Can you say what product you are working on? How would you describe the game design philosophy for your team, or Zynga overall?

I think when people say Zynga is evil, they largely point to three things:

* spaminess of the games

* propensity to copy other products rather than come up with original ideas

* tuning of games to maximize revenues from individual players

Do you think these are fair judgments about Zynga's methods? Is Zynga more guilty of these tendencies than other gaming companies?

As a hardcore/indie gamer myself, I understand that a lot of hardcore gamers are turned away by Zynga.

But I'm not Zynga's target audience, and that's okay. And there's a lot of sympathy for your point about the "spaminess."

However, going from spammy/over-monetizing to evil has always seemed a tad dramatic to me.

The games are designed to both get people addicted, and to get your friends involved by manipulating social gift reciprocity obligations. I think we'd have settled for "awful" up until the clawbacks, now we know the leadership at Zynga is sociopathic at best. Maybe not evil, but totally unscrupulous, totally unsympathetic.

I think the leap from "spamminess" to "evil" is helped by those other two things he pointed out.

I think the reasons you list are why people really dislike Zynga, but those things alone are not enough to explain the pure hate people have for the company.

The reason I think they are evil is the way they treat their employees, beginning with forcing developers to give back stock before their IPO. This latest stunt is just piling on.

Thats standard, two months(60 days) are required by California Law(WARN act) and one month pay is usually tied to an agreement that you won't sue.

IANAL, but I'm fairly confident that you're wrong about CA requiring severance pay under the WARN act, and I don't think you should be giving legal advice if you're not a lawyer. Your post can mislead a lot of people on HN.

The law:

An employer must give notice 60-days prior to a plant closing, layoff or relocation. In addition to the notifications required under federal WARN, notice must also be given to the Local Workforce Investment Board, and the chief elected official of each city and county government within which the termination, relocation or mass layoff occurs. (California Labor Code Section 1401)

No one gives notice because of the risk that employees will do something malicious and instead just pay out the 60 days(with benefits including vacation accrual). I've done 3 sets of layoffs at my old company as a manager and was eventually layed off. At non California locations and offices that were too small to fall under WARN, we terminated employees with no severance except one month that was attached to an agreement not to sue. BTW, nothing i said was legal advice just simply stating that 3 months is standard for California.

Minor nitpick: He isn't giving legal advice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_advice

Also, you did the exact same thing he/she did when you said you didn't think the warn act requires severance so even if what he/she did was giving legal advice, your comment would fall under the exact same category.

If that was legal advise that was given, then can I warn you to stop giving legal advise about legal advise? Thanks.

If you didn't pay money for it, it's not legal advice.

You might want to tell pro bono lawyers that. They've been giving free legal advise for some time now.

This isn't a courtroom; they use agreements. I could be parsey to hunt down and list all the exceptions, but my point is true for the general case of legal discussions on the Internet. "If you have no client relationship with the person offering the advice" just seemed kind of clunky, you know?

3 months! Wow that's way more than generous. Anon might want to target someone else

How do you "accidentally" hire more people than you can afford?

I could see two people both hiring a janitor without realizing it, but not "accidentally" hiring a lot of developers, designers or whatever else.

> How do you "accidentally" hire more people than you can afford?

Making predictions is difficult, especially about the future.

So it's not really an accident. They meant to hire those people, they were just bad at forecasting. To me, those are separate issues.

You expect to make more revenue than you actually do.

So you didn't "accidentally" hire people. You did it with a lack of foresight. To me, that's different.

Saying you accidentally hired people makes it sound softer than it really is. If Raytheon or Boeing hired 2,000 people ahead of a defense contract they were sure they'd get, and didn't that wouldn't be an "accident." That would be poor planning (counting your eggs before they hatch kind of thing.)

Either way, I don't really care either way about Zynga. I don't think I've ever played their games, but at the same time I'm not hoping they fail.

You are a middle manager. Do you say "bob in the other department hired 5 people, so I guess I'll stick with the three I have"? Nope. You go straight to your VP and say a rival VP just got five guys, where's mine. If hiring is decentralized and no one is concerned about costs you end up growing exponential.

That sounds like what would happen at Strawman, Inc. I've worked at a bunch of companies, big and small, and have never seen hiring justified like that.

Now, getting people and teams transferred once they are hired? That's a whole different story.

What do you propose caused Zynga management to vastly overhire and conduct layoffs?

They expected faster growth than what actually happened. It's possible that the CEO approved each individual hire and they still could have overhired.

Then the VP is not doing his/her job correctly. Someone needs to be aware of the budget for salaries and be responsible for ensuring it isn't exceeded (and held accountable if it is).

It's also very backwards (government-level!) thinking to be playing the hiring quota game like that. I'd much rather hire a few members in a kick-ass team than participate in a headcount battle.

I agree with your statements, but those are arguments about how it should be, and not how it is.

Seems to me that they need the level of developers they have, because they've said they are moving their whole division to India.

That's not a mass redundancy, that's a mass replacement.