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, Interesting)
Zynga threatened to sue me (Score:2, Interesting)
for distributing some javascript that ran in greasemonkey which clicked buttons in their game. Fuck Zynga.
Re:Pretty bad when EA seems more appealing (Score:3, Interesting)
The nightmarish working conditions at EA are legendary. Those "jokes" you've heard? Probably real-life anecdotes.
The game development industry as a whole is a shitty place to work though, EA is just widely known as the worst of the lot.
Re:Metrics are a synonym for Hell (Score:5, Interesting)
It's best when you write -2000 lines of code [folklore.org] during the day.
Re:Good (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, they sure do deserve to suffer for the crime of making something you don't like. Because it is inherently immoral to not plan your career around what Slashdot poster joss approves of.
And yes, that IS literally exactly what you meant.
Re:Pretty bad when EA seems more appealing (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Pretty bad when EA seems more appealing (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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.
Re:Ah, capitalism. (Score:4, Interesting)
You maybe haven't heard of Employment Tribunals then?
Rgds
Damon
Re:Pretty bad when EA seems more appealing (Score:4, Interesting)
We fill out a time sheet that requires 40 hours a week or it takes from our Paid Time Off. On the sheet is project time (billed to client) and non-project time (requires explanation.) I'm not a fan of the system, and I've been billing my full 8 hours/day to the current project but I was told recently that they were looking at comparing that time to the issue tracker logged time. The company is growing, so I hope I can nudge that aspect away from the thought process. I'm not holding up my hopes since I'm one of the "new guys."
Re:Pretty bad when EA seems more appealing (Score:3, Interesting)
Not accurate unless you're a contractor, and I think the best advice that I can possibly give as someone who's been in the game industry for over 6 years is to not be a contractor in the game industry. You don't get as many benefits, you're typically given less consideration than "real" employees, you barely get any equity (if at all), you don't get paid time off.
To be perfectly honest, EA has its shit together nowadays. Although a number of their releases are lukewarm at best, they've done a good job at keeping their noses clean for the past few years. Sadly, this just means that an altogether new Big Brother game publisher has taken their place: Activision.
All of those things that were written about EA about 6-7 years ago would now be more genuinely applied to Activision. At the top it's run entirely by business people and MBAs who are so ridiculously disconnected from the actual gaming market and gamers themselves that it would make your head spin. Guitar Hero was run into the ground by Activision's piss-poor management style, which is to squeeze a game for everything that it's worth and then have mass layoffs when gamers finally tire of having a given title stuffed down their throat. They did it with Tony Hawk, they've done it most recently with Guitar Hero, and as a former Activision employee, I can personally vouch for the fact that they are in the process of doing it with Call of Duty.
Zynga got its fame and money through the "too much, too young, too fast" mobile market, and it makes perfect sense to me that it would be a miserable place to work since I can almost guarantee that not a one of their employees could tell you why their games are popular. Ergo, the entire workday for the upper management is to run around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying desperately to maintain the status quo, let alone grow the company, and so they micro-manage everyone beneath them as they have nothing to do themselves. This is a sad story that has been told many times over the past 30 years or so in the game industry, only replace "mobile market" with whatever the latest burgeoning game market is that nobody at the top can understand but can be explained at length by anyone under 25.
Realistically speaking, as someone who in the past 6 years has worked for 3 different companies and founded the most recent, the best thing you can do if you want to get into the game industry is to either take a crack at the "indie" market if you're positive you have the marketing skills and the coding skills to actually realize your dream, or simply work for a medium-sized game company that is already owned by a publisher that isn't Activision. Stay away from huge studios like EA Tiburon (400+ employees), stay away from the medium-sized studios that are working on the latest edition of a "popular" franchise, because chances are within 5 years that franchise will be flagging and they'll be doing layoffs, and stay away from the tiny studios that just got started off the back of a single ridiculously-popular indie games. Following these criteria, there will still be hundreds of studios from which to choose - it's just a matter of choosing the one that makes games on which you'd like to work.
Re:Pretty bad when EA seems more appealing (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:how much OT is from lack of staff? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Pretty bad when EA seems more appealing (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:That's it? (Score:2, Interesting)
As the SO of a resident I agree with you and sympathize with GP. The thing is that many med. students (later to become residents) are basically brainwashed. The attitude is that you WILL work every waking hour, or we'll find someone who will. And they're right.
It's not just supply and demand though. It's a culture problem. Sort of like an extended period of hazing for every wannabe doctor. I'm almost ok with the hours required in the game industry because those programmers can easily choose to do another programming job that's less insane. The hours of doctors kill folks though.
Re:Ah, capitalism. (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Pretty bad when EA seems more appealing (Score:5, Interesting)
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.)
Re:Pretty bad when EA seems more appealing (Score:4, Interesting)
Billing 80 hours is not the same as working 80 hours. Especially for a landshark. With minimum billing increments, travel time and air-phones a shyster can bill an easy 5 billable hours/hour. 2 billable hours travel as has 2 clients issues in the same direction (e.g. east) plus 3 billable hours in 6 5 minute phone calls at .5 hour bill increment. At a 1 hour increment it gets real fun (for them).
A lawyer dies and goes to the pearly gates, being a shyster he knows he's going to have to do some fancy lawyering to get in. He starts by pleading that he died very young; he was only 34. St. Pete looks up from his book and says, 'that's funny, according to your billable hours you were 82.'
Re:Pretty bad when EA seems more appealing (Score:4, Interesting)
Frankly, the thought of going to a doctor who works an 80 hour week scares the hell out of me. You can't possibly do your best work under those conditions. The problem is not that folks at computer game manufacturers are forced to work ridiculous hours. The problem is that there are any employees in the U.S. who because of their "exempt" status are allowed to work such unhealthy hours.
I'm okay with having an exemption to the forty hour cap for highly skilled workers, but there should be a 60 hour cap that applies for everyone, and a maximum of 50 hours average over the course of a year, above which the employers should start having to give comp days at a rate of one day per eight hours of additional work over the limit. Period.
Re:Pretty bad when EA seems more appealing (Score:4, Interesting)
I can think of a few reasons to challenge the 40 hour rule. One, you're doing an unhealthy amount of sitting. Two, we already know people aren't doing 8 hours of work during an 8 hour day. Not even close, in most cases. Three, 8 hour days are usually out of sync with school schedules, for people who have kids (I don't, for the record). Shouldn't we at least talk about it? We know 80 hours destroys people. Why are we so quick to assume 40 is OK?
Re:how much OT is from lack of staff? (Score:3, Interesting)
ho much OT is from lack of staff?
As some times people end doing the work load of 2-3 people?
This is a management error.
If you permanently lack staff because your company/division/office can only be profitable with 60% of the staffing actually required, management has to realize that they are likely better off closing it.
If it is profitable at 100% staffing, but management want higher profits by running with 60% staffing, its management greed, and staff should consider walking out ASAP.