It was a great response until he got to the 80 hours thing.
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?
About the Penny Arcade Job Posting
41–50 of 126 posts
Re: About the Penny Arcade Job Posting
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ladder comment is about the Ping-Pong tournaments regularly held in the office. From the comment it's pretty obvious this is a two person job and getting a single dev is a business mistake.
Given that this is posted on his current employers' public forum, I take the "bottom of the ladder" and "not a benefit" juxtaposition as a "ha ha only serious" kind of joke. There's no way that wasn't intended to have a double meaning.
There is a way. The way in which you're completely misreading a joke about an office ping pong tournament.
Re: About the Penny Arcade Job Posting
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I downvoted you. I think completely justifiably. Is your type comment really appropriate for HN? 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.<<
This is a free country you can downvote me as much as you want but you cannot distort facts by quoting half paragraphs. And facts are that that if he was paid enough he would have stayed longer at Penny Arcade in order to later fulfill his dream of teaching. > 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 th…
> -I need to put away a lot of money to support myself when I’m getting paid a truly ludicrous wage -> indicating he is getting paid well at PA and was able to amass money for the low paying job when teaching.
Non sequitur.
Re: About the Penny Arcade Job Posting
#44blah blah blah. I'm leaving because I'm underpaid. blah blah blah.
I downvoted you. I think completely justifiably. Is your type comment really appropriate for HN? 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.<<
Yes it is actually. He pointed out the obvious between the lines message.
Re: About the Penny Arcade Job Posting
#45They're rock-stars looking for a digital roadie. The roadie doesn't care he's abused because he's "with the band".
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.
Re: About the Penny Arcade Job Posting
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think your reaching a little, taking things outta context and spinning what he says to reinforce what you want to believe. 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 signific…
Paying someone "near market value" for a regular developer at a normal company, but leaving them on call 24/7 for 5 years is paying them "way below market value". 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 d…
> Paying someone "near market value" for a regular developer at a normal company, but leaving them on call 24/7 for 5 years is paying them "way below market value".
I say this as someone who went through that exact situation: I worked at a small company
SOP for small companies, except the market value bit, you'll usually get less.
Re: About the Penny Arcade Job Posting
#47This post confirms that the job posting is exactly what it looks like: an exploitative horror-show * 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 tak…
My thoughts exactly. You see this all over the place; people talk about their job requiring passion and sacrifice as if it's a good thing. If your job requires you to do the work of two people and keep a laptop by your bed it's because your boss doesn't value your time and wont bother to hire the second person needed to do the job correctly. You aren't helping your coworkers by meeting ridiculous expectations, you're…
Ya, I'm surprised to see so much outrage here over this. You see sometimes people here taking work/life balance seriously, but work yourself to death seems more the norm here.
They rationalize it because they are working for themselves (read: their VC) to death.
Re: About the Penny Arcade Job Posting
#48He doesn't seem to dispute that he basically gets paid less than someone who does all those things should... 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.
That sort of depends on your definition of "legitimate", but in my opinion, no.
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.
Re: About the Penny Arcade Job Posting
#49It's almost as if people with no knowledge of the situation didn't know what they were talking about and speculated angrily instead.
Gotta drive those ad eyeballs somehow.
Downvotes? Come on. Manufactured controversy based on uninformed speculation to drive hits to ones blog is the entire business model of half the "news" sites out there. Is it impolitic to point that out?
Re: About the Penny Arcade Job Posting
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
... And they got it right . The employee confirmed what was in the job posting and what people had issues with (so many different roles, ridiculous hours, low pay, etc). 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/…
I disagree. In a small company, everyone takes on multiple roles -- so why can't a single person be a programmer, web developer, system administrator? I've done that job many times. 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.
Penny Arcade is not a small company, it just plays one on TV.