A classic psychopath at Zynga

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

A good comment at Hacker News:

Perversely, I enjoyed reading this memo. Mark Pincus is a classic psychopath and it’s always educational to observe how people like him attempt to justify themselves.

The psychopath’s language is usually a caricature (sometimes to the point of absurdity) of going assumptions of the culture in which he’s trying to win acceptance. Though they have no values, they are skilled at picking up others’ values and using them to make their actions seem acceptable. In Pincus’s case, he’s taking the noble concept of meritocracy and twisting it into bizarre shapes, refusing to stop even at outright fraud.

Oh, and if I understand Mr. Pinkus right, people who work with food don’t deserve to make money. Fucker.

Judging his attitudes from his writing and actions, he’d be a natural fit for the Tea Party. Since the Tea Party and Zynga are the two malefactors most responsible for insufferable activity on Facebook, this is a natural transition for Mr. Pincus.

To the screwed: sorry to hear it, but I guess this is what you get when you work for a company whose name sounds like 4th-grade anatomical slang.

Another comment focuses on how hard chefs work:

My sister’s a french trained chef and I’ve been writing software most of my life. She works probably 3X harder than any geek I know including me. It’s brutal. She arrives 8am to prep and leaves 11pm after service, 6 days a week when she was working for someone else. 7 now that she’s opening her own place. She’s on her feet all day. The job is both time critical and requires constant teamwork. If you or anyone else drops the ball the angry customer is right there, including the angry wait staff and angry team mates. It’s very high pressure.

She’s now busy opening her own restaurant and it’s a far cry from writing software once and kicking back while each incremental copy sold costs you zero effort or money. Every incremental product a chef sells is hand-made and has to have its raw ingredients bought without any certainty it’ll actually get sold. What’s worse is many ingredients have a shelf life of mere days.

Every product is hand made to a customer’s specifications and delivered in real-time with immediate feedback. If a product is rejected, it’s expected to be replaced immediately without interrupting the flow of products heading out to new customers. And of course the tools of the trade are not a keyboard, but sharp knives and open flames.
So yeah, the “google chef scenario” comment bugged me too.

This gets to the heart of the issue:

I remember that pre-IPO articles about Google always mentioned the great working conditions, including the amazing meals in the cafeteria. Recruitment material from Google touted the chef as a major reason for working there. People talked about Google as the de-facto model for treating your employees well “look they even have a good chef”. Given how much that chef played a role in Google’s name making, he certainly deserved every penny he made.

But this is the best overview:

This really bothers me. It presumes that a chef cannot be a significant contributor to the success of a company. As someone who was there in Google’s early days I can tell you from firsthand experience that this is not true. If someone at Zynga actually did say this on the record, they owe Charlie Ayers an apology.

Working at a startup is hard. The hours are long, the stress can be brutal, and there is no guarantee of success. In fact, the odds for a raw startup (which is what Google was when Charlie joined) are very much against you. I have no idea what Google’s deal with Charlie was, but typically you take a pay cut for a shot at the brass ring. Charlie didn’t make $20M for cooking, he made $20M for taking the risk that the company he was joining would fail and that he could end up five years older, unemployed, and with nothing to show for his trouble.

But it is not Zynga’s failure to grasp this basic fact of startup economics that bothers me, it is their singling out of Charlie in particular because he’s a chef. As someone who was there in the early days I can tell you that Charlie Ayers contributed more to Google’s success that I did, and I was a senior software engineer.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that people get hungry, and when they do their productivity drops. As a company you have three options: make your employees deal with it themselves (bring sack lunches or go out), provide some basic but uninspiring food (stock the break room with snacks, have the odd pizza delivered), or you can, as Google did, provide them with really good food.

The latter option costs more, but it pays dividends. When the best restaurant in town is the company cafeteria it liberates your employees from having to worry about where their next meal is coming from (literally) and lets them focus on their work. For software engineering in particular, where getting into an uninterrupted mental “flow” is crucial to productivity, free quality food is a huge lever.

Providing quality food to an ever-growing roster of hungry engineers is not an easy task. Charlie and his staff worked harder on a light day than I ever did (or probably ever will). If you doubt me, take a job in a restaurant kitchen some time. Not only that, but the stakes are higher than most people realize. Feeding a few hundred people in a professional setting is not just taking the process of preparing a home-cooked meal and multiplying. If a software engineer screws up, the site goes down. But if a chef screws up, people get sick. In extreme cases, they die.

If I were to point out that no one ever got sick from eating Charlie’s food most people would consider than to be damning with faint praise, but that is just a testament to how well Charlie did his job. Not only did he keep us well feed and free from salmonella, he inspired us. When I said that the best restaurant in town was Google’s cafeteria that was no exaggeration. Charlies food was outstanding, day in and day out. (It still is. If you’re in the Bay Area, do yourself a favor and have a meal at his restaurant.)

But Charlie’s contribution to Google’s early success went even well beyond that. Charlie was a friend and a cheerleader. Everyone at Google got to know him because everyone went through the lunch line, and Charlie was always there making sure everything was ship-shape. And Charlie got to know us, got to know our individual tastes and preferences, and bent over backwards to accommodate them, but never at the cost of compromising on his principles of making his offerings healthy and sustainable, principles he still adheres to. Being fed by Charlie was a privilege. It was inspiring. It was cool. It kept us going.

Don’t tell me Charlie deserved his payday any less than the rest of us.