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Comment by Jach | Hacker News Reader

I find it very hard to feel any pity for the employees that knowingly got involved with such a company, and I would be surprised if many of Zynga's best and most hardworking employees didn't jump ship long ago.

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Any developer with half a brain should know that the game industry should be avoided like the plague. Long working hours, abusive management, racism (the Kixeye debacle), the issues just go on and on.

Take patio11's advice and go into B2B, you'll make money hand over fist with much more manageable working hours.

I work at a mobile game development company in Vancouver, and it's great here. Best environment I've ever worked in. Good people, good management, get in at 8:30 and leave at 5, etc.

Not everyone in the industry is scum, though it's certainly not uncommon.

There are always exceptions, but there sure is a large amount of anecdotal evidence for not-so-great working conditions in general across the gaming industry. If you follow gaming news you'll also hear over and over about lots of "crunch" time, etc.

I've only heard about that at a few big name companies (i.e. EA, Zynga) who's working conditions are legendarily bad. What about some of the other big players? Nintendo? Microsoft? Rare? Square Enix? Valve?

Holy cow, how did I miss that Kixeye story? It read like a horror story. I guess they weren't exaggerating when they used insanity wolf to advertise for jobs, talk about a toxic environment.

Don't forget good apples like Valve :(

Doesn't it say in Valve's handbook (the one released earlier this year) that it doesn't actually consider itself to be a gaming company?

That doesn't make it true.

It means that their mentality is significantly different from other game companies, which means that generalizations of gaming companies drawn from their work culture are much more tenuous.

Or it means their handbook doesn't entirely line up with the actuality.

I wonder. They don't release a lot of titles. But Steam is a gold mine. I wouldn't be surprised if that's where most of the money comes from these days. If true they're really not a game company but rather a distribution company.

What sort of company does the handbook say they are?

I would love to see the average hours worked for a Valve employee. Probably more than 8-10...

But not likely due to company policy or pressure. By all accounts, Valve employees work on things they enjoy doing and end up spending more time if only to pursue things they find interesting.

Riot Games is also a standout of a great place to work from what I've heard.

My brother works there as a QA, and he's enjoyed every minute of it. There is a reverence and appreciation for their users that trickles down from the CEO into the rest of the company that seems to be the exact opposite of the situation at Zynga.

Correct. A developer with a full brain would know better than to extrapolate a few examples to an entire industry.

Doesn't matter if there are exceptions. When there are so many job opportunities out there for developers, why take the risk?

I think the general lesson is "don't be a idiot."

I know several people working quite happily at gaming companies (doing, from what I can see, some pretty cool stuff), and those game companies who are the most abusive generally have well-known reputations as such.

I suppose it might not be the best industry to go into straight out of college, when you have little leverage and lack industry smarts...

Or you would identify the most likely underlying cause of the stereotype: that the games industry is an industry of love, just like fashion, music, theater or art.

That means that there is a much more abundant supply of labour and that the demand side is exploiting this by offering lower wages, worse working environment, crazier hours etc.

The main difference between fashion, music and art is that the discrepancy is much more poignant in the games industry because there's an abundant supply of well-paying cushy jobs just around the corner which involve almost the exact same skill-set to compare against.

Let me assure you, working at wooga, in Berlin, is nothing like what you just described.

What about the ones who were acquired into Zynga?

I am more concerned about all the non-technical employees they have, who may have not been as well equipped to recognize Zynga for what it is. Most of the artists probably should have been able to recognize it (with all that tracing going on...), but employees more removed than that could have been relatively blindsided.

If they have access to the internet, they have had plenty of opportunities to read about it. The shameful behavior of Zynga is public knowledge and has been for years.

Also > (with all that tracing going on...)

Yet, the market for non-technical employee's is not nearly as supply-centric as demand.

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