About the Penny Arcade Job Posting
forums.penny-arcade.com
forums.penny-arcade.com
* He speculates whether the job is worth a "lower salary" (and, given his admitted inexperience in the workforce, he probably has no idea what a market salary looks like)
* "The ping-pong table is NOT a benefit"
* He's on the "bottom of the goddamn ladder" and "reminded every day" edit: I'm getting a lot of flak for taking this out of context. This is a post on his employer's public forum, that they tweeted out on their corp accounts. It's not a stretch to read between the lines because this "joke" is so awkward and forced. I cannot imagine that it didn't have a double meaning. In other words, "ha ha only serious"
* He wears "four hats," and does the job of "two people" so they can run "lean."
* At some point his burnout was so bad (and so visible), his employers asked if they could "send [him] anywhere"
It's really a little strange to read this post. It's obvious that he really, really likes his coworkers and really, really hates his job. He describes horrible things with soft, feel-good terms. The author seems to hope applicants go into it with open eyes: the new hire will be crapped on and underpaid while he keeps a laptop next to the bed to handle early-AM change requests. But your coworkers are really fun!
The ladder is about the ping pong league they run, and he's joking that it's not a benefit because he's not winning. He decided he preferred to get a lower salary for a job he enjoyed more. He said he can wear four hats because "The reality is that one highly motivated, highly skilled person can handle all of this. You do not need to be constantly working IT, or constantly managing servers or writing code. There’s a lot there, yes. This is a job that will keep one person fairly busy. Two people might find themselves spending a lot of time on /r/aww."
So either you're really reading a lot between the lines to see what you want to see, or you didn't read it.
He posted this on his current employer's public forum, after all.
I did not get that after re-reading the post. While I thank you for clarifying the point which changed the tone of the post dramatically(bad juxtaposition if you ask me, really), I'd also like to point out allegations of did you read the post are, in general, not constructive ad hominem(that whoever you're replying to is incapable of reading and etc.) and uncalled for.
They rationalize it because they are working for themselves (read: their VC) to death.
* No, the conditions are not awful...I love this company
* No one here has been scammed into working as hard as they do, and the implication that we’re all blind fools with low self esteem for being here is honestly insulting.
* There won’t be any taking advantage of starry-eyed young twenty-somethings.
He explains why he's leaving directly and clearly, (including "No, I did not burn out.") and that he likes working there. You're assuming he's lying, which you can't know.
He very obviously loves the company, but it's not a healthy love.
It's clearly not for everybody, but it's not at all difficult for me to imagine that it's very much for some people.
> That’s like saying everyone would be fulfilled by getting married and having 2.5 kids.
Not everyone has the same utility function.
I don't think I can do that here, though. You're totally right in that people have different utility functions, but I believe that there are some things that are just objectively bad and unhealthy, and whether or not you think you enjoy them or "like" them, they are still bad for you, and possibly bad for others.
I don't want to live in a world where it's ok for a company to create a position like this guy was in, and have that be the norm. No, it's not like that, but the more we apologize for companies that do that, and the more we say, "oh, it's ok for that person to work in those conditions; if you don't like it then pick another job", the easier we make it for companies to think that those kinds of things are ok for everyone.
And then there's the wage issue. Bottom line: if you are working the jobs of more than one people, you should be paid more than one person. This guy took a pay cut to do more work. That's certainly a reasonable thing to do if compensation comes from other (healthy) angles, which appears not to be the case. The job posting for his replacement explicitly says they're cheap-ass bastards who aren't going to pay what you are worth or what the job duties merit.
That's not just a company I don't want to work for. That is a company with staffing practices that are actively harmful to individuals and the industry as a whole.
edit: @wvenable puts it so so so well a bit below: "I guess I'm old and tired of my peers devaluing their own skills and time."
Basically this whole issue seems to be a case where a significant part of the compensation is non-monetary (essentially, working at PA), and people whose utility functions assign that compensation zero value are getting bent out of shape about the fact that there exist people whose utility functions assign that compensation high value. (For the record, I'm in the group who assigns it zero value.)
This needs to be protected by applicants valuing their time. I guess I read the current guy's description differently than you did; to me, it seemed his multiple-job job required significantly more time than the norm.
I think I distinguish between forms of non-monetary compensation as being good and bad (or healthy and unhealthy, if you prefer). Again, this is all relative, but I think at least on a base level we can probably find common ground here. Accepting lower pay because a place to work is "cool" falls squarely into the unhealthy pile for me. Perhaps it temporarily raises your happiness level (which is of value!), but it's fleeting, and, well, temporary. Accepting lower pay because you're underqualified and the job will be a bit learning experience for you seems reasonable, as would accepting equity in lieu of pay (e.g. a recently-started company) if you think it might be worth something later to compensate. These sorts of things can have lasting impact on your life and are actually useful.
As I said, I just worry that things like this can inspire other companies to do similar things. Right now it's fairly easy to get a job at a good company if you're a developer with some chops. Demand is high and supply is still not quite meeting that demand. But what happens if that changes? If there's a strong culture of paying people market rates and avoiding my-company-is-cool type compensation in lieu of cash, perhaps people can expect a reasonable wage standard when the market is more competitive. But every company that tries to feed applicants some feel-good bullshit about how it's ok that they pay people less because they're just so cool... well, that jeopardizes that.
Or perhaps I'm just worrying about nothing.
To me, this reads as "This needs to be protected by applicants changing their utility function." Applicants do value their time. Everyone values their time. They just value it differently.
Your claim basically hinges on your belief that some aspects of utility are objective. The essential point of your argument then, as I understand it, is that you want job applicants to correct their utility functions according to that objective evaluation, to help out the rest of us whose utility functions are already 'correct'.
This would actually be pretty cool, but the trouble is that you really are not going to have much luck trying to convince everyone else to agree with your utility estimates, even if they do strike you as objective. I think I would probably agree with many of them, personally, but they cannot be made normative.
At the end of the day I agree that you are probably worrying about nothing. I'm not going to claim that the market does an excellent job of setting salaries. There are a lot of irrational agents at play in that market, and the results are skewed accordingly. That said, I think this particular brand of irrationality is highly unlikely to be a driving force.
(With my apologies to Pearl Jam)
Well, duh, presumably he'd like to get a job at some point in the foreseeable future, and bad-mouthing your former employer is a wonderful one-way ticket to food stamps.
>No one here has been scammed into working as hard as they do
"Scam" is subjective. Of course nobody thinks they've been scammed. If you think you've been scammed, you quit. But if someone works basically illegal hours for below-market pay at a high-visibility company whose great overall contribution to society is a three-panel webcomic, well, it walks like a scam, quacks like a scam, and flies south for the winter.
>the implication that we’re all blind fools with low self esteem for being here is honestly insulting.
You don't have to be a blind fool to make a bad decision, and you don't have to hate yourself to sell yourself short. The reason we say these people are being exploited is quite simple: everything about their situation fits perfectly with the exploitation hypothesis. But you know what? This is par for the course in the world of "art". If you want to work in the "art" industry, like for a webcomic or a video game studio, be prepared to be paid less for more work than in some respectable field, unless you find a way to exploit the situation, cf. Thomas Kincaid.
Of course people call it exploitative, but it's really market pressure. There's no shortage of starry-eyed twenty-somethings to take advantage of, so the whole industry does it because, seriously, who's going to turn down free money? Why would you hire someone for a decent job at a respectable salary when you can make someone's life hell for a fraction of the price without any real impact on your bottom line? That's all Penny Arcade is really thinking.
Of course there's a word for people who think like this: Homo economicus. There's also a shorter word with less Latin: despicable. Penny Arcade is despicable. Period.
>There won’t be any taking advantage of starry-eyed young twenty-somethings.
But there is. It's their business model. It's part of the business model of a litany of "cool" companies where, in lieu of a fair salary, you get to put on your Facebook "I work at Penny Arcade", and, I dunno, maybe people think it'll get them laid or something.
You can't ignore a person's status when you're considering what they're saying. This poor bastard's comments have a direct and measurable impact on his future earning prospects, and having Hacker News ruminate over his situation for half a week is steadily decreasing his prospective income for the rest of his life. These are facts, not opinions. This is what happens when you bad-mouth your employer, because the deck is stacked against you.
>He explains why he's leaving directly and clearly, (including "No, I did not burn out.") and that he likes working there
In conclusion, no shit, Sherlock. Would you hire someone who said they burned out at their previous job because it sucked? Of course not.
If the person hired is also satisfied in the position, I suspect that will make no difference to the naysayers.
But it's not that easy for a company to keep employees happy. Many who pay market rates have mostly miserable workers. To me, a genuinely satisfied employee is never an example of a moral or other mistake by a company.
From the comment it's pretty obvious this is a two person job and getting a single dev is a business mistake.
There's no way that wasn't intended to have a double meaning.
Even if they find someone who's just as skilled and motivated, that person won't have the key experience of "I built all this" and will have to spend a much larger fraction of time on maintenance/extension.
Ultimately PA will have to hire multiple people to do all this stuff. If they're smart they'll recognize it now, rather than when the smart, motivated person they do hire starts to fail.
The bottom of the ladder is takin outta context, I am pretty sure he is referring to his position in the ping pong standings and joking about the ping pong table.
Salary is poor may also be considered "fair" based on his comment:
It is true that I am paid below market value, but not so significantly as folks on the internet assume.
I say this as someone who went through that exact situation: I worked at a small company for five years out of college, and was on-call for 24/7 for most of that. Someone called me on my goddamn honeymoon (which was basically the only real vacation I took during the interval) to troubleshoot a minor issue I had left explicit instructions for before I left.
They were very good with salary increases, and I didn't get more than a 5% raise out of switching jobs. But I went from working 50-60 hours a week, plus perpetual on-call, to working 40 hours a week.
I loved working there, loved the people, had a lot of fun but ... I wish I'd left years earlier. It wasn't worth it. It's hard to admit it, when you love a job that doesn't love you back. But I will never go back to working the job of two people unless I'm getting paid the salary of two people.
A normal web dev job, with limited on-call and not a lot of travel, perhaps, but unless he's being paid in the high-$100s, the travel and on-call requirements alone would have made him, in actuality, paid vastly below market.
I'm also intrigued to learn that he worked for Amazon as his one and only job out of college, before joining PA. With respect to the Amazonians on HN, his experiences working on a frontend team (with the requisite and insane oncall) at Amazon may have helped normalize a job description that to most of us here seems shocking and deplorable.
Amazon's salary offers to new undergrads is on the low end of normal (it's a standardized package, almost zero wiggle room on the compensation front). They're also infamous for their oncall system - a major contributor to their sky-high attrition rate. Turnover at Amazon is insane. I'm willing to bet that in his 3 years at Amazon, Kenneth would have seen just about every single person on his team turn over. In fact, if he was at Amazon for 3 years he's already way over the average tenure for devs, and likely the most veteran member of his team.
If you're coming from this environment, the PA deal is only moderately crazier. If you're coming from, well, most sane development jobs, the PA deal would seem absolutely off its rocker.
I spent 2 years at Amazon. I learned a ton, I worked with some great people. But boy, if you think Amazon is a "normal" gig, I've got a bridge to sell.
I say this as someone who went through that exact situation: I worked at a small company
SOP for small companies, except the market value bit, you'll usually get less.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/screenlife-part-1 http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/screenlife-part-2
"he probably has no idea what a market salary looks like"
Amazon doesn't pay as well as Google, but Amazon salary is really far better than you'll get at anything other than the four big tech companies for a normal SDE.
It would be like a textbook case of the Stockholm syndrome -- only, despite trying quite hard, he doesn't come off as that keen about his captors or his environment anyway...
* "It is true that I am paid below market value"
* "If I had had to apply for the job with the presently listed requirements, I might not have gotten the offer."
* "Depending on the project load, I might spend 8 hours at the office and call it good, or I might stay til 10-midnight consistently for a couple weeks."
Just because the person who currently does the job feels this is a great thing and all the people applying for the job feel it's a great thing doesn't make it great.
I guess I'm old and tired of my peers devaluing their own skills and time.
They need to admit to themselves that they didn't treat the previous guy right for the kind of work he put in.
Honestly, given PA's history I'm not surprised by this whole situation. They seem like a great bunch of guys who suffer from some serious Aspie-myopia about how life works for everybody outside of their club, and they've had to fight enough trolls and lunatics online that they can't sort out the legitimate criticism from the noise anymore, so when they screw up they just double-down.
You are spreading misinformation, and potentially insulting people in a throw-away portion of your otherwise good point. You don't need to be on the spectrum to be myopic.
Financial gain? Nope. World class technological challenges? Still no. Work life balance? Obviously not. Solving meaningful problems? No. Name recognition or industry stepping stone? Maybe, but highly mitigated by the fact that any serious applicant would be qualified for more valuable positions elsewhere.
Is this job squarely aimed at die hard PA fan-people? What about them as an organization is particularly exciting?
You'll notice the PA guys themselves are technologically illiterate. Most of their fan base is too. They appeal to people who want to be labeled as gamers more so than they appeal to people who play games.
>Salary: Negotiable, but you should know up front we’re not a terribly money-motivated group. We’re more likely to spend less money on salary and invest that on making your day-to-day life at work better.
That immediately jumped out at me. That came off so off-putting. If you're not a "money motivated group", that means you pay more, right, RIGHT? No, of course not. Again, the author probably didn't mean for it to come out the way it did, but it felt so sleazy, like they were trying to put one over the applicant. "We can't pay you a lot because we're not about money here". .. urgh.
All the other stuff about work-life balance and multiple roles, I didn't have a problem with. This job is made for a single 20-something guy or girl who wants to hang out with the penny-arcade crew, not someone with kids and a spouse.
So 80 hours of work a week -- or more. Inability to travel or enjoy wilderness or even visit family if they don't have reception. And if you're in the hospital, maybe they will visit and lend you something relatively cheap that you can return later.
I suspect the answer is a flat, "No." Unless I was running a successful media company like PA there's nothing in it for you. What about it being PA makes it okay then?
Unfortunately I'm not surprised by the job posting. In non-unionized media companies the labor relations are generally very poor. A friend of mine used to work in such a post-production audio studio as a junior engineer. They paid him practically nothing and waited as long as they could to pay his invoices. In return he lived to work for them and never received credit for anything.
In contrast his sister worked in a larger post-production effects studio where the workers were unionized. She still has a job there afaik and is quite happy. Her brother left his gig when he was up to his eyeballs in debt and couldn't handle the hours anymore.
It sucks but that's the free market for you.
It sucks, but that's "the reality of what the people of Earth have demonstrated they want" (when they have to make tradeoffs against the rest of reality, anyway) for you.
"This job meant security, a huge opportunity to go out of my comfort zone and learn, and countless other 'soft' benefits I couldn't think of. And I got to work with people I truly enjoyed."
i can't even begin to know what the fuck a 'volunteer' Enforcer is, especially for a profitable company. quite frankly it sounds like the typical 20 foot pile of horse shit that only the games industry could come up with. and i've seen some really mind-bendingly exploitative behavior after being based here in LA for a decade.
anything significantly less than the above salary + benefits, and you are being ripped. off. by. people. who. know. better.
i know this because i have several senior devops guys on my staff who fit that description and have been with us for over 3 years. this is also what I used to make as a senior engineer before i started up my company as an owner/executive.
people should be FAR AND AWAY your most expensive resource. with a few notable types of exceptions, if you pay your people less than your hosting provider or your rent or marketing, you're doing something very, very wrong, and it will catch up to you in some way or another. see: penny arcade job post.
Why don't you try using Google and looking it up before angrily speculating?
The Enforcer system is what the use at Penny Arcade Expo. It's a volunteer system to help run the event, and in return you get to attend things when you're not on the roster. It's no different to all sorts of roles, be it grad students being a student volunteer to attend a conference (and if you want to talk about underpaid, grad student is where it's at) or teenagers picking up trash after the Glastonbury Music Festival.
No-one is being pressganged into being an Enforcer, it sounds like a pretty sweet gig to me.
that's funny, i didn't see "non-profit" or "charity" anywhere on this page. you guys should consider updating it.
i am angry because there is an ongoing, systematic monetary devaluation (and hence social devaluation, dot com billionaires notwithstanding) of all technical roles by people in our own industry. it pisses me right the fuck off and the games companies are at the forefront of the fuckedupedness and loss of dignity.
you chain this fucking guy to a pager and pay him peanuts and harass him to the point where he needs to resign and then flippantly post another job posting with such unbelievably thinly veiled condescension and arrogance, and it's about time an industry called you out for it.
Since you didn't seem to get it, the Enforcers are people that 'volunteer' for parts of the event in exchange for free tickets to attend the rest.
a for-profit enterprise should not be asking for volunteers for anything. that is a moral position i take.
second, the loss of dignity and monetary devaluation was referring to his day job. the one that he ostensibly makes a living from.
Why do you hate freedom? Think someone's going to steal your job? Are you one of those union members who freak out if someone is setting up at a convention center and plugs in their own laptop or moves their own chair? :P
(Now if they're fraudulent and misrepresent the volunteering, that's another matter.)
They are 'volunteers' in the sense they are not an event staff handled some company. Penny Arcade decided they wanted some event staff made up of people that were interested in making the event a success because they were also part of it.
Free work for a weekend seems quite different than systematic under compensation in your day-to-day job.
It's not that hard:
Want a programmer? Hire one.
Want a web developer? Hire one.
Want a system administrator? Hire one. Hire two if you have any type of 24/7 on call requirement (it's not remotely reasonable to expect one individual to be on call 24/7 365).
Then unless you want to get sued, set reasonable expectations of hours (2x full time is not reasonable).
The only issue is if the workload is more than one person can handle. In this case, the work sounds like it's only slightly more than a one-person job and it's unfortunate he's not paid accordingly.
Penny Arcade is not a small company in that sense. They definitely _could_ hire the right 4 people to work there, but instead they want to just pay 1 person to do that job.
While I am sure you were competent enough to do 3 jobs, you are probably not as good at all 3 as someone who focuses primarily on one of those roles. But you forget this is for 4 jobs, and they want 1 person to do all that within their regular bounds of a job where they expect you to be on call 24/7. Oh and they want to pay you below market rates to do all 4 of them. I think that is what every is angry about.
There seems to be a disconnect here between the amount of income/profit of a company and the size of the company. It doesn't sound like there is enough work for 4 people full time. There might not even be enough work 2 people full time all the time.
And while you might be right that I'm probably not as good as someone focusing on a single job that's irrelevant. I was competent enough to get the job done.
Good lucky finding someone who is good at all those things, doesn't mind working 80s hours a week while being on call 24/7x365 AND doesn't mind a below average salary. You'd be lucky to find any one of those qualities.
The job posting said they are a team of 15-20 people which is more than large enough to be run better than a sweat shop.
For the sake of the 15-20 people lucky enough to have PA as an employer, I hope it's just "IT" that they take a shit on (not terribly uncommon as it's usually seen as an expense instead of an asset).
I don't get how people are translating how he worked around 80 hours a week for a very brief period into some sort of hours requirement or expectation for the job. That's not even remotely what he said.
Overall, it reinforced that they are interested in someone who is willing to take a below market rate, is a generalist in many arenas, and is willing to work 60-80 hours a week, including 24/7 on call.
Honestly, breaking the job into 2 positions (no, they would not be reading r/aww all day, and if they were, you hired the wrong people) would make this SO much more enticing. It would eliminate the 24/7 on call (you could do every other week), you'd have someone to bounce ideas off, and if you hired the right 2 people, their expertise in the 4 'jobs' would likely be much higher than whoever is going to get the gig currently.
The clincher is how he ends his post: "There is this notion that work/life balance is some kind of sacred goal. I’m sorry, but it’s ludicrous. That’s like saying everyone would be fulfilled by getting married and having 2.5 kids. If you want to work 40 hours and never think about your job after 5pm, great! Find something that does that for you. If you want to work 80 or more hours at something you truly enjoy, in fact you don’t want to stop working ever because you love it so much, shouldn’t that be okay too? Shouldn’t we be so lucky as to have a job that we are so invested in?"
He has set up a false dichotomy and left out a whole lot of other possible options out of his little attempt at rationalizing selling oneself to a rich person for less than his efforts are worth. Dismissing an abusive employment environment with a statement about people "choosing" to work there while ignoring all the context around such "choices" is just runny icing on that crap cake.
In pure capitalistic terms what these companies are doing is profiting from an imbalance in the labor pool. But what they are also doing is creating a vicious cycle where a whole swath of smart people avoid the industry altogether, and experienced employees eventually get burned out and leave. This in effect embeds all sorts of idiotic behaviors in the game industry.
As a pure business move, if someone agrees to be paid far less than they're worth, that's an easy way to make more money. But it is unethical and ultimatley counterproductive in my book.
This is especially an issue with "big name" companies that have "franchises." Their core market is unlikely to not purchase the next release in the franchise, so quality is less of an issue.
The fact that he's ok with that is the problem!
Saying that he somehow has a problem because that's what he wants in life is pretty judgmental. Do I want to work that way? No. Do you? No. Does it mean he has a "problem" because that's what he wants? No.
And now we get a forum post from the poor sucker who confirms that the reality of this job is as brutal and exploitative as promised. But that's totally cool because he never felt taken advantage of because of the smooth atmosphere , the cool tech and the friendly colleagues. Looks like the Penny Arcade guys took a page from the game industries playbook.
Next, you'll be telling me that I'm not really getting a 10% finders fee from the $75M fortune of Oil Minister Louis N'Kornongo of Nigeria for helping him transfer the money to the USA. As if.
Why would you take a below market wage to do twice the work? Is there equity in penny arcade? Some kind of lucrative upside we don't know about?
So what I'm missing is whether there's a legitimate reason for him to be paid below market considering the Penny Arcade seems quite successful.
Though as one of the many people who's accepted supposedly below market pay, I can somewhat relate.
I am fully aware that I make below market pay. Almost everyone (except for my developer co-ops, who I need to pay above market to be competitive in the local market) at the not-for-profit I work for does. It's not something that it hidden but our revenue comes from government money and membership fees that is best applied towards fulfilling our mandate so from a community perspective standpoint there is some degree of necessity.
There are other compensation factors though. There's some amount of profile enhancement (in a smallish pond), I've learned a ton, I get to work with a huge number of startups, I get to participate in any of the company-run events I want (and there's a lot).
To me, those are legitimate reasons for me to accept a salary under market value. But if we were a for profit the equation changes dramatically.
Salary is not the be all and end all for all (arguably most) people, and if it's within a certain percentage of market value, then other factors of compensation do make it worthwhile. Maybe you could get 10% more working in grey cubes but you wouldn't be working with those people, you wouldn't be part of a significant force in the geek culture world, and for some those trade offs are worth it.
What makes it stink for me is that I feel like PA could afford market rates, and they're not entirely because they know they don't need to be competitive in that regard, and to me that feels exploitative. They have a huge crowd of people willing to sacrifice some financial gain to be part of them, and they're going to take advantage of that.
It's reasonable from a business standpoint, I think it's even ethical, but it doesn't mean that it's a good thing.
I would like to believe that this guy enjoyed his job and it was a fair relationship. But that just doesn't ring as true. He's deluded himself into believing that he's working for a greater cause, the people who like Penny Arcade. It's not really a noble cause though is it?
No, actually, fuck YOU. Everyone out there who is going all white-knight on "Oh no, this is not a good situation yadda yadda, you're being exploited, abused,... You're in such abusive relationship that you don't even see it". The job posting was worded to be terrible just to ensure only the most motivated and willing would apply.
Does this mean PA are looking for a slave? No, there are better ways to get yourselves a slave and a lot of startups are doing it without anyone batting an eyelash. Look around you: unpaid internships, low salaries that don't compute with the living costs in the area, all these talks of "sure, you start with a low salary but you'll get equity and stock-options",... This is the real bullshit happening around us every day.
All of this talk about "he's working in awful conditions" when he's describing his happiness is making me sick. Who gave any of us the Judgement Stick to impose our views on other people? The real abuse Kenneth is getting is from anyone putting words he never said in his mouth. He's doing great stuff for a great company who SUPPORTS him whole-heartedly. Why is this crowd trying to disminish his proudness of being part of a family?
We've broken the boundaries of the "9-to-5" job. We're beginning to see the myth of developers working only from the workplace crumbling in front of our eyes and I'm only expected to be at work during the day because we got a sales team whose job IS 9-to-5. Because in the end it's not about our capacity to seat 40 hours in an office but our capacity and desire to get stuff done. And some of us are burning with it, don't deny them. Yes we don't count our hours but what would be our alternatives? Go home while we're HAVING FUN? And I can't picture a workplace where I would be told "Okay, you did your thing. Go home and continue it tomorrow morning." I stay late because I like it, sometimes for the 1Gbps fiber, sometimes because there's still stuff I want to do. Yes, two people could do my job and we could share the hats. But we could also hire 50 people to share the hats and just produce even less.
Stop hating and go slap the companies who really deserve it, all the one who boast their funding, business model, clients, w/ever... and think you're being "arrogant" when you ask for a decent salary.
Why so angry mate?
I'm angry because this week, our splendid BBS was just a tech version of US Weekly (or The Sun-Herald if "mate" is any indication of you being Aussie).
When Snowden did his revelation that was pretty much all we talked about. In fact, pretty much everywhere I go was full of the discussions. BBS, blogs, forums, you name it. We recounted where Snowden was at the time, whether he would escape the U.S., whether he would be granted asylum, and so on. The news was very high profile and (in)directly relating to the people, especially the developer community(the hackers, following your diction).
That's the nature of the high profile event. When something of interest happens you want to talk about it, do you grumble about its lack of diversity of topics? Sure, but the stuff was important and we talked about it.
I'm sure at least half of the so-called hackers, (I would prefer the term developers, but I digress) also either play a game, or more obviously, hired. A lot of us have been burned by bad employers and know at least a friend who's been exploited by such bosses.
PA, in this case, hits the two demographics in the center. They are one of the biggest presence in gaming industry and they showed themselves as an exploitive, abusive boss still pretending to be 'the good guys protecting the small'.
To me PA stands in a very bad books because they had a track record of hypocrisy, misogyny, and more importantly, bullying. This is just another record to be added, but you see why people would want to talk about it, and when they have a place to talk about it, sharing the same interests and same demography, they talk about it.
We are all people, and a BBS doesn't define the topics.
If that flood of respondents doesn't treat their skills (or their life) as having any value, why should Penny Arcade?
This isn't one of those crap IT jobs someone takes out of desperation for work. This is a job that a ton of people are going to be feverishly applying for and calling their "dream job".
If their "dream" is to trade their skills and time for that level of compensation, who am I to start saying PA is in the wrong by not splitting it into two jobs?
Realistically PA needs at least two hires here. One ops guy responsible for IT/Sysadmin, and one dev. Both can crossover as much as needed. They can share the on-call duties. Either decide to reel-in the expectations on this position or hire two people to do it right.
The PA guys were running a one-man show. This isn't going to just be "A system made by somebody else". This is going to be "An entire infrastructure made by one overworked dude who obviously had no time to document anything or make it neatly organized".
Their entire infrastructure is organized and managed in this one guy's head. There will be at best a pile of notebooks and sticky-notes documenting things. Unless he suffers from a severe case of clinical OCD, there is approximately zero chance that the files, the code, the database, the servers, the jobs... anything is any condition to be handled by anything but That One Guy.
This isn't even a two-man job. It's a 10 man job.
People treat us how we let them treat us, someone taught his bosses that it's OK to ask one employee to be your entire IT department. That it's OK to have them on call 24/7 and have him work a minimum of 8 hours a day (but up to 15-16h/day for months at a time), in exchange for friday lunch and the ability to play video games at work. I'm certain that the people he describes, those who leave at 5 to be with their families, each had a situation when they were pressured to stay late day after day and at some point just said, "no, I'm leaving".
Anyway, Penny Arcade's human resource management obviously sucks. But hey, they had a guy doing the work of a 3-4 person team and for cheap to boot. Why shouldn't they expect to find someone else to pump and dump?
For the company that is supposed to be cool and racks up money from PAX... I don't have words to express my thoughts. It's a huge whirlwind, thoughts quickly appear in my head and move in circles and I can't grab any of them to display here. Just wow!
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2013/nov13/11-06ge...
Doubly ironic given Krahulik's famous love for the Surface Pro, the flagship device of this new platform.
I'm leaving because I'm underpaid.
blah blah blah.
Quote from the post: >>First things first - you may wonder, how could this job possibly be so good if I'm leaving it behind? No, I did not burn out. No, the conditions are not awful. I am leaving because I have always wanted to teach.<<
> Doing so comfortably requires that before then, I need to put away a lot of money to support myself when I’m getting paid a truly ludicrous wage. It is true that I am paid below market value, but not so significantly as folks on the internet assume. I live quite comfortably on this salary, and while it’s less than I could make elsewhere, it’s not out of the bounds of reasonable expectation. But I want to accelerate my plans for teaching. So here we are. I love this company, but I have goals that won't be fulfilled by working there, so it's time to move on.
TL;DR I'm leaving because I'm underpaid.
-I want to accelerate my plans for teaching
-I have goals that won't be fulfilled by working there
-I need to put away a lot of money to support myself when I’m getting paid a truly ludicrous wage ||-> indicating he is getting paid well at PA( compared to the teching job ) and was able to amass money for the low paying job when he will be teaching.
Reading is tech.
> I am leaving because I have always wanted to teach. Doing so comfortably requires that before then, I need to put away a lot of money to support myself when I’m getting paid a truly ludicrous wage. It is true that I am paid below market value, but not so significantly as folks on the internet assume. I live quite comfortably on this salary, and while it’s less than I could make elsewhere, it’s not out of the bounds of reasonable expectation. But I want to accelerate my plans for teaching. So here we are. I love this company, but I have goals that won't be fulfilled by working there, so it's time to move on.
'I live comfortably... but I want to accelerate my plans for teaching'; he's not quitting to teach, he's quitting to 'accelerate my plans' ie. save up a bunch of money, which implies getting a better-paying job which is not itself teaching.
Non sequitur.
This line scared me the most...