[danko]

The article makes an excellent point: you can really only demand "startup hours" out of your employees if you can offer "startup perks" (i.e. (a) an extremely favorable work environment, (b) interesting work, and (c) the possibility of the big cash-out).

Zynga has never seemed particularly strong at (a) and (b), but compensated with a heaping helping of (c). Now that's gone. If they're going to demand startup hours now, they'll have to get there by pressure and exploitation (which admittedly is nothing new in the gaming industry). There's always been something brutal and antagonistic about that company, and that's probably just going to get worse.

Also:

TechCrunch comment threads have one positive attribute: they make me appreciate the level of discourse here at HN all the more.

[gammarator]

Bizarrely, one Techcrunch commenter says "Sometimes comments on TechCrunch are only a half step above the comments on Hacker News."

http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/09/working-at-zynga/?fb_commen...

[colmvp]

For some reason I have trouble loading TechCrunch comments, which I guess is a good thing.

On that note, I'm a little surprised they copy and pasted the Quora writeup. Might as well just link to it and call it a day as the rest of the writeup wasn't particularly insightful.

[jrockway]

The writeup on Quora seems to have been deleted.

[michaelochurch]

A problem with startups and startup hours is that in a startup, there are real existential threats, and this enables a class of narcissistic managers to present their own bikeshedding and ill-advised pet projects and unreasonable demands as existential issues.

If you're an entry-level engineer at Google and your manager tries to convince you to work a 60-hour week because of some existential threat to the company, you're going to say, "I'll gladly do that, but I want an EMG award and a double promotion." It's just not plausible that a sophisticated, large company would bet itself on the work of a low-level grunt and if it did, this would be one hell of a great time to ask for a promotion. But at a startup, for there to be an existential threat is plausible, and a lot of managers at startups abuse this (both down, in exerting long hours from subordinates, and up, in misleading executives).

I recently saw a 25-year-old on his first white-collar job, using existential-threat FUD arguments, convince the CTO and CEO of a $100m+ startup that the entire codebase needed a "rearchitecture" that turned out to be the worst idea ever-- botched in every possible way from political deployment, language choice, schedule and scaling. It was a complete and utter disaster, and possibly killed the company (it's teetering, the culture has been completely destroyed, and a number of that company's best people have left or been fired in the past few months).