Who was the second weakest? Third weakest?
OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"
151–160 of 194 posts
Re: OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"
#152Looks like he just apologized: https://twitter.com/#!/tfadp/status/186460580201238529
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.
He didn't apologize. After an apology, you need to back up your words with actions.
Re: OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"
#153I'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. Very good fit for Zynga.
I'm glad these management types cluster at Zynga - its hopefully a few less we all have to deal with everywhere else
I wonder if people said the same thing about EA? And look where that got us :(
Re: OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"
#154So 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.
Re: OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"
#155Porter 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" va…
> 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…
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?
Re: OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"
#156The 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…
If I worked for him I'd be wondering if he thought of me as one of the many.
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.
Re: OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"
#157App idea: Twitter client with a breathalyzer.
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.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/confirm-a...
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.
Re: OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 out…
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.
Re: OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
An ant throws a pebble at an elephant, and the elephant stomps on the ant in response. How courageous of you to side with the elephant here.
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... live your life in constant fear of the elephant. Whatever the elephants says, goes. Gotcha.
Re: OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"
#160While 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 al…
"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.