On Penny Arcade, Exploitation, and the Myth of the Do-Everything Rock Star
cwbuecheler.tumblr.com
cwbuecheler.tumblr.com
"You need to have a crazy-person level of attention to detail" - We will judge you based on anything you've overlooked, rather than what you've done.
"A motivated self-starter who can overcome or workaround issues independently" - Don't bother telling us we are asking for something impossible, that's your problem.
"Flexibility to travel up to 30% of the time." - Not only should you be able to do four jobs, but you should be able to do them from an airplane/car/hotel room with permanent availability.
"Should have no problems working in a creative and potentially offensive environment." - Note this doesn't apply to you, only we will be insulting prima donnas. You will conform.
"Flexibility adapting to deadlines, changing schedules, priorities and unpredictable events in a fast paced environment." You should be able to meet deadlines that are assigned arbitrarily. You'll have no control over your own schedule, but you'll be expected to give highly detailed attention to whatever the project of the day is.
"It’s rarely we call on it, but if something breaks in the middle of the night, you are expected to be on call to address that issue 24/7." - We'll cheap out at every opportunity, buying shitty hardware and cheap services, because it's not us that has to fix it when it's 2am Christmas morning. If you keep shit running, then we were right to be cheap. If it fails, then you're a bad IT person. That you recommended a different option is irrelevant.
"we are not money-motivated group" - We aren't motivated to give you any money.
PA will surely find someone who meets their requirements and accepts their level of compensation. PA will be lucky to hang onto them for more than a year. Anyone who has accumulated all of the skills that this post requires, will also not stay in this position for longer than it takes to put it on their resume.
'attention to detail' - If I hire someone I want them to have a good attention to detail and not just do whatever works. It's the little things that make the difference between a good server admin and a great one.
'motivated self-starter' - I don't want someone who's going to run to me to get every decision made. If you are able to identify things that are part of your job, decide how to do them, and do them, that makes my life much easier, and your job more efficient.
'Flexibility to travel' - They run conventions. Obviously they want their IT guy around to help set everything up. The wifi at PAX Prime 2012 was unusable the majority of the time. How do you mitigate that?
'creative and offensive environment' - Well, they can certainly be offensive; sometimes intentionally offending stupid people, sometimes unintentionally offending normal people. I won't get into this (but I've railed against them in the past for shitty comments).
'flexibility with deadlines, schedules, etc…' - This is project management. Anyone who's managing projects (either their own or someone else's) needs to do this. This is entirely normal.
'on-call 24/7' - Again, this is normal. Ideally, you set things up so that they don't break in the middle of the night, or if they do you don't have to deal with it immediately. Shit breaks, that's life.
You seem to assume the absolute worst of every possible thing they say, even though all of this is part of most senior IT jobs.
Their website developer is supposed to be in charge of their convention networking?
> 'on-call 24/7' - Again, this is normal.
Not if there's only one person handling everything. Normally, you have the main developer and someone who is on-call. However, PA wants a developer, a sysadmin, a DBA, and an IT guru all rolled into one, and they want this unicorn to be on call for all four of these jobs 24/7. That's not normal. That's horse shit.
The fact is, he's right: if you have that skillset, chances are they're not paying well enough for what they're asking for, and you'll likely not stay longer than it takes to make the resume look good before you move into a position where you're paid well.
Or maybe they're paying near the top of the industry, seeing as they're asking for near the top of the industry in terms of one-man-team talent.
Crazy-person level of attention to detail. Not good. Not adequate. It asks for perfection, or lunacy: both of which are abusive to ask for. [1]
They run conventions. Obviously they want their IT guy around to help set everything up. [...] How do you mitigate that?
Try hiring four people to do the job of four people. If they fucked up the wifi because their intern-slave is busy updating the site's CSS, managing the databases, backing up the file server, fixing the wifi, carrying down the booths, making coffee, cleaning the toilets, and has to catch a plane for Kuala Lumpur tomorrow at 6 a. m., guess who's failing at his job. And it's not the guy making the coffee.
'on-call 24/7' - Again, this is normal.
Maybe it's normal, but that doesn't mean those who accept it for a pittance are not suckers.
[1] "Oh, but they're joking, it's hyperbole". I presume the salary is a joke too?
To examine this more seriously:
Individually their requirements fit in the broader context of IT. However, taken as a whole the job post screams 'toxic environment', and 'setup for failure'. It's possible I'm entirely wrong, but the post throws off a lot of red flags. Such a long list of requirements and roles without one mention of decision making or authority. Not even one mention of responsibility. Most skilled IT people are comfortable meeting a high standard, but are wary of entering situations where they will be 24/7 solo on-call for variegated environments that they get no authority over.
The issue with the requirements isn't being oncall or managing projects, or travel, or attention to detail, or fexibility, or offensive environment. It's oncall AND projects AND travel AND details AND flexibility AND offensive environment WHILE cheap AND alone.
How would they fix it? How could this job post be better? Change the language to reflect more of a management position. Talk more about selecting and managing tech vendors, projects, strategies. Make it sound like they are looking for an IT Director for guidance who is not afraid to roll-up his sleeves. Right now it appears they are looking for a skilled slave to do it all.
Having been around many highly skilled IT teams, I can guarantee you that most senior IT people aren't filling multiple roles while being on-call for all of them.
EDIT: "The wifi at PAX Prime 2012 was unusable the majority of the time. How do you mitigate that?"
I'd reach out to my network and find someone who's already solved the problem of large scale wi-fi and rent them. Or contact a large wi-fi equipment provider and see if we could make an arrangement for equipment support/manpower in exchange for PAX floor space. The last thing I would do is ask the IT generalist who's been on-call for three months straight and is in the middle of updating the website. "Hey can you figure out convention wifi?"
I would have a lot of questions for them, for sure. I've worked as sysadmin for $10/hr with 24/7 on-call (when I was desperate, broke, and nearly homeless), and I'd never go back. That said, if you're the only IT guy… well, obviously you're going to be on-call if something breaks. I would definitely negotiate this up in my contact if I were interviewing for the job.
The interesting thing to me about the potential here is that they already have all of their infrastructure; they have the website, the servers, the CDNs, and whatever else they need to run the site. The job would involve taking over those responsibilities and bringing them in-house. They already have redundancy, monitoring, and distribution taken care of, so you wouldn't be asked to build a new server infrastructure from scratch and take care of it. You might be tasked with bringing it in-house, but that's definitely doable by one person if there's no strict (unreasonable) timeline on it.
As for the wifi: yeah, I wouldn't want to do it either, personally. There's lots of other people who can do it far, far better than I could.
Looking at the PA guys, I'm willing to make a bet that their biggest IT problem is that they don't know what they don't know. Can awful wifi be solved? Presumably, right? But they're dealing with tens of thousands of people. How do you do that? Who do you call?
So, what they need for the wifi example, for example, is someone who can step in and say 'These are the things we don't know and need to learn', or 'these are the questions we need to ask', or 'this is the discussion we need to have' (which ties in with my 'don't know how to write a good tech job post' point above).
One thing I've learned in tech jobs is that having no answers is far, far better than having no questions. Maybe they're trying to hire someone to ask questions.
Most of the smaller organizations I've worked at don't have an on-call schedule for various reasons, but I'd posit it's primarily that there aren't enough people for a good rotation.
One guy might be able to do something with a server in a pinch, but there's probably only one guy that deals with them as a regular part of his day.
Imagine if, instead of trying to find one 'unicorn', PA hired four separate positions: Server Admin, Developer, General IT, DBA.
Is it really all that effective to have the Server Admin picking up when the issue is that payments on the website have stopped going through? Or the General IT guy answering because the server's down? Sure, if someone gets hit by a bus the other people can probably put out fires if need be, but it's a lot more effective to have the person who regularly works on something and specializes in it working on it when possible.
The 'good' IT departments you're thinking of are probably large enough to have multiple employees in a role.
This is the argument, of course. If four people were hired for the various jobs, as the post advocates, there could be a reasonable rotation of on-call responsibility.
There are three technicians at my organization (2000 users) and we get interrupted on-call only once or twice a year.
By hiring enough qualified people to handle setting it up properly instead of relying on a wing and a prayer and an under-appreciated, underpaid worker doing too many things at once?
This confuses me, because its as if the author tries to force his valuation of the opportunity onto all prospective applicants. He recognizes that a position at Penny Arcade has a level of cachet, but doesn't recognize that that level of cachet is transitive: if someone "can work somewhere “cool” and feel like a part of something big", then good for them. It's up to each person whether or not to decide if those benefits outweigh the costs of eschewing different employment.
Also, lots and lots of ad hominem. I'm not super familiar with Penny Arcade -- having never attended PAX and having not read the comic in a few years -- but a lot of this post seems to be conjecture which hinges on Robert Khoo being a villain.
(I would never apply for this job, because I value salary and work-life balance too much. But I recognize there are people who don't, which is why early-stage startups can thrive.)
Perhaps it's rather as the author believes in an objective reality, where there is one true valuation of a thing, and he's not so much trying to "force his valuation onto all prospective applicants" as trying to "communicate the real valuation to all prospective applicants".
>He recognizes that a position at Penny Arcade has a level of cachet, but doesn't recognize that that level of cachet is transitive: if someone "can work somewhere “cool” and feel like a part of something big", then good for them.
Perhaps he recognizes that what some people perceive as "cachet" is actually BS and can be bad for them, regardless of what they believe, in the same way that a teenager wanna-be rockstar that thinks heroin is cool and an early death is "romantic" needs to be told otherwise...
I strongly disagree with this, though. I'm young, but I'm confident people can have different experiences at the same position -- I have friends who would happily take a salary hit to work at startups or smaller businesses. They value the opportunities and cultures of those jobs to be worth more than the additional $X,000. That doesn't mean they disagree with a "one true valuation" -- it means their valuation has different factors and weights.
Actually, looking at the job post for PA:
- 'Code in multiple front-end and back-end languages' - well, I can do that. In fact, I do a lot of backend work at my job, and am forced to do front-end work for it as well because we don't have web devs on staff.
- "Maintain servers and other hardware including load balancing and database admin" - Yep, I do that. It's part of my core tasks.
- "Do general office IT" - Don't need to do much of this, because we're almost entirely a Mac shop.
- "Manage your own projects" - I suck at this, but It's part of the job.
- "Be on call 27/7 though we hope not to bug you too much in the middle of the night" - Yep. I once got a phone call at 3 AM and had to get up and refactor some code because it wasn't displaying data properly. Not even business critical, that's just how it goes.
I could make more elsewhere, and have on several occasions. I could make twice as much consulting, for example. The perks, however, are great. I get to set my own hours outside of our core hours, I work with really smart people, we have neat company events, and all in all it's a great place to work.
So for everyone who thinks that I'm being 'exploited' the way these PA guys are: I really, really like my job. I have a great team and a great boss, and I'm happier here than I've been in my entire working career, but if someone broke it down to just these bullet points, it might sound shitty.
Personally, I think it would be a great opportunity to work at Penny Arcade. They're a huge company in some ways, and they have a lot of visibility. It's also a fun office environment (ping-pong tournaments? prank wars? video games?) if you're the right fit. I'd apply if I were willing to move to the US (and if I were, Seattle would be a good pick).
It's not all about money. If you're getting paid enough to live comfortably at home, the next most important thing is to live comfortably at work.
Keep in mind, all of these tasks are already being done by somebody. It's possible that the majority of the tasks will be additional projects (e.g. set up an office fileserver to optimize the art workflow, automate common tasks, fix minor bugs in the CMS, etc).
My point is: there's a ton of things we don't know about this job either; for example, their 'we're not going to pay you lots' could mean $100k instead of $120k, which would be fine by me for living in Seattle, but the way people are complaining about it makes it sound like it's $35k/yr and you have to buy your own office equipment.
Oh, lord. No pesky routers, phones, cabling, or other infrastructure-level things, then? Machines never upgraded? Hardware never fails?
Since not everyone is objectivist, the first is sort of contradictory.
The second point is lost on comparing the job to illicit drugs. This is more like comparing it to an intern where you may not get as high of a salary as you could possibly demand, but you will get to work with people you likely view as celebrities. Would be closer to a roadie position with a very established band. Probably not the most lucrative position ever, but is it really comparable to heroin?
That seems like circular logic to me. It assumes that being subjective blocks objective arguments, based on the subjective opinion of some people.
>The second point is lost on comparing the job to illicit drugs.
It's just an example of a tempting but harmful habit.
And there is a huge difference between heroin and "just an example of a tempting but harmful habit." I mean, sure I can see what you are getting at. But I go back to saying it is a terrible rhetorical style. Any point there is lost by it just being off in scope.
Take this as you will, but I would (subjectively, natch) contend that the only objective argument is that objectivity doesn't exist. There is always selectivity in play when making an argument, both by what is included to support the argument and by what is not. So, subjectivity itself blocks objective arguments. I'm willing to be proven wrong, though.
Their cachet is pure geek cred.
If by "geek cred" you mean "the scorn of savvy geeks who can see through cheap employer tactics to get suckers to work for less that they are worth"
Either way, I would think that having Penny Arcade on a resume would be an interesting story but other than that I can't imagine their infrastructure being anything that would help a career. Penny Arcade is probably only slightly above a real estate office for complexity.
I'm not sure how that is any more impressive than many other businesses that aren't known in the geek world.Their other endeavors (Child's Play, PAX) are more business and logistics and light on the IT. From what I've read most of that stuff is outsourced anyways so that PA can focus on the content and not the tedium.
Reddit still gives error pages to me dozens of times a day.
I'm not trying to challenge you, but as an employee I'd always thought that a tech company that supports the infrastructure would look better on resume than one that depends on it. I'd like to hear why.
People who are 'switched on'^ are astonishingly more valuable than people who come to the office and manage to passably succeed at the daily task list they're assigned.
^ <-- This is an arbitrary term I use for people who come to work and care about what they do, engage with other coworkers and generally involve themselves in doing the work because they care about the work, rather than having a 'home life' of things they care about, and not caring about work at all, other than to get money. ...it's easy to tell in person when you work with someone, but much harder from an interview or resume. A history of working at places you cared about is a good indicator in my experience, limited as it is.
This just annoys me to no end. Even in an objective reality, valuations are subjective; e.g. I value having a high-end computer at my home and a rink-a-dink laptop on the road, whereas some of my friends will never own a desktop again because they find no value in it. To be cliche, different strokes for different folks. There is no real valuation of anything, but simply a choice between alternatives which offer some or all of the things that someone chooses to value.
What you're describing is utilitarianism.
Wait, are you proposing that this is actually the case? That all things have one true real value? That if the entire world likes pistachios but I don't, my perceived low value of pistachio is somehow objectively wrong and needs correction?
People value things differently. Whether its because of individual preference, or just different circumstances, the fundamental proposition of commerce is that people want different stuff.
If I have a banana tree and you have a goat, one banana is worth less to me than a cup of goat milk. Meanwhile, a cup of goat milk is worth less to you than a banana. We exchange and now we're both better off. This is the whole reason commerce works: because it's a non-zero game.
people perceive as "cachet" is actually BS and can be bad for them
I'm just flummoxed here that someone can just flatly declare that another's perceptions of their own preferences are bullshit. "No, dude, you really hate chocolate. Trust me. Yeah, that feeling of satisfaction you have right now. Not real. Don't smile like that. It's a fake smile! You hate it!"
How does that make sense?
I didn't get this sense from the post. He disagrees with what Khoo is doing. That kinda necessarily means he'll be talking about Khoo negatively.
Also, I don't see an actual ad hominem attack in here. Buecheler is blunt, but it seems to me he's very explicitly attacking Khoo's actions and policies here. He may be arguing that those actions make Khoo kind of a jerk, but that's not ad hominem. (Buecheler clearly argues Khoo is a terrific businessman, in fact; he just argues that he's using his powers for evil.)
You can certainly argue that "You should know it's a shit job, here's how it's a shit job, but hey it's for Penny Arcade! Woo!" is a fine enough job posting because it's up front about its intrinsic shittiness. But I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to respond with, "Yes, but not only is a shit job still a shit job, this particular one is a shit job at a company that certainly has the resources to make it not a shit job and is choosing to make it so because they're a high-profile, loved-by-nerds company and can get away with it." That response appears to be fundamentally correct.
I find this type of knee-jerk response to the job posting disappointing. When did we become so sensitive or insecure or helpless that we need to shame this person or this job posting?
It's been said multiple times over in this comments thread that Robert is actually being uniquely transparent, that the candidates who apply have lots of other options and no one is being forced to take this job given those two factors. If this was a Craiglist ad for some deviant act, would we jump on our horse and say, "How dare this person ask someone to do [deviant act]?" No, we'd probably just ignore it because we're adults and we get to make our own decisions. That [deviant act] is not for us.
You can say Robert should follow best practices and be more competitive in his offer, and to some extent, this post does that. But to use colorful and aggressive language, presuming that the founders of Penny Arcade are cashing in "trade show checks" is not productive. Robert isn't breaking any employment laws. The best you can do to show your disapproval as a great developer is to not apply.
"Robert isn't breaking any employment laws".
I didn't know we should only voice our disagreement when someone does something illegal. Actually, on second thought, I think doing that would be somewhat redundant because, well you know, the law has already taken care of that.
"The best you can do to show your disapproval as a great developer is to not apply"
What a misguided and cynical opinion! No. What we can do, is to expose unethical and exploitative tactics, in order to protect the younger, and by extension, the more naive candidates.
The point I am making is that there is a community that is taking an outsized response to his very honest and open job posting about the type of person he wants on his team. As many people mentioned here, this isn't very different from other postings in other desired fields, like game design, acting, etc. or in many startups.
I will agree I am cynical but I am hardly misguided. I doubt anyone reading that job posting will think they are joining a highly lucrative, salary-competitive role. They are doing it because they love PA.
What if we wrote the "real" job descriptions of other desired positions like being an engineer at Apple, for example? Apple is notoriously known for working their employees. Where's the outrage?
You and the author of this post has every right to say the job posting is not competitive or in your opinion, unethical or exploitive. Where I find disagreement is the manner in which he argues his points. There's no need to use language that can be misconstrued as aggressive to makes his points, but he does anyway.
I agree that you should attack arguments and not people. Maybe the author of the article got a bit over excited.
Ad hominem is when you say, in effect, "You butter your toast on the wrong side, so I'm going to discount anything you say, you wrong-side-butterer, you."
It's not ad hominem to point out that a a specific claim ("I don't even really like toast," while sitting on a throne and dais made entirely of toast) is calculatedly disingenuous.
The argument isn't "This guy's a hypocrite and therefore he's wrong about absolutely everything," which would arguably be ad hominem. The argument is "This guy doesn't even believe what he's telling you right now, maybe you shouldn't believe it either."
It's not exploitation; it's a trade, and Penny Arcade have listed out their terms. Everyone is free, or not, to go along with what they want.
The author mixes two messages: (1) the merits of the offer, and (2) the ethics of the offer. The author may be right about (1) -- I am not qualified to say -- but this does not imply that he's also right about (2). A poor job offer is not an unethical one; and in this sense I think Penny Arcade are living up to higher standards by being transparent about where they may fall short.
Also, a transparent trade can still be exploitive. If I were to advertise for a slave, that would be an advertisement for an exploitive "offer."
The real question is if this offer, in particular, is exploitive or not. I think he makes a solid case that it is.
You read wrong. tvladek did not say Buecheler implied anything, only that being correct about one thing does not imply being correct about another.
And if you advertised for a slave you would presumably be dealing with the owner of said slave, so if you were offering a reasonable price, then no that would not be an exploitative offer.
Khoo's job posting offers value and leaves it up to the applicant to decide if that is inline with their requirements. For some it will be a dream job. For others it will not.
Slaves do not choose to be slaves, that is part of the definition of the term. The introduction of hyperbole and apples to oranges comparisons does not further conversation.
Personally, I take the former opinion, though I'm saddened that walmart is able to continue to exist despite their bad proposition. Many people see their options as "Work for walmart" or "starve", and in many cases, they're right (Or they might end up with both anyway). Basic income might fix this, though I doubt it.
Given what the requirements and the drawbacks are, that's just marginally better than not being clear.
To give an extreme example to make this clear, I'm not going to be lauded by putting up an ad like: "I'm a old-style racist, and want a black person to serve as my personal assistant. No salary given. Must do as told".
But in America, with no social safety net, the alternative is not pretty.
Reading about unpaid internships, Wal-mart having food drives for their employees and McDonald's recommending employees get a second job makes me sick to my stomach.
The very fact that people even take these jobs is proof they don't have another choice - what sane person would work these jobs if they had a viable alternative - any alternative.
I'm starting to doubt that this kind of thing is hyperbole and starting to think people actually believe it.
Tell me about that safety net.
I'm sure the reply will be that that isn't enough, so at least then we'll just be back to it being righteous hyperbole.
A real safety net for disability would be something like what Aflac provides. I had a friend who slipped a disk in his back and was stuck on a couch for months until he had surgery. Fortunately for him his company paid for disability insurance as a perk. I'm not sure what he would've done otherwise.
Bullshit.
Depending on case loads in your jurisdiction, it might take longer than that to apply and appeal your (likely) denial.
Maybe you're thinking of short-term disability insurance, which is a private service unavailable to those who can't afford it?
Edit because we're too deep in this thread: from ssa.gov
"Social Security has a strict definition of disability for children.
The child must have a physical or mental condition(s) that very seriously limits his or her activities; and The condition(s) must have lasted, or be expected to last, at least 1 year or result in death."
Perhaps you were in a state-run program for minors with different eligibility requirements, I'm not sure.
I personally applied for - and received - state disability payments when I was diagnosed with cancer. I was barely an adult and had no financial means to speak of.
All you're saying is that state programs work, which is a right/libertarian position and probably not what you're going for.
"a person qualifies for SSDI if: they have a physical or mental condition that prevents them from engaging in any "substantial gainful activity" ("SGA"), and the condition is expected to last at least 12 months or result in death, and they are under the age of 65, and generally, they have accumulated 20 social security credits in the last 10 years prior to the onset of disability"...
"Applicants may hire a lawyer to help them apply or appeal... Most SSDI applicants—about 90 percent according to the SSA—have a disability representative for their appeal"
"The Social Security Administration estimates that the initial benefits application will take 90 to 120 days, but in practice filings can take up to eight months to complete. The appeals process for denied filings can likewise take 90 days to well over a year to get a hearing, depending on caseloads."
"In 2013, the average monthly disability payment was $1,132 and highest on record was $2,533"
Is that something you would want to rely on?
So I guess it is technically true, and the advice to someone who breaks their leg is to make sure that it is a horrific fracture that won't heal for a year. Sounds like a comprehensive safety net after all, people with the typical recovery time of only three months are just ineffective and don't want to use the safety net.
edit: deleted double post, got confused by caching
It's tricky getting SSDI when the problem is inobvious like debilitating pain from Trigeminal Neuralgia or Crohns Disease or anything behavioral, cases which - from the outside - look like you're just effort-averse. Even family and friends , it's difficult to watch someone manage their pain with pot and videogames or TV and not conclude they're they're just being deliberately useless and that you should withdraw support "for their own good".
People argue that if you can play games then you can do menial office work, but unskilled office labor pools generally don't tolerate you taking a ton of sick time because you need to spend all day curled in a ball crying, drugged to sleep for pain, or because you're pooping five times an hour. The job market is such that they can just hand your job to someone healthier, and they usually will without considering the labor law of their jurisdiction, you could challenge that but its probably a waste of time. If you can keep them, these jobs probably also don't include health coverage.
This is where the later phases of will ACA become valuable to you, but until then and otherwise (say if its opponents finally manage to kill it), if you have no money or health coverage its pretty fucking hard to get a diagnosis. For pain, if you can't pay much for a doctor you get to spend 90% of every appointment just trying to convince your doctors that you're not a junkie. For anything behavioral, that end of the care market seems to mostly either be a joke where they shrug and throw prescription samples at you or a nightmare where they try to hospitalize you.
Even with a diagnosis you are not likely to be deemed eligible. Then you get to argue your case which requires finding a litigator willing to bet you'll win and some years.
Some assistance you're just automatically not eligible for if you're attending school, with the idea that you'd instead use the financial aid systems specifically in place for that situation, not considering that maybe aren't eligible because your parents make too much, or they refuse to even file taxes so you can prove what they make, or even in the case that you're independent if past health issues affected your grade average too harshly.
Doing all of this yourself (because you have zero social support because friends and family all think you're just lazy or a druggie) with your condition is difficult to say the least.
Meanwhile you're vagrant because there's nothing in place to help you unless and until you win your case(s) for eligibility or wrongful termination, or for getting things stricken from your education record.
And that's if you're even fully educated on what your options for care are. Many people just don't know how to begin seeking free mental care, free clinics or that they could try to find a lawyer that would help them seek SSDI, some are homeless and have no phones internet or mail, some of them are single parents doing everything they can just to continue to have jobs, others have behavioral problems and wrongly perceive that these options will fail so can't generate the will to try them.
Sure, the US has nets, but they're not so big that you don't have to aim for them as you're falling.
I guess there's a logical position that you could hold that the people in those situations don't matter: if they can't even help themselves why should we help them, if it's impossible to distinguish them from lazy people then we shouldn't help them lest we increase opportunity for fraud, but I reserve the completely subjective opinion that such a position is terrible and irresponsible.
I'll re-word what I said to be clearer.
>>But in America, with no social safety net, the alternative is not pretty.
But in America, the social safety net is so grossly inadequate by developed country standards, the alternative is not pretty. America is the only developed country that has many fully employed working people living below the poverty line and ~10% of the population with no health care. (EDIT: re-worded to be per capita, not outright numbers)
This system is such a disgrace, people are forced to take the aforementioned jobs, proving they have no choice.
Ask people from any other developed country, and they'll be shocked, disgusted and outraged that people in a supposedly developed country must live that way.
Are you redefining ethics to suit your argument? Consent does not voids ethics. It's only a single component of ethical behavior.
This isn't really unique to software, so I'll use the example of the dying American family farm.
I grew up on a small farm, for most of the time it was owned by four men, all related by blood. They each individually took full responsibility for the business, and were never off the clock. If something needed doing -- planting a field, fixing a tractor, feeding livestock -- they got it done. They didn't quit working when the work was done, because the work was never done. They momentarily paused when they were too exhausted to continue. If there was an emergency at three AM -- livestock escaped, water main broken, building on fire -- they got out of bed and dealt with it without delay. They were partners.
Occasionally, mostly during harvest, these farmers employed a few farm hands. These farm hands were contracted to do a specific job, like buck hay. They bucked hay for a certain number hours, and then went home. If something went wrong outside their purview, like a tractor breaking down, they informed one of the four farmers, who dealt with it. If there was a disaster at three AM, they were not summoned. They were employees.
It would have been easy for these farmers to expect the farm hands to act like farmers. After all, the farmers worked all day and some nights, did anything that needed to be done. But the farmers were partners in their business, and the farm hands were employees. Expecting employees to behave like partners just makes you a bad boss.
I think it is important for a small business, when growing, to remember the difference between partners and employees, and if you're hiring employees -- and not adding a partner -- to remember to treat them as employees, and not expect them to act like a partner in a business they have no interest in.
In this specific case, Penny Arcade's job offer doesn't mention anything about equity. Their IT guy won't be part of their branding or image, so they don't even get any social equity out of the deal. The IT guy would be an employee, who'd be expected to expend effort like someone who's bootstrapping the business.
If, on the other hand, you do not really want a partner, you should be honest with yourself about what you are looking for. Maybe you really want two or three employees. Maybe you need one full time employee and a few part time employees. Maybe you need some combination of employees and contractors, who can respond to extraordinary problems and then go away when there is no work to do. (IT tends to have a problem with the latter. It's like expecting the cleaning staff to do plumbing just because you don't have enough plumbing jobs to keep a plumber on staff, and they both work with bathrooms.)
To sum it up with a bit of sexist humor, if what you need is a wife, either find a wife or hire a cook, a maid, an accountant, and a mistress. Don't hire a cook and expect him to sleep with you and do your taxes.
I'd take the extra $10k a year over stock 95% of the time, thanks. Or how about a matching 401(k)? Those are the kinds of compensation that show consistent returns right away, and aren't a roll of the (rigged) dice like employee equity.
Assuming success at a $50 million valuation, you did all that sweat equity for 25K, while probably giving up a lot more in salary.
(this is all said with respect to an engineering position)
In an early-stage startup, you are likely to be building the product and doing at least as much useful technical work as the tech cofounder from whom you are taking some of the burden.
Moreover, because you're in a small company, you probably don't get benefits, and you probably don't get good pay ("After the next round!"), and you probably don't get much gear, and so on and so forth. The options you're granted may well not pan out, and even if they do they probably will be diluted into something equal to a holiday bonus.
That being the case, it makes great sense to look after your own interests.
This equation, of course, changes once the company is large enough to actually take proper care of its employees and pay proper market rates.
Yes, it is the difference between being a parent and being a babysitter.
Both are responsible for the health and welfare of one or more children, but the babysitter eventually gets to go home and be "off the clock".
Problem is, many small companies seem to think that the equivalent of calling up the babysitter at 2am to deal with a vomiting child is acceptable.
I understand that pain of seeing someone in an abusive relationship, like a talented programmer working at a game studio on a crappy legacy codebase because it was once touched by some personal hero of theirs. Or the killer VLSI chip designer writing shell scripts any system administrator could write because its "working at Google." But the author here isn't in the place.
He is arguing that this job offer is a setup for entering into an abusive relationship with the folks behind Penny Arcade.
So all of that I understand and I pretty much agree with it, people will ask you to work for peanuts and spin it in such a way that they try to make you feel good about it.
But where it gets confusing for me is the whole 'I'm a unicorn and I know these guys personally' rant. What that reads like is "Gee I'm perfect for this job, know these guys, and would could totally do it but they won't compensate me 'fairly' to do it." The angst of wanting something but not willing to pay the price of getting it.
I don't know what Chris is trying to say there.
Perhaps for some people it is the same reason they take 'production assistant' jobs for minimum wage in Hollywood, so they can 'make contact with' the folks in the industry they want to be a part of. What I do know is that monetary compensation is only part of the value for some people, I know I've been in jobs that the fact they paid me was just icing on the cake, they were that fun to do [1]. Clearly the job posting is looking for someone for whom part of their compensation is that they are part of the 'Penny Arcade' family. I don't see the issue there that Chris does, hence the confusion.
[1] Ok not completely, I do need to eat and live somewhere, but sometimes felt I was being paid more than I needed to be paid to stay, just because it was so interesting/fun.
A story:
I was the technical cofounder (effectively) for a coworking space once upon a time. I did everything from build websites, handle mailing lists, run cable, deploy and design enterprise-class networking infrastructure, take out the garbage, and power-route through a blocked sewer drain.
It was a great job, and a good way of keeping myself in beer money while decompressing from my previous gig.
Except, at the end of the day, I wasn't a cofounder. I had no contractual stake in the company. I had no health insurance. I didn't always get payed on time. To replace me, they suddenly needed: an AV person, a networking person, a Rails developer, and somebody that could hawk their space to other developers (they were biz bros through and through, and the only developers we had at the space were basically due to my networking on their behalf).
I don't regret the time I spent there, and I still help put out fires from time to time, but it was an easy trap to fall into, and could've ended really badly for all parties involved.
In these little businesses, especially when you start taking on the technical risk, you need a stake in the company. Otherwise, you're just some schlub that was recruited to do the work.
And when the web site is updated a little late, or a power outage kills a switch because the owners cheaped out on your spec (and they will, because they think in the small), or some other damn thing, it'll be you swinging in the breeze.
And they'll shitcan you, and find the next person foolish or desperate enough to go in for it.
The wage was fine, the hours were bulky but understandable. Little did I know that the founder wanted/expected probably double that. The nail in the coffin was when he lectured me on how the human body only really needs 4 hours of sleep a night and after 6 months we can re-evaluate my working schedule. Hah!
That for a mediocre wage, no benefits, and zero equity? The last 2 weeks he paid me the salary to find another job, I did zero work for him during that time.
Your anecdote, and the original article, have the same form. Allow me to abstract it a bit and tell me if I screw it up.
We have in one hand a "job" which has some set of properties associated with it; Hours needed to do it, responsibilities, tools, and environment in which to do it. And we have this independent variable, compensation.
Now lets take your anecdote first and change the conditions in a wild way in order to reason about it. Let's say that nothing in your anecdote changes except that instead of 'beer money' it was "$100,000 a week".
That is an extraordinary amount of money per week for someone to make would you agree? If without a "stake in the company" would you have looked back fondly on your time there? Along the lines of "it was a crazy work schedule with people who were clueless but man the money was sweet." ?
What I'm trying to demonstrate is that there is a "value" received when working somewhere. It is more complex than just "cash" it has elements of ownership, cash, people, tools, location, and mission.
I've hired consultants that their bottom line was cash per week. They had a goal of some amount of cash by some point in time and they could be sorting pennies by minting date all day long and be fine with it if it met their cash flow goal.
I've known people continue to work on stuff after the company ceased to exist because it was something they were really committed to getting done.
I have come to conclude that the value someone gets from doing a particular job is a deeply personal thing and unique and made up from a variety of factors some of which I can control and some of which I cannot. When people are reasonably self aware about what it is they value they can make good choices about what compensation they would need to work somewhere. And those values can change over time.
So back to your anecdote, when you started the job it met all your compensation needs (beer money, decompressing) after a while it didn't (no equity, no health insurance, poor predictability of pay), perhaps because once you had "decompressed" you were once again thinking about the future and the relative value of things like health insurance rose in your list. I knew a guy who fell in love with the girl of his dreams and she was constrained to living in Livermore, a 2 hr commute to the southern part of the Bay Area. You could not pay him enough to stay in his job, he changed to a job in Livermore. The values changed over time.
So let's get to where we disagree, the characterization of the Penny Arcade job as a "set up".
For me, the term 'set up' implies fraud. And yet the terms of the job are very clearly spelled out in the job listing. Given that level of clarity I have no trouble believing that they would be as forthcoming in person as well (but could be wrong there). You and I can read it, "If you want equity you need not apply" or as Chris read it "PA isn't interested in sharing any wealth with you." and in both cases forewarned is forearmed. But they already said they wouldn't and presumably people who value equity will, in fact, not apply (or at least ask if that is a possibility prior to applying)
So end of the day. I don't agree Penny Arcade is being misleading or 'setting someone up' to be exploited. While I can understand that someone whose value equation isn't met by what they are offering would consider themselves "exploited" if they were forced into that sort of labor contract. Except nobody is forcing anyone here.
And in the long run, that probably wouldn't matter as much as getting paid properly--especially once the glamor wears off.
The point the author makes is that they are doing well enough that they could actually be paying better than market rates, and could have put up a job posting that would've avoided all this.
I agree with your summary, but again the problem is that it is very, very easy to trick people into doing things not in their self interest--and if not trick outright, to allow them to convince themselves something is a better deal than it is.
And we can all claim "Hey, they knew the terms when they signed up", but that doesn't excuse their being taken advantage of by people who don't have to do so.
People are dumb and don't always do smart things, and only sometimes does experience give them the perspective to admit that they were dumb--it's not unreasonable for the rest of us to try and warn them.
What the...? Why would you do that?
Honestly, because I consider what they do to be important to my community, and because if they succeed they'll help everyone else; it's a form of community service for me.
So what if the blogpost describes a myth, and they'll settle for someone who does a bit of each? That's not a crime, that's a strategy.
That said, if a rushed Bill Gates pays you $500 for a Starbucks coffee and you bring him instant coffee instead, it doesn't matter whether he drinks it: you still exploited him. These are all examples of exploitation, just of relative degree.
I've been in positions where I was in charge of developing software, building servers from scratch (which was a ton of fun, since I got to play with tens of thousands of dollars worth of hardware that I wouldn't have otherwise), doing desktop support, creating a build/deploy/test strategy, planning projects, and on and on. I wasn't the best guy to be in charge of building servers, and I'm sure I got some things wrong (looking back, I definitely got some things wrong!), but it got the job done and was a hell of a learning experience. And it all worked. And the company made some decent money off it.
So as a fellow "Jack of All Trades Master of None", I say good luck to PA. :)
Is that really so hard to find? I might be selling myself short... (I actually thought I'm worth less on the marketplace by being a "generalist")
If you can fulfill four jobs by yourself, then you should be getting paid for four jobs. In Seattle terms, that should be north of 200k annual.
(nod to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)
"Although test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd."
A glance at the graph above should explain everything. Though many assume the slope of the "perception graph" is monotonically negative, the slope is actually positive.
Distributions still overlap, though.
I mean, if "managing office firewalls" is on someone's list of things that are impressive, maybe that person does not have a clear view of the problem space.
But I should not even be giving the article so much attention as this. It's clear the author is confused. At first he talks about how rare and crazy it is to find someone who can do this, but then, contradictorily, he laments that PA will get tons of applicants who can do the job. Well, guy, which is it? They can't both be true.
All that is going on here is that someone had a negative reaction to the job posting and is trying to express and rationalize their reaction, regardless of how that rationalization really matches up to reality. Happens all the time, why am I even replying?
If you don't believe that highly-productive programmers exist, it is only because you haven't yet met one.
Surely you don't think the potential of these highly productive programmers is to spend their days doing general IT, working on call 24/7, and being compensated with below market salary and benefits?
Programming skill, at least, is like compound interest. The more you program, the better you will be in the future, which means you will learn faster in the future, etc. At a big company or in an undemanding situation, your pace of learning is pretty slow, being limited by the circumstances around you; and like any compound interest, if you get behind, it becomes pretty hard to catch up to where you would have been.
Whereas in a small-company situation or any situation where you are limited only by what you are physically and mentally capable of doing, you are learning as fast as possible. It is very good.
You could say that the Penny Arcade job is not as good as starting your own startup and working that hard, and maybe that is true; but my company shut down and left me $100k in debt (back in 2000 when $100k was real money!) whereas when you get paid, you are not taking the same risk. Maybe this also means it is psychologically difficult to work as hard. I don't know.
Sure, there are a lot of people out there who exaggerate on their resume, but this has nothing to do with the existence of people who actually do know things.
And even then, you aren't working at average levels, you would be far below it due to overexertion.
You can't have one guy write the website, maintain the servers, support the office IT, act as tech support, and manage all the site databases. Not on something as big as PA, at least. Maybe on a site with 100k views a month, where the server is just an ECS2 instance and your office firewall is a dlink router with iptables.
In terms of greed, the blog post above correctly points out that Penny Arcade is at this point a large outfit that is making a ton of money. The founders are at this point millionaires and will, baring extravagant spending, never have to worry about money again. So when they come out with a job posting such as this one people look at it as they would seeing a wealthy investor hiring an unpaid intern as an assistant, or something similar. This person has more than enough money to satisfy almost every desire, and yet rather than pay competitive wages, or work to spread some of that wealth out to the people who help them obtain their success they have deliberately chosen to keep as much of it as possible even to the point of paying people far less than they are worth, instead talking up nebulous terms like "access", "experience", or "work environment". This strikes most people as the definition of greed (taking more than you could possibly need even if it means exploiting other people) and we generally react negatively.
In terms of hypocrisy, there is right up front the spectacle of a businessman and salesperson telling you with a straight face that they are "not money-oriented" despite the fact that this is a complete description of their job. But more than that, you have an organization that has spent years taking potshots at the "big guys" ostensibly standing up for the "gamer", aka the little guy, the consumer, etc, etc. Hell they even run a comic about QA work in the game industry, ostensibly a satire about the terrible conditions, accompanied by writeups from people doing QA talking about the terrible exploitation they have faced. But apparently, when push comes to shove (or paying market wages), Penny Arcade is just as comfortable taking advantage of naive young people, willing to grind themselves down for their "heroes" as their heroes gaze on and pocket millions.
Given those two things, I think the only surprising thing is that apparently the powers that be at Penny Arcade are too sheltered to not immediately understand that this would be the reaction they would receive.
Firstly, take a job posting to it's logical extreme and you'd get something similar to the linkedin post[1].
"We want a ninja rockstar coder+sysadmin in the top 99.999th percentile of skill/ability/knowledge. A successful candidate will give their heart and soul to the company, for very little money. Fringe benefits: pong pong table, a beer fridge, and limited 401k matching"
[1] Speaking as someone currently looking for work.
Secondly, this is par for the course at Penny Arcade who has historically gone to great (and borderline abusive imho) lengths to find the best candidates. Their television show PATV did two fascinating arcs on hiring, the first episode of which is here: http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/new-hire-part-1
Robert Khoo will no doubt get a lot of applicants, whom he will ruthlessly cull until he has the perfect fit for his organization. And if he can't find a perfect fit, he'll start over until he does.
I greatly admire his accomplishments at Penny Arcade and have no strong desire to work for him.
[1] https://twitter.com/jephjacques << at the moment, the posts are about 4 hours old and the first 5 or so.
Also, while this is sarcasm in the tech industry, this is the life blood of non-profits.
The salary you'd consider for a for-profit and for a mission you believed in are two different domains, though. (I speak, from the heart, as one who finds the idea of believing in money incomprehensible - I am aware that not everyone's brain has the same bug/feature.)
However hard it may be for some here to believe, there are many people who are most efficient -- and most satisfied -- in an environment of constant and unpredictable variety in both type and intensity of work, just as there are people who find it more entertaining being jacks of all trades rather than mastering one.
Implying that all jobs should accommodate your personal preferences (e.g. specialization, predictability, or work-life balance) is not doing them any service, and their skills are already discounted too far in this marketplace.
The mindset behind this job posting is quite similar to that behind unpaid internships.
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Work_with_us
The smartest people you will ever work with, doing good work on a seriously popular website, at charity rates of pay ;-)
But... you know, honestly, I think the closest thing to an industry-changing genius Penny Arcade has is Robert Khoo, and this job ain't gonna have you getting your hands dirty in such a way that lets you learn Khoo's ways.
There's a broader argument for and against "specialization" i.e. studying other disciplines yields perspective etc.
At any rate, I'll share the ways I'm solving it presently:
* reduce the number of disciplines required to be effective * confront human resource management problems * build funnels to save time or improve process
I suppose I'm advocating tackling fundamental leadership problems in an organization :/
If you have any advice or ideas you can share I'd surely love to hear them.
This has the consequence that I prefer migration from inhospitable climates to hunkering down in the antarctic with no snow boots. Quit early and often for me means that you are better off finding and working within a good system than sinking your time and energy attempting to change a bad system. If you have no power to affect "fundamental leadership" problems in an organization, my suggestion is to find another organization--if you can afford it.
its not uncommon to see in the games or entertainment industries in general... everyone wants in and so many are willing to work themselves to death for it.
Absent that, there is no ad hominem. What you have is a discussion of the personalities involved in the enterprise and a speculation as to their motives, methods and the means available to them. All of that is relevant in answering some questions which need to be asked of any job offer: Who will I be working with? Will I be a valued team member? What will the team and workplace dynamics be? How do these people operate?
The term ad hominem means a specific thing. It's not a blanket term for "some people were spoken of in an unflattering way." If you don't like that some personal qualities are discussed and conclusions drawn therefrom, say that you simply dislike discussions which include value judgments about the actions of specific people.
Hell, we don't even really know what the compensation is for this position. Could be they are willing to pay upwards of 200k. Am I just missing where they are saying this will pay terribly? I saw they are not "money oriented" which is probably true since they have more of it than they can really reason about. Better, they have front row access to what they dreamed about as kids. They don't need the money anymore.
I think something a lot of folks from companies that aren't 20ish people are missing is that they are effectively auditioning someone to come be part of a very close knit crew. Imagine the postings for a recurring role on {insert popular tv show}.
It's pretty upfront about the fact that if working for Penny Arcade isn't a huge plus point for you, you're not the person for the job. That's supposed to be part of your compensation.
Don't ignore that second sentence. If you're interpreting this section as anything other than "shit pay", you're being wildly optimistic.