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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

No matter what anyone says, to me, zynga is silicon valleys groupon. The worst company in the valley.

I like seeing them fail.

The company does have honest employees, including designers and engineers (I know a few personally).

Yes, it can be argued, "It's their fault for working at an evil company in the first place", but it's tough for me to see the 'regular folk' suffer as well :(

By "suffer" do you mean "not make millions from their stock options"?

A lot of these regular people have quite good job prospects in other companies, perhaps even at a greater salary, but (I presume) chose Zynga because of the stock options.

Zynga is like a slot machine company -- bad business practices, and the product is not actually fun. If "regular people" invested in slot machines and that investment didn't work out, would you still call it "suffering"?

I say: let it fall apart, and get these engineers working on real problems.

All companies, positive or negative, have some honest employees.

They are guilty for working for a evil company. Ignorance of the crime does not make you innocent.

What if your company was acquired by them and you're in vesting period? Are engineers of the acquired company guilty of a career move that they had nothing to do with?

(this is the exact situation my friends are in)

Yes. You choose who you work for (before the acquisition and after), and stock options are a an understood risk. Let's not pretend otherwise.

Given Zynga's history they likely won't vest anyway (clawbacks).

Look how well that worked out for OMGPOPs CEO who came out in public making horrible statements of some of his employees.

He deserved to be acquired by Pinchs and it showed his true colors.

The day OMGPOP was acquired, I deleted draw something.

I've played games my whole life, computer games are what got me into computers as my career, but I have never played a Zynga game and never will.

I boycott everything the company does as a personal preference.

I don't think all the employees are bad, but anyone who is blatantly working to do Pincus' theft of others' work certainly KNOW they are doing it and that's pretty shitty.

Those vesting options are going to be worthless. Sorry.

"I like seeing them fail."

PG was just talking the other day about HN'ers who have feelings like that:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4293786

I'd be curious if you get a chance of your comments to that thread (particularly what I said I felt was a possible reason and PG's response).

Of course no matter which way you slice it it does make interesting watching. As they say in news "if it bleeds it leads". People love a good train wreck.

I'm not sure the comment you're replying to views all startups as a con like PG was talking about. A lot of people just dislike Zynga because of their early shady business practices, and the fact that their games are seen as a dumbing down of the industry.

Zynga is sort of the Nickelback of the startup world.

Not to mention their recent move of asking employees to return unvested options.

Not to mention the shameless cloning of games from smaller indie companies such as NimbleBit's Tiny Tower http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2399380,00.asp

If you have that attitude about 90% of startups (or companies in general), it's unhealthy.

If you have that attitude about just one or two of them, I'd suggest it's healthier than that number being zero.

Not everything that makes money should be celebrated.

That comment was in the context of startups in general. As a gamer, I consider the game development practices of Zynga disgusting and if I hope that they fail, it's so that other companies are wary of trying to replicate their game designs in the future.

"As a gamer"

Thanks for your perspective. I'm not a gamer and don't follow the inside story about zynga to understand it from that point of view (ask me about certain domain registrars though and I will have plenty to say along the same lines).

Correct me if I'm wrong (can't find any links) but I think Pincus was the one that fired some employees for not pulling their weight prior to the IPO or something like that. That gave me a distaste for him although I also noted that Fred Wilson defended him personally on his blog.

Here's a link but not the most relevant on the matter:

http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2010/01/fred...

That post is only talking about a certain type of people, who disparage startups on the whole. Not liking one particular startup does not imply that you don't like all startups.

I only feel this way about Zynga. Knowing their history and everything about the way they have conducted business, I have no sympathy for them and even their investors.

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