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About the Penny Arcade Job Posting

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Re: About the Penny Arcade Job Posting

#101

Post by coldtea »

DannoHung wrote: post #42
hapless wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or you know, maybe others missing this are not very good at reading obvious stuff between the lines and need everything spelled out...

Re: About the Penny Arcade Job Posting

#102

Post by coldtea »

QuantumGood wrote: post #22
hapless wrote: post #8

This 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…

He fairly specifically says that interpretations such as yours are wrong. He specifically says: * No, the conditions are not awful...I love this company * No one here has been scammed into working as hard as they do, and the implication that we’re all blind fools with low self esteem for being here is honestly insulting. * There won’t be any taking advantage of starry-eyed young twenty-somethings. He explains why he'…

Sure, he says as such. And abused spouses say they fell on the door knob and that "everything is fine", sending just as much mixed signals as the ones you listed above.

Re: About the Penny Arcade Job Posting

#103

Post by TWAndrews »

johngalt wrote: post #67

Congrats Kenneth Kuan. If I ever meet you in person I'd buy you a beer and tell you it isn't always like this. Realistically PA needs at least two hires here. One ops guy responsible for IT/Sysadmin, and one dev. Both can crossover as much as needed. They can share the on-call duties. Either decide to reel-in the expectations on this position or hire two people to do it right.

Ultimately they'll have to, but not because of any outrage about under compensation. This is only possible for Mr. Kuan because he built the systems he maintains. The next person is going to have to maintain systems someone else built. That will be a lot harder, and my guess is ultimately impossible for one person.

Re: About the Penny Arcade Job Posting

#105

Post by jedrek »

Has it been said that this guy is the reason Penny Arcade wrote the ad they wrote?

People treat us how we let them treat us, someone taught his bosses that it's OK to ask one employee to be your entire IT department. That it's OK to have them on call 24/7 and have him work a minimum of 8 hours a day (but up to 15-16h/day for months at a time), in exchange for friday lunch and the ability to play video games at work. I'm certain that the people he describes, those who leave at 5 to be with their families, each had a situation when they were pressured to stay late day after day and at some point just said, "no, I'm leaving".

Anyway, Penny Arcade's human resource management obviously sucks. But hey, they had a guy doing the work of a 3-4 person team and for cheap to boot. Why shouldn't they expect to find someone else to pump and dump?

Re: About the Penny Arcade Job Posting

#106

Post by kelnos »

nbouscal wrote: post #89
brianwawok wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a human being

Yes, because you know what is best for all human beings. This line in the post was directed at you: > That’s like saying everyone would be fulfilled by getting married and having 2.5 kids. Not everyone has the same utility function.

I tend to be a fairly relativistic, each-to-his-own person, so when things like this come up, I generally nod my head in agreement.

I don't think I can do that here, though. You're totally right in that people have different utility functions, but I believe that there are some things that are just objectively bad and unhealthy, and whether or not you think you enjoy them or "like" them, they are still bad for you, and possibly bad for others.

I don't want to live in a world where it's ok for a company to create a position like this guy was in, and have that be the norm. No, it's not like that, but the more we apologize for companies that do that, and the more we say, "oh, it's ok for that person to work in those conditions; if you don't like it then pick another job", the easier we make it for companies to think that those kinds of things are ok for everyone.

And then there's the wage issue. Bottom line: if you are working the jobs of more than one people, you should be paid more than one person. This guy took a pay cut to do more work. That's certainly a reasonable thing to do if compensation comes from other (healthy) angles, which appears not to be the case. The job posting for his replacement explicitly says they're cheap-ass bastards who aren't going to pay what you are worth or what the job duties merit.

That's not just a company I don't want to work for. That is a company with staffing practices that are actively harmful to individuals and the industry as a whole.

edit: @wvenable puts it so so so well a bit below: "I guess I'm old and tired of my peers devaluing their own skills and time."

Re: About the Penny Arcade Job Posting

#107

Post by Legion »

The initial job post, to me, was very clearly written to scare some people off, in an attempt to reduce the tidal wave of responses down to a mere flood.

If that flood of respondents doesn't treat their skills (or their life) as having any value, why should Penny Arcade?

This isn't one of those crap IT jobs someone takes out of desperation for work. This is a job that a ton of people are going to be feverishly applying for and calling their "dream job".

If their "dream" is to trade their skills and time for that level of compensation, who am I to start saying PA is in the wrong by not splitting it into two jobs?

Re: About the Penny Arcade Job Posting

#108

Post by kaonashi »

macspoofing wrote: post #54

The one (and only) problem I had with the posting was this line: >Salary: Negotiable, but you should know up front we’re not a terribly money-motivated group. We’re more likely to spend less money on salary and invest that on making your day-to-day life at work better. That immediately jumped out at me. That came off so off-putting. If you're not a "money motivated group", that means you pay more, right, RIGHT? No, o…

Probably intended it to be more of a comment on the size of the budget and the percent allocated for the position than the size of the salary relative to the market. That said, having been involved in a similar set-up, being the lone guy holding up tech for a large organization is a type of hell I wish on no man.

Re: About the Penny Arcade Job Posting

#109

Post by Pxtl »

TWAndrews wrote: post #103
johngalt wrote: post #67

Congrats Kenneth Kuan. If I ever meet you in person I'd buy you a beer and tell you it isn't always like this. Realistically PA needs at least two hires here. One ops guy responsible for IT/Sysadmin, and one dev. Both can crossover as much as needed. They can share the on-call duties. Either decide to reel-in the expectations on this position or hire two people to do it right.

Ultimately they'll have to, but not because of any outrage about under compensation. This is only possible for Mr. Kuan because he built the systems he maintains. The next person is going to have to maintain systems someone else built. That will be a lot harder, and my guess is ultimately impossible for one person.

... oh God. I hadn't even thought of that.

The PA guys were running a one-man show. This isn't going to just be "A system made by somebody else". This is going to be "An entire infrastructure made by one overworked dude who obviously had no time to document anything or make it neatly organized".

Their entire infrastructure is organized and managed in this one guy's head. There will be at best a pile of notebooks and sticky-notes documenting things. Unless he suffers from a severe case of clinical OCD, there is approximately zero chance that the files, the code, the database, the servers, the jobs... anything is any condition to be handled by anything but That One Guy.

This isn't even a two-man job. It's a 10 man job.

Re: About the Penny Arcade Job Posting

#110

Post by Pxtl »

throw7 wrote: post #82

Any job where one is required to be "plugged" into the internet 24/7 is a red flag. He goes on and mentions that being able to take a hike in the mountains is out of the question. If your life is work...

Reminds me of the infamous Office 365 tone-deaf infographic:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2013/nov13/11-06ge...

Doubly ironic given Krahulik's famous love for the Surface Pro, the flagship device of this new platform.

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