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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

#71

Post by Zimahl »

jdminhbg wrote: post #53
angersock wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Break your leg, don't claim insurance, and have your car break down, and lose your job. Tell me about that safety net.

I guess I was right, it wasn't hyperbole, you actually believe it. At any rate: http://www.ssa.gov/disability/ I'm sure the reply will be that that isn't enough, so at least then we'll just be back to it being righteous hyperbole.

If you think Social Security is a safety net, think again. Unless you are completely disabled you aren't going to see a dime from SSI. Anything that is 'short term' you are out of luck. Even cancer is considered 'short term'.

A real safety net for disability would be something like what Aflac provides. I had a friend who slipped a disk in his back and was stuck on a couch for months until he had surgery. Fortunately for him his company paid for disability insurance as a perk. I'm not sure what he would've done otherwise.

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

#72

Post by jblow »

gaius wrote: post #26
coldtea wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This confuses me, because its as if the author tries to force his valuation of the opportunity onto all prospective applicants. Perhaps it's rather as the author believes in an objective reality, where there is one true valuation of a thing, and he's not so much trying to "force his valuation onto all prospective applicants" as trying to "communicate the real valuation to all prospective applicants". > He recognize…

Quite. Imagine you are a hiring manager (or perhaps you don't have to imagine). Would you make a candidate a higher offer seeing Penny Arcade on their CV? Then what is the cachet exactly?

I do run a software company, and I would much rather hire someone with Penny Arcade on their resume than, say, Oracle or something.

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

#73

Post by ChristianMarks »

I had thought that the general IT/AV person was a dinosaur, but judging from comments here, the position is alive and well. And all too common. Avoid these jobs if you can. If you have the talent and energy to do them, your energies will be dissipated and misdirected, and your talent wasted. You may end up too discouraged to develop it. And you will get old fast.

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

#74

Post by Sukotto »

Two thoughts spring immediately to mind.

Firstly, take a job posting to it's logical extreme and you'd get something similar to the linkedin post[1].

"We want a ninja rockstar coder+sysadmin in the top 99.999th percentile of skill/ability/knowledge. A successful candidate will give their heart and soul to the company, for very little money. Fringe benefits: pong pong table, a beer fridge, and limited 401k matching"

[1] Speaking as someone currently looking for work.

Secondly, this is par for the course at Penny Arcade who has historically gone to great (and borderline abusive imho) lengths to find the best candidates. Their television show PATV did two fascinating arcs on hiring, the first episode of which is here: http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/new-hire-part-1

Robert Khoo will no doubt get a lot of applicants, whom he will ruthlessly cull until he has the perfect fit for his organization. And if he can't find a perfect fit, he'll start over until he does.

I greatly admire his accomplishments at Penny Arcade and have no strong desire to work for him.

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

#75

Post by jtuente »

coldtea wrote: post #16
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…

> This confuses me, because its as if the author tries to force his valuation of the opportunity onto all prospective applicants. Perhaps it's rather as the author believes in an objective reality, where there is one true valuation of a thing, and he's not so much trying to "force his valuation onto all prospective applicants" as trying to "communicate the real valuation to all prospective applicants". > He recognize…

>Perhaps it's rather as the author believes in an objective reality, where there is one true valuation of a thing

This just annoys me to no end. Even in an objective reality, valuations are subjective; e.g. I value having a high-end computer at my home and a rink-a-dink laptop on the road, whereas some of my friends will never own a desktop again because they find no value in it. To be cliche, different strokes for different folks. There is no real valuation of anything, but simply a choice between alternatives which offer some or all of the things that someone chooses to value.

What you're describing is utilitarianism.

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

#76

Post by jblow »

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.

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

#77

Post by danudey »

johngalt wrote: post #38

Par for the course for IT/Sysadmin type jobs. "We expect you to build the hospital while running the emergency room and operating room." They are just being up front about it. There are a few areas where they glossed over it. I will translate: "You need to have a crazy-person level of attention to detail" - We will judge you based on anything you've overlooked, rather than what you've done. "A motivated self-starter…

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-starter' - I don't want someone who's going to run to me to get every decision made. If you are able to identify things that are part of your job, decide how to do them, and do them, that makes my life much easier, and your job more efficient.

'Flexibility to travel' - 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?

'creative and offensive environment' - Well, they can certainly be offensive; sometimes intentionally offending stupid people, sometimes unintentionally offending normal people. I won't get into this (but I've railed against them in the past for shitty comments).

'flexibility with deadlines, schedules, etc…' - This is project management. Anyone who's managing projects (either their own or someone else's) needs to do this. This is entirely normal.

'on-call 24/7' - Again, this is normal. Ideally, you set things up so that they don't break in the middle of the night, or if they do you don't have to deal with it immediately. Shit breaks, that's life.

You seem to assume the absolute worst of every possible thing they say, even though all of this is part of most senior IT jobs.

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

#78

Post by Zimahl »

angersock wrote: post #55
ChuckMcM wrote: post #29

This is a confusing post. I understand that pain of seeing someone in an abusive relationship, like a talented programmer working at a game studio on a crappy legacy codebase because it was once touched by some personal hero of theirs. Or the killer VLSI chip designer writing shell scripts any system administrator could write because its "working at Google." But the author here isn't in the place. He is arguing that…

I didn't get that reading at all--it seemed very much a straightforward "folks, don't be starstruck: this job is a set-up." A story: I was the technical cofounder (effectively) for a coworking space once upon a time. I did everything from build websites, handle mailing lists, run cable, deploy and design enterprise-class networking infrastructure, take out the garbage, and power-route through a blocked sewer drain. I…

One startup I worked at for about 2 months was very similar. I needed a job at the time and took what I could get.

The wage was fine, the hours were bulky but understandable. Little did I know that the founder wanted/expected probably double that. The nail in the coffin was when he lectured me on how the human body only really needs 4 hours of sleep a night and after 6 months we can re-evaluate my working schedule. Hah!

That for a mediocre wage, no benefits, and zero equity? The last 2 weeks he paid me the salary to find another job, I did zero work for him during that time.

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

#79

Post by nerfhammer »

dllthomas wrote: post #40
nerfhammer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DKE means people rate themselves closer to average for both those below average and above average. But people below average still think they are below those at the top, just not by the amount they think.

So if I think I'm above average, I'm good?

No, people tend to think they are above average at any task they spend time on. That's a different cognitive bias.

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

#80

Post by jblow »

jere wrote: post #52
jblow wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really I guess the reason I am replying is that I am disturbed by this repeatedly-brought-up notion that highly productive people do not exist. I am not sure why it disturbs me so much, I think maybe because if potential highly-productive people read these things and believe them, they may be demotivated from reaching their potential. Maybe, I don't know. If you don't believe that highly-productive programmers exist,…

>they may be demotivated from reaching their potential. Surely you don't think the potential of these highly productive programmers is to spend their days doing general IT, working on call 24/7, and being compensated with below market salary and benefits?

Well, I don't know that I would recommend this particular job. But I do know that the time I learned the most, and became a truly good programmer, was just a couple of years after college, when I worked my ass off doing very hard things that were initially beyond my ability. It was a company I started with a friend from college, and ultimately the company failed, but it was a tremendous learning experience.

Programming skill, at least, is like compound interest. The more you program, the better you will be in the future, which means you will learn faster in the future, etc. At a big company or in an undemanding situation, your pace of learning is pretty slow, being limited by the circumstances around you; and like any compound interest, if you get behind, it becomes pretty hard to catch up to where you would have been.

Whereas in a small-company situation or any situation where you are limited only by what you are physically and mentally capable of doing, you are learning as fast as possible. It is very good.

You could say that the Penny Arcade job is not as good as starting your own startup and working that hard, and maybe that is true; but my company shut down and left me $100k in debt (back in 2000 when $100k was real money!) whereas when you get paid, you are not taking the same risk. Maybe this also means it is psychologically difficult to work as hard. I don't know.

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