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OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"

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Re: OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"

#161

Post by georgemcbay »

verelo wrote: post #59

I would hate to be a recruiter for these guys now. Ignoring that i hate recruiters already...I don't think this will help their case. In general I'm just amazed by this. Is it even legal for your employer (even if it be an ex-employer) to talk about you in this way?

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.

Re: OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"

#162

Post by wging »

droithomme wrote: post #154

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 compensa…

>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.

Do you mean Porter, not Pierce?

Re: OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"

#163

Post by michaelochurch »

jpdoctor wrote: post #142
michaelochurch wrote: post #135

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, peop…

> You get a reputation for being unethical, it ruins your career. About those worthless MBS that got sold: Should we expect the death of Goldman anytime soon?

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.

Re: OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"

#164

Post by haberman »

michaelochurch wrote: post #135

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, peop…

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.

Re: OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"

#165

Post by rictic »

latch wrote: post #36
mattkirman wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. [1] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/167244/Turning_down_Zynga...

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.

Re: OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"

#166

Post by michaelochurch »

haberman wrote: post #164
michaelochurch wrote: post #135

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, peop…

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…

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.

Re: OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"

#167

Post by haberman »

michaelochurch wrote: post #166
haberman wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 actu…

I was going to respond that you seem to have an axe to grind. Then I realized you're Michael Church. Never mind, carry on.

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-03-14/tech/31163139...

Re: OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"

#168

Post by jpdoctor »

michaelochurch wrote: post #163
jpdoctor wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You get a reputation for being unethical, it ruins your career. About those worthless MBS that got sold: Should we expect the death of Goldman anytime soon?

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.

> People have a hard time recovering from a bad reputation

Lloyd Blankfein hired a criminal defense lawyer in order to prepare for charges. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/14/goldman-financial-c...)

After how many years should we expect his ouster by the board?

Re: OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"

#170

Post by droithomme »

wging wrote: post #162
droithomme wrote: post #154

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 compensa…

>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. Do you mean Porter, not Pierce?

Oops, sorry, yes. (Would correct, but edit link has expired.)
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