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On Penny Arcade, Exploitation, and the Myth of the Do-Everything Rock Star

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Re: On Penny Arcade, Exploitation, and the Myth of the Do-Everything Rock Star

#141

Post by MrZongle2 »

jblow wrote: post #76
gaius wrote: post #5

This is the dirty little secret of startups too. As an early hire you will work as hard as the founders, and take at least as much personal financial risk as them if it doesn't work out, yet with minimal exposure to any upside - so the sane options are, full co-founder, or double market rate salary to offset the risk. Not pennies and "stock options".

If you believe this then you have never run a company. Being responsible for a company is categorically different from being an employee at a company, even if that employee is very hard-working.

Being responsible for a company is categorically different from being an employee at a company, even if that employee is very hard-working.

Yes, it is the difference between being a parent and being a babysitter.

Both are responsible for the health and welfare of one or more children, but the babysitter eventually gets to go home and be "off the clock".

Problem is, many small companies seem to think that the equivalent of calling up the babysitter at 2am to deal with a vomiting child is acceptable.

Re: On Penny Arcade, Exploitation, and the Myth of the Do-Everything Rock Star

#142

Post by RandallBrown »

Zimahl wrote: post #131
taeric wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me thinks you have not seen the scope of their audience. This would be akin to having no respect for the Humble Bundle developers because it is just a tiny shop. I mean, only a few games every few weeks. :)

The scope of their audience is somewhat irrelevant. I'm not criticizing their comic here - other than a somewhat simple blog(ish) design, they just need to handle a lot of users to their semi-static site which is a solved problem. Maybe deal with a ton of users on their forum - once again a solved problem. Otherwise, like I said, most of it is office IT stuff for a handful of people working in an office. I'm not sure…

are massive user forums a solved problem?

Reddit still gives error pages to me dozens of times a day.

Re: On Penny Arcade, Exploitation, and the Myth of the Do-Everything Rock Star

#143

Post by danudey »

johngalt wrote: post #121
danudey wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a huge long reply to this comment, but by the time I got to the end I realized you were just making cynical, shitty comments because you're upset with them for whatever reason. 'attention to detail' - If I hire someone I want them to have a good attention to detail and not just do whatever works. It's the little things that make the difference between a good server admin and a great one. 'motivated self-start…

You're right, I'm not being charitable in my assumptions. I would edit it and trim it back a little, but I don't want to take away from your response. To examine this more seriously: Individually their requirements fit in the broader context of IT. However, taken as a whole the job post screams 'toxic environment', and 'setup for failure'. It's possible I'm entirely wrong, but the post throws off a lot of red flags.…

You're not wrong in that there's a lot of questions left unanswered by this post. Where you see 'terrible work environment', though, I see a pretty decent likelihood of 'Lots to do, and also I have no idea how to write a good IT job posting'.

I would have a lot of questions for them, for sure. I've worked as sysadmin for $10/hr with 24/7 on-call (when I was desperate, broke, and nearly homeless), and I'd never go back. That said, if you're the only IT guy… well, obviously you're going to be on-call if something breaks. I would definitely negotiate this up in my contact if I were interviewing for the job.

The interesting thing to me about the potential here is that they already have all of their infrastructure; they have the website, the servers, the CDNs, and whatever else they need to run the site. The job would involve taking over those responsibilities and bringing them in-house. They already have redundancy, monitoring, and distribution taken care of, so you wouldn't be asked to build a new server infrastructure from scratch and take care of it. You might be tasked with bringing it in-house, but that's definitely doable by one person if there's no strict (unreasonable) timeline on it.

As for the wifi: yeah, I wouldn't want to do it either, personally. There's lots of other people who can do it far, far better than I could.

Looking at the PA guys, I'm willing to make a bet that their biggest IT problem is that they don't know what they don't know. Can awful wifi be solved? Presumably, right? But they're dealing with tens of thousands of people. How do you do that? Who do you call?

So, what they need for the wifi example, for example, is someone who can step in and say 'These are the things we don't know and need to learn', or 'these are the questions we need to ask', or 'this is the discussion we need to have' (which ties in with my 'don't know how to write a good tech job post' point above).

One thing I've learned in tech jobs is that having no answers is far, far better than having no questions. Maybe they're trying to hire someone to ask questions.

Re: On Penny Arcade, Exploitation, and the Myth of the Do-Everything Rock Star

#144

Post by rantanplan »

dpcheng2003 wrote: post #93
jmduke wrote: post #7

I think the thing that frustrates me the most about it is: they’ll probably get a thousand applicants. A bunch of 25 year-old kids with a ton of talent and stars in their eyes are going to try to get this crap job for crap pay so they can work somewhere “cool” and feel like a part of something big. The Penny Arcade “machine” (their term) will roll on, making its millions of dollars while somehow retaining the “little…

I think the author skates between praise and criticism as they are different sides of the same coin--Robert is a great businessman. I find this type of knee-jerk response to the job posting disappointing. When did we become so sensitive or insecure or helpless that we need to shame this person or this job posting? It's been said multiple times over in this comments thread that Robert is actually being uniquely transp…

There are so many logic flaws in your comment that I will just respond to the ones that stand out(to me anyway).

"Robert isn't breaking any employment laws".

I didn't know we should only voice our disagreement when someone does something illegal. Actually, on second thought, I think doing that would be somewhat redundant because, well you know, the law has already taken care of that.

"The best you can do to show your disapproval as a great developer is to not apply"

What a misguided and cynical opinion! No. What we can do, is to expose unethical and exploitative tactics, in order to protect the younger, and by extension, the more naive candidates.

Re: On Penny Arcade, Exploitation, and the Myth of the Do-Everything Rock Star

#145

Post by danudey »

rhizome wrote: post #120
ceol wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They run conventions. Obviously they want their IT guy around to help set everything up. The wifi at PAX Prime 2012 was unusable the majority of the time. How do you mitigate that? Their website developer is supposed to be in charge of their convention networking? > 'on-call 24/7' - Again, this is normal. Not if there's only one person handling everything. Normally, you have the main developer and someone who is on…

It's also a single-point of failure. I have to wonder what the turnover for these unicorns is. Maybe that's why they're trolling LinkedIn with this stuff.

They post all of their job posts on LinkedIn, and then they tweet them to a hundred thousand people, and have them retweeted to millions. LinkedIn is just a place for them to put the text they want to show people.

Re: On Penny Arcade, Exploitation, and the Myth of the Do-Everything Rock Star

#146

Post by danudey »

nsxwolf wrote: post #126
danudey wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a huge long reply to this comment, but by the time I got to the end I realized you were just making cynical, shitty comments because you're upset with them for whatever reason. 'attention to detail' - If I hire someone I want them to have a good attention to detail and not just do whatever works. It's the little things that make the difference between a good server admin and a great one. 'motivated self-start…

On-call 24/7 is normal? I thought good IT departments had rotating on-call schedules.

When you're the only person charged with any technical issues? I would say yes (in my experience). In most cases, though, there's not really a lot of issues that need taken care of, and I doubt they have a sufficiently complicated infrastructure that things would break often enough for this to be a problem (unless, in the course of doing your job, you make things worse).

Re: On Penny Arcade, Exploitation, and the Myth of the Do-Everything Rock Star

#147

Post by saalweachter »

Yen wrote: post #119
eshvk wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But but but stock options, 'generous equity' etc

In the general case, equity could serve to create a realistic in-between position between employee and partner. An employee with equity might not have control or responsibility for the entire business, but they have a more direct stake in its success. So there's that. In this specific case, Penny Arcade's job offer doesn't mention anything about equity. Their IT guy won't be part of their branding or image, so they d…

There's nothing wrong with adding a partner. The family farm adds (and loses) partners every generation. Having an extra partner can be great, and it's perfectly reasonable to prefer a partner to an employee. (Or vice versa.) If what you really want is a partner, then you'll be a lot happier if you find a partner and treat him as such.

If, on the other hand, you do not really want a partner, you should be honest with yourself about what you are looking for. Maybe you really want two or three employees. Maybe you need one full time employee and a few part time employees. Maybe you need some combination of employees and contractors, who can respond to extraordinary problems and then go away when there is no work to do. (IT tends to have a problem with the latter. It's like expecting the cleaning staff to do plumbing just because you don't have enough plumbing jobs to keep a plumber on staff, and they both work with bathrooms.)

To sum it up with a bit of sexist humor, if what you need is a wife, either find a wife or hire a cook, a maid, an accountant, and a mistress. Don't hire a cook and expect him to sleep with you and do your taxes.

Re: On Penny Arcade, Exploitation, and the Myth of the Do-Everything Rock Star

#148

Post by taurath »

kalleboo wrote: post #89
rayiner wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact of the matter is that this sort of "cool but shitty" job is quite common in other industries (music, movies, advertising, politics, sports). At least in tech, these sorts of jobs don't involve giving sexual favors, so be thankful for that much.

There's an even closer analogy on hand, which is especially poignant with Penny Arcade - video games. Lots of kids enter the game industry and get chewed up and overworked and tolerate it because they love games.

I knew I had to leave when I was asking why X benefit was so bad and HR's response was "well we work on video games" as if that helped the situation.

Re: On Penny Arcade, Exploitation, and the Myth of the Do-Everything Rock Star

#149

Post by danudey »

ceol wrote: post #100
danudey wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a pay cut of $20k/yr to work at my current job. I'm glad I did. I made a shitload of money before, and even if I'm sometimes discontent with my current position due to the occasional fit of stress, it's much healthier of an environment for me to be in. Actually, looking at the job post for PA: - 'Code in multiple front-end and back-end languages' - well, I can do that. In fact, I do a lot of backend work at my…

We have no idea what your office is like or how much they make. We do have an idea how much PA makes, and it's enough to hire at least two people to handle these tasks.

Assuming there's enough work across all four that needs doing.

Keep in mind, all of these tasks are already being done by somebody. It's possible that the majority of the tasks will be additional projects (e.g. set up an office fileserver to optimize the art workflow, automate common tasks, fix minor bugs in the CMS, etc).

My point is: there's a ton of things we don't know about this job either; for example, their 'we're not going to pay you lots' could mean $100k instead of $120k, which would be fine by me for living in Seattle, but the way people are complaining about it makes it sound like it's $35k/yr and you have to buy your own office equipment.

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