all the other companies will start to emulate that. Look at what happened with retirement plans: Most companies used to offer pensions, which were great for workers. Then a few removed them and went to the far shittier 401k plan. This was deemed acceptable because "you have the choice to work for a company that provides a pension." Fast forward a few years, and now it's almost impossible to find a company that offers pensions to it's employees, unless they are a union job. So don't give me that bullshit about "choice of working".
that you are a pointy-haired who feels that blaming your workers for your inability to properly budget time and expenses is a viable business strategy.
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
You work 12- hour days and you're complaining? I'm a resident physician and work 12 hours shifts everyday. Plus, I have to take call which translates into 30-hour shifts on occasion. My personal record is 32 hours awake in the hospital---and that's after Congress stepped in and created the work-hour limitations.
The medical industry is severly broken. You wouldn't let a truck driver operate his vehicle 12 hours straight, let alone 32. If he did and he had an accident he'd be imprisoned. Yet doctors do insane shifts. That is just plain ridiculous. You need to have your shifts limited to 8 hours in any 24 hour period and train a lot more doctors. The reason this isn't happening is your medical associations artificially limit supply of doctors to drive rates up for the elite specialists. Again ridiculous. How many people have died because a doctor has been too tired to do their job properly and has made a mistake. Do I dare ask you if you've ever made a fatal mistake due to fatigue, and how you live with it?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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?