More On Why It Stinks To Work At Zynga 325
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."
Re:Pretty bad when EA seems more appealing (Score:5, Insightful)
nice comments (Score:4, Insightful)
*Stop asking if Mark is a good CEO on a company survey that people fill out over their company-issued computers. Everyone assumes it can be tracked.
* Expect to find yourself micromanaged by someone much less skilled than you, and who also has no skills in management.
Re:Metrics are a synonym for Hell (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Quelle surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Ah, capitalism. (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean to suggest that if a socialist system (or any other for that matter) were used, stupid management would suddenly disappear?
Stalin's approach of shooting those who couldn't meet the required metrics at least ensured that management became smart enough to fiddle the metrics.
Good (Score:4, Insightful)
It *should* suck to work in that stupid place. If you're doing something that is a parasite on society to make a living at least at least you should have a miserable time doing it. Do something productive instead like, I dunno, deal heroin or something.
http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/22/who-killed-videogames-a-ghost-story/chapter/2/ [insertcredit.com]
Re:Metrics are a synonym for Hell (Score:5, Insightful)
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 ;-)
Re:Metrics are a synonym for Hell (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Ah, capitalism. (Score:3, Insightful)
You're confusing socialism for The People's Republic of China and the scare stories about Russia in the 1980s as told by Americans to other Americans.
Places like Denmark, Finland, Sweden, France, and Germany are phenomenal when it comes to variety and choice in job.
Perhaps a bit of world travel and turning off Fox News would do you good.
Another data point (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Pretty bad when EA seems more appealing (Score:5, Insightful)
When you work in software development, like many other fields, there are times near a release (or whatever milestone) where you have to work a lot of overtime. It's simply a fact of life
Nonsense
If you have to do that, it's due to bad management i.e bad planning and a lack of "alignment" (*cough* - PHB speak) in the organisation.
Note that I didn't say "bad managers": they're only part of the problem.
Try a little bit of Scrum, Agile and Design for Lean Six Sigma.
If you can't handle 80 hour weeks
No one can honestly say that they can work 80 hours in a week. Sure, they may be physically present, but during at least 30-35 of those hours they will be producing next to nothing, and quite probably contributing more problems in terms of mistakes to the project due to fatigue.
You macho people need to get a healthy dose of reality.
Re:Metrics are a synonym for Hell (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pretty bad when EA seems more appealing (Score:5, Insightful)
When you work in software development, like many other fields, there are times near a release (or whatever milestone) where you have to work a lot of overtime.
No, not true. Furthermore, in most other fields, if you end up working overtime, you're usually compensated for it. There is absolutely NO REASON WHATSOEVER why software engineers should not be compensated for excess overtime.
Re:Pretty bad when EA seems more appealing (Score:4, Insightful)
Look at Team Bondi as an example of how to run a team into the ground. The grind went on for years. People left because of the pressure and toxic atmosphere. The net result Bondi had a constant turnover of burned out angry staff and had to work the remainder even harder to make up for lost time. They were so deep in the red by the end that even when they released a product they got shut down. It does no one good to work in that kind of atmosphere. Not the games company and certainly not the employees. It's not the norm in any other form of software development and it really shouldn't be the norm for games development either.
Re:Pretty bad when EA seems more appealing (Score:5, Insightful)
I mandated that all projects (we did implementations as well as incident support) would not be allowed to budget more than 35 hours a week (5 hours for overhead/utilization) of effort. OT would have to be approved by me directly. All OT had to be paid for by the projects submitting the work.
6 months later, we had regular 40 hour work weeks for 95% of the staff. OT dropped. And the best part? I got the cream of the crop from other departments requesting to work for my shop... they wanted the work/life balance. Normal hours were suddenly a recruiting feature.
Chronic OT is always a sign of either ineffective people managers, or a broken corporate culture. Always.
Re:Ah, capitalism. (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
Re:Pretty bad when EA seems more appealing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Another data point (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems like the parents are pushing this kid kinda hard to begin with... Why would you even try and send a 16 year old into a program designed for college students?
Take a deep breath. Slow down. Relax.
Re:Pretty bad when EA seems more appealing (Score:4, Insightful)
Scrum/Agile can also be as bad. My last job we had "Scrum meetings" and were confronted if we didn't get at least 6 hours of "work time" on any particular task per day. If we didn't log every single change we made in the issue software we were asked what we were doing during that time. They could have checked the commit logs to see what changes I made during that day, but that's apparently not in their report. Heaven forbid I have a slow day or a meeting that prevents me from logging my 6 hours of time.
They were doing it badly wrong. This sounds like old-fashioned managers who didn't trust their staff to get on with the job.
Their report? What report? They don't need a "report." That's the whole point. The progress is visible for everyone to see on the story board and the burn-down chart. If they want more data (they're mad, but...) they shouldn't be wasting developer time to get it.
At my current location, the management doesn't attend Scrum meetings and it's night and day as far as what is reported. People here actually work together, but there is talk of linking "issue time" to "billed time" and I can see that quickly devolving into a pissing contest as well.
I'm not sure how "billed time" comes into it. I've just been sold (with 600 of my colleagues) to an Indian outsourcing company. The understanding at the moment is that everything we do is for the customer (including investigating issues) so it all gets billed. We'll see how that changes over the next few months, assuming I don't get downsized at the end of January when my project goes to India, or assuming that I don't escape before then to a better job :-)
and I suspect... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pretty bad when EA seems more appealing (Score:5, Insightful)
Believe me, EA_Spouse's husband may have been working in one of the worst places but the basic problems are common throughout the industry. And the really bad thing - it doesn't work!
Re:That's it? (Score:3, Insightful)
And... this is part of what's wrong with healthcare in the US. You're probably working like that because all the other men in the medical fraternity got hazed even worse than you did.
Meanwhile, medical mistakes kill... how many people every year?
Meanwhile, the number of smart people who decide not to become MDs is... how many each year?
Re:That's it? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:how much OT is from lack of staff? (Score:2, Insightful)
So don't do it. It is really that simple. Do not attempt to do the work of 2-3 people. Tell them what you can get done in 40 hours and ask if they want to adjust your priorities. But don't let them for a moment think that adding another task to your backlog of work happens for free.
You do have to complete all of the tasks you have already committed to doing. It is the responsible thing to do. You made the commitment and your boss has relayed those commitments to others. But don't dig the hole any deeper.
Here's the secret: if they don't have the staff to get everything done now, they are not going to fire you and make the situation worse for themselves. You just have to handle it in an extremely professional manner. That's where a lot of techies get themselves into trouble. They reach their breaking point and do something very unprofessional (they make a career-limiting move). Don't let that happen to you.
Re:Pretty bad when EA seems more appealing (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want the opportunity to make a six figure salary, you're going to have to be prepared to make some sacrifices.
I make a six figure salary without having to work 80 hours every week, now or at any point in the past. So do many other people I know, working at Microsoft, Google and Amazon.
Face it, you're just regurgitating the story that has been fed to employees so that they can be squeezed for a little while longer. Come to think of it, how many Zynga employees actually earn six figures?
Re:Pretty bad when EA seems more appealing (Score:5, Insightful)
The most I've ever worked was only about 80 hours, and I've only done that once or twice, and only for a week to get past a major crunch. If memory serves, I ended up taking a sick day afterwards in both cases. Even knowing that the end was in sight, with a clear goal, I was physically exhausted and ended up getting ill as a result. The human body just was not built to work 80 and 100 hour weeks.
Your body needs eight hours of sleep, plus time to travel back and forth to work, bathe, get settled down for bed, eat breakfast, etc. This means that you cannot realistically budget fewer than ten hours per day away from work. If you try, you'll likely cause serious and, in some cases, permanent damage to your employees' health. This only leaves 14 hours per day, or 98 hours per week as an absolute maximum that the human body can realistically endure over an extended period of time, even if you have no outside activities at all besides work—no family, no church, no hobbies. And psychologically, all work and no play isn't healthy even in the short term.
In general, above about 50 hours per week, productivity is flat, and it starts to taper off way before that. You can do more than that for very, very brief periods—a week, maybe two if you use enough caffeine and are really, really excited about what you're doing—but it simply is not sustainable in the long term, and this has been proven by countless studies. In short, anybody who works their employees for 80 hour weeks is a complete f**king idiot who should not be allowed to manage the animals in a local zoo, much less the employees in a major corporation.