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-...
...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.
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.
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.
In case your browser isn't showing it (android chrome?), there is some italicized emphasis there.
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.
Agree with your overall point though.
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.
We can also see this in Foxconn assembly lines, the home of the work/life balance in China.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
Picture yourself meeting new people. The first question to eventually come up will be "So, where do you work?"
http://www.sfgate.com/news/slideshow/Mark-Pincus-039-16M-Pac...
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.
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.
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.
Of course, this all sounds ridiculous in comparison to "real" evil, like mass murder. So I'm also tempted to disagree ;).
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.
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.
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.