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I really don't feel sorry for anyone who work(s)(ed) for Zynga. This company milked the whole "social gaming" bubble for every drop it was worth. Every game they made was a clone of this or that, and they used every spam trick in the book to get more clicks, and every single employee at that company knew 100% full well that they were part of a modern day ponzi scheme that would blow up once Facebook become uncool.

This is so incredibly wrong in so many ways. Many developers were seduced into social games because people loved them and it seemed like a new frontier and a new market with shorter development cycles and interesting challenges. It is easy to have great hindsight but a few years ago the game industry looked very different. Zynga has had a few games be reviewed quite well, but nobody ever seems to remember them.[1][2]

As a former Zynga employee that came in through acquisition, I find it repulsive that people assume we are all responsible for the poor decisions of a few at the top. Most of us worked our asses off to try to make something awesome, but ended up having to compromise in the worst possible ways to satisfy the top brass or poorly understood metrics.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/31/zynga-channels-settlers-of-... [2] http://kotaku.com/5836588/adventure-world-is-zyngas-take-on-...

It's easy to say 'Oh sure, I work for the Evil Empire, but my division makes interesting things which people actually quite like...'

...but then you've got to be prepared to take it on the chin when someone says, "Yes, but that whole company is Evil, which, kind of by association includes you."

When you work for someone, their reputation does, absolutely, 100% reflect on you personally regardless of what your role in the company is (to some degree, obviously).

Just food for thought.

If you don't like it, don't work for people you don't want your personal reputation associated with.

When you work for someone, their reputation does, absolutely, 100% reflect on you personally regardless of what your role in the company is (to some degree, obviously).

I don't understand this rationale at all. You are not your company. Calling someone evil because you dislike their company (I'm not defending Zynga, but they're the #firstworldproblems of "evil") is incredibly sophomoric.

Perhaps. ...but I think you're fooling yourself if you think this doesn't happen in the real world.

You've basically got a very mild variation on the Wernher Von Braun thing going on here.

Engineer of prolific impact and talent, working for the worst possible people, indirectly exploiting people in the worse possible way to do shit work that is related to his pure and commendable goals and interests. The engineer feels as though he is powerless to resist the the exploitation that is demanded by his employer. Eventually the bad guy employers go down in flames to everyone's delight, but the engineer still has the technical chops to make himself valued.

The question, does the previous employer reflect poorly on the engineer?

To be honest, Von Braun is one of those ambiguous figures in history for me. I don't really know how I feel about him. However, the fact that he is ambiguous at all means that I have to admit to myself that his affiliations during the war do tarnish what I think of him. I don't think it is possible for that not to be the case.

Ex-Zynga software engineer? Obviously the ambiguity is not going to be "is this guy a war criminal or not?" But would there be any ambiguity of any sort? Yeah, I think for me there would be.

I don't think an engineer of any caliber is evaluated in a vacuum, past employers shape how we view them, for better or worse. This (particularly how I feel about Von Braun) is something I have thought about hard in the past when considering what I want to do as an engineer.

I know Mark Pincus is a pretty big dick, but "worst possible people"? Come on.

> very mild variation

In case your browser isn't showing it (android chrome?), there is some italicized emphasis there.

I totally understand. Most major "evils" happen through a combination of very small steps towards the cliff. It takes a very vigilant stance, permeated through the company structure to prevent this fall into the abyss. In this light, constantly questioning the ethics of your employer company, as a whole, is healthy.

com·pa·ny noun:
a : association with another
b : companions, associates
c : a group of persons or things
d : a chartered commercial organization or medieval trade guild

e : an association of persons for carrying on a commercial or industrial enterprise

You are your company. That's the very definition of the word. One might be given a dispensation to the evil-by-association if you were working at Burger King because that's the only job you could get.

But you're presumably an incredibly smart and capable (and thus sought after) tech professional who could no doubt have placed his labor wherever he chose.

To be honest, "company" is an association of shareholders. I don't think this definition covers or should cover employees.

Agree with your overall point though.

If you are the company, but the company is not you (assuming other employees and shareholders), but the company is a person itself, does this mean that you and the company are conjoined siblings?

There's something so particularly American about gaining so much of your identity from your job. American's are so defined by what work they do.

I am not my employer. My employer pays my wage and that's it. I'm not interested in joining a cult. I'm earning a paycheck.

This is not to say I would feel comfortable working for a company like Zynga. Absolutely not. But I also don't doubt there are many people at Zynga who really do not like the company's direction. Don't blame the soldiers for the fault of the generals.

That's so true. In the Eastern philosophy, your work is one part of you, may be a big one, but just a part of you. Your inner being, inner peace is of greater importance. Your friends, family and love matters.

As we can see in Japan because no true Japanese person lets their work take away from their family life.

We can also see this in Foxconn assembly lines, the home of the work/life balance in China.

Judge: Did you shoot the peasants?

Soldier: Yes I did, but I was following orders.

Judge: But, you could have avoided shooting the peasant, right? But you didn't.

Soldier: Yes I could, but I was following orders.

It's not about your employer being your identity; It's about empathy and whether your choices improve or worsen others' lives.

> Don't blame the soldiers for the fault of the generals.

Since you apparently like military analogies, I'll quote one of the Nuremberg Principles, which---as far as I am aware---are not an American invention:

"The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."

This is a pretty sensible principle, because it's the soldiers who enable the generals. Similarly, if you're a developer (unless you're really terrible) and you work at Zynga or any other company, you're enabling your employer.

Zynga may have lost all it's glamour and has a bad reputation now but the same goes for Facebook. I don't think employees should be blamed for the decisions of their heads.

In no way, should this be regarded like military service where your job causes fatalities. For me, as long as you're doing something you enjoy with people you like and developing a skill set, that's reason enough to work at a company. Some people work at jobs they hate all their lives because they need to live and support their families. If you have a career where you can work with smart people and do what you like, you're already pretty lucky.

If the company does something you believe in, wow. You're really lucky. How many people get to do that in the world?

You are misinterpreting the Nuremberg Principles: They didn't charge the rank and file of the German army for the crimes committed by the various officers and SS members.

All that was decided at Nuremberg was that if you have committed a crime, the fact that you have been ordered to by your superiors does not innocent you.

So we agree that anyone who did the spammy deeds at Zynga is "evil", whether their boss asked them to or not. But that does not make everyone else in the company (from the backend developer to the cantine lady) evil.

I don't think that's American at all. In all modern societies we first define an individual as which company he works for.

Picture yourself meeting new people. The first question to eventually come up will be "So, where do you work?"

Those compromises helped this story get written:

http://www.sfgate.com/news/slideshow/Mark-Pincus-039-16M-Pac...

I hear what you are saying but it is NOT simply hindsight. Many of us from the beginning were very critical of sort of games developed by Zynga, it is definitely not a case of looking back. This is not to say that all the developers were there to rip off previous games and create digital crack but Zynga is what it is and we did say it from the beginning.

I think this as a terrible way to look at people and the world. People need jobs to provide for themselves and their family. Social gaming isn't a "ponzi scheme" -- you can think its a waste of time, you can think Zynga's corporate policies were bad, but at the end of the day a bunch of people who just wanted to make money building things just lost their jobs.

I'm not so sure they deserve the sympathy though. Nearly every game released for the past several years has been a literal clone of another game- usually so wholesale, so completely devoid of any innovation or new content, that it was indistinguishable to the lay man.

When you're literally being told to copy another company to create your product, so brashly? You honestly deserve what's coming to you. I'm okay if you try to innovate at least a little, but they never did. They just used their platform and size to bully smaller companies(and sometimes, stupidly, larger companies like EA) into irrelevance.

I'm tempted to agree with you. "They're just trying to support their family" can only be an acceptable excuse up to a point. I don't know if Zynga reached that point or not. I just think it's important to keep in mind that you can only do so much evil before "providing for your family" is no longer a valid excuse.

Of course, this all sounds ridiculous in comparison to "real" evil, like mass murder. So I'm also tempted to disagree ;).

Zynga has poached a lot of talent from the real game industry. People don't need to resign and join Zynga - it's a choice they've made. And with the requirements Zynga had - even if you had been unemployed and got an offer from Zynga you could get another one everywhere else: they had not been exactly scrapping the bottom of the barrel, quite the opposite.

I'm curious as to how were they able to poach. Money, equity, working conditions, all of these, none of these...?

Working conditions in some of the big companies in the real games industry sound pretty bad to me, but I am only going on lazy reading of articles like "EA spouse", I have no experience in the industry itself. I think I'd be pretty outraged to be on a Farmville death march, for sure.

I'd guess equity and money. Zynga does not seem to have conditions different from EA (not surprisingly as it's managed by the same people) and EA is not really able to poach somebody with its working conditions.

> People need jobs to provide for themselves and their family.

No, these people were seduced by promises of a big payday for copying other people's work -- plain and simple. There are so many tech and gaming companies to work for in Silicon Valley that I just don't believe it's possible to pick the most egregious one simply by accident.

> People need jobs to provide for themselves and their family.

That may apply to the administrative staff, or people in sales and marketing. Maybe even managers.

But not to the developers that had options and chose money over ethics. It doesn't make them "evil", but it puts them very low on the list of people to feel sorry for.

>they were part of a modern day ponzi scheme that would blow up once Facebook become uncool.

but isn't this like 80% of silicon valley, at this point? I mean even google is now trying to become facebook; and the rest of us are just trying to get acquired by one of the giants, or trying to sell something to the Engineers who are in one of those groups.

I mean, seriously, glass houses; be careful with them rocks.

What? Even assuming that Google is trying to become Facebook and that everyone is "trying to get acquired", why do those situations preclude trying to create something that you believe has actual value (vs the complete, blatant ripoffs and spammy crap that Zynga pushes). You're free to disagree that Zynga's games _are_ spammy ripoffs, but you didn't seem to take issue with that part of the parent comment's post, and saying that the rest of the Valley is engaged in the same behavior is downright silly.

>Even assuming that Google is trying to become Facebook and that everyone is "trying to get acquired", why do those situations preclude trying to create something that you believe has actual value[?]

well, assuming you honestly believe that facebook creates enough real value to justify it's valuation, sure, you are right. My take on the matter is that it's myspace 2.0. I mean, no question, it's worth something, but not nearly what it's valued at right now. I personally have a very difficult time believing that anyone who was working in the industry during the first dot-com can honestly believe that facebook is a sustainable business.

The only people I know who honestly espouse the view that facebook is fairly valued are facebook employees. (Interestingly, I know no facebook employees who were working during the first dot com.)

I mean, maybe these people all really believe exactly what their paymasters want them to believe? Personally, I find that thought far more creepy than the idea that they are just faking it because that's what the employer requires. Certainly there is some selection effect; you are more likely to apply for a facebook job if you believe the company is going somewhere? but it's weird. I remember one guy who is probably the staunchest facebook advocate I know now, he was extremely cynical about facebook before he got the job. Of course, he's also pretty young, too young to have worked through the first dot-com.

The weird thing is that I know a bunch of people who work for defense contractors, too... a place where you'd expect a certain level of brainwashing. None of those people believe their companies are doing good things for the world. Not one. I mean, they generally think the work is really interesting, but they don't believe at all in the end goals. (and I do have some conservative friends... it's just that none of them work for defense contractors.)

But then, what do I know? I find that what I consider to be 'spammy crap' is a pretty good heuristic for what most people want. I don't use facebook because it consists almost entirely of what I would call spammy crap. Spammy crap and baby pictures.

>Who I don't feel bad for is Mark Pincus. The collapse of Zynga couldn't happen to a more deserving person. Just 18 months ago when Zynga was on top of the world, Pincus made a name for himself by bullying staff to give back stock options [1] for no other reason than he thought they didn't deserve such a huge windfall.

That was my first thought. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

"Frankly I'd hesitate in working for any company backed by the same VCs that let this happen."

I see some pretty big names in the list of Zynga investors. Namely Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers. The set of startups these VCs have invested in will cover a huge portion of the "good" startups to work for.

I don't know if refusing to work for a company backed by one of them is a viable option.

> I don't know if refusing to work for a company backed by one of them is a viable option.

There is a bigger world out there than you think.

Google invested on Zynga, and Cletus work for Google. Sorry for being cynic, it's not my style.

Why do you assume Google is so good? Or so unavoidable?

Recently Google bought Quickoffice and booted two offices of android devs + QA in Ukraine without even paying them 2-month equivalent of salary for the inconvenience. Not sure if they are going to sue.

You can argue it was not "The Google" but some of their proxies, but it doesn't matter: as a company they're cool with that, saving some dimes by ripping out employees they aren't going to use, when they can get away with that.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5817073

So what? I didn't doubt Google invested; I just claim it's not as important because Google isn't actually good when it comes to treating 3rd party employees.

You didn't read the whole thread. The thread was initiated by someone who works at Google, and says ""Frankly I'd hesitate in working for any company backed by the same VCs that let this happen.".

It wasn't obvious from the context that he works for Google.

And it seems he actually works for Twilio: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=stanleydrew

But I would say "core Google" is safe, it's just that Google investements/acquirement doesn't really mean any safety per se.

Again you are not reading what I say. The user is https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cletus

> I don't know if refusing to work for a company backed by one of them is a viable option.

people can get rich selling socks. you don't need to work for these companies.

I'm the last person to defend Zynga and it's practices but I agree this needs caution.

If the boot is on the other foot, and VC's are expected to own such a degree of responsibility to maintain their reputation, then as a founder suddenly I'm going to be dictated by my investors as to how to run lower level aspects of my business that would not normally need board (thus investor) approval.

If we want investors to remain hands-off outside of board decisions then you can't expect them to take responsibility for aspects they have no control over.

Frankly I'd hesitate in working for any company backed by the same VCs that let this happen. To allow this erosion of what I'd call the "startup bargain" (trading salary for equity) by greatly reducing the upside is shortsighted and undermines the very conditions that makes the startup scene thrive and succeed.

Not exactly that, but Google invested on Zynga.

Interesting, but needs a bit more context - when and how much?

Here's two bits:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/10/google-secretly-invested-10...

http://allthingsd.com/20110718/zynga-updates-ipo-filing-to-l...

The solution to prevent clawback of stock options is better employee rights law.