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Zynga May Have Just Laid Off 100+ Employees From Its Austin Office

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Re: Zynga May Have Just Laid Off 100+ Employees From Its Austin Office

#171

Post by trhtrsh »

727374 wrote: post #170
ChuckMcM wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh it absolutely was against policy to short your own stock for just those reasons. At the time I had a restricted stock grant (pre-owned but you 'vest' over time) and ISO options, also vesting. If I had a been a bit more clever I could have sold a 'put' option on all those shares. Not worth as much as actually selling the shares would have been of course. But really there are two points here: 1) People with a lot of…

Selling a put is a long position. If you meant buying a put, I'd assume that's against policy too. Or else that's a really simple loophole. I totally agree with point #1 though. People should be able to diversify their risk.

Yeah, any sort of trading instructions, even a binding instruction like "Sell my shares a year from today, when I won't be under lock up", is considered suspect for insider trading.

A 10b-5 plan or similar is the only legally safe way to act during a quiet period.

But trading during a post-IPO employee lockup, when there is no insider information concern, maybe isn't as tight as "the week before earnings release". Seems like it shouldn't be legally. But employers certainly would order their employees not to trade.

There was a nasty loophole/scandal a few years back where people would set up a legal auto-sale plan like "Sell 1000 shares every week", and selectively cancel the plan on weeks they didn't want to transact. I'm not sure what became of that.

Re: Zynga May Have Just Laid Off 100+ Employees From Its Austin Office

#172

Post by snogglethorpe »

w1ntermute wrote: post #136
gdulli wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. A developer with a full brain would know better than to extrapolate a few examples to an entire industry.

Doesn't matter if there are exceptions. When there are so many job opportunities out there for developers, why take the risk?

I think the general lesson is "don't be a idiot."

I know several people working quite happily at gaming companies (doing, from what I can see, some pretty cool stuff), and those game companies who are the most abusive generally have well-known reputations as such.

I suppose it might not be the best industry to go into straight out of college, when you have little leverage and lack industry smarts...

Re: Zynga May Have Just Laid Off 100+ Employees From Its Austin Office

#173

Post by salemh »

rohern wrote: post #125
jlgreco wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am more concerned about all the non-technical employees they have, who may have not been as well equipped to recognize Zynga for what it is. Most of the artists probably should have been able to recognize it (with all that tracing going on...), but employees more removed than that could have been relatively blindsided.

If they have access to the internet, they have had plenty of opportunities to read about it. The shameful behavior of Zynga is public knowledge and has been for years. Also > (with all that tracing going on...) :D

Yet, the market for non-technical employee's is not nearly as supply-centric as demand.

Re: Zynga May Have Just Laid Off 100+ Employees From Its Austin Office

#174

Post by lazugod »

wilfra wrote: post #161
Spoom wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that other organizations also make dick moves does not negate this dick move.

Is it a 'dick move' that Apple releases their products at a time calculated to get maximum media exposure? Or that every other smart company in the World also times bad news? There are many things one might accurately criticize Zynga for, but this is not one of them. If they hadn't done it this way investors would have yet another reason to sell the stock, it would be evidence the company is run by idiots.

Hiding information is worse than spreading information, yes.

Re: Zynga May Have Just Laid Off 100+ Employees From Its Austin Office

#175

Post by noonespecial »

danilocampos wrote: post #23

Conceptually, I love every bit of bad Zynga news. I like to be reassured that a company will, in the long term, fail when its products are cynically designed to manipulate. That a company will fail when their strategy assumes it's okay to blatantly, consistently, continuously lift design from other firms and products. Practically, though, bad Zynga news feels terrible . Because the guys who architected this repugnant…

Its cynical to say, but every single one of those hard working folks knew they were working hard for Zynga.

Re: Zynga May Have Just Laid Off 100+ Employees From Its Austin Office

#176

Post by w1ntermute »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #100
danilocampos wrote: post #23

Conceptually, I love every bit of bad Zynga news. I like to be reassured that a company will, in the long term, fail when its products are cynically designed to manipulate. That a company will fail when their strategy assumes it's okay to blatantly, consistently, continuously lift design from other firms and products. Practically, though, bad Zynga news feels terrible . Because the guys who architected this repugnant…

I get mixed emotions. Yes, companies that do 'bad things' ideally are corrected out of existence by the market. I never like to see anyone lose their jobs, because at some level the rank and file of the company is the blood coursing through its veins. And as Marissa Meyer and others have re-iterated over the last few months, companies don't do thing people do things. So people who are getting things done and fighting…

> There was a guy at Sun whom I helped manage out of the organization, he landed a job at a start up that two months later got bought with a full vesting of everyone. He walked away with several million dollars. It took a lot of thinking about that series of events to let it sit in my head without pissing me off.

Why did that piss you off? Sounds like it was a win-win situation for you and that guy.

Re: Zynga May Have Just Laid Off 100+ Employees From Its Austin Office

#177

Post by [deleted] »

StavrosK wrote: post #114
ericabiz wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come to some meetups here in Austin. I can't get through a meetup here without a company announcing that they are hiring. Especially the more niche meetups like the Python Web Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/austinwebpythonusergroup/events/880678... My startup is based out of Capital Factory, and if you even just walked in the door during Friday happy hour and announced that you were a developer here in Austin looking…

Python Web development is still niche? Are any of these companies looking for remote work, by any chance? :-P

[deleted]

Re: Zynga May Have Just Laid Off 100+ Employees From Its Austin Office

#178

Post by zerostar07 »

pud wrote: post #24

Startups are hard. Even big startups are hard. Zynga is startupy, even though they're public. There's a lot of schadenfreude on HN when it comes to Zynga. Articles about Zynga's problems regularly make it to the top of HN. Some people think games are frivolous. They're not. Entertainment is (almost) a basic human need. Some people think Zynga players are somehow being tricked. They're not. They're being entertained.…

Nobody steals like zynga. The worst part, they steal from small , non-VC-or-SV-connected indie developers and then they sue them. If they were in china or Russia, everyone would call them scum.

Re: Zynga May Have Just Laid Off 100+ Employees From Its Austin Office

#179

Post by zerostar07 »

danilocampos wrote: post #23

Conceptually, I love every bit of bad Zynga news. I like to be reassured that a company will, in the long term, fail when its products are cynically designed to manipulate. That a company will fail when their strategy assumes it's okay to blatantly, consistently, continuously lift design from other firms and products. Practically, though, bad Zynga news feels terrible . Because the guys who architected this repugnant…

Hard to feel sorry for ppl who chose to waste talent and time like that. They could have gone the other route and compete with zynga if they wanted better

Re: Zynga May Have Just Laid Off 100+ Employees From Its Austin Office

#180

Post by hdragomir »

w1ntermute wrote: post #77
Jach wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it very hard to feel any pity for the employees that knowingly got involved with such a company, and I would be surprised if many of Zynga's best and most hardworking employees didn't jump ship long ago.

Any developer with half a brain should know that the game industry should be avoided like the plague. Long working hours, abusive management, racism (the Kixeye debacle), the issues just go on and on. Take patio11's advice and go into B2B, you'll make money hand over fist with much more manageable working hours.

Let me assure you, working at wooga, in Berlin, is nothing like what you just described.
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