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Former Zynga Engineer doing AMA on reddit
- aymeric 15y agoShame the person doing the AMA doesn't express himself better, he loses a bit of credibility. I can't tell if his answers are given out of anger against Zynga or if they are a reflection of reality.
- majorlazer 15y agoI agree. Seems like he has a lot of hate built up inside him: "Google and Apple teams are total cunts. Fuck em, and their hipster bullshit." Followed by: "I like Google as a whole, but they hire too many wanna-be-devs. And their SC2 team can suck a big herpes-infested cock. FUCK THEM." Hard to take this AMA seriously.
- copper 15y agoI do hope you didn't miss this gem :) > Brogrammers are mostly Silicon Valley / Harvard type douchebags who got into programming. YCombinator drop outs. Years of experience in managed and web languages, but who have no idea how to setup a build system nor work in native code.
- Stormbringer 15y agoI have a new favourite word
- SkyMarshal 15y agoIf you're new to the term, observe: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=brogrammer http://duckduckgo.com/?q=brogrammer
- wyclif 15y agoI believe you mean this, bro: http://youtu.be/Qi_AAqi0RZM http://youtu.be/Qi_AAqi0RZM The best 15 minutes you'll ever spend on your career, almost as important as your dubstep collection.
- SkyMarshal 15y agoI almost linked to that, but wanted to share the love with the other bro's sites out there too. That vid is in the top of the search results I linked, it's all good.
- potatolicious 15y agoI think I met more brogrammers working for Amazon in Seattle and hanging out with Microsofties, than in the Bay Area. I almost feel like "real geeks" are a rare breed these days. It's so rare nowadays to meet a hacker that likes to hack, as opposed to a coder who's really in it so he can afford to rage at the club every chance he gets.
- cbs 15y agoSeems like he has a lot of hate built up inside him Eh, hes just talking like every other former marine: honesty riddled with swears.
- ryanmolden 15y agoHe seemed, to me, to be talking about the Google/Apple folks in some gaming league, not the general employees.
- Stormbringer 15y agoWell, the good news is that even if you're a big company, the Apple App approval process is just as annoying for you as for everyone else. The bad news? That's where the herpes comes into the picture...
- physcab 15y agoI'm an analyst for a gaming company too, so let me offer my perspective. I consider myself to be an ethical, non-creepy person, and I disagree with what this person says. Yes, gaming companies are extremely data-driven and they measure everything they can. I'm in charge of dashboards that have over 300 KPI's (key performance indicators) on them. What do we measure? A whole lot of shit. ARPU, ARPPU, HC (hard currency) spend/gained, SC (soft currency) gained/spend, Retention, DAU, Spend DAU, Gained DAU, Downloads, Activations, plus funnels for every page, every user action you can think of. Do I think measuring all this is creepy? No. Why? Because when I come in the morning, I look at my stats. I'll be able to tell within an hour if the build the engineers shipped the night before had a bug that affected 30% of our users in a certain location. I'll then report this to the Engineering team, they can create a hotfix, and users can be happy again. Engineers are happy knowing that we have actual data to validate and confirm their gameplay suggestions (made during scrum/sprint planning sessions). I also report monetization metrics to the VP's. They want to know if the boatloads of money they are spending on user acquisition are actually paying off. And the PM's want to know if users are playing the game, or how far they get into the game. Yes, we maximize for users who spend over $10k. These users even have names. They're called "whales" in industry parlance. Why wouldn't you want more of them in your game? This is a business afterall. I feel just as bad as the next person wondering whether some of these "whales" are addicts. I don't want to be creating products for addicts. But what if these users are just rich people who have tons of money to spend off the cuff? There's no way we can know because we never get that data. All I see is what's reported in ItunesConnect. Do we ever record any personally identifiable information? No. Do we ever sell or distribute this data to outside parties? No. Can any of this data ever be used maliciously? No. Personally, I like the way game companies work (hence why I work in the industry). It teaches you to measure everything. You make decisions quickly. And no one can argue with the facts. You'll know real fast whether the product is shitty and you can do an about-face, gather the troops, and push out something new.
- cbs 15y ago>Yes, we maximize for users who spend over $10k. >I don't want to be creating products for addicts. But what if these users are just rich people who have tons of money to spend off the cuff? Ahhh, ignorance is plausible deniability bliss.
- bryanh 15y agoInteresting comment about data-driven decisions and creative processes at Zynga: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/pc6j9/iama_former_fulltime_zynga_engineer_quit_6_months/c3o81fy?context=1 http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/pc6j9/iama_former_full... I've often wondered, how do you balance the two? When you have that much data, wouldn't it be insane to go by what any single person thinks is "good design"?
- bryne 15y agoThat's part of the point. Zynga is disrupting the risky, hits-based game industry by attempting to remove as much risk as possible from the equation, and this extends down to (game) design by data.
- alagu 15y agoEx-Zynga engineer here. I could see a lot of hatred in his post. Couldn't see credibility. Creepy stuff: Spying on players. Getting intimate gaming data, their habits, their networks, and how to effectively monetize given X. This never happened. Zynga doesn't do behavioral targeting at all. Creepy/bad stuff in my view: All decisions are short-term. Let us build X games in Y months. Bad code quality. There is a team which optimizes for the bad code written by engineers at high speed. Good stuff: Speed - They are really aggressive. And they never think twice to throw away something if there is a better alternative. Decisions - Right or wrong, decisions are made with least and things progress. Meritocracy - I wouldn't call it pure "meritocracy", but when they know you are a smart guy who can ship stuff, they'll love you in $ and positions. I know several young people at VP/GM positions. Data-driven - I see this as huge plus. Lot of companies are clueless because of not enough feedback-data. A/B testing, phased rollout, metrics are mandatory for any product/feature. Zynga is 100% data driven. Zynga is not a tech-company, it is a product-manager-company. Product managers are more statisticians than PM. All decisions are from numbers.
- barefoot 15y agoWhy doesn't Zynga do behavioral targeting?
- alagu 15y agoHonestly I don't know why, but I haven't seen any game doing it and there is no infrastructure to do behavioral targeting.
- cbs 15y agoZynga doesn't do behavioral targeting at all. This statement seems fundamentally at odds with the following. Could you explain further? Data-driven - I see this as huge plus. Lot of companies are clueless because of not enough feedback-data. A/B testing, phased rollout, metrics are mandatory for any product/feature. Zynga is 100% data driven. Zynga is not a tech-company, it is a product-manager-company. Product managers are more statisticians than PM. All decisions are from numbers.
- spitfire 15y agoFinally we have a good term for these guys - Brogrammer. Brogrammer - Brogrammers are mostly Silicon Valley / Harvard type douchebags who got into programming. YCombinator drop outs. Years of experience in managed and web languages, but who have no idea how to setup a build system nor work in native code.
- jacoblyles 15y agoIn my definition, "brogramming" involves shots and beer pong.
- rdouble 15y agoI dunno about his assessment of Brogrammers. Engineering departments have always had a sizable Bro contingent. The typical male Stanford CS student could very well be the paragon of the programming Bro... and they are usually pretty good at what they are doing. Maybe he's getting Brogrammers confused with web dev scenesters. Awesome Tumblrs, lo-fi keytar side band, scruffy hair, interesting glasses, polaroid cameras. I don't know if those guys have a name yet. Hipster is too easy...it's never really been "hip" to have a desk job.
- spitfire 15y agoI think that might be what he was getting at. In my mind both the groups sort of meld together as "non-engineers". If you can't handle a pointer, you have no business being near a compiler. If you don't know why you (usually) don't want to handle a pointer, you have no business calling yourself an engineer.
- dotBen 15y agoI'm concerned Zynga will work out who he is and decide to retaliate a) out of spite and b) to re-affirm a culture of fear to keep other ex-employee's quiet. He mentioned he quit in August (I wonder how many engineers quit in August? Single digits?) and uses curious language quirks like "[they gave] nay fucks". As a Brit he sounds potentially British to me. I know people in Zynga's management - they'll relish the opportunity to fuck this guy for contravening some part of his NDA. I'm sure Dani is pissed. If you are going to 'whistleblow', people, be careful.
- robryan 15y agoHe also mentions a bug he supposedly fixed, which would make it very easy to work out who he is internally.
- jrockway 15y agoWhat I find most odd is all the talk about contractors. It sounds to me like being a contractor at Zynga is the same as being a contractor at every other company on the face of the earth. In exchange for not getting benefits or job security, you get a higher hourly rate and overtime. Nothing evil about that, just a reasoned financial exchange. If you don't want to be a contractor, don't accept their job offer!
- potatolicious 15y agoI used to work for a company that (over my time there) seemed to use contractors more and more, and the justification was always to cut costs. I'm highly doubtful that their hourly rates were as high as one might imagine a temporary position to be. I wasn't privy to all the details, but the impression seemed to me that it was a cost-cutting measure (no benefits for comparable pay), and a hiring-cap dodger, since at this company they didn't seem to count. The increasing use of contractors-as-full-time was part of the reason I left. I personally knew two people who were getting strung along by HR with vague promises to turning full-time, and one who was unceremoniously let go when he was getting close to the legal limits. This seemed like a regular occurrence. I hated working next to people who had no benefits, no job security, and were doing precisely the same work as full-timers.
- Duff 15y agoMost bodyshops due hard-line negotiations with the employees. One particularly nasty one that I ran into would arbitrarily delay payment to employees for 90 or 120 days, unless the employees agreed to pay 10% for a weekly paycheck. The bad ones are even nastier to folks on temporary work visas. If they are a good place, they will pay people whatever the fully-loaded cost of an employee is. Contractors aren't getting rich.
- jrockway 15y agoMy experience at BAC was that contractors were used for the ability to be fired for no reason. Employment is at-will or whatever, but apparently firing full-time employees is nearly impossible (until they get promoted to Director or above). As for pay, we were hiring people right out of college at $65 an hour plus overtime, which works out to over $130,000. That's more than I made as an employee.
- atomicdog 15y agoI think he may have coined a new term >Brogrammers
- rit 15y agoNot a new term at all. See: http://www.quora.com/Brogramming/How-does-a-programmer-become-a-brogrammer http://www.quora.com/Brogramming/How-does-a-programmer-becom...
- mathattack 15y agoSeems to me that Zynga is just operating like a credit card company. This isn't a judgment, I just find it have an emotional response towered MasterCard or Visa. They also do a lot of data analysis, only care about their best customers, and copy each other at every turn. I still use them.