On: Zynga to Lay Off 520 Employees and shutter NY and ...

[gaius]

Right, imagine a hypothetical employee whose job it was to make tobacco more addictive. "But the company doesn't have a bad chemical reputation..."

EDIT: Downvoters, do you really not think that a person's personal ethics can be judged from the work they choose to do?

[nsxwolf → gaius]

Sometimes you can certainly judge a person's personal ethics based on the work they choose to do.

But silly mobile games using a business model SV geeks don't like? No. In the grand scheme of things Zynga is trivial and harmless.

[gaius → nsxwolf]

In the 90s when boo.com imploded (you might not remember them but they were huge) my company wanted to hire some of them. I prevailed against it then. Boo collapsed because they partied their way through their investor's money. Regardless of any other skills, they all had a spectactularly poor attitude to other people's money. You don't want that kind of culture to take root in an organization.

[jlgreco → nsxwolf]

> In the grand scheme of things Zynga is trivial and harmless.

In the "grand scheme" those "whales" are lost in the noise, so yes. In the grand scheme they were trivial and harmless.