Like Notch said... "you are an insane idiot!". What did the CEO of OMGPOP had to gain from making those remarks ? He surely didn't expect the world to take his side.. Even if Shay Pierce really was "the weakest link of the team", you just don't say that.
You just got bought for $200 million, now it's the time to show that you deserved to be the CEO of that company, by being diplomatic, respecting those around you (or who used to be around you) and now calculating your every move. Your opinion no longer just affects yourself, it affects your whole company, as well as (in a lesser extent), the company that just bought you.
What's so interesting about success is the number of
failures who try to ride on your back. Shay Pierce is
just one of many...
since the guy specifically went out of his way not to "ride on his back" because of morals.
Frankly from his tweets it sure looks like the biggest failure on the team is the CEO...they just got lucky and instead of being humble, he is doing the completely wrong thing...and if he was such a failure as an employee, why did such a great manager keep him employed
Can't stress this enough. I liked OMGPOP from the start, when they were still that obscure flash-site for 6-12yr olds. But that was before the CEO announced that he's an asshole...
"DrawSomething" most likely got popular mainly because the implementation is much better than the other Pictionary clones (which have been around forever). And that's an aspect that Mr. CEO probably wasn't involved with at all, but rather his lowly developers.
The one thing that Mr. CEO could attribute to himself would be if he smelled the opportunity early and executed on it. But he didn't. It took them 3 years to port their most popular flash-game (then called "Draw my thing") to the cashcow mobile platform.
That doesn't seem like a calculated move to brag about, does it?
A professor of mine once said that becoming a professor requires equal parts intelligence, hard work and luck. Usually I cite him to stress the importance of luck: being talented and working hard often isn't enough. However when someone says that someone else just got lucky, I cite it to make another point: without talent and hard work, luck is often useless. You need vast amounts of luck to get somewhere if you're talentless and lazy. If you are talented and work hard, the tiniest amount of luck is enough to lift you from your peers.
According to me if a person is lazy and unproductive, even luck gives up on him.
You need to work hard anyway. And you need need luck on top of it. Things work in that order.
But a lot of people first expect to get lucky and then work hard. IMO that never happens, because the person tries to reverse cause-effect scenarios. The person expects reward before work, whereas rewards always come after work, never before it.
That's what unsuccessful people say when someone becomes successful.
I think there are two reasons for the typical "he just got lucky" insult.
1) When you tear down a successful person, you get to transfer a little of their success to you. (aka "player hatin'")
2) Level playing field. It's nice to imagine that everyone has the same amount of "luck," and therefore the same chance of being successful. It's disheartening to accept that some people might work harder or have more natural talent than you. Chalking it up to "luck" gives you hope that it could just as easily happen to you one day.
"Hope is the only thing stronger than fear" - Hunger Games
Btw, I think what the OMGPOP guy wrote on Twitter was mean and dumb. He shouldn't have written it. And I don't know these guys.
And I actually believe that most success is rooted in luck (or chance or circumstance). But everything I've read about OMGPOP says that they struggled for 6+ years and finally made it big with Draw Something.
"The harder I worked, the luckier I got." - Samuel Goldwyn
I agree with you. Hard work drastically improves your chances. But there are indeed times when people hit the silicon valley lottery. I suspect marc andreessen's secretary's peers were just as hard working as she was.
Maybe he is indeed an exceptional CEO. If you rank CEO's by quality, I suspect the top half of the list has better things to do than fumble around on twitter Saturday afternoon.
You are probably thinking of Jim Clark's exec admin, and I can say as someone who supported Jim Clark, that no, she worked about 10x harder and smarter than any admin you will likely meet. I Have a hundred anecdotes, but the one that comes to mind is where she had to delay his private jet, with an "electrical failure", just so we could deliver a ThinkPad the IT organization was repairing without him even knowing it was missing. She was still lucky, but based on the number of other admins JC went through, she was also unique in her ability and work ethic.
I don't know anything about Dan Porter. I have to admit my first thought reading this was that he's another 20-something CEO who hasn't developed the communication and political skills an good executive needs. But this guy is a seasoned executive (http://danporter.org/?page_id=4). Astounding.
True. It is indeed very unprofessional. But how come people like him are held up to such high standards? When you're not anyone important you can be brutally honest and say what you want like everyone else does. But as soon as you're in the public eye you're put on this pedestal. This is what scares the hell out of me. I'm a very uncensored person who says what he means and means what he says (and am an asshole sometimes). So the thought that one day IF I'm successful in getting my business off the ground a life of censorship awaits me. :(
Then I see celebrities like Snoop Dog (who owned a porn company), Sarah Silverman (who has some of the most offensive jokes imaginable), lil john (self explanatory), Colin Farrel, Charlie Sheen, Lindsey Lohan, and other well known figures who say and do anything they want yet still have successful careers, keep starring in movies, and even get in on really good business deals and endorsements. Lets not forget the Lady Gaga / Polaroid event where during the unveiling she said "smile you're fucking famous" and other unprofessional phrases.
It's like there's absolutely NO consequence for them. I guess because it's their "image" and it's "expected". So I guess the moral of the story is, become an offensive comedian /or/ celebrity known for being crazy and work your way up towards serious entrepreneur. That way you can talk shit and get away with it. OR start out as the well spoken guy, and just 1 accidental F-bomb later, show up on the news as the bad guy and get thrown out by your company board.
EDIT: ALSO, wtf did Notch gain by saying "You're an insane idiot"?! What did he gain from his remark?
I can't speak for everyone else, but it wasn't the honesty I had an issue with, it was the reckless disloyalty and willingness to publicly burn people who've worked for you.
For sure, this guy called Zynga evil and said he didn't want to work for them, and that's the last thing you want showing up in Mark Pincus's news feed when he's just bought your company. But to shoot back in public and call him a parasite and the weakest person on the team? That's just vengeful and childish.
Forget censorship, it's just about having a shred of professional respect. Maybe he has a fat mother, or erectile dysfunction, or shitty dress sense. If you do something to upset me, what would you want me to post about you on Twitter? There's a line that even DHH-style "I'm funny because I'm callous" can't cross.
Any business relationship carries with it a certain amount of trust, and between a leader and their team most of all. Pierce said he didn't like Zynga (his personal opinion) and he was attacked by someone who had the ability to expose private information about his job performance, and who should have owed him better than that.
Personally, I wouldn't care if Porter said "Shay Pierce is wrong and doesn't know what he's talking about", or even if he said "Shay fucking Pierce is fucking wrong fucking" while hanging out of a porn-funded blimp. It's the intention, not the words, that I find offensive.
You're right. When you fire someone, experience layoffs or people quit in disgust, the best thing to do is to let it go and if some negative publicity comes back at you, the best thing to do is to kill them with kindness, especially when you were actually trying to retain said employee. Which I assume was part of the buyout deal. Yes, the employees, especially the engineers, are company assets.
"Shay is a great engineer who we were unfortunately unable to retain. I'm sure he'll do well wherever he lands." Would have sufficed as a tweet. One comes across as not being pricked by the story and if he's actually the weakest guy on the team and ends up hired by a competitor, you win.
A CEO is always recruiting and promoting, even to employees. To use the petty language that he did only weakens his position amongst his team and outsiders interested in the company.
Ok I get it now. I think being a closed up shy introverted recluse has taken its toll on my ability to understand what's socially acceptable and what isn't.
I grew up around a father that would talk shit but do good things so to me I've always discarded what people say and paid attention more to what their actions are.
> But how come people like him are held up to such high standards?
Because he is supposed to be a leader. Leaders are held to higher standards. They are supposed to have integrity and good character.
The people you cite are celebrities, not leaders. We do not take them seriously. They are there to entertain us, make a lot of money, do drugs and fade into oblivion. Comparisons are irrelevant. All that you get making comparisons is a race to the bottom.
And it wasn't that he was profane. He wasn't profane in the tweet at all. (No one really cares about profanity anymore anyway).
He went out of his way to demean another human being (who he likely knew and worked closely with) when it was really not necessary. That is the shocking, self-serving, and utterly ugly part about his statement. It shows that he lacks character.
I think some of it is the kind of comment it was as well. Negative public comments about specific employees are the kind of thing that would make a lot of people think the CEO was someone you should steer clear of, even if he weren't that high profile. If you saw it in a Tweet from a 10-person startup, it probably wouldn't make news, but it might be a red flag to potential employees. When you add to it that the guy is hugely wealthy, it just gives it an added aura of entitled-rich-asshole-looking-down-on-the-plebs.
Actually it reminds me of the kinds of reactions Sebastian Marshall gets around here for his jerky/arrogant/employee-badmouthing style of blogging, and that guy isn't even wealthy or famous (except HN-famous).
Just to be clear, you are comparing two hip hop artists, two comedians, two actors, and an avante garde pop artist to the CEO of a mobile games company? In fact you are comparing a group of individuals who are all famous or infamous in their own way for being edgy and/or a mess, to a company that makes family friendly games. There is a very large difference between the responsibilities of an entertainer and a CEO. The responsibilities of some of the aforementioned celebrities could arguably include being "offensive". Witness the scorn heaped upon Eddie Murphy when he decided to shed his Raw persona and turn to family movies.
If you are worrying about having to censor your public persona in the future, go into a line of business where being edgy is part of the attraction. However, it is never a good move, whether as a CEO or public figure or basic human being to get up on a soapbox and say bitchy, petty, mean spirited things. The OMGPop CEO is not speaking "brutal honesty", he's just acting like a dick most likely because his ego has swollen out of control by the sale and the success of Draw Something and he can't stand that this "little guy" is pissing on his parade. This is the behaviour of a child, not a leader.
Lastly, this isn't about "holding people to high standards", as if it is some sort of conscious thing we participate in. In societal interactions there is a implicit understanding of the range of acceptable behaviour for a public figure, it is unconscious and breaching those boundaries will have immediate emotional consequences on how people perceive you. If Snoop Dog says fuck or calls himself a pimp nobody will blink, if he punched a child in the face people would immediately react negatively. Likewise if he stopped all of his Snoop persona and started working for the Rick Santorum campaign. If you are the CEO of a company that makes family friendly mainstream games, people expect that you will act like an adult in possession of self-control are good judgement. If you are the CEO of a company that sells coke spoons, maybe less so.
Notch is able to say what he did because he has garnered significant good will, and because it embodies the mass public reaction to the OMGpop tweet. If he tweeted this kind of thing all the time he would lose that good will eventually. As a one off though.. it IS idiotic and insane to publicly belittle former employees as a CEO.
Moral of the story is don't be a dick in public view, unless you are in public view for being a dick ;)
Those people you name are all artists who make their living performing. "Professional" for them has a different meaning. But they still can't say anything they want without censure. Look at how much crap Kanye West took for "Imma let you finish", for example. You will very rarely find them talking trash about people they've worked with, and when it does it often has consequences. Megan Fox, for example, got fired from the Transformers movie because she said some unprofessional things about the director. Her co-star said, "Criticism is one thing. Then there's public name-calling, which turns into high-school bashing. Which you can't do."
More importantly, they're not executives or leaders. Dan Porter is in charge of hundreds of people. How he treats the people who work for him isn't some minor thing; it's the essence of management. His tweet made him look like a petty asshole, and his non-apology confirms that for me.
When you're nobody, nobody listens. If I say one of my co-workers is useless, the only people who are going to care about it are people who need to know that information - the other members of my team, and the boss. It's a private matter
When the CEO of a recently acquired company says it, it's not a private criticism anymore, it's a public shaming. He could have found a way of being honest to the developer without mocking him on twitter
The other celebrities you mention don't get criticized Because they have a limit. They say stupid things, but stop short of direct, public, unprovoked personal attacks.
Celebrities can get away with a lot, but they don't have carte blanche to say whatever they want. For instance, Lady Gaga's comment indicates that she has some business acumen. I guarantee she wouldn't have gotten away with saying something like "Nobody cares about Polaroid. This is about me.", which probably better reflects what she was really thinking. But since she said something that reflects well on her business partner, she can ultimately get away with using a bit of salty language.
It's not so much how offensive you are, but whom it's directed at and what the relative power balance is. Powerful or famous people will usually only attack or make fun of those who are more famous or powerful than them.
I seriously doubt this guy was being brutally honest. If this guy was so awful, why did they keep him? It sounds much more likely that he's lying about how bad this fellow was out of spite.
If he really was awful and got called on it, that would be one thing. But to be libeled for no reason other than writing up your decision not to take a new job is terrible. Nobody should do that, CEO of something or not.
People like him are held up to high standards because they have responsibilities and are paid accordingly. It's called leadership. Leaders watch what they say.
As for celebrities acting badly, this doesn't make it particularly admirable. I should point out that no F-bomb was used by the CEO in question - he merely showed a complete lack of class. There really was no upside. A lot of people wouldn't have known, or perhaps wouldn't have cared, that Shay didn't join the new company.
I'd suggest that the OMGPOP CEO be very careful about what he says. Saying someone was the "weakest link" in a team with no backup might lead to defamation proceedings.
I'm glad this happened in such a public way. I once heard him speak at a VC event about his firing practices with the same sort of attitude. I won't get into the details, but I was shocked that such an individual could be so championed, but he's quite business savvy and very personable... I guess as long as you're on his good side.
I'd be curious to hear what some of his "firing practices" were, if you wouldn't mind sharing.
You seem reticent to get into details, perhaps not to add fuel to the fire - but these were practices he spoke publicly and proudly about, on the record, if I understand you correctly - and I'm curious just how people like him tick (if only so I can learn to avoid them).
What a fool. Shay Pierce's article was incredibly polite and graceful, so there's no way OMGPOP can come off looking like anything but pathetic and vindictive.
I think the worst thing I've heard our CEO say about a former employee is "it was time for the company and X to part ways" after X took a job elsewhere, and this was an internal meeting. We don't take to tweeting the inner workings of our company.
"Earlier this week – days after Zynga bought OMGPOP for $210 million – a now former OMGPOP engineer named Shay Pierce wrote a column for gaming news Web site Gamasutra explaining that he would not join Zynga because it is "evil." He said that companies like Zynga think of users as "weak-minded cash cows.""
Come on. OMGPOP was a fast rising company with a very green CEO. Expectations that they're going to act like the CEO of Oracle (boom, bad example) or something seems out of place. The CEO is a person just like everyone else, and had a moment of weakness.
The CEO took it personally. And rightly so, because in his implications Pierce was saying that everyone else were willing to join an "evil" company that treats people as "weak minded cash cows". When we make personal statements of values and their justifications ("I don't eat meat because I don't like murdering innocent animals, blood on my hands"), we naturally raise the hairs of those who make different decisions.
EDIT: Normally I just bear those downvotes, but in this case I find them a little disturbing. The whole narrative around this has taken on a distinctly "we are the 99%!" type of schism. The CEO is a human being too, and there is no reason to value or respect the opinion of Pierce.
You're over analyzing it: it's not a "we are the 99%" schism. It's just a guy in a leadership position being a first class douche bag.
It's also independent of whether the other guy was "right" or "wrong". I've had plenty of moments of weakness in my life, and none of them compelled me to rip in to former coworkers on Twitter.
It's very childish, to say the least, to take offense and lashing out upon hearing of someone else's morals.
Many would see Pierce's media efforts as childish and unprofessional. I originally saw it presented with the title "The one smart OMGPOP employee", and it was pretty obvious what the deal was (when you make demands and the other side ignores you, it means you aren't in a position to make demands).
Further his "morals" went so far as demanding that they provide some sort of oddball waiver for him, which they didn't feel worthy of the time required. I'm not sure if you're reading a different story than I am, but the one I read had him completely fine with joining Zygna until they said stuff it, at which point he retroactively gained a higher calling.
That is not an "oddball" waiver. Saying that creative people continue to own what they owned before they took the job is a common contract feature. I know we have that in the IP agreement that our developers sign -- anything they explicitly list as theirs continues to be theirs.
Many would see Pierce's media efforts as childish and unprofessional.
Well, he explained publicly why he opted out of the employment offer.
when you make demands and the other side ignores you, it means you aren't in a position to make demands
And so what? Should I look down upon him because he's "weak" when compared to Zynga?
Further his "morals" went so far as demanding that they provide some sort of oddball waiver for him, which they didn't feel worthy of the time required. I'm not sure if you're reading a different story than I am, but the one I read had him completely fine with joining Zygna until they said stuff it, at which point he retroactively gained a higher calling.
Well, it was your post which introduced differing morality into the question, as a justification for Porter's tantrum. Pierce himself waives any claim to being an "idealist", in his words[1]. On the "oddball waiver" I won't comment; that's a Silicon Valley thing, don't wanna be culturally insensitive.
He has 20 years of executive leadership. Irrespective of what you think of the actual job activities or of a particular title, how can you possible color that "green"?
Reluctant to comment, since this is circumstantial and may be seen as not adding to the discussion, but for what its worth, I've heard (long before this incident) many cases in which Dan Porter has exhibited this type of behavior (immoral actions), and that this headline in itself is not an isolated incident.
Out of all the ways I can think of to describe Pierce's article, "incredibly polite and graceful" is probably at the bottom of the list. Pierce branded a potential employer "evil" because of a minor detail in his contract (granted, a minor detail he had every right to turn the contract down for). Zynga isn't exactly well known for having the most integrity as a company, but it's certainly neither polite nor graceful for him to publicize his dispute with them like that.
A better way to phrase it would be to say "Pierce's article says something impolite and ungraceful in the most polite and graceful way possible".
Frist, he said he wasn't joining because they wouldn't let him keep ownership of his prior work. They publicly announced that all developers were joining, forced him to make a decision quickly, and refused to negotiate. They in effect forced him out of his job. Him losing a game he built was not a "minor detail".
Second, he did not call Zynga evil because of that. His actual words: "When an entity exists in an ecosystem, and acts within that ecosystem in a way that is short-sighted, behaving in a way that is actively destructive to the healthy functioning of that ecosystem and the other entities in it (including, in the long term, themselves) -- yes, I believe that that is evil. And I believe that Zynga does exactly that."
Politeness and grace do not require you to bend over and take it. They do not require you to shut up when your conscience insists that you speak.
Pierce branded a potential employer "evil" because of a minor detail in his contract
That's not true. This is the reason he gave:
An evil company is trying to get rich quick, and has no regard for the harm they're doing along the way. It's not making things of value, it's chasing a gold rush. An evil game company isn't really interested in making games, it's too busy playing a game -- a game with the stock market, usually. It views players as weak-minded cash cows; and it views its developers as expendable, replaceable tools to create the machines that milk those cows.
Wouldn't it be possible to create a trust (or even a corporation), transfer all of your IP to the trust and then appoint trusted third parties as trustees? There seems to be a world of difference between personally holding IP and being the sole beneficiary of a trust that holds IP.
For my part, I'll stick to working for employers with reasonable terms of employment.
Reasonable question, but I suspect the answer is, practically speaking, "no".
Two important things to remember about negotiating contracts: A) They are mainly about the spirit of the agreement, and B) If any of the language actually gets as far as being tested in a court and you're just an individual, you're probably already fucked.
Zynga/OMGPOP clearly think it's unreasonable for any of their employees to do any outside game work. When Shay said, "Hey, can have an exception for my pet project," they said no. If Shay had tried to find some behind-their-back trick, the best case is that they just wouldn't care.
The worst case is that they fire him and bring a suit to take the game from him. Whether or not they win, Shay probably can't afford to spend $100k or more on a lawsuit, not for a little side project. So if he's lucky he escapes with $5K in legal bills so that he can hand the game over to him and agree in writing never to utter the word "Zynga" again.
I'm not suggesting that this would work for subverting an agreement as it pertains to work done while an employee. The grandparent specifically referred to an employer demanding past work, presumably predating any business relationship.
Your approach might be enough to win a lawsuit. But he probably can't afford to fight a lawsuit, so whether or not he'd eventually win doesn't matter. Even if he could, it would be a hollow victory. He'd get to keep his modestly successful iPhone game, but it would cost him his job and maybe a year's salary on lawyers, plus 2-3 years of aggravation.
That would almost certainly work, but I suppose the proble that Shay Pierce had was that this was not possible to do before he had to sign the contract.
From his article, Zynga isn't evil because of the minor detail in the contract. He gives a reason why he thinks zynga is evil and so not worth negotiating this minor detail.
"When an entity exists in an ecosystem, and acts within that ecosystem in a way that is short-sighted, behaving in a way that is actively destructive to the healthy functioning of that ecosystem and the other entities in it (including, in the long term, themselves) -- yes, I believe that that is evil. And I believe that Zynga does exactly that."
I said no such thing. What I did do is question whether it was a good idea for the ant to throw the pebble at the elephant. The pebble did little to harm the elephant and might have earned the ant a reputation for being a pebble-thrower.
So this guy Pierce wrote his game Connectrode before he even went to work for OMGPOP. It's completely standard to NOT seize ownership of preexisting IP as part of hiring, unless that's a negotiated part of the deal for which one is compensated. I always have a disclosure list of my preexisting IP as a rider to contracts, this has never been an issue anywhere. Trying to seize ownership without negotiation and compensation is an instant "no thanks" as far as I am concerned; it indicates bad faith.
It seems since Pierce is the only one who ran into this problem that he is the only person working there who had actually written an entire game from start to finish and created a company to sell it. That means he is the most experienced and competent person there. The assertion that he is incompetent and they were about to fire him can't be taken seriously at all; it's obviously said in spite.
It is interesting that CEO Dan Porter identifies himself in the tagline to his @tfadp twitter account as "creator of epic game Draw Something". This pretty clearly suggests he created that game. Which actually, he didn't. He doesn't even know how to code or to design, and the game itself is a clone of another game so he didn't come up with the concept either. Only in this blow-up's damage control attempts does he even acknowledge that anyone other than himself was involved in creating the game. His assertions that Pierce was stealing credit are obviously psychological projection about his own actions.
In his CV we see that Pierce has a long history of positions, quite varied, and none of them held very long. This is consistent psychologically with the sort of person that the rest of his situation indicates he is.
>In his CV we see that Pierce has a long history of positions, quite varied, and none of them held very long. This is consistent psychologically with the sort of person that the rest of his situation indicates he is.
And this seems bizarre behaviour on OMGPOP's part - he was entirely complimentary to OMGPOP and he publicly disclaimed credit for Draw Something. Even if you did hate him and the press he stirred up, the best way to make it go away is to completely ignore it. Why on Earth would you make this the story?
It was a poor decision, but I can see being furious/frustrated that the story of your company's success had mutated into one on how your new parent owner was evil.
True, but he shouldn't blame Shay Pierce. Porter's the one who decided to do a deal with Zynga. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.
Further, Porter's the one who set up the retention process in a way that forced somebody out the door over a perfectly reasonable issue. A manager who's first instinct for a problem is to blame others has a big problem. One who does it publicly is a fool.
I don't understand this. Pierce didn't slam OMGPOP, from what I have read, just Zynga's unwillingness to exempt his personal project from its IP clutches. I have to wonder why OMGPOP's CEO felt the need to do this.
He sounds incredibly insecure about it which probably belies a lot of the truth about what Shay Pierce contributed to the team.
Shay probably didn't have a lot at stake and it was just a job, as a leader it's a sign of leadership failure if your troops don't follow you which is what the CEO is likely insecure about. He's also working at Zynga and who knows what the management team will think next week about what OMGPOP really contributed to Zynga.
Both of them look incredibly insecure, but Mr. Porter is the guy with $200 mm in the bank who is expected to show some class. If Shay's weak why even pay attention, just smile that you avoided bringing a weak link with you.
My thoughts exactly. My first hunch was: Pincus (CEO of Zynga) put him up to it (or called him out, "how did you ever hire this asshole?"), and Porter jumped at the chance to please his new boss.
Most times I see a sensationalized twitter post where everyone is saying, "I can't believe they just said that!" I just look at it and shrug, and wonder where the PC police will strike next. This tweet, however, had me staring at the screen in disbelief.
Now, I had read Shay's post when it made headlines on HN. Maybe I have to go back and re-read it, but I didn't click away thinking that OMGPOP's best programmer decided to bail on the buy-out. I don't think Shay claimed they would fail miserably without him.
Obviously Shay was seeking to gain some publicity off recent events, maybe even boost revenue on his side-project game. Yeah, I can see how Dan Porter might think Shay's pissing in his soup. So, Dan, respond to the damn allegations, don't just go all ad hominem on Shay's ass.
I would have gone with something like "I disagree with what Shay had to say about OMGPOP, we're loving it here at the evil empire, but I wish him the best at his next venture." You even have 2 characters to spare, Dan!
Well, I had ignored the whole Draw Something phenomenon until a few days ago. I downloaded the game, and for the last 3-4 days have been finding myself enjoying it quite a bit and anxiously refreshing the app to see if my game partners had updated their drawings.
Needless to say, having just read this I deleted the app a couple minutes ago. They can keep my dollar, for all the good it will do them.
Remember that if you choose to uninstall the app, also go into Facebook and remove the app from their as well.
Porter forgot the number 1 rule of politics: If your opponent is making a mistake, don't stop him. I understand what Pierce is saying (and can't help sympathizing), but I can't help thinking that writing that editorial was poor taste on Pierce's part, and probably would have reflected poorly on him had Porter kept his mouth shut and not turned him into a martyr.
I mean, if you disagree with a potential employer's" values", it's career suicide to write a widely distributed Op-Ed about it unless that value is something like "Don't club baby seals" and you have hard proof that said employer is actively clubbing baby seals. Calling them evil over what is essentially a contract dispute (even if it's a perfectly valid contract dispute) would make me think twice before negotiating a contract with him. If he's writing an Op-Ed about them, what's to prevent him from writing an Op-Ed about me if he doesn't like my terms?
> I mean, if you disagree with a potential employer's" values", it's career suicide to...
It's not career suicide. People should talk about shitty places to work more often, and there's no way Zynga can keep another company from hiring the guy. The only time you see "you'll never work in this town again!" work is when all the companies are colluding to control the labor market. In programming that hasn't happened yet, so he can say pretty much whatever he wants and still get a job.
In fact, it was easier for me to get a job after I demolished Ruby on Rails for being the piece of shit that it is. People like honesty.
There's a world difference between speaking ill of an open source project and speaking ill of someone you couldn't negotiate a contract with. We're used to people ranting about open source projects. It happens every day.
In a perfect world, people would be able to expose employers who are doing wrong with impunity. In the real world, it's difficult to do so without repercussions. How do you think companies like Zynga can still recruit developers?
Well, given how many people Zynga is buying vs. the mass exodus that seems to be happening in S.F. from them, I'd be interested in seeing their recruitment numbers.
I highly doubt dissing on Zynga when he didn't take a job there is going to hurt his chances of being hired by other software shops (for one thing, we all sit around dissing on Zynga too.)
I respect honesty, priorities and transparency. I'd hire the guy. We aren't MBAs, after all: our goal isn't to hide behind a web of obscurity while we sell our clients bonds too toxic for us to hold. We want to hire people with side projects as long as they won't distract from their work for us.
He will have lost some crappy jobs at crappy companies that want cogs instead of collaborators. I don't think it's going to be a major disappointment for him.
Imagine the viral traffic you could get when people have seen "moe clubbed two obnoxious baby seals" in your facebook ticker a few times an hour for a while.
You should probably go back and re-read the editorial; He didn't call them evil because of a contract dispute.
Personally, I'd have no trouble hiring Shay Pierce. I like it when people I hire have some backbone and some moral sense. Obedience is occasionally useful, but making software is essentially a creative effort (as is starting a new company). For that, you need people who can think independently from the basis of shared values.
And actually apologized: "sorry for what I said", not "sorry if anyone was offended by what I said". I still don't think it looks good for him - apologies only mitigate, not erase - but that's the right response. If he follows up with a "it was a stressful transition and I was afraid that Pierce's understandable legal concerns would sour the whole deal and frankly I drank way too much", all the better.
On twitter, it looks like he apoligzed: "sorry for what I said ... no excuses." But then he e-mails VentureBeat with--you guessed it--a bunch of excuses:
When the game blows up ... and one employee, who didn’t work on the product,
and is more about his own games then the team, jumps in the press and becomes
the story, it is very hurtful to all the people who are on team.
[W]hen you give blood, sweat and tears on something and someone who doesn’t
even work on the project, and prioritizes his own games as his own professional
development over the team, becomes the story it is very demoralizing.
[M]y point is that it wasn’t about Shay. It was about the 41 other people who
made it happen. Those are the people I would throw myself in front of the
train for and those are the people I want to celebrate.
So, to recap, Shay was fired (for refusing to accept a change in the terms of his employment) and wrote about it. Porter still seems to take offense that Shay wrote anything to distract from OMGPOP's preferred message, continues to call out Shay for not being a team player, and says he would throw himself in front of a bus for every OMGPOP employee except Shay.
He didn't apologize. After an apology, you need to back up your words with actions.
I dunno. Reading his longer explanation in VentureBeat, I'm not sure that's an actual apology. Being sorry for what you said's a little vague. I'd rather see something like:
"I apologize unreservedly to Shay Pierce. What I said about him was untrue and unkind. I regret that we X", where X is the mistake he feels he made in handling Pierce's situation.
Can't help but think this whole controversy must be (at least in part) motivated by that $30-million for "employee retention" mentioned in the article. I suspected as much when I first saw the uproar on Twitter, but didn't know if the Zyna/OMGPOP deal had any such incentive.
Does anyone know how those retention clauses usually work?
The subject misquotes the tweet. It did not say "Shay Pierce". It just said it was the one employee who turned down going to Zynga.
However, there was a second tweet that did explicitly mention Pierce. Here's a screenshot showing both: http://i.imgur.com/Dob8n.jpg
The text of the other tweet is "What's so interesting about success is the number of failures who try to ride on your back. Shay Pierce is just one of many...".
These tweets were on March 30, so they are not April fools jokes.
Shay Pierce was the only employee not to go to Zynga [1]. Even though the tweet doesn't explicitly mention Shay Pierce I'd say that the subject is still fairly accurate.
I know this is pedantic but the subject is a quote, so your parent is correct. It really should have either used square brackets around the name, or been written differently. Personally, I feel that once you open a double-quote there's a certain responsibility.
The adjacent tweet from the CEO mentions Shay by name. I'm usually a stickler for this kind of thing as well, but this one reads as entirely unambiguous to me.
Our window for reaching its peak was gone. I sat in our tent, unable to do anything, while my dream of climbing Mount Everest faded
It's wrong to quote them as saying
"Our window for reaching Mount Everest's peak was gone"
Even though the "its" is clearly referring to Mount Everest. There are a couple options, the simplest being:
"Our window for reaching [Mount Everest's] peak was gone"
What worries me is that people don't know this. That you can just substitute/fill in a quote because it's obvious that's what the person meant. Rather, it should be thought of as a recording device that can only play back exactly what the person said.
And if I were the acquirer I'd be wondering just how bad he thinks his team is, and why he didn't do anything about it before I made offers to all of them.
I'm not sure how many folks who read Hacker News work in videogame development, but for any who are, I'd like to propose something simple: refuse to work for Zynga. Extend this boycott to any videogames company that behaves in this contemptuous and insulting manner towards the people who actually generate the real worth in the company.
Sentiment towards the likes of EA and Sony are at an all-time low for their consumer-hostile behaviour, and I think the market is ripe for being shaken up. We've already seen in recent weeks that the games-playing public are prepared to reach into their wallets even in the middle of an economic downturn and help fund videogame projects through Kickstarter.
If the people who make videogames refuse to be treated like disposable commodities by obnoxious pricks like Dan Porter by boycotting working for them, then eventually these organisations will have to change their ways, or risk being replaced by companies who will treat their staff with respect and humility.
It dumbfounds me when alleged journalists print anonymous slander like this. Whatever one thinks of Shay Pierce's editorial, he signed his name to it and is answering questions about it.
from what that article makes it look like, its simply Pierce's word against the company's. both have their share of things to "fight for". Pierce has his game and public image and OMGPOP has PR and it's recent sale to zynga.
I'm curious, could these sort of statements made by a CEO in regards to a former employee be crossing the line into defamation? As in, if Pierce is looking for a job in the future and this is what a potential employer finds...
Could well. I've heard a lot of larger companies have a policy of only providing references of the form "X worked here from Y to Z" for that exact reason.
I also agree - but then he said something potentially defamatory :-)
However, I think if an employee looks up Shay's details, they will first find his op-ed calling Zynga "evil". I guess if they are concerned about the OMGPOP tweet, then they will be REALLY worried about the op-ed!
I'd like to but can't, because his "actively destructive to the healthy functioning of that ecosystem" also applies to Apple's iOS app store and the independence of my profession. I hope he reconsiders the landlord he accepted.
I am not a lawyer, but I do know that HR departments at larger companies coach their employees not to speak poorly of any ex-employee for fear of defamation lawsuits. The industry standard even for horribly incompetent employees is to say only when the employee worked for you, what their salary is, and on the very edge of acceptability is "would you hire this employee again?" as a simple yes/no only question.
Most employers would have a fit if you got on the phone, even in a private conversation, and bad-mouthed an ex-employee you managed because of defamation lawsuit fears. And that's from a one-on-one, he said/she said deal. Blasting this stuff over twitter is so much worse.
tl; dr -- Zynga's lawyers are probably in crisis mode right now.
"Porter admitted that the he was harsh in his language describing Pierce. “Yes it was, but my point is that it wasn’t about Shay. It was about the 41 other people who made it happen,” Porter wrote. “Those are the people I would throw myself in front of the train for and those are the people I want to celebrate.”
You know, this guy just sold his company for ~$200MM -- I'm going to believe that he took several thousand and bought a shitload of coke and was high as a kite when he tweeted this - while saying to himself "There it is, my tweet. There is NO WAY this was a bad idea!"
While I don't agree with how Dan Porter came across on Twitter I think I can understand the frustration. You are having one of the best days of your life and then out of left field someone you know does an article that sideswipes it.
I read the Shay Pierce article when it was published and it was very respectful of his former employers...but it didn't have to happen now. Why did he write that article NOW? There is already a well deserved Anti Zynga sentiment and that article made his fellow employees look as if they were traitors to the forces of good. He admits that he has done work for Zynga in the past but then drops lines like "Not everyone shares my values, and not everyone is in a position to pick and choose job offers.". While true I can see how it can rub the people who choose to move forward with the Zynga acquisition the wrong way.
I don't agree how Dan Porter dealt with it, but I can understand being upset by that article being published right at this moment.
There is already a well deserved Anti Zynga sentiment and that article made his fellow employees look as if they were traitors to the forces of good.
How would holding off on the article change the contents? It wouldn't.
Timing matters, he struck while the iron was hot. There is no reason he should self-censor himself for the benefit of a company that looks like it's run by a bit of an ass.
I'm not talking about for the benefit of the company. I am talking about for the benefit of his fellow employees who took the deal. His article does not put them in the best light.
"that article made his fellow employees look as if they were traitors to the forces of good."
I didn't read that into it. The original piece by Pierce simply made the case that it's unethical for Zynga to gain ownership of a game he made and marketed completely in his own time, and since they were inflexible on that point, the decision was relatively straightforward for him. He then went on to criticize the design of Zynga's products, to explain how that made his decision even easier. The implication that other former coworkers are compromising their character by joining Zynga is never made by Pierce; it's your own interpretation.
That's actually not a bad idea, particularly if you generalize it. You could make a device, or you could do some cool text analysis that predicted whether you are drunk.
I have the Thunderbird Confirm-Address addon installed, to give me one last chance to check if I'm sending a message to someone who probably shouldn't receive it. Like the boss. Which happened.
I remember once I sent some email to some friends, after a very hard night of drinking. I knew I was drunk while I wrote, and I tried my damnedest to write coherently, with no errors. I was very proud when I checked it over and clicked Send. I was astounded the next morning when I read it over, at how obviously drunk the writer was.
Warning: this is going to get very long and ranty.
I worked on Wall Street 2006 to 2008, and I had friends on the Street before that. I went into "tech" in 2008, saw the mini-crash and read the Sequoia ScareDoc, and now I'm watching this bubble.
Wall Street has a bad reputation, but I've seen far worse ethics and much less professionalism in technology, which is supposed to be above that garbage. On Wall Street, people know what the rules are. They're pretty clear, because the scummiest shit has generally been tried. You front-run your customer, you go to jail. You get a reputation for being unethical, it ruins your career. You defraud people, you get fired for life from the securities industry. You have to take a Series 7, so you have no excuse. Sure, the industry has some slimeballs and some slip through, but not so brazenly, and they at least are supposed to feel bad about it. In technology these days, there are so many people who don't give the square root of a shit about making good software but just want to play the angles. The vast majority of them aren't engineers, those who are tend engineers turning into junior executives by putting their ethics through a fire sale, but none of those fuckers belong here.
Google: generally professional and probably ethical macroscopically, but careerist to a fault. Bureaucratically overgrown. Full of horrid legacy systems that are built to flip-- specifically, to be "interesting" enough to merit a promotion for the original architect, who then moves on before it goes into maintenance phase and falls to pieces. That's how you get promoted at the big G. Launch and flee, every 18 to 24 months.
Startupland: I can name two major ($100M+ valuation) VC-funded companies that have committed major ethical faults in the past 6 months (one wasn't published and won't be, one developed last week and might be in the next 3 weeks). Both of these startups have some of the best, nicest, and most interesting engineers I've ever met... but are run by scumbag executives that would have fit in better with 1980s private equity people than with the (more decent, much more boring) typical Wall Street quant. I've never met a VC and I'm sure they're not all bad, but my theory is that the scumbaggery in so many VC-funded startups has to come from the top. I assume they fund people who are like them, and that would make sense, given that VCs are mostly MBAs, and something like 60 percent of B-school students at top schools cheat in their coursework.
Why do I bring this up? Because it's fucking nuts that some unprofessional, vindictive jerk like this guy was just acquired for $200 million. The world is seriously on tilt here. What are we even doing?
Your dig at Google here is astonishingly out of place. Even if what you say is true, you're comparing fraud and serious ethical violations with... being bureaucratic and having bad legacy systems? I don't even know what to say.
Also, what you say isn't true. Google has the shallowest management structure and the most aggressive attitude towards refactoring (both in the large and small) of any company I've ever worked at. I'm sure that you could find plausible complaints to make about Google, but these two aren't even close.
I don't think it's really possible to have a constructive yet critical discussion about Google culture on HN. There are too many members here with personal ties to the company. I imagine Facebook would be similarly hard to publicly deconstruct.
Google has a lot of really stupid policies that are unethical and hurt peoples' careers. For example, Perf. Five percent of employees end up on PIPs for no other reason than getting shat on in Neutron-Jack-style stack-ranking. People on PIPs can't transfer. They rarely actually get fired (most quit, most PIPs on people who stay are inconclusive; rare is for a person to get fired and even rarer is for a person to actually pass... inconclusive PIPing isn't "passing" because it leads to a shorter and more obnoxious PIP, 2 quarters later) but the effect is just the same-- an utterly fucking pointless waste of peoples' time, jobs lost for no good reason, billions of dollars of capital being destroyed. I'd guess that most of those people who run afoul of the completely arbitrary 5% yank-point are on those launch-and-flee systems.
Then there is the rampant abuse of process that goes on related to Perf. I know one person who, as a protest, wrote negative unsolicited feedback to 5 random Googlers each cycle. I would actually say that he is a lot more unethical than Perf's designers, but it just shows how silly the whole system is.
Then there's Real Names (for which people were PIP'd if not fired, even though Google is supposed to be so open it would never do that). Don't get me started on that shit. With Real Names, I can only ask: do you not want your product to succeed? Are you afraid of users?
I think Google is unethical to promote and retain, in management positions, sometimes with global impact, severe and obvious incompetents in the same way that it's unethical to let a 4-year-old fly a plane. If you're a billion-dollar company, you have no excuse for promoting the kinds of stupid fucks who think that company-wide stack-ranking is good for your culture. That shit might make sense in a piece-rate sweatshop, but not in tech.
To me what you described looks like classic description of any big company not any one company in general.
The founders ideals are torn to shreds the moment the management layers begin to take control. Management by leadership either works only on paper or there are very few people who follow it.
Most managers rank only by following methods. The most competent guy is always seen as a threat. Promotions and rewards are given to guys who can polish their boots and offer a degree of allegiance to them. And a guy who is capable of growing and doing something on himself gets kicked in the teeth. Nepotism, partiality and biased behavior are extremely common in management layers.
I like Perf. I've worked at a lot of big companies, and promotions were correlated to whether or not they thought you would quit or not. Perf is a lot of work, but it seems perfectly capable of promoting the best employees. Everyone with a title above or equal to Senior Software Engineer has seemed worthy, which has not been the case at other companies.
I think your problem is: you can't work at Google if you want ego-inflating titles for doing nothing. When I was at Bank of America, the lowest title you could have (if you weren't hired straight out of college, that is) was "Vice President". It inflated your ego but meant nothing.
They do, and they were supposedly in the process of redoing titles as I left, but my guess is that it didn't go very well. Nobody likes to give up an important-sounding title.
"unethical to promote and retain, in management positions, sometimes with global impact, severe and obvious incompetents in the same way that it's unethical to let a 4-year-old fly a plane."
I should have clarified: personal reputation vs. organization reputation.
Wall Street's a big industry and has a lot of unethical people in it, but corporations are good at distancing themselves from bad actors (even if they supported them while they were being scummy). People have a hard time recovering from a bad reputation; companies reinvent themselves more easily.
Ok, that's upper class, which is a different culture from Wall Street.
If you're a VP or a middling MD and you get a reputation for being scummy, it hurts you. Not to say there aren't lots of scummy people at middle ranks of banks; it's just that getting caught doesn't help you.
Corporate executives, on the other hand, are a different breed and live in a world that's much more tolerant of scumbaggery (like the world of politicians and well-connected people in general).
The upper class is the same whether you're in finance or non-profits or regular corporate America. They like scumminess. Or, at least, they're more invested in the mob-like tendency to always protect their own than any other ethical principle.
> If you're a VP or a middling MD and you get a reputation for being scummy, it hurts you.
So Goldman managing director, Scott L. Lebovitz sat on the BoD of a company which hosted of the biggest forum for sex trafficking of under-age girls. Village Voice Media had 70% of prostitution ads.
Is this what hurt him that he had to step down after many years?
BTW, we can play this game all day. If you think that there is an iota less scumminess on Wall Street, then you haven't worked there or looked too carefully.
I think there's less scumminess among average people on Wall Street than among average non-engineers in VCistan, which is only a small percentage of startups, much less technology.
I think there's way more scumminess on Wall Street than in technology as a whole, or than in the private-sector in general, but I think the current crop of darling-at-the-ball social-games/network-coupon VC-funded startups have some really scummy executives. This is something I've observed through experience, and it surprised me a lot, to tell the truth.
yeah it's the same with gambling and poker. In these worlds if you slip up you probably won't be given another chance, and once you lose your reputation, you have nothing left. Nobody wants to deal with you anymore. Sure gamblers are no angels, but to be honest, I have found that online poker players, especially at high stakes, are much more ethical and considerate of other people than a lot of the other people I see. The fact that they are constantly under scrutiny from their peers and the rest of society probably makes them think a lot more about what's ethical and what's not ethical.
So, paradoxically when you are part of a negatively connotated industry, there is a good chance you're actually much more ethical than the vast majority of other people.
I agree with you in general but I think that only three classes of Silicon Valley companies attract jerks like that: 1) gaming, 2) social networks (glorified dating), 3) market place / "new business model" companies.
Good. This community hadn't had a good Zynga-bashing thread in a few days. Let's repeat the same tired anecdotes and all jump on the bandwagon hating Zynga! Don't forget to downvote any minority opinions or skeptics of the evil Zynga narrative.
You just got bought for $200 million, now it's the time to show that you deserved to be the CEO of that company, by being diplomatic, respecting those around you (or who used to be around you) and now calculating your every move. Your opinion no longer just affects yourself, it affects your whole company, as well as (in a lesser extent), the company that just bought you.