* He speculates whether the job is worth a "lower salary" (and, given his admitted inexperience in the workforce, he probably has no idea what a market salary looks like)
* "The ping-pong table is NOT a benefit"
* He's on the "bottom of the goddamn ladder" and "reminded every day" edit: I'm getting a lot of flak for taking this out of context. This is a post on his employer's public forum, that they tweeted out on their corp accounts. It's not a stretch to read between the lines because this "joke" is so awkward and forced. I cannot imagine that it didn't have a double meaning. In other words, "ha ha only serious"
* He wears "four hats," and does the job of "two people" so they can run "lean."
* At some point his burnout was so bad (and so visible), his employers asked if they could "send [him] anywhere"
It's really a little strange to read this post. It's obvious that he really, really likes his coworkers and really, really hates his job. He describes horrible things with soft, feel-good terms. The author seems to hope applicants go into it with open eyes: the new hire will be crapped on and underpaid while he keeps a laptop next to the bed to handle early-AM change requests. But your coworkers are really fun!
The ladder is about the ping pong league they run, and he's joking that it's not a benefit because he's not winning. He decided he preferred to get a lower salary for a job he enjoyed more. He said he can wear four hats because "The reality is that one highly motivated, highly skilled person can handle all of this. You do not need to be constantly working IT, or constantly managing servers or writing code. There’s a lot there, yes. This is a job that will keep one person fairly busy. Two people might find themselves spending a lot of time on /r/aww."
So either you're really reading a lot between the lines to see what you want to see, or you didn't read it.
He posted this on his current employer's public forum, after all.
I did not get that after re-reading the post. While I thank you for clarifying the point which changed the tone of the post dramatically(bad juxtaposition if you ask me, really), I'd also like to point out allegations of did you read the post are, in general, not constructive ad hominem(that whoever you're replying to is incapable of reading and etc.) and uncalled for.
They rationalize it because they are working for themselves (read: their VC) to death.
* No, the conditions are not awful...I love this company
* No one here has been scammed into working as hard as they do, and the implication that we’re all blind fools with low self esteem for being here is honestly insulting.
* There won’t be any taking advantage of starry-eyed young twenty-somethings.
He explains why he's leaving directly and clearly, (including "No, I did not burn out.") and that he likes working there. You're assuming he's lying, which you can't know.
He very obviously loves the company, but it's not a healthy love.
(With my apologies to Pearl Jam)
Well, duh, presumably he'd like to get a job at some point in the foreseeable future, and bad-mouthing your former employer is a wonderful one-way ticket to food stamps.
>No one here has been scammed into working as hard as they do
"Scam" is subjective. Of course nobody thinks they've been scammed. If you think you've been scammed, you quit. But if someone works basically illegal hours for below-market pay at a high-visibility company whose great overall contribution to society is a three-panel webcomic, well, it walks like a scam, quacks like a scam, and flies south for the winter.
>the implication that we’re all blind fools with low self esteem for being here is honestly insulting.
You don't have to be a blind fool to make a bad decision, and you don't have to hate yourself to sell yourself short. The reason we say these people are being exploited is quite simple: everything about their situation fits perfectly with the exploitation hypothesis. But you know what? This is par for the course in the world of "art". If you want to work in the "art" industry, like for a webcomic or a video game studio, be prepared to be paid less for more work than in some respectable field, unless you find a way to exploit the situation, cf. Thomas Kincaid.
Of course people call it exploitative, but it's really market pressure. There's no shortage of starry-eyed twenty-somethings to take advantage of, so the whole industry does it because, seriously, who's going to turn down free money? Why would you hire someone for a decent job at a respectable salary when you can make someone's life hell for a fraction of the price without any real impact on your bottom line? That's all Penny Arcade is really thinking.
Of course there's a word for people who think like this: Homo economicus. There's also a shorter word with less Latin: despicable. Penny Arcade is despicable. Period.
>There won’t be any taking advantage of starry-eyed young twenty-somethings.
But there is. It's their business model. It's part of the business model of a litany of "cool" companies where, in lieu of a fair salary, you get to put on your Facebook "I work at Penny Arcade", and, I dunno, maybe people think it'll get them laid or something.
You can't ignore a person's status when you're considering what they're saying. This poor bastard's comments have a direct and measurable impact on his future earning prospects, and having Hacker News ruminate over his situation for half a week is steadily decreasing his prospective income for the rest of his life. These are facts, not opinions. This is what happens when you bad-mouth your employer, because the deck is stacked against you.
>He explains why he's leaving directly and clearly, (including "No, I did not burn out.") and that he likes working there
In conclusion, no shit, Sherlock. Would you hire someone who said they burned out at their previous job because it sucked? Of course not.
If the person hired is also satisfied in the position, I suspect that will make no difference to the naysayers.
But it's not that easy for a company to keep employees happy. Many who pay market rates have mostly miserable workers. To me, a genuinely satisfied employee is never an example of a moral or other mistake by a company.
From the comment it's pretty obvious this is a two person job and getting a single dev is a business mistake.
There's no way that wasn't intended to have a double meaning.
Even if they find someone who's just as skilled and motivated, that person won't have the key experience of "I built all this" and will have to spend a much larger fraction of time on maintenance/extension.
Ultimately PA will have to hire multiple people to do all this stuff. If they're smart they'll recognize it now, rather than when the smart, motivated person they do hire starts to fail.
The bottom of the ladder is takin outta context, I am pretty sure he is referring to his position in the ping pong standings and joking about the ping pong table.
Salary is poor may also be considered "fair" based on his comment:
It is true that I am paid below market value, but not so significantly as folks on the internet assume.
I say this as someone who went through that exact situation: I worked at a small company for five years out of college, and was on-call for 24/7 for most of that. Someone called me on my goddamn honeymoon (which was basically the only real vacation I took during the interval) to troubleshoot a minor issue I had left explicit instructions for before I left.
They were very good with salary increases, and I didn't get more than a 5% raise out of switching jobs. But I went from working 50-60 hours a week, plus perpetual on-call, to working 40 hours a week.
I loved working there, loved the people, had a lot of fun but ... I wish I'd left years earlier. It wasn't worth it. It's hard to admit it, when you love a job that doesn't love you back. But I will never go back to working the job of two people unless I'm getting paid the salary of two people.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/screenlife-part-1 http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/screenlife-part-2
"he probably has no idea what a market salary looks like"
Amazon doesn't pay as well as Google, but Amazon salary is really far better than you'll get at anything other than the four big tech companies for a normal SDE.
It would be like a textbook case of the Stockholm syndrome -- only, despite trying quite hard, he doesn't come off as that keen about his captors or his environment anyway...
It's not that hard:
Want a programmer? Hire one.
Want a web developer? Hire one.
Want a system administrator? Hire one. Hire two if you have any type of 24/7 on call requirement (it's not remotely reasonable to expect one individual to be on call 24/7 365).
Then unless you want to get sued, set reasonable expectations of hours (2x full time is not reasonable).
The only issue is if the workload is more than one person can handle. In this case, the work sounds like it's only slightly more than a one-person job and it's unfortunate he's not paid accordingly.
I don't get how people are translating how he worked around 80 hours a week for a very brief period into some sort of hours requirement or expectation for the job. That's not even remotely what he said.
Overall, it reinforced that they are interested in someone who is willing to take a below market rate, is a generalist in many arenas, and is willing to work 60-80 hours a week, including 24/7 on call.
Honestly, breaking the job into 2 positions (no, they would not be reading r/aww all day, and if they were, you hired the wrong people) would make this SO much more enticing. It would eliminate the 24/7 on call (you could do every other week), you'd have someone to bounce ideas off, and if you hired the right 2 people, their expertise in the 4 'jobs' would likely be much higher than whoever is going to get the gig currently.
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.
Financial gain? Nope. World class technological challenges? Still no. Work life balance? Obviously not. Solving meaningful problems? No. Name recognition or industry stepping stone? Maybe, but highly mitigated by the fact that any serious applicant would be qualified for more valuable positions elsewhere.
Is this job squarely aimed at die hard PA fan-people? What about them as an organization is particularly exciting?
You'll notice the PA guys themselves are technologically illiterate. Most of their fan base is too. They appeal to people who want to be labeled as gamers more so than they appeal to people who play games.
I suspect the answer is a flat, "No." Unless I was running a successful media company like PA there's nothing in it for you. What about it being PA makes it okay then?
Unfortunately I'm not surprised by the job posting. In non-unionized media companies the labor relations are generally very poor. A friend of mine used to work in such a post-production audio studio as a junior engineer. They paid him practically nothing and waited as long as they could to pay his invoices. In return he lived to work for them and never received credit for anything.
In contrast his sister worked in a larger post-production effects studio where the workers were unionized. She still has a job there afaik and is quite happy. Her brother left his gig when he was up to his eyeballs in debt and couldn't handle the hours anymore.
It sucks but that's the free market for you.
It sucks, but that's "the reality of what the people of Earth have demonstrated they want" (when they have to make tradeoffs against the rest of reality, anyway) for you.
"This job meant security, a huge opportunity to go out of my comfort zone and learn, and countless other 'soft' benefits I couldn't think of. And I got to work with people I truly enjoyed."
I'm leaving because I'm underpaid.
blah blah blah.
Quote from the post: >>First things first - you may wonder, how could this job possibly be so good if I'm leaving it behind? No, I did not burn out. No, the conditions are not awful. I am leaving because I have always wanted to teach.<<
> Doing so comfortably requires that before then, I need to put away a lot of money to support myself when I’m getting paid a truly ludicrous wage. It is true that I am paid below market value, but not so significantly as folks on the internet assume. I live quite comfortably on this salary, and while it’s less than I could make elsewhere, it’s not out of the bounds of reasonable expectation. But I want to accelerate my plans for teaching. So here we are. I love this company, but I have goals that won't be fulfilled by working there, so it's time to move on.
TL;DR I'm leaving because I'm underpaid.
i can't even begin to know what the fuck a 'volunteer' Enforcer is, especially for a profitable company. quite frankly it sounds like the typical 20 foot pile of horse shit that only the games industry could come up with. and i've seen some really mind-bendingly exploitative behavior after being based here in LA for a decade.
anything significantly less than the above salary + benefits, and you are being ripped. off. by. people. who. know. better.
i know this because i have several senior devops guys on my staff who fit that description and have been with us for over 3 years. this is also what I used to make as a senior engineer before i started up my company as an owner/executive.
people should be FAR AND AWAY your most expensive resource. with a few notable types of exceptions, if you pay your people less than your hosting provider or your rent or marketing, you're doing something very, very wrong, and it will catch up to you in some way or another. see: penny arcade job post.
Why don't you try using Google and looking it up before angrily speculating?
The Enforcer system is what the use at Penny Arcade Expo. It's a volunteer system to help run the event, and in return you get to attend things when you're not on the roster. It's no different to all sorts of roles, be it grad students being a student volunteer to attend a conference (and if you want to talk about underpaid, grad student is where it's at) or teenagers picking up trash after the Glastonbury Music Festival.
No-one is being pressganged into being an Enforcer, it sounds like a pretty sweet gig to me.
that's funny, i didn't see "non-profit" or "charity" anywhere on this page. you guys should consider updating it.
i am angry because there is an ongoing, systematic monetary devaluation (and hence social devaluation, dot com billionaires notwithstanding) of all technical roles by people in our own industry. it pisses me right the fuck off and the games companies are at the forefront of the fuckedupedness and loss of dignity.
you chain this fucking guy to a pager and pay him peanuts and harass him to the point where he needs to resign and then flippantly post another job posting with such unbelievably thinly veiled condescension and arrogance, and it's about time an industry called you out for it.
So what I'm missing is whether there's a legitimate reason for him to be paid below market considering the Penny Arcade seems quite successful.
Though as one of the many people who's accepted supposedly below market pay, I can somewhat relate.
I am fully aware that I make below market pay. Almost everyone (except for my developer co-ops, who I need to pay above market to be competitive in the local market) at the not-for-profit I work for does. It's not something that it hidden but our revenue comes from government money and membership fees that is best applied towards fulfilling our mandate so from a community perspective standpoint there is some degree of necessity.
There are other compensation factors though. There's some amount of profile enhancement (in a smallish pond), I've learned a ton, I get to work with a huge number of startups, I get to participate in any of the company-run events I want (and there's a lot).
To me, those are legitimate reasons for me to accept a salary under market value. But if we were a for profit the equation changes dramatically.
Salary is not the be all and end all for all (arguably most) people, and if it's within a certain percentage of market value, then other factors of compensation do make it worthwhile. Maybe you could get 10% more working in grey cubes but you wouldn't be working with those people, you wouldn't be part of a significant force in the geek culture world, and for some those trade offs are worth it.
What makes it stink for me is that I feel like PA could afford market rates, and they're not entirely because they know they don't need to be competitive in that regard, and to me that feels exploitative. They have a huge crowd of people willing to sacrifice some financial gain to be part of them, and they're going to take advantage of that.
It's reasonable from a business standpoint, I think it's even ethical, but it doesn't mean that it's a good thing.
I would like to believe that this guy enjoyed his job and it was a fair relationship. But that just doesn't ring as true. He's deluded himself into believing that he's working for a greater cause, the people who like Penny Arcade. It's not really a noble cause though is it?
No, actually, fuck YOU. Everyone out there who is going all white-knight on "Oh no, this is not a good situation yadda yadda, you're being exploited, abused,... You're in such abusive relationship that you don't even see it". The job posting was worded to be terrible just to ensure only the most motivated and willing would apply.
Does this mean PA are looking for a slave? No, there are better ways to get yourselves a slave and a lot of startups are doing it without anyone batting an eyelash. Look around you: unpaid internships, low salaries that don't compute with the living costs in the area, all these talks of "sure, you start with a low salary but you'll get equity and stock-options",... This is the real bullshit happening around us every day.
All of this talk about "he's working in awful conditions" when he's describing his happiness is making me sick. Who gave any of us the Judgement Stick to impose our views on other people? The real abuse Kenneth is getting is from anyone putting words he never said in his mouth. He's doing great stuff for a great company who SUPPORTS him whole-heartedly. Why is this crowd trying to disminish his proudness of being part of a family?
We've broken the boundaries of the "9-to-5" job. We're beginning to see the myth of developers working only from the workplace crumbling in front of our eyes and I'm only expected to be at work during the day because we got a sales team whose job IS 9-to-5. Because in the end it's not about our capacity to seat 40 hours in an office but our capacity and desire to get stuff done. And some of us are burning with it, don't deny them. Yes we don't count our hours but what would be our alternatives? Go home while we're HAVING FUN? And I can't picture a workplace where I would be told "Okay, you did your thing. Go home and continue it tomorrow morning." I stay late because I like it, sometimes for the 1Gbps fiber, sometimes because there's still stuff I want to do. Yes, two people could do my job and we could share the hats. But we could also hire 50 people to share the hats and just produce even less.
Stop hating and go slap the companies who really deserve it, all the one who boast their funding, business model, clients, w/ever... and think you're being "arrogant" when you ask for a decent salary.
Why so angry mate?
I'm angry because this week, our splendid BBS was just a tech version of US Weekly (or The Sun-Herald if "mate" is any indication of you being Aussie).
Realistically PA needs at least two hires here. One ops guy responsible for IT/Sysadmin, and one dev. Both can crossover as much as needed. They can share the on-call duties. Either decide to reel-in the expectations on this position or hire two people to do it right.
The PA guys were running a one-man show. This isn't going to just be "A system made by somebody else". This is going to be "An entire infrastructure made by one overworked dude who obviously had no time to document anything or make it neatly organized".
Their entire infrastructure is organized and managed in this one guy's head. There will be at best a pile of notebooks and sticky-notes documenting things. Unless he suffers from a severe case of clinical OCD, there is approximately zero chance that the files, the code, the database, the servers, the jobs... anything is any condition to be handled by anything but That One Guy.
This isn't even a two-man job. It's a 10 man job.
They need to admit to themselves that they didn't treat the previous guy right for the kind of work he put in.
Honestly, given PA's history I'm not surprised by this whole situation. They seem like a great bunch of guys who suffer from some serious Aspie-myopia about how life works for everybody outside of their club, and they've had to fight enough trolls and lunatics online that they can't sort out the legitimate criticism from the noise anymore, so when they screw up they just double-down.
You are spreading misinformation, and potentially insulting people in a throw-away portion of your otherwise good point. You don't need to be on the spectrum to be myopic.
>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.
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?
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2013/nov13/11-06ge...
Doubly ironic given Krahulik's famous love for the Surface Pro, the flagship device of this new platform.
* "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.
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.
Why would you take a below market wage to do twice the work? Is there equity in penny arcade? Some kind of lucrative upside we don't know about?
People treat us how we let them treat us, someone taught his bosses that it's OK to ask one employee to be your entire IT department. That it's OK to have them on call 24/7 and have him work a minimum of 8 hours a day (but up to 15-16h/day for months at a time), in exchange for friday lunch and the ability to play video games at work. I'm certain that the people he describes, those who leave at 5 to be with their families, each had a situation when they were pressured to stay late day after day and at some point just said, "no, I'm leaving".
Anyway, Penny Arcade's human resource management obviously sucks. But hey, they had a guy doing the work of a 3-4 person team and for cheap to boot. Why shouldn't they expect to find someone else to pump and dump?
For the company that is supposed to be cool and racks up money from PAX... I don't have words to express my thoughts. It's a huge whirlwind, thoughts quickly appear in my head and move in circles and I can't grab any of them to display here. Just wow!
This line scared me the most...