8 ms·

Anonymous Is Going After Zynga For Mistreating Employees

106 points by psycho 14y ago

TheGateKeeper 14y ago
So releasing employees from their ahem employ is mistreatment? These kids need to stick their noses back in their schoolwork.
- codewright 14y ago
  More likely this is a build-up of many offenses, like Pincus' past threatening to fire employees if they didn't surrender their stock. Pincus is a scum-bag of the first order and is ruining startup employee confidence in the value of their equity. He's poisoning the well for the rest of us. Anonymous is silly in their own way, but you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss things or actions you don't understand.
  - h123b 14y ago
    Actually, you don't understand Zynga since you're relying on rumor and hearsay. I've worked as Zynga. Things aren't as black and white as you think they are.
    - georgemcbay 14y ago
      I don't think he has to have worked at Zynga to understand the problem. Zynga is hardly the only one, but they are one of the biggest of the new crop of startups that grew huge and IPOed to the benefit of very few employees. Back in the "old days", even when you move the "old days" up to include Google's IPO, a company with such a massive liquidity event could be expected to result in a lot of wealth spread out among early employees. Even receptionists, chefs, etc could cash out big paydays. With the way things are now, companies are often structured such that unless you're a founder with an ironclad paper trail of equity ownership, you probably aren't going to be walking away with much more money than what you'd get from a particularly good yearly bonus at a large company, and that's absolutely best-case. More likely is that a liquidity event will occur where nobody but preferred stock owners will see a single dime. This perception is absolutely a problem for the overall startup ecosystem and plays into why everyone involved wants to be a founder and not just an early employee and this in turn plays into why all these startups all these founders are founding are having massive problems hiring non-founder employees. As a potential startup employee, your biggest concern shouldn't be whether the company fails spectacularly. Failure sucks, but that's easy enough to get past psychologically. Your biggest concern should be what if the company is extremely successful and you get screwed anyway. Because while this is statistically less likely than spectacular failure, it is much harder to deal with and more common than a lot of people think.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - nextstep 14y ago
    >you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss things or actions you don't understand. Instead you should offer more speculation on top of what You don't understand?
    - rhizome 14y ago
      Which part of his response was speculation, that Zynga is poisoned from the top?
  - JohnHaugeland 14y ago
    Mob vigilante acts are not excusable. Not even if you dislike Pincus.
- matthewowen 14y ago
  Well, in many countries it is illegal. I'm not really looking to debate the rights or wrongs of at will employment, but it's pretty common in Europe that sacking a worker requires going through a lot of legal hoops (broadly speaking, unless they've committed gross misconduct, you have to show that you've made efforts to help them improve, that you've provided guidance, and that you've given clear and explicit warnings). Laying them off in Zynga's circumstances involves statutory redundancy regulations (including minimum redundancy payouts according to length of service etc etc). So I think that it is somewhat unfair to say that their position is fundamentally juvenile or under-informed - agree with it or not, laws based on the principle that you can't sack employees at will are very well entrenched and popular in a number of countries.
  - cremnob 14y ago
    And this is one of the reasons unemployment in certain Eurozone countries is so high. It's better not to hire when you're unsure about future demand because you're sure as hell not going to be able to fire them.
    - mweibel 14y ago
      This is plain wrong. Unemployment in Eurozone is so high because of a lot of other Problems. Switzerland has also quite a lot of laws which protect employees and the rate is lower than in a lot of countries.
      - cmccabe 14y ago
        Please read what economists have written before you add your opinion. One analysis of Europe's inflexible labor market is here, by the IMF: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/06/soltwede.htm http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/06/soltwede.h... Europe's ridiculous labor regulations do more to strangle startups in the crib than almost anything else. Zynga may have done some unethical things, but firing employees they didn't need was not one of them.
        14y ago
- vacri 14y ago
  I like how you phrased it so that losing your job sounds beneficial.
  - kookiekrak 14y ago
    earning 3 months severance and easily finding another job is pretty beneficial if you ask me
    - jrockway 14y ago
      Indeed. You'd have to try pretty hard to not find another programming job in three months. Everyone is desperate to hire programmers.
maak 14y ago
Tackling the big issues...
mdonahoe 14y ago
I am guessing that Zynga games don't have a lot of security, and that a targeted attack would be disastrous to their players and analytics.
Alex_r 14y ago
As a current zynga contractor who is losing his job there next Friday, I have to admit I have mixed feelings about this. Firstly, I don't see the employees being let go as victims, most are getting 3 months severance. Secondly, I don't think there is any real evil going on by Zynga; they accidentally hired more people than they can afford, it sucks as I'm one of them, but I fundamentally agree with the notion of at-will employment in the US.
- andrewljohnson 14y ago
  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?
  - Alex_r 14y ago
    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.
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      I think the leap from "spamminess" to "evil" is helped by those other two things he pointed out.
    - krickle 14y ago
      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.
aes256 14y ago
Anonymous is now composed of jilted Zynga employees?
- snuze 14y ago
  My first thought exactly! To claim that Zynga employees were taken advantage is like claiming that the bankers were taken advantage of during the 2008 collapse. If you don't like your employer, find another one! These guys work in San Francisco, plenty of jobs to go around.
m0nastic 14y ago
I would be shocked if this isn't actually just a post-rationalization for previously completed hacking activity (which has been the majority of their previous M.O.)
- bpatrianakos 14y ago
  Thanks for saying this as sometimes I'm afraid that Anonymous gets too much respect around here. You mention their M.O. which seems to basically be hack something, release tons of private or damaging information then say its because the people they hacked were evil. In reality its a bunch of bullshit. If they had hacked the American Cancer Society or even Piratebay or Wikileaks they'd come up with some reason they were evil. Shit was cute at first but now its just looking like a reason hack for its own sake. And the whole grandiose "Hacktivist" identity they've garnered is now looking more and more like its also bullshit.
  - angersock 14y ago
    Right, but they didn't hack the ACS, or Piratebay, or Wikileaks. That's worth keeping in mind.
    - redthrowaway 14y ago
      No, but there was the Epilepsy Foundation, back in the day. I tend to draw a distinction though between Chanology, /i/, Op Payback, and OWS flavours of Anonymous, despite a great deal of overlap in the people involved. This idea of Anonymous being (or seeing themselves as) a force for good is actually pretty new. I'm thinking it can probably be traced back to the financial blockade against Wikileaks and the response thereto. Coming just as it did after the resurrection of Anonymous during Op Payback, I think the response to Wikileaks' trials probably brought in a lot of new people with a much different set of ideals than those who came before.
      - lmm 14y ago
        Epilepsy Foundation was widely speculated to be a Church of Scientology false-flag operation. Don't know if anything was ever proven either way. I'd say the idea of Anonymous being a force for good goes all the way back to the Hal Turner raid. Before then it was all about spoiling other people's fun (Habbo Hotel etc.), but after targeting this white supremacist (basically by accident) suddenly people realised that maybe this power could be directed against those who really deserve it. Chanology and all the rest of it came out of that.
hkmurakami 14y ago
>The offensive has been dubbed “#OP MaZynga” A pun for Mazinger[1]? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazinger_Z http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazinger_Z
ambiguator 14y ago
I don't see the evil in a company needing to lay off employees after shipping a bunch of games that didn't do so well. Zynga should be more careful the next time they hire somebody wearing a Guy Fawkes mask in their profile picture.
- objclxt 14y ago
  I think that if Anonymous want to protest dodgy labor practices there are certainly far more compelling targets in the US. However, I would say that if as a CEO you're laying off 5% of your workforce due to poor company performance you should really evaluate your own compensation package, because as a CEO you're meant to stop that kind of crap from happening. I doubt that's going to be happening for Marc Pincus.
  - paulhauggis 14y ago
    "I would say that if as a CEO you're laying off 5% of your workforce due to poor company performance you should really evaluate your own compensation package, because as a CEO you're meant to stop that kind of crap from happening" This isn't really true. A CEO is there to make sure the company stays profitable. Sometimes, cutting a percentage of the workforce achieves this goal.
Jach 14y ago
The gamers I know (who are the only people I know with an opinion about Zynga) would like to see Zynga no longer exist as a company, which entails all the employees having to find a new job. What's with the sudden sympathy for the employees?
tylerc230 14y ago
All this will do is hurt Zynga employees further. Releasing sensitive data about a company will push the stock price down further. Most employees have equity in the company. Equity is (was) one of the major incentives for working at Zynga. Zynga is not forcing anyone to work there. If employees feel mistreated they are free to go work elsewhere. I say all of this as a former Zynga employee.
- rhizome 14y ago
  Zynga's stock price is below book value, and it hasn't been an incentive since about 2 days after IPO. The employees have already been hurt by the company themselves much worse than any outside influence can at this point.
diminoten 14y ago
So they're going to cause Zynga employees problems (who, after all, will have to deal with the fallout) in an effort to protest the fact that problems have been caused for Zynga employees?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
michaelochurch 14y ago
I have mixed feelings about this. Laying people off, for business reasons, and providing three months severance, is not worthy of this kind of attack. Most of these people will get better jobs. Companies commit injustices against their employees all over the place, and Zynga is justifiably disguised, but this isn't a case of that. I think the general precedent of increased employee empowerment (by increasing the consequences, currently at zero, of treating employees badly). I'd like to live in a world where employees have some power and a few hiccups or overactions on which I don't agree with all the details is something I have to accept. So that is to the good. I don't think they deserve this for laying people off. Every company has to lay people off. The clawbacks, on the other hand, earned Zynga this.
- flyinRyan 14y ago
  Exactly. Zynga should have been punished back when they did the clawbacks and the CEO made that idiotic statement about the "Google Chef". Not now that they're behaving pretty nicely (3 month severance? In the US?).
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
citricsquid 14y ago
These sort of news posts should be a game, take an article like this and put the top comment against an article about SOPA or any other internet "oppression" policy: From a "Hacker Advocate" at Spotify The internet needs policing Really?
DigitalSea 14y ago
The inner nerd in me would love the opportunity to take a peak at some Zynga game code, but the exterior sensible adult in me has mixed feelings about this. The employee's weren't terminated without pay, the employees are being gracefully compensated, I don't see what Zynga have done wrong here other than failing to predict how many employees they actually needed. Any company regardless of money in their bank is entitled to make their own decisions and trim excess staff, it's called business and I am sure even a profitable company like Apple if in the same situation would do the same thing.
EliRivers 14y ago
At which point do these guys simply become a lynch mob?
- flyinRyan 14y ago
  They're not now?
JohnHaugeland 14y ago
Getting really tired of how internet news is acting like mob vigilante justice is a good thing.
- debacle 14y ago
  Calling it vigilante justice is giving it too much credit.
beatgammit 14y ago
I'd rather Anonymous go after Zynga because they use flash. It's about time we get some quality client-side code that doesn't eat 100% CPU just to plant some seeds on my stupid little virtual farm. Another legitimate motive is to reduce the amount of time people waste on *ville. Even if they just DDOS, that means 2+ hours more productivity per person! That leaves bored programmers with nothing to do to waste their time, and we might just get some quality games out of it!
leoedin 14y ago
Meanwhile at Walmart employees are receiving great treatment.

106 points by psycho 14y ago

So releasing employees from their ahem employ is mistreatment? These kids need to stick their noses back in their schoolwork.

codewright 14y ago
More likely this is a build-up of many offenses, like Pincus' past threatening to fire employees if they didn't surrender their stock. Pincus is a scum-bag of the first order and is ruining startup employee confidence in the value of their equity. He's poisoning the well for the rest of us. Anonymous is silly in their own way, but you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss things or actions you don't understand.
- h123b 14y ago
  Actually, you don't understand Zynga since you're relying on rumor and hearsay. I've worked as Zynga. Things aren't as black and white as you think they are.
  - georgemcbay 14y ago
    I don't think he has to have worked at Zynga to understand the problem. Zynga is hardly the only one, but they are one of the biggest of the new crop of startups that grew huge and IPOed to the benefit of very few employees. Back in the "old days", even when you move the "old days" up to include Google's IPO, a company with such a massive liquidity event could be expected to result in a lot of wealth spread out among early employees. Even receptionists, chefs, etc could cash out big paydays. With the way things are now, companies are often structured such that unless you're a founder with an ironclad paper trail of equity ownership, you probably aren't going to be walking away with much more money than what you'd get from a particularly good yearly bonus at a large company, and that's absolutely best-case. More likely is that a liquidity event will occur where nobody but preferred stock owners will see a single dime. This perception is absolutely a problem for the overall startup ecosystem and plays into why everyone involved wants to be a founder and not just an early employee and this in turn plays into why all these startups all these founders are founding are having massive problems hiring non-founder employees. As a potential startup employee, your biggest concern shouldn't be whether the company fails spectacularly. Failure sucks, but that's easy enough to get past psychologically. Your biggest concern should be what if the company is extremely successful and you get screwed anyway. Because while this is statistically less likely than spectacular failure, it is much harder to deal with and more common than a lot of people think.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- nextstep 14y ago
  >you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss things or actions you don't understand. Instead you should offer more speculation on top of what You don't understand?
  - rhizome 14y ago
    Which part of his response was speculation, that Zynga is poisoned from the top?
- JohnHaugeland 14y ago
  Mob vigilante acts are not excusable. Not even if you dislike Pincus.
matthewowen 14y ago
Well, in many countries it is illegal. I'm not really looking to debate the rights or wrongs of at will employment, but it's pretty common in Europe that sacking a worker requires going through a lot of legal hoops (broadly speaking, unless they've committed gross misconduct, you have to show that you've made efforts to help them improve, that you've provided guidance, and that you've given clear and explicit warnings). Laying them off in Zynga's circumstances involves statutory redundancy regulations (including minimum redundancy payouts according to length of service etc etc). So I think that it is somewhat unfair to say that their position is fundamentally juvenile or under-informed - agree with it or not, laws based on the principle that you can't sack employees at will are very well entrenched and popular in a number of countries.
- cremnob 14y ago
  And this is one of the reasons unemployment in certain Eurozone countries is so high. It's better not to hire when you're unsure about future demand because you're sure as hell not going to be able to fire them.
  - mweibel 14y ago
    This is plain wrong. Unemployment in Eurozone is so high because of a lot of other Problems. Switzerland has also quite a lot of laws which protect employees and the rate is lower than in a lot of countries.
    - cmccabe 14y ago
      Please read what economists have written before you add your opinion. One analysis of Europe's inflexible labor market is here, by the IMF: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/06/soltwede.htm http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/06/soltwede.h... Europe's ridiculous labor regulations do more to strangle startups in the crib than almost anything else. Zynga may have done some unethical things, but firing employees they didn't need was not one of them.
      - 14y ago
vacri 14y ago
I like how you phrased it so that losing your job sounds beneficial.
- kookiekrak 14y ago
  earning 3 months severance and easily finding another job is pretty beneficial if you ask me
  - jrockway 14y ago
    Indeed. You'd have to try pretty hard to not find another programming job in three months. Everyone is desperate to hire programmers.

maak 14y ago

Tackling the big issues...

mdonahoe 14y ago

I am guessing that Zynga games don't have a lot of security, and that a targeted attack would be disastrous to their players and analytics.

Alex_r 14y ago

As a current zynga contractor who is losing his job there next Friday, I have to admit I have mixed feelings about this. Firstly, I don't see the employees being let go as victims, most are getting 3 months severance. Secondly, I don't think there is any real evil going on by Zynga; they accidentally hired more people than they can afford, it sucks as I'm one of them, but I fundamentally agree with the notion of at-will employment in the US.

andrewljohnson 14y ago
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?
- Alex_r 14y ago
  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.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    I think the leap from "spamminess" to "evil" is helped by those other two things he pointed out.
  - krickle 14y ago
    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.

aes256 14y ago

Anonymous is now composed of jilted Zynga employees?

snuze 14y ago
My first thought exactly! To claim that Zynga employees were taken advantage is like claiming that the bankers were taken advantage of during the 2008 collapse. If you don't like your employer, find another one! These guys work in San Francisco, plenty of jobs to go around.

m0nastic 14y ago

I would be shocked if this isn't actually just a post-rationalization for previously completed hacking activity (which has been the majority of their previous M.O.)

bpatrianakos 14y ago
Thanks for saying this as sometimes I'm afraid that Anonymous gets too much respect around here. You mention their M.O. which seems to basically be hack something, release tons of private or damaging information then say its because the people they hacked were evil. In reality its a bunch of bullshit. If they had hacked the American Cancer Society or even Piratebay or Wikileaks they'd come up with some reason they were evil. Shit was cute at first but now its just looking like a reason hack for its own sake. And the whole grandiose "Hacktivist" identity they've garnered is now looking more and more like its also bullshit.
- angersock 14y ago
  Right, but they didn't hack the ACS, or Piratebay, or Wikileaks. That's worth keeping in mind.
  - redthrowaway 14y ago
    No, but there was the Epilepsy Foundation, back in the day. I tend to draw a distinction though between Chanology, /i/, Op Payback, and OWS flavours of Anonymous, despite a great deal of overlap in the people involved. This idea of Anonymous being (or seeing themselves as) a force for good is actually pretty new. I'm thinking it can probably be traced back to the financial blockade against Wikileaks and the response thereto. Coming just as it did after the resurrection of Anonymous during Op Payback, I think the response to Wikileaks' trials probably brought in a lot of new people with a much different set of ideals than those who came before.
    - lmm 14y ago
      Epilepsy Foundation was widely speculated to be a Church of Scientology false-flag operation. Don't know if anything was ever proven either way. I'd say the idea of Anonymous being a force for good goes all the way back to the Hal Turner raid. Before then it was all about spoiling other people's fun (Habbo Hotel etc.), but after targeting this white supremacist (basically by accident) suddenly people realised that maybe this power could be directed against those who really deserve it. Chanology and all the rest of it came out of that.

hkmurakami 14y ago

>The offensive has been dubbed “#OP MaZynga” A pun for Mazinger[1]? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazinger_Z http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazinger_Z

ambiguator 14y ago

I don't see the evil in a company needing to lay off employees after shipping a bunch of games that didn't do so well. Zynga should be more careful the next time they hire somebody wearing a Guy Fawkes mask in their profile picture.

objclxt 14y ago
I think that if Anonymous want to protest dodgy labor practices there are certainly far more compelling targets in the US. However, I would say that if as a CEO you're laying off 5% of your workforce due to poor company performance you should really evaluate your own compensation package, because as a CEO you're meant to stop that kind of crap from happening. I doubt that's going to be happening for Marc Pincus.
- paulhauggis 14y ago
  "I would say that if as a CEO you're laying off 5% of your workforce due to poor company performance you should really evaluate your own compensation package, because as a CEO you're meant to stop that kind of crap from happening" This isn't really true. A CEO is there to make sure the company stays profitable. Sometimes, cutting a percentage of the workforce achieves this goal.

Jach 14y ago

The gamers I know (who are the only people I know with an opinion about Zynga) would like to see Zynga no longer exist as a company, which entails all the employees having to find a new job. What's with the sudden sympathy for the employees?

tylerc230 14y ago

All this will do is hurt Zynga employees further. Releasing sensitive data about a company will push the stock price down further. Most employees have equity in the company. Equity is (was) one of the major incentives for working at Zynga. Zynga is not forcing anyone to work there. If employees feel mistreated they are free to go work elsewhere. I say all of this as a former Zynga employee.

rhizome 14y ago
Zynga's stock price is below book value, and it hasn't been an incentive since about 2 days after IPO. The employees have already been hurt by the company themselves much worse than any outside influence can at this point.

diminoten 14y ago

So they're going to cause Zynga employees problems (who, after all, will have to deal with the fallout) in an effort to protest the fact that problems have been caused for Zynga employees?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

michaelochurch 14y ago

I have mixed feelings about this. Laying people off, for business reasons, and providing three months severance, is not worthy of this kind of attack. Most of these people will get better jobs. Companies commit injustices against their employees all over the place, and Zynga is justifiably disguised, but this isn't a case of that. I think the general precedent of increased employee empowerment (by increasing the consequences, currently at zero, of treating employees badly). I'd like to live in a world where employees have some power and a few hiccups or overactions on which I don't agree with all the details is something I have to accept. So that is to the good. I don't think they deserve this for laying people off. Every company has to lay people off. The clawbacks, on the other hand, earned Zynga this.

flyinRyan 14y ago
Exactly. Zynga should have been punished back when they did the clawbacks and the CEO made that idiotic statement about the "Google Chef". Not now that they're behaving pretty nicely (3 month severance? In the US?).
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

citricsquid 14y ago

These sort of news posts should be a game, take an article like this and put the top comment against an article about SOPA or any other internet "oppression" policy: From a "Hacker Advocate" at Spotify The internet needs policing Really?

DigitalSea 14y ago

The inner nerd in me would love the opportunity to take a peak at some Zynga game code, but the exterior sensible adult in me has mixed feelings about this. The employee's weren't terminated without pay, the employees are being gracefully compensated, I don't see what Zynga have done wrong here other than failing to predict how many employees they actually needed. Any company regardless of money in their bank is entitled to make their own decisions and trim excess staff, it's called business and I am sure even a profitable company like Apple if in the same situation would do the same thing.

EliRivers 14y ago

At which point do these guys simply become a lynch mob?

flyinRyan 14y ago
They're not now?

JohnHaugeland 14y ago

Getting really tired of how internet news is acting like mob vigilante justice is a good thing.

debacle 14y ago
Calling it vigilante justice is giving it too much credit.

beatgammit 14y ago

I'd rather Anonymous go after Zynga because they use flash. It's about time we get some quality client-side code that doesn't eat 100% CPU just to plant some seeds on my stupid little virtual farm. Another legitimate motive is to reduce the amount of time people waste on *ville. Even if they just DDOS, that means 2+ hours more productivity per person! That leaves bored programmers with nothing to do to waste their time, and we might just get some quality games out of it!

leoedin 14y ago

Meanwhile at Walmart employees are receiving great treatment.