About the Penny Arcade Job Posting

When Snowden did his revelation that was pretty much all we talked about. In fact, pretty much everywhere I go was full of the discussions. BBS, blogs, forums, you name it. We recounted where Snowden was at the time, whether he would escape the U.S., whether he would be granted asylum, and so on. The news was very high profile and (in)directly relating to the people, especially the developer community(the hackers, following your diction).

That's the nature of the high profile event. When something of interest happens you want to talk about it, do you grumble about its lack of diversity of topics? Sure, but the stuff was important and we talked about it.

I'm sure at least half of the so-called hackers, (I would prefer the term developers, but I digress) also either play a game, or more obviously, hired. A lot of us have been burned by bad employers and know at least a friend who's been exploited by such bosses.

PA, in this case, hits the two demographics in the center. They are one of the biggest presence in gaming industry and they showed themselves as an exploitive, abusive boss still pretending to be 'the good guys protecting the small'.

To me PA stands in a very bad books because they had a track record of hypocrisy, misogyny, and more importantly, bullying. This is just another record to be added, but you see why people would want to talk about it, and when they have a place to talk about it, sharing the same interests and same demography, they talk about it.

We are all people, and a BBS doesn't define the topics.

If the person hired is also satisfied in the position, I suspect that will make no difference to the naysayers.

But it's not that easy for a company to keep employees happy. Many who pay market rates have mostly miserable workers. To me, a genuinely satisfied employee is never an example of a moral or other mistake by a company.

To me, this reads as "This needs to be protected by applicants changing their utility function." Applicants do value their time. Everyone values their time. They just value it differently.

Your claim basically hinges on your belief that some aspects of utility are objective. The essential point of your argument then, as I understand it, is that you want job applicants to correct their utility functions according to that objective evaluation, to help out the rest of us whose utility functions are already 'correct'.

This would actually be pretty cool, but the trouble is that you really are not going to have much luck trying to convince everyone else to agree with your utility estimates, even if they do strike you as objective. I think I would probably agree with many of them, personally, but they cannot be made normative.

At the end of the day I agree that you are probably worrying about nothing. I'm not going to claim that the market does an excellent job of setting salaries. There are a lot of irrational agents at play in that market, and the results are skewed accordingly. That said, I think this particular brand of irrationality is highly unlikely to be a driving force.