This post confirms that the job posting is exactly what it looks like: an exploitative horror-show
* 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.
> 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.
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.
My thoughts exactly. You see this all over the place; people talk about their job requiring passion and sacrifice as if it's a good thing. If your job requires you to do the work of two people and keep a laptop by your bed it's because your boss doesn't value your time and wont bother to hire the second person needed to do the job correctly. You aren't helping your coworkers by meeting ridiculous expectations, you're perpetuating exploitation.
Ya, I'm surprised to see so much outrage here over this. You see sometimes people here taking work/life balance seriously, but work yourself to death seems more the norm here.
They rationalize it because they are working for themselves (read: their VC) to death.
He fairly specifically says that interpretations such as yours are wrong. He specifically says:
* 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 says the conditions are not awful, then describes awful conditions. He says he's not leaving because he burned out, and then describes when he burned out.
He very obviously loves the company, but it's not a healthy love.
If I were a twenty-something with no family, I could very easily imagine really liking that work environment. There is a ton of responsibility and the sense of accomplishment you'll get when you're the person who is making everything work has to be really gratifying. Is it sustainable for a lifetime? Clearly not, but you'd learn a ton, make some great friends doing it, and eventually move on.
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.
I tend to be a fairly relativistic, each-to-his-own person, so when things like this come up, I generally nod my head in agreement.
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."
I agree that there is a point at which allowing the market to decide on fair compensation breaks down. Hence minimum wage and policies against discrimination, etc. I just don't see how one could possibly make an argument that this is the case here. The job pays enough to live well on, and while it does involve performing tasks typically associated with different roles, I don't see any indication that it involves doing more than one person's job. His description of the time involved doesn't sound that far off the norm. The main argument seems to be that the position is under-compensated, but I don't see any reason why in this case the market shouldn't be allowed to determine that.
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.)
I'm not talking about wage-slave conditions here. This isn't something that needs to be protected by a minimum wage or a government entity.
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.
> This needs to be protected by applicants valuing their time.
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.
Sure, he says as such. And abused spouses say they fell on the door knob and that "everything is fine", sending just as much mixed signals as the ones you listed above.
>* No, the conditions are not awful...I love this company
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.
It will be interesting in a few years or months when, considering the publicity, I'm sure we'll hear from whoever get hired for this position.
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.
The whole post made me think of someone defending an abusive spouse. 'Yeah I'm not allowed to go anywhere ever, but he takes care of me. I probably wouldn't even meet the requirements for the job, I'm sure lucky he chose me.'
Given that this is posted on his current employers' public forum, I take the "bottom of the ladder" and "not a benefit" juxtaposition as a "ha ha only serious" kind of joke.
There's no way that wasn't intended to have a double meaning.
I think this is the key thing here. This guy came on and grew into the job. He's obviously skilled and motivated, and because he built the systems from the ground up, can keep them maintained with way less effort than someone coming in will be able to.
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.
I think your reaching a little, taking things outta context and spinning what he says to reinforce what you want to believe.
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.
Stick with any company from right outta college until 5 years in and your probably below market value unless they give you amazing raises each year.
Paying someone "near market value" for a regular developer at a normal company, but leaving them on call 24/7 for 5 years is paying them "way below market value".
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.
Exactly this. He may have been paid "near market value", but he was being paid "near market value" for a different job description than what he actually had.
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.
> Paying someone "near market value" for a regular developer at a normal company, but leaving them on call 24/7 for 5 years is paying them "way below market value".
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.
Ping pong is Serious Business at Penny Arcade. They have an intraoffice league where the top players play other companies. They are always giving each other shit (jokingly) when they don't play well.
Have you ever worked at Amazon? He did. For 3 years (I did for 4). I very much doubt PA is any worse than Amazon with regards to it being the job from hell. Everything in the PA job description is practically a carbon copy of what should be in every job description from Amazon.
"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.
Amazon is infamous for being a terrible place to work that drives people away in a few years (notice how everyone works there for 2-4 years?). Saying "this is no worse than amazon" is about as damning as you can get.
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...
Nothing seems to contradict what anyone has said about this job:
* "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're rock-stars looking for a digital roadie. The roadie doesn't care he's abused because he's "with the band".
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.
Why is it "Aspie-myopia"? People with Aspergers are entirely capable of understanding that other people have different thoughts, expectations, emotions, minds. They sometimes (it's a spectrum which means that not all have the same symptoms) have difficulty understanding others' mental state from body language and other direct social clues but they understand that people have different opinions.
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.
Nothing about this job seems equitable. There appears to be literally 0 reward for making added sacrifices and taking on the additional duties called for.
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?
Im personally not interested, but PA is something of a cultural zeigiest in the same demographic as most of the people who would meet this skill set. They are a big name in gaming, running PA, PAX(the largest video game expo out there), and the childs play charity. They are considered leading commentators in gaming, being both insightful and involved with gaming for over a decade.
They have zeitgeist in the gaming world, not the software engineering world. They aren't doing anything remotely cutting edge software wise. I don't see why an engineer would think it's such a special place to work, other than just because they like video games, and by extension Penny Arcade.
I think it would be more accurate to say "as most of the people who wish they met this skill set". I don't know anyone who approaching meeting those requirements who thinks anything better than "meh, they made a couple funny comics over the years" about PA.
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.
The one (and only) problem I had with the posting was this line:
>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.
Probably intended it to be more of a comment on the size of the budget and the percent allocated for the position than the size of the salary relative to the market. That said, having been involved in a similar set-up, being the lone guy holding up tech for a large organization is a type of hell I wish on no man.
* If you want to work 80 or more hours
* Prepare to have a laptop and some way of connecting to the internet with you at all times. Want to go on a hike somewhere there's no reception? Sorry, you can't.
* They pushed out the launch, came and visited me in the hospital, brought me delicious Asian snacks and lent me a Vita to help pass the time.
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.
So you like working for less-than-market rates and have no life other than work? Want to work for me?
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.
The free market is sending you a price signal and telling you that you shouldn't go into this field. It's over-saturated. Unless you really think it will be emotionally rewarding, stay away.
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 really speak for him but my junior audio engineer buddy liked his job too. It's still a craptastic job that ultimately goes no where. You don't retire from a job like that: you quit, move on and tell people about your glory days down the road when you have a real job.
the job he describes is at LEAST $125k/year + benefits + location and schedule flexibility i.e. work from home if you want, and you can leave to pick up the kids at 2pm. as long as the work gets done. possibly stock or options - depends on the company, but quite honestly i don't even view that as 'real' compensation for 90% of all cases.
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.
i can't even begin to know what the fuck a 'volunteer' Enforcer is, especially for a profitable company. sounds like a 20 foot pile of horse shit.
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.
A for-profit enterprise should feel free to ask for volunteers whenever they feel like it, and would-be volunteers should feel free to ignore them if it's a bad deal.
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.
That's a fine moral position to take. I don't agree, and haven't seen argument from you that would convince me. Volunteer work in exchange for admission tickets is a fine offer, and there are no shortage of people who agree. Some of those become Enforcers at the event.
Free work for a weekend seems quite different than systematic under compensation in your day-to-day job.
... And they got it right. The employee confirmed what was in the job posting and what people had issues with (so many different roles, ridiculous hours, low pay, etc).
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).
I disagree. In a small company, everyone takes on multiple roles -- so why can't a single person be a programmer, web developer, system administrator? I've done that job many times.
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.
Generally you are required to take on multiple roles at a small company because there is no other choice. There are no funds to hire the proper people to do it. It's either do it or go bust.
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.
Lets just remove pay from the equation; because everyone should be paid appropriately for their work.
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.
> I disagree. In a small company, everyone takes on multiple roles -- so why can't a single person be a programmer, web developer, system administrator? I've done that job many times.
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).
This is ridiculous. Has no one on HN worked at a small company before? Sometimes there's only enough budget and only enough work for one tech guy. You don't need to hire a DBA if there's only 40 hours of DBA work a year to do. Same thing for networking. But if there's more than 8 hours of DBA or networking work a year then it's probably a good idea to hire someone who has a reasonable amount of familiarity with it and isn't silo'd into dev work so hard they would struggle with shifting gears.
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.
Nothing he wrote has changed my opinion about the ad or the position, except for the parts regarding his depression and lung issues, and how they handled it (well).
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.
I'm going to trust that he understands his desires, ambitions, and capabilities better than anyone reading that thread, the discussion around the Internet, or the job posting. This is not some naive kid fresh out of college being abused by a powerful corporation.
Yes, actually it is somebody being abused by a corporation. His attempt at sugar coating it is a decent one, but is not convincing.
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 a nutshell, he has described one of the fundamental problems of the gaming industry. Companies know people want to work in games so badly that they can pay them low wages and work them to the bone. In some cases, people are laid off as soon as the game ships. The company gets to pump up the balance sheets and the employees just take it until they're forced out of the industry to be replaced by another crop of fresh meat.
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.
Absolutely spot on description of the gaming industry. I spent a few years in it. I won't do it again, precisely because of the issues you describe. The kicker is they don't really seem to care that the "best and brightest" aren't interested in working for them. They care about getting product out the door, and quality is only on the radar to the minimal extent necessary to keep a plurality of fans happy.
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.
Absolutely nothing he has said in this post has contradicted anything said about this position. He flat out states he is underpaid and has no work/life balance.
It sounds like you are surprised that there are people who are not like you. There are lots of people in lots of companies that prefer working longer hours and maintaining their social circles at work. The author of the post says he's one of those guys, and he took a pay cut to work there. He worked at Amazon, he's not dumb and he's not being willfully exploited. So one must assume that he did it because he wanted to. He could have left long before now.
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.
If you work long hours, you should be paid accordingly. If you want to volunteer your time to make a company profitable that's your choice but I reserve the right to believe that's dumb/wrong. It also devalues the work of every other developer.
Let's see, we have a job posting that promises you that your job will have founder level responsibilities that will destroy your social life, for an interns pay.
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.
Downvotes? Come on. Manufactured controversy based on uninformed speculation to drive hits to ones blog is the entire business model of half the "news" sites out there. Is it impolitic to point that out?
That sort of depends on your definition of "legitimate", but in my opinion, no.
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.
It's just another example of people abusing their power. Got name brand recognition? Use it to stick it to your workers. Prettying it up with bright primary colors and photoshop fades all you want, we can still see the reality behind the flowery show.
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.
I'm angry because for the last four days, it's been all about "the PA job posting". It's not even about "hacker" or "news" anymore. It's just about "hey look at us, we're having our weekly scandal and everyone can write a blog post to jump on the bandwagon and cash some visits".
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).
I can see where you're coming from, though I don't quite share your anger. Let me explain:
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.
The initial job post, to me, was very clearly written to scare some people off, in an attempt to reduce the tidal wave of responses down to a mere flood.
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?
A lot of people commenting seem to think that salary is the only form of compensation in a job, as well. I'd gladly trade a few thousand dollars a year to be excited to go to work, with people I enjoy, instead of working a corporate gig where I'm miserable and working on boring projects.
That isn't his response to the kid's post, it's his response to the original job posting, and it got a lot of points being posted on its own yesterday.
That's what I meant, should have been clearer sorry. I searched on this thread for a link to it. I should have searched the actual site - obviously a Marco post would be there...
Congrats Kenneth Kuan. If I ever meet you in person I'd buy you a beer and tell you it isn't always like this.
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.
Ultimately they'll have to, but not because of any outrage about under compensation. This is only possible for Mr. Kuan because he built the systems he maintains. The next person is going to have to maintain systems someone else built. That will be a lot harder, and my guess is ultimately impossible for one person.
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.
Has it been said that this guy is the reason Penny Arcade wrote the ad they wrote?
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?
How much money does this company make? Does their corporate structure require them to file balance sheets? I mean if you're doing something like this to support the site you love, I can understand (still not agree, but understand). But if it's just to make some owner/investors rich...
Erm. "..I wanted to teach but I needed money before that to put aside; and to make money I took a salary cut after Amazon job to work for PA. And then I work sometimes till midnight for weeks because they can hire more people but they won't. And you can't go hike and should be on call, always, forever and ever..." LOL what?
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!
Any job where one is required to be "plugged" into the internet 24/7 is a red flag. He goes on and mentions that being able to take a hike in the mountains is out of the question. If your life is work...
I downvoted you. I think completely justifiably. Is your type comment really appropriate for HN?
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.<<
This is a free country you can downvote me as much as you want but you cannot distort facts by quoting half paragraphs. And facts are that that if he was paid enough he would have stayed longer at Penny Arcade in order to later fulfill his dream of teaching.
> 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 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.
I read it as he's not getting paid well enough to put money away so he's changing to a better paying job which let's him build up his savings and then move to teaching. Which would imply that PA isn't paying him very well.
Yes, he's not really clear that 'I am quitting so I can get a better-paying job to save up for becoming a teacher', but if you parse the paragraph carefully and pay attention to the 'but's, it's what he's saying:
> 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.
Your conclusion is quite bizarre. He wants to teach. He will get paid poorly when he does so. He needs to save up money first. So he is leaving PA to get a job that pays well so he can save up that money. He has not been able to amass that money, he is only able to "live comfortably". He is not taking a teaching job yet, he is taking a job to finance his future teaching career.
> -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 and was able to amass money for the low paying job when teaching.
* 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!