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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 star

by jmduke 13y ago

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 guy” image that hasn’t been accurate for at least five years, and probably more. That’s one of Khoo’s many gifts — he has figured out exactly how to sell this company, even if the image they’re peddling is a load of horseshit. This confuses me, because its as if the author tries to force his valuation of the opportunity onto all prospective applicants. He recognizes that a position at Penny Arcade has a level of cachet, but doesn't recognize that that level of cachet is transitive: if someone "can work somewhere “cool” and feel like a part of something big", then good for them. It's up to each person whether or not to decide if those benefits outweigh the costs of eschewing different employment. Also, lots and lots of ad hominem. I'm not super familiar with Penny Arcade -- having never attended PAX and having not read the comic in a few years -- but a lot of this post seems to be conjecture which hinges on Robert Khoo being a villain. (I would never apply for this job, because I value salary and work-life balance too much. But I recognize there are people who don't, which is why early-stage startups can thrive.)

dpcheng2003 13y ago
I think the author skates between praise and criticism as they are different sides of the same coin--Robert is a great businessman. I find this type of knee-jerk response to the job posting disappointing. When did we become so sensitive or insecure or helpless that we need to shame this person or this job posting? It's been said multiple times over in this comments thread that Robert is actually being uniquely transparent, that the candidates who apply have lots of other options and no one is being forced to take this job given those two factors. If this was a Craiglist ad for some deviant act, would we jump on our horse and say, "How dare this person ask someone to do [deviant act]?" No, we'd probably just ignore it because we're adults and we get to make our own decisions. That [deviant act] is not for us. You can say Robert should follow best practices and be more competitive in his offer, and to some extent, this post does that. But to use colorful and aggressive language, presuming that the founders of Penny Arcade are cashing in "trade show checks" is not productive. Robert isn't breaking any employment laws. The best you can do to show your disapproval as a great developer is to not apply.
- rantanplan 13y ago
  There are so many logic flaws in your comment that I will just respond to the ones that stand out(to me anyway). "Robert isn't breaking any employment laws". I didn't know we should only voice our disagreement when someone does something illegal. Actually, on second thought, I think doing that would be somewhat redundant because, well you know, the law has already taken care of that. "The best you can do to show your disapproval as a great developer is to not apply" What a misguided and cynical opinion! No. What we can do, is to expose unethical and exploitative tactics, in order to protect the younger, and by extension, the more naive candidates.
  - dpcheng2003 13y ago
    Everyone has the right to voice their disagreement. It is, after all, a free country. I voiced my opinion, you're voicing yours. I am confused where my logic "fails" here. The point I am making is that there is a community that is taking an outsized response to his very honest and open job posting about the type of person he wants on his team. As many people mentioned here, this isn't very different from other postings in other desired fields, like game design, acting, etc. or in many startups. I will agree I am cynical but I am hardly misguided. I doubt anyone reading that job posting will think they are joining a highly lucrative, salary-competitive role. They are doing it because they love PA. What if we wrote the "real" job descriptions of other desired positions like being an engineer at Apple, for example? Apple is notoriously known for working their employees. Where's the outrage? You and the author of this post has every right to say the job posting is not competitive or in your opinion, unethical or exploitive. Where I find disagreement is the manner in which he argues his points. There's no need to use language that can be misconstrued as aggressive to makes his points, but he does anyway.
    - rantanplan 13y ago
      Fair enough. Maybe I am not impressed by the "honesty" depicted in the job posting. Being honest won't redeem you from being exploitative towards other people. I agree that you should attack arguments and not people. Maybe the author of the article got a bit over excited.
coldtea 13y ago
>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 recognizes that a position at Penny Arcade has a level of cachet, but doesn't recognize that that level of cachet is transitive: if someone "can work somewhere “cool” and feel like a part of something big", then good for them. Perhaps he recognizes that what some people perceive as "cachet" is actually BS and can be bad for them, regardless of what they believe, in the same way that a teenager wanna-be rockstar that thinks heroin is cool and an early death is "romantic" needs to be told otherwise...
- jtuente 13y ago
  >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.
- jmduke 13y ago
  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 applications". I strongly disagree with this, though. I'm young, but I'm confident people can have different experiences at the same position -- I have friends who would happily take a salary hit to work at startups or smaller businesses. They value the opportunities and cultures of those jobs to be worth more than the additional $X,000. That doesn't mean they disagree with a "one true valuation" -- it means their valuation has different factors and weights.
saraid216 13y ago
> a lot of this post seems to be conjecture which hinges on Robert Khoo being a villain I didn't get this sense from the post. He disagrees with what Khoo is doing. That kinda necessarily means he'll be talking about Khoo negatively.
chipotle_coyote 13y ago
I don't think the author describes Khoo as a villain, just as someone who is very "money-motivated" despite explicitly saying otherwise. Yes, it's subjective to say "the cachet of working at Penny Arcade doesn't outweigh the negatives of this job, and the fact that the posting tells you up front that it's a shit job doesn't change that," but the author certainly makes a good case as to why he believes that. Is it conjecture to say that Khoo wants to pay under market rate for one job that should really be done by more than one person at market rate? Well, if you believe the job listing that Khoo wrote, not really. That's pretty much how he described the job, and that's a perfectly reasonable inference from it. Also, I don't see an actual ad hominem attack in here. Buecheler is blunt, but it seems to me he's very explicitly attacking Khoo's actions and policies here. He may be arguing that those actions make Khoo kind of a jerk, but that's not ad hominem. (Buecheler clearly argues Khoo is a terrific businessman, in fact; he just argues that he's using his powers for evil.) You can certainly argue that "You should know it's a shit job, here's how it's a shit job, but hey it's for Penny Arcade! Woo!" is a fine enough job posting because it's up front about its intrinsic shittiness. But I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to respond with, "Yes, but not only is a shit job still a shit job, this particular one is a shit job at a company that certainly has the resources to make it not a shit job and is choosing to make it so because they're a high-profile, loved-by-nerds company and can get away with it." That response appears to be fundamentally correct.
deleted 13y ago
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rayiner 13y ago
The fact of the matter is that this sort of "cool but shitty" job is quite common in other industries (music, movies, advertising, politics, sports). At least in tech, these sorts of jobs don't involve giving sexual favors, so be thankful for that much.
- kalleboo 13y ago
  There's an even closer analogy on hand, which is especially poignant with Penny Arcade - video games. Lots of kids enter the game industry and get chewed up and overworked and tolerate it because they love games.
  - taurath 13y ago
    I knew I had to leave when I was asking why X benefit was so bad and HR's response was "well we work on video games" as if that helped the situation.
jgon 13y ago
Well he kind of is acting like a villain. I mean if we were to strip out all the names associated with this topic the one line summary could be "Business/Sales guy wants to hire a tech person to work really hard for little money while he gets rich". I mean its a tale as old as the tech industry but are we seriously going to apologize for him? Do we have absolutely zero solidarity with regard to this issue?
Lagged2Death 13y ago
Also, lots and lots of ad hominem. Ad hominem is when you say, in effect, "You butter your toast on the wrong side, so I'm going to discount anything you say, you wrong-side-butterer, you." It's not ad hominem to point out that a a specific claim ("I don't even really like toast," while sitting on a throne and dais made entirely of toast) is calculatedly disingenuous. The argument isn't "This guy's a hypocrite and therefore he's wrong about absolutely everything," which would arguably be ad hominem. The argument is "This guy doesn't even believe what he's telling you right now, maybe you shouldn't believe it either."

by jmduke 13y ago

dpcheng2003 13y ago

I think the author skates between praise and criticism as they are different sides of the same coin--Robert is a great businessman. I find this type of knee-jerk response to the job posting disappointing. When did we become so sensitive or insecure or helpless that we need to shame this person or this job posting? It's been said multiple times over in this comments thread that Robert is actually being uniquely transparent, that the candidates who apply have lots of other options and no one is being forced to take this job given those two factors. If this was a Craiglist ad for some deviant act, would we jump on our horse and say, "How dare this person ask someone to do [deviant act]?" No, we'd probably just ignore it because we're adults and we get to make our own decisions. That [deviant act] is not for us. You can say Robert should follow best practices and be more competitive in his offer, and to some extent, this post does that. But to use colorful and aggressive language, presuming that the founders of Penny Arcade are cashing in "trade show checks" is not productive. Robert isn't breaking any employment laws. The best you can do to show your disapproval as a great developer is to not apply.

rantanplan 13y ago
There are so many logic flaws in your comment that I will just respond to the ones that stand out(to me anyway). "Robert isn't breaking any employment laws". I didn't know we should only voice our disagreement when someone does something illegal. Actually, on second thought, I think doing that would be somewhat redundant because, well you know, the law has already taken care of that. "The best you can do to show your disapproval as a great developer is to not apply" What a misguided and cynical opinion! No. What we can do, is to expose unethical and exploitative tactics, in order to protect the younger, and by extension, the more naive candidates.
- dpcheng2003 13y ago
  Everyone has the right to voice their disagreement. It is, after all, a free country. I voiced my opinion, you're voicing yours. I am confused where my logic "fails" here. The point I am making is that there is a community that is taking an outsized response to his very honest and open job posting about the type of person he wants on his team. As many people mentioned here, this isn't very different from other postings in other desired fields, like game design, acting, etc. or in many startups. I will agree I am cynical but I am hardly misguided. I doubt anyone reading that job posting will think they are joining a highly lucrative, salary-competitive role. They are doing it because they love PA. What if we wrote the "real" job descriptions of other desired positions like being an engineer at Apple, for example? Apple is notoriously known for working their employees. Where's the outrage? You and the author of this post has every right to say the job posting is not competitive or in your opinion, unethical or exploitive. Where I find disagreement is the manner in which he argues his points. There's no need to use language that can be misconstrued as aggressive to makes his points, but he does anyway.
  - rantanplan 13y ago
    Fair enough. Maybe I am not impressed by the "honesty" depicted in the job posting. Being honest won't redeem you from being exploitative towards other people. I agree that you should attack arguments and not people. Maybe the author of the article got a bit over excited.

coldtea 13y ago

>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 recognizes that a position at Penny Arcade has a level of cachet, but doesn't recognize that that level of cachet is transitive: if someone "can work somewhere “cool” and feel like a part of something big", then good for them. Perhaps he recognizes that what some people perceive as "cachet" is actually BS and can be bad for them, regardless of what they believe, in the same way that a teenager wanna-be rockstar that thinks heroin is cool and an early death is "romantic" needs to be told otherwise...

jtuente 13y ago
>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.
jmduke 13y ago
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 applications". I strongly disagree with this, though. I'm young, but I'm confident people can have different experiences at the same position -- I have friends who would happily take a salary hit to work at startups or smaller businesses. They value the opportunities and cultures of those jobs to be worth more than the additional $X,000. That doesn't mean they disagree with a "one true valuation" -- it means their valuation has different factors and weights.

saraid216 13y ago

> a lot of this post seems to be conjecture which hinges on Robert Khoo being a villain I didn't get this sense from the post. He disagrees with what Khoo is doing. That kinda necessarily means he'll be talking about Khoo negatively.

chipotle_coyote 13y ago

I don't think the author describes Khoo as a villain, just as someone who is very "money-motivated" despite explicitly saying otherwise. Yes, it's subjective to say "the cachet of working at Penny Arcade doesn't outweigh the negatives of this job, and the fact that the posting tells you up front that it's a shit job doesn't change that," but the author certainly makes a good case as to why he believes that. Is it conjecture to say that Khoo wants to pay under market rate for one job that should really be done by more than one person at market rate? Well, if you believe the job listing that Khoo wrote, not really. That's pretty much how he described the job, and that's a perfectly reasonable inference from it. Also, I don't see an actual ad hominem attack in here. Buecheler is blunt, but it seems to me he's very explicitly attacking Khoo's actions and policies here. He may be arguing that those actions make Khoo kind of a jerk, but that's not ad hominem. (Buecheler clearly argues Khoo is a terrific businessman, in fact; he just argues that he's using his powers for evil.) You can certainly argue that "You should know it's a shit job, here's how it's a shit job, but hey it's for Penny Arcade! Woo!" is a fine enough job posting because it's up front about its intrinsic shittiness. But I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to respond with, "Yes, but not only is a shit job still a shit job, this particular one is a shit job at a company that certainly has the resources to make it not a shit job and is choosing to make it so because they're a high-profile, loved-by-nerds company and can get away with it." That response appears to be fundamentally correct.

deleted 13y ago

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rayiner 13y ago

The fact of the matter is that this sort of "cool but shitty" job is quite common in other industries (music, movies, advertising, politics, sports). At least in tech, these sorts of jobs don't involve giving sexual favors, so be thankful for that much.

kalleboo 13y ago
There's an even closer analogy on hand, which is especially poignant with Penny Arcade - video games. Lots of kids enter the game industry and get chewed up and overworked and tolerate it because they love games.
- taurath 13y ago
  I knew I had to leave when I was asking why X benefit was so bad and HR's response was "well we work on video games" as if that helped the situation.

jgon 13y ago

Well he kind of is acting like a villain. I mean if we were to strip out all the names associated with this topic the one line summary could be "Business/Sales guy wants to hire a tech person to work really hard for little money while he gets rich". I mean its a tale as old as the tech industry but are we seriously going to apologize for him? Do we have absolutely zero solidarity with regard to this issue?

Lagged2Death 13y ago

Also, lots and lots of ad hominem. Ad hominem is when you say, in effect, "You butter your toast on the wrong side, so I'm going to discount anything you say, you wrong-side-butterer, you." It's not ad hominem to point out that a a specific claim ("I don't even really like toast," while sitting on a throne and dais made entirely of toast) is calculatedly disingenuous. The argument isn't "This guy's a hypocrite and therefore he's wrong about absolutely everything," which would arguably be ad hominem. The argument is "This guy doesn't even believe what he's telling you right now, maybe you shouldn't believe it either."