Penny Arcade's Insultingly Horrible Job - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2013/11/26/penny-arcade-awful-job <comment><USER4> There are so many fucking developers out there who are totally unaware of their own value, and will take a salary significantly less than they're worth. This usually comes as a result of nervousness in interviews, lack of confidence, fear of going broke, and/or some other feeling of desperation.

As an employer, you want to find these folks. There's usually no downside to having these absurd job postings. Penny Arcade apparently went too far and is getting some bad publicity, but usually there are no repercussions. Can you really blame them for trying to do this - when it works?

As developers, you need to educate your fellow developers about how much they're worth, strategize ways to extract maximum value from companies you work for, and instill a sense of confidence in one another. If you've ever gone to engineering school, I _know_ you knew tons of folks who couldn't believe what companies were willing to pay for them. Their misconceptions need to be abolished.

If you don't help your fellow developers understand their positions, then they'll end up taking jobs like this one at Penny Arcade for shit pay and it brings down the overall price of employees in general.

Company owners don't want you to know this. They benefit from these awesome hires.

<comment><USER5> So how does a developer determine their own value? For example:

1.) I do web development every day. I'm not a spectacular designer, but I can put a work flow together and I'm comfortable on both the client side javascript (JavaScript proper, jQuery, Backbone, AngularJs) as well as the server side (Ruby, Node.js, PHP 5.5 (Laravel mostly), C#).

2.) I do development in the form of sysadmin/devops type tasks (bash/powershell/vbscript)

3.) I currently do IT related tasks with regards to servers (not desktops) such as building servers from parts, loading them in to racks, setting up firewalls/routers/networking, etc

4.) I'm not perfect with attention to detail. Things fall through the cracks, but I know when to skip details (because they can be easily rectified if missed) and when not to (because the work really is mission critical, or rectifying the mistake would be particularly painful)

5.) I'm self-educated with minimal college. However, I devour books about algorithms, AI, language references, etc

6.) I have terrible work-life balance. I love my wife dearly, but if there is a problem to be solved, I can't let it go. I often dream about problems that are on my mind.

7.) I work well in teams, but I prefer solo work as I can often get in the "zone" easier when not distracted. I am not socially awkward, but I prefer smaller groups. I won't do sales, and while I can do direct customer service, I find it exhausting and my day is often shot afterwards.

8.) I understand how to deal with, and juggle, multiple "number one" priorities.

9.) I generally don't do on call, but if there is a fire, I'm always available to work on it.

10.) I'm constantly on the lookout for techniques to enhance myself, and the team as a whole. I often do presentations on up and coming software stacks, or training on technologies that I think would be worthwhile to implement.

11.) I live in Portland, Or. Relocating to SV or SF is not an option.

Given all of that (and more since it's never binary), how do I go about valuing myself in the market without wasting a ton of time?

<comment><USER6> > How do I go about valuing myself in the market without wasting a ton of > time?

It takes a ton of time, but interview people. Seriously, you would not believe what the applicant pool is like, even after resume filtering and phone screening. After interviewing 20-30 people you may have a very different perspective on which decile of value that you fall into. If you are in the top 10% of developers, then your value is the top 10% as well.

<comment><USER7> Note that those you get to interview will tend to be the less attractive candidates because they will tend to do more interviews before getting a job (and may be job hunting again sooner) BUT THAT DOESN'T MATTER. You only have position yourself amongst the AVAILABLE candidates anyway

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A lot of companies out there are run by total morons or psychopaths, this doesn't surprise me at all. This sounds like a combination of both.

I was recently introduced to a job by a recruiter and they wanted me to do a "programming assignment" which would take at least 20 hours, before I could even talk to them and see who they were. I was like, "Cool story bro".

The reason why I bring that up is because I noticed the same pattern here; this job ad is screening for desperate people lacking a spine. I can't imagine any decent developer with a good job applying for this. Only someone desperately looking for work and having relatively low skills would willingly take this job, assuming he's not an idiot.

<comment><USER9> Before resorting to ad hominem attacks you may want to do some research on who you're attacking. Robert Khoo is neither a moron nor a psychopath. I disagree with his job posting, but it helps no one to attack the person behind it (with false insults) instead of attacking the posting itself and what it represents.

<comment><USER10> I think someone who so blatantly values his developers so little _deserves_ to be insulted.

<comment><USER11> What about someone who values honesty enough to actually list the accurate job posting, which honestly doesn't sound that different than a lot of jobs in this industry. The biggest difference is those jobs didn't actually list the bad conditions in the job posting.

<comment><USER12> So it's ok to be an abusive arsehole as long as you're honest about it? The only crime is to be a dishonest arsehole?

How about being a decent reasonable human being/employer? Or is that just off the table altogether in this discussion?

With limbo-like justifications like this I'm not surprised these kind of diseased company cultures exist.

<comment><USER13> Yes. You are acting like this job is not voluntary.

<comment><USER8> So a job that advertises terrible working conditions is suddenly morally upstanding and ethical just because you know what you're in for? What if you need money to feed your family and the job ad says that as a precondition to getting hired you need to give them one of your kidneys?

This is exactly why labor law exists and why libertarian/extreme capitalist societies could never function. The argument "it's a free market" doesn't hold water. Without a system of checks and balances exploitation will always take place because there are always people desperate enough to do anything to make a living. No matter what you say about "free markets" and "voluntary agreements", you can't convince me that it's right and ethical and a good idea in any capacity.

<comment><USER11> Labor laws? Holy crap, you are deluded. We're talking about a cushy white- collar job here. Yes, the expectations sound pretty bad, _relatively speaking_. But it's a far cry from exploitative labor.

<comment><USER8> Calm down, go back and re-read the sub-thread. We are talking about general principles behind the practice, not necessarily about this concrete example.

<comment><USER11> How very patronizing of you.

In the entire category of white-collar jobs the idea of requiring labor laws is ludicrous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm glad someone spoke up about it. I was rather insulted as a developer myself who feels undervalued that a business is doing nothing to help improve conditions for developers, this is why the industry is plagued with mental health issues; we aren't sleeping, we are drinking a lot of coffee, we have no time to socialise or even spend time outside in the air/sun. Workplace conditions as highlighted in the job ad for Penny Arcade are what is wrong with the industry as a whole.

Don't get me started on the ridiculousness of expecting someone with a computer science degree for such a job. After spending tens of thousands of dollars on a CS degree, I'm sure said developer would love nothing more than to get a job that underpays, has no perks or offers real value. Surprised they didn't list they wanted someone with knowledge of plumbing and performing complicated electrical work with experience working in a commercial kitchen and being able to cook 500 meals in the space of a couple of hours...

There aren't many developers out there who would meet even half the requirements Penny Arcade listed in their job ad as a self-taught web developer with no qualifications, I would be on that list as well.

<comment><USER15> I am working on improving lives of developers through my book: [https://leanpub.com/nightowls](https://leanpub.com/nightowls)

The idea is to produce a book programmers can give to whomever is making their lives miserable and teaching said person about keeping programmers happy and productive. I'm also adding practical advice for programmers themselves because I feel that we bring a lot of these problems on ourselves.

That said, if you're in the Bay Area I'd love to buy a drink and talk about the state of the industry. My book needs more material :)

<comment><USER14> This sounds really good. I think the issue definitely needs more attention, because these kind of toxic environments are becoming the norm for the software and web development industries. I remember a conversation a manager had with me once because he felt I wasn't putting in enough overtime (being salaried and not being paid for overtime, I felt this was wrong). His issue was that the other developer who I worked with, who had no girlfriend or wife or kids to spend time with was staying until 9/10pm every night of the week and he lived a 2 hour drive away whereas I lived 45 minutes away by train or 20 by car.

The problem is if you refuse to put in the overtime, there will always be someone else who is willing and able to put the overtime in, as a result they are presented with more opportunities. The mentality in every development industry is if you are the first to leave, you'll most likely be the first on the chopping block if the business hits a rough spot. You are perceived as not being a team player, not working hard enough and putting pressure on your peers.

I understand overtime is part of the job. We as developers know when we signed up to be developers that there will be late nights, but when companies expect overtime as part of the normal job for no good reason other than to get more for less, that's not right. People are afraid to leave at 5.30pm on the dot at most companies, especially as the economy gets worse.

Sadly I'm in Australia, otherwise catching up and discussing the state of the industry would have been awesome. I'll most likely be in the US sometime next year though, my partner and I are currently trying to get some funding for an ambitious idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The actual ad seems a _lot_ less disturbing than Marco's write-up of it... the main thing I notice is it seems to avoid the typical grinning-HR-guy-speak and sounds more like they're being honest about things.

This clearly isn't the job for everybody (obviously not Marco), but there are plenty of people out there who are (as the ad puts it) "not terribly money- motivated" and would be willing to work hard to be in a cool environment with cool people. [Some of the best jobs I've had have been for absurdly low salaries, but I don't regret them for a nanosecond...]

Given who wrote the ad, I also wouldn't be surprised if they're exaggerating a wee bit and making it sound rather scarier than it really is. Having a small outfit with reasonable people in charge (and whatever faults they have, I don't think PA are really psychopathic-startup-CEOs in disguise) is one of the best insurances there is against a truly unreasonable work environment. Sugar- coated job ads are an insurance against nothing....

If anything, I'm more disturbed by Marco's rush to judgement...

<comment><USER17> The funny thing is that this was actually the job for Marco when he was younger at Tumblr--as he admits. But now that he's older and more successful, it looks like a bad deal.

Which it is--for older more successful people. For a youngster with a light resume and a thirst for excitement, though, it might be perfect.

<comment><USER18> God, did you even read his response? He took a similar job for a few years out of college but required and received competitive pay _and equity (!)_ as well as a reasonable work/life balance. He was allowed to learn parts of that job on the fly: ie, he didn't come into it with the expectation that he know every aspect of it day one.

PA wants someone who not only has expert-level experience in several disciplines but is willing to work such a job to the exclusion of anything else while not getting paid a competitive salary nor receiving any sort of stake in their gaming media empire. This is absolutely in keeping with the worst inclinations of this industry, made worse by PA's knowledge of these practices in many of the companies they cover.

So, no, they are wildly different. This job is a good deal for no one and you do an immense disservice by carrying water for people that should know better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Robert Khoo, the business manger of Penny Arcade and the one who wrote this job ad subscribes to the "work is family" level of cultural fit. He looks at hiring as adding a new member to the family rather than just filling a position. This is why his job ads and hiring methods are so harsh. The three seasons of Penny Arcade's video show paint a good picture of what it's like to get hired and work at Penny Arcade: [http://penny-arcade.com/patv/show/pa-the- series](http://penny-arcade.com/patv/show/pa-the-series).

<comment><USER20> Bullshit.

Anyone who has been in the industry for more than 2 months knows that the "work is family" thing is a nonsensical feel good catchphrase thrown around by manipulative managers.

Your boss will not feel bad for you if you have a personal emergency which requires your absence and costs the company money (parent dying, spouse or children having medical problems, etc.).

Your company will not hesitate one second to fire you if the output you produce is deemed less valuable than the input you need to function.

Seriously, this is why Penny Arcade can get away with shit like that - <USER2> there are people out there who blindly believe that "work is family" and eat up the whole "it's not for everyone, others don't want to do it because they're not hardcore enough, but you're hardcore enough spiel". Statistically speaking, any argument that rests on the premise that you are better than 99% of the population is bullshit.

If you really subscribe to the whole "work is family" thing, go ahead. Then in 6, 12, 18 or 36 months, when you inevitably get fucked over, you'll complain about how you wish you had been warned ahead.

Sure, I love making work pleasant and grabbing beers with my boss and co- workers as much as the next guy- but at the end of the day, work is work, and anyone who tries to convince you otherwise has ulterior motives.

<comment><USER21> I won't try too hard to convince you otherwise, because you certainly seem set in your opinions. But I think it's a shame that such an overwhelmingly negative tone is thrown around so much. There are companies (small and otherwise) made up of good people that do not operate on this horribly cold impersonal calculus. There are bosses that will genuinely go out of their way to help you through a family crisis. There are co-workers and organizations that feel like family. I'm sorry you think it doesn't exist and that you've never had a relationship with a boss that was anything other than evil, but don't be so quick to tell everyone that that's all there is.

<comment><USER20> My opinions are formed by witnessing friends getting fired/being pressured to quit because their company had run out of money, or because they had to take care of an ill relative and the company felt that their performance wasn't as good as what it used to be, or because of some BS office politics. Those companies include small trendy startups and big fortune 500 companies alike.

At the end of the day, no matter how wonderful everything is, if the company is having a hard time and they need to fire you, they'll do it. Your boss is not going to sell his car or house to pay your salary.

If the company is doing well and offers a nice work environment, it can be fantastic, as you described- in which case, enjoy the ride while it lasts. But don't delude yourself in thinking that the wind won't turn if bad times hit. Believing anything else is setting yourself up for major letdown when it happens.

<comment><USER22> I broke my hip. The team rallied around and handled it until I was back. Both my parents died. The team rallied around and handled it until I was back. One of the team got close to burnout - the company provided him with unsolicited paid time off provided he took it now, so he could chill and get back to being productive.

My good experiences don't invalidate your bad experiences - but that sentence applies vice versa too.

A bunch of bad data points proves that bad exists, but it doesn't prove that bad is prevalent. That sentence also applies vice versa.

<comment><USER20> That's awesome- I'm genuinely happy for you. Finding a fulfilling job is hard.

Based on your experience in the field, how many software companies out there do you think are like yours? 20%? 10%? 1%? 0.1%? Less?

<comment><USER22> I have a suspicion that for larger companies, it's more a question of which teams are like that than which companies are, since the line manager's attitude has a huge influence on the results (for example, one bent the HR system substantially for me to enable me to house hunt effectively - <USER3> personal act rather than an organisational one).

As for what percentage? I'm not really sure. Shadowcat is how it is because it was baked into the culture from day one because that's how things _should_ be done, so I'm not sure I can extrapolate usefully from it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > _Full Medical, Vision and Dental, 401k (SEP) retirement contributions (2% of > annual income per year), Holiday pay, Periodic bonuses, Flexible vacation > time, We 're willing to relocate you if need be_

An _insultingly horrible job_ and _this is everything wrong with tech-startup culture_ , really Marco? Maybe your post is what's insulting to 99% of the world work population (who have much worst jobs) and what's wrong in the tech culture today (disclaimer: I was Marco's first employer).

<comment><USER24> He said it was an insultingly horrible job in the context of the software world. And requiring someone to do the job of four and paying them for less than the fair market value of one is insulting.

 _insulting to 99% of the world work population (who have much worst jobs)_

Many of the benefits you listed are standard in Europe. Full medical coverage is provided by the government, and they have ~30 days of paid leave.

<comment><USER23> Also I don't see what's the big deal about "doing four different jobs". In a small company most employees do multiple jobs. It does mean that they have to work more, just that they have to be flexible.

<comment><USER25> When we read "doing four different jobs," there are two ways to take that: doing one job that involves the functions of four separate positions but still maintains a rational workload, or being asked to carry a workload that, if not _actually_ the equivalent of four full-time jobs, is still substantially higher than that of just one job. People who are willing to give Penny Arcade the benefit of the doubt seem to be reading it the first way, whereas "skeptics" like Marco and Christopher Buecheler (the author of the previously- linked post about this) are reading it the second way. I admit I'm inclined to be in the skeptic camp, simply because the posting goes _so_ far out of its way to hammer home that the job has no work-life balance whatsoever and will manifestly not pay you what you're worth.

And, Beucheler's larger point remains salient: Penny Arcade is _not_ such a small company that this is so easily defensible. A five-person startup may require one person to be web application developer, sysadmin and operations manager. But Penny Arcade isn't a five-person startup. They've been around for over a decade, produce multiple comics, and put on massive industry trade shows. They can afford to hire more than one person if they have enough work for it, and no matter how many people they hire they can damn well afford to pay them market rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> In a bit of life-imitating-art, Penny Arcade also co-writes a side webcomic about poor conditions in the gaming QA industry: [http://trenchescomic.com/](http://trenchescomic.com/)

The Tales from the Trenches section is less hilarious in hindsight.

<comment><USER27> People comparing this job to the work in gaming QA have no idea how bad gaming QA is, generally, compared to even the worst possible interpretation of this posting. Let's start with working for minimum wage, with no guarantees of regular hours, not a salary. Forget about 401(k) or anything else like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Man, the people complaining about this shit are hilarious. I bet half of you people are "libertarians". Nobody has to take this job, and if it means they don't get a good employee, then so be it, that's their business decision. I get worrying about McDonald's employees, many of those folks are living in poverty and have few other options. Anybody who can do this job has a lot of options and even if underpaid will be far from poverty.

When I was 22, I was a small businesses best programmer, IT guy, server admin, CAD draftsman, document writer, butcher, baker, candlestick maker, etc. These kinds of jobs are _extremely_ common in small businesses and honestly it was an amazing and formative experience. You people are being babies.

</comment><comment><USER29> "Annual Salary: Negotiable, but you should know up front we're not a terribly money-motivated group."

This is ridiculous to anyone who knows Robert Khoo. He is nothing but money oriented and motivated. In fact he was brought in to PA for exactly this reason and he is the reason why they grew to what they are now.

<comment><USER30> He definitely needs to be called out on this. Of course companies will always try to pay the minimum that they can get away with while employees will try to get as much as we can. That's normal in negotiations.

But saying that "we're not a terribly money-motivated" is just bullshit for, "we're not terribly money-motivated when it comes to your compensation so please be thankful with what we give you and don't ask for more.".

<comment><USER31> >> He definitely needs to be called out on this.

Maybe it's just because I'm old and jaded, but I think the ad is doing people a favor. Clearly it's an "overwork, underpaid" position, which should raise red flags for most people to say "Next!"

It's a lot less insidious than being dragged through an interview cycle where they don't tell you what they consider market value for the position you're interviewing for until the later stages, or where they won't tell you that everyone in the company is a workaholic doing 80 hours a week unless you know to ask.

Sure, it's a sucky position, and you can call him out. In my experience, people like that can't be educated. They'll feign some remorse, but all they'll do is use softened, misleading wording and end up wasting the time of prospective candidates who will be misled into thinking that this is a better job than it really is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> At dinner one night I overheard a senior guy tell a junior guy that what he couldn't pay him in salary, he'd pay him in experience. The junior guy was full of excitement. The senior guy was also full of excitement but did his best to conceal it because he had just won a favorable victory in convincing another to do his deeds without an equitable compensation.

<comment><USER33> I guess he didn't tell him that it would be the experience of getting screwed over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is absolutely the norm for the creative industry. They pour themselves into their work, and they expect you to too.

The reason is that creative work is incredibly hard in a way that's not possible to make up for with experience or training. It's hard on day one, year one, and hard on day one year twenty.

The thing that gets you through it all is the very nature of the work. It's like you're giving birth to a baby and seeing it grow and thrive, only this baby can make you shitloads of money. It's incredibly rewarding.

Penny Arcade wants the type of employee that can not only handle this, but who can thrive off of it the same way they do. That's why they're so in-your-face about how shitty the job is.

The entertainment industry is driven by big names. It's relentlessly competitive, the successful enjoy a never-ending crush of people who want to be a part of something they've been seeing on TV or the Internet and at cons for years. The unsuccessful have to fight for every minor victory. It's winner takes all, there's only so much public mindshare to go around.

If you want to know what the poor hapless sap who does get hired on to be their resident nerd is getting out of the arrangement, it's being part of this crush of attention. It's seriously life-changing. The social perks defy enumeration. After a few years of shoveling Penny Arcade's shit, they will be able to write their own salary at any number of massive media franchises who need every vetted hand they can get and are willing to pay top dollar. That's what's unsaid in that job ad, but if you've spent any time around that industry, you'd be salivating at the mouth at the opportunity.

<comment><USER35> What you described is true when applied to the creative positions. The ad is not for one of those. It's for the "IT guy"'s role. I imagine this gets you as much leverage in the entertainment industry as it got the guy who serviced Michael Bay's laptop. If you've spent any time in that industry you knew it yourself.

<comment><USER34> Well if we're talking leverage, you're right. You need very deep pockets or serious star power to get any _leverage_ in entertainment. The most famous example of this is Arnold Schwarzenegger buying his way into action movies. That's what it takes to be able to tell them what to do.

But that's not the only way to make it.

<comment><USER35> You've just said that the guy will get a lot of leverage described as the ability to write one's own salary.

<comment><USER34> More just to mean that he'll get paid ridiculously well. Probably a bad choice of words. I didn't mean to give that impression.

What the PA hire is looking at here is a few years of $30-50,000 (if he'll even get that) followed by an immediate bump to the low six figures. Over the course of his career he'll steadily work his way to the high six figures.

This is pretty much guaranteed, although it's not stated anywhere in any contract or in the ad. Professionals in entertainment typically make an order of magnitude more than their contemporaries, after they get in and are vetted, join the trade association, etc.

You just have to get in. This involves getting a well-known production to take a chance on you. A lot of people bum around entertainment for ten-fifteen years before they catch their break. That break typically comes in the form of a very part-time gig on a huge production. You might get some face time with a big name.

That's when everything changes. Overnight, your marketability goes up tenfold. You keep working with bigger and bigger names and before you know it, you're rolling in cash and bennies.

This looks like a horrible job ad when you look at it from our perspective, but what it really offers is a short-cut. You can jump out of the IT industry and the generally shitty 'opportunities' it offers and hop immediately on the fast-track to success. You don't have to bum around with the hangers-on for years, you can get your foot in the door immediately. This is a truly Edison- type opportunity, one that comes dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Entertainment types don't typically hire outside the industry. Outsiders just don't understand it, can't quite grasp their priorities. That's why they chew through so many young people and burn them out, because they can't get outside professionals to work they way they need to.

PA is willing to, and you'd be a fool not to jump on it.

<comment><USER35> Can you name somebody who followed this path you just desribed? In my 15+ years in games there had not been any agmin/ops/general IT people who rose to stardom. In fact I don't recall any IT who worked at another studio before or moved into another studio. Why would anybody care about their industry experience? Why would anybody pay high six figures for such a job? It's the equivalent of roadies in the music biz.

<comment><USER34> Rose to stardom? Where did you read that in my comment?

All I'm saying is that career trajectories are very different between the two industries. Of course you won't see people with entertainment-type careers in the video games industry. They're two totally different types of sausage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Props to PA for the honesty though. There's _plenty_ of jobs like this out in small businesses that only need/can afford one "IT guy" to run everything, and most will have pretty much this exact set of requirements (can't pay crazy dot-com salaries, has to be able to do a bit of everything, be on-call 24/7 if the shit really hits the fan), but how many of them would actually spell it out?

<comment><USER37> What kind of small business needs 24/7 support?

<comment><USER38> It's a good point, at least in this case. Nobody's going to die if PA goes down for a few hours, and they're not even going to lose millions.

Being asked to work a few extra hours when PAX tickets go on sale or something would be reasonable. On call 24/7 is just gratuitous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It doesn't seem that out-of-the-ordinary in how horrible it is, but there is something really unsettling in the "yeah, this is going to be terrible" attitude of the job poster. There's an arrogance there that I don't think is earned by being part of an only sometimes funny publication.

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm reminded of the movie MoneyBall. Jonah Hill and Brad Pitt are employed with what outsiders would consider horrible jobs, but each stick with it because they enjoy it.

As an outsider you may think Penny Arcade's offer is bad, but someone, somewhere would love nothing more to work with the people behind that legendary comic and expo, no matter how rough it is.

Edit - I would also like to make an analogy with MMO guilds, particularly World of Warcraft. There are players who spend 4+ hours a night with their guild hardcore raiding (especially after the release of a content patch). These hardcore guilds have very strict enlistments. Unless you're as hardcore as them you're not in. An outsider would think they're insane, but there is no shortage of people applying to these guilds because they enjoy the experience of hardcore raiding. Some of these guilds have a very family-like bond toward each other, so you have to consider community/culture fit.

<comment><USER41> I assume you're being sarcastic when you write legendary, right? Peanuts, Pogo, Calvin and Hobbes, Krazy Kat, Little Nemo... those are legendary comic strips. Penny Arcade is a comic strip focused on a narrow subculture (man children) within a subculture (video game fans) that largely consists of jokes on videogame news cycle topics. It's the sort of thing that will be entirely without value in 40 years.

That being said, I'm sure someone out there really does believe it's a legendary comic strip and will want to be a part of that.

<comment><USER42> Brutal and incisive comment. Both in terms of the (non) value of the comic (I would extend this to every web comic I've personally ever seen), and in terms of its audience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> DanI-S > This is everything wrong with tech-startup culture

In my experience, this isn't really tech-startup culture, it's entertainment industry culture. If you know anyone who has ever worked in film, music or videogames, it's a fairly typical thing.

<comment><USER43> Penny Arcade is a marketing company

<comment><USER44> They're all marketing companies... except for government contractors; those are bribery companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The job posting looks an awful lot like the usual videogame programmer job: it's bound to attract some people just because of the nature of the job, so they don't bother adding good money or perks. In this case it's a little more blatant and there seems to be some boasting from the employer, but in the end it's the same.

And the saddest of all this is that the job will get covered. In fact, I'm sure that there will be a lot of applicants. Just like for videogame programming.

Yes, we need to fight this. It's good that there are people complaining publicly. By the way, I believe that a few details from the job posting would be illegal in my country, although probably not in the US.

</comment><comment><USER46> "a person that can do four jobs"

"terrible at work-life balance"

"on call 24/7"

"potentially offensive environment"

"being pushed to your limit is part of the job"

"sometimes tedious work"

That, and Penny Arcade's history of avoidable and frustrating controversies ([http://business.financialpost.com/2013/06/21/download- code-p...](http://business.financialpost.com/2013/06/21/download-code-penny- arcade-needs-to-fix-its-krahulik-problem/?__lsa=03bc-7082)), and their terrible responses to them?

Where do I sign up?

<comment><USER47> Those controversies are over-analyzed. People tend to forget that these two guys are, like all of us, human and don't have some sort of fancy PR machine to soften the blowback. Krahulik suffers from chronic anxiety and so when the threats started piling up, he responded in kind the way an animal gets backed into a corner. There's no denying he fucked up, but curiously his critics seem to gloss over his attempts to apologize.

I've been at PAX. These guys are approachable, they're kind and funny and do not carry an air of superiority. I know their failings as well as I know my own.

<comment><USER48> Saying you're sorry then putting out a goddamn tshirt with a reference to a rape joke isn't an apology.

<comment><USER47> also, I don't believe that's the actual chronology of the dickwolf debacle.

<comment><USER48> I read more into it and you're right; they posted the comic, then posted a passive-aggressive "apology" comic, then started selling the shirts. They took down the shirts and apologized, and then Krahulik later said that taking down the shirts was the biggest mistake he's made. So it's actually worse than I originally thought.

Also the Fruit Fucker does not rape PEOPLE, it rapes fruit. There has been outcry, but pretty balanced by the fact that it "takes advantage" of an inanimate object.

<comment><USER47> My question stands. the strip has covered topics such as bestiality, suicide, torture, a juicer that "fucks" oranges (note, I didn't say people, in case you were correcting me), among others. There wasn't a similar outcry. Why is that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> > _Their unreasonable, immature expectations are a damaging message to send to > their huge audience of young software developers._

Two things:

1\. The intent of their hiring specification isn't to send a message to their audience, it's to hire someone to service their audience. I'm not sure why the two are assumed to be mutually exclusive? Don't want to apply? Then don't apply - let market forces weed them out.

2\. In all of my years of applying for jobs and hiring people, not once has a candidate ever met exactly the profile nor eventually fulfilled every responsibility in a hiring specification. This sounds a bit overdramatic and too pedantic. Let it go.

<comment><USER50> Penny Arcade are being publicly called out for their questionable ethical behavior. That _is_ market forces at work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This passive aggressive tone permeates a lot of PA's comics, postings, and general presence. So I'm not surprised to see it. They've built a community around the over all nerd thug mentality that exists within their forums.

I stopped reading PA after the controversy about the rape wolf and their dismissive reaction to it.

I wouldn't want to work there. Not because of the hard work aspect, but because I can imagine that the overall attitude that informs their public work would inform their internal political structure as well.

Lets face it, you're not curing cancer here. You're making events and media that appeal to a certain sub-culture. This shouldn't require repressed nerd rage to get right.

</comment><comment><USER52> I'm not defending PA's job listing, because I do agree that it's absurd, but it's also important to remember that job listings tend to be for "ideal" candidates. Actual hired candidates are often far less qualified than the ideal candidate listed in the job requirement.

For instance, ideally, I'd love to hire a dev that has 5+ years of professional PHP experience building web apps and has experience with machine learning systems specifically relating to fraud. But in all likelihood I'll be lucky to hire someone with 3+ years of professional PHP experience with zero experience doing machine learning. The hired candidate will likely be simply _interested_ in machine learning. The hired candidate will likely have _no_ experience with fraud-related topics.

I can train you. I can teach you those things. But ideally, I wouldn't have to.

Likewise with PA's job listing, ideally, they want someone who can do all of those things. Practically, they'll hire someone who can do a very small subset of those things.

That said, it's a bit unrealistic to expect one person to do the job of four people (which is what this listing wants), especially for low salary, so... yeah, it's a bit ridiculous.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, but unicorn ads usually have a "please, please, please" hopeful tone. This one specifies that you literally have to do the job of 4 people and are expected to be the technical epi-center.

Also, my first impression, like Marco's, was "Is this a joke?" Especially this line: _It's rarely we call on it, but if something breaks in the middle of the night, you are expected to be on call to address that issue 24 /7._

<comment><USER52> Sure, but my boss also expects me to be working the entire 8 hours I'm sitting at my office, not browsing Hacker News... :)

Expectations are one thing, and they're very easy to state up front. Reality is quite another, and much more difficult to enforce.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Oh cmon. There are thousands of tech jobs that don't pay that well and require all those skills. The difference is that when those companies go to find someone, they lie in the ad. How is being honest insulting?

I'll bet there's plenty of young developers out there who don't mind working long hours and would love to spend their time flying around with the Penny- Arcade crew keeping everything running - admittedly they won't be hiring the best applicants in the industry with the rates and conditions that they're offering, but I doubt they'll have much trouble finding someone who fits the bill.

</comment><comment><USER54> For anyone not familiar with Penny Arcade( PA ), the absurd condition are there to reduce the number of candidates applying. Pa gets thousands of applications every time they have a job opening. Everyone dismissing the possible job at PA for those conditions is automatically removed from the process and that is exactly what R.Khoo wants. In case you are wondering why would you still want to work there, then you are not the Candidate, and >shock<, they don't want you there. Yes it is that simple.

Anyone who wants to work at PA, knows why very well.( hint: its not the money )

<comment><USER55> So they'll probably get the person that they ask for, but the question is what value they will get out of that person. They've asked for qualities that make for a good PM, but without emphasizing any of the qualities that make for a maintainable code base. Anyone they hire is guaranteed to be eager to please, and may have a problem saying "no" to work that comes at the expense of their focus.

I don't trust their technical vetting abilities, as their technical staff is small, and were not themselves selected by people with much technical expertise. The issue isn't that their job posting is unfair, it's that it weeds out the wrong people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> It's a reasonable strategy, because it's the same one other prestige companies use, particularly in gaming. Blizzard, for one, doesn't pay market rates for developers. It's a 15% difference or so, and you accept it because...well, it's Blizzard, and you really want to work there. The same may hold for a few other prestigious companies, like Valve, Bioware, etc.

Does it hold for Penny Arcade? Unknown.

Does it have any implication at all for the general profession? No way. It's funny to see how upset people are getting about a job ad. They are "insulted". But really what they are experiencing is, at worst, Penny Arcade misattributing themselves so much "juice" that they'd be willing to let someone grind themselves up in a job.

(That is, perhaps, the only narrow way in which this job posting is immoral, is if it describes working conditions so horrific that no-one could escape without deep emotional scarring. And no, I don't think it's quite that bad.)

<comment><USER57> I'm also finding it funny how upset people are getting, but I'm attributing it to a different cause. I think that a large number of developers have inflated ideas of how rare and valuable we are. Actually, that's not quite true. We are valuable, we're just not rare.

There's plenty of developer talent to go around and job ads like this are getting filled even by firms without whatever prestige Penny Arcade may have. It can be scary to know that this is what your next job might look like and I think there's a lot of denial out there, but basic supply and demand is going to keep moving developer jobs in this direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> This blog post basically boils down to: you will work far more than a regular full time job, and you will be paid poorly.

This is not, as far as I can tell, actually supported by the job posting itself.

I really can't understand why this is getting upvoted so much. I'd love to see an intelligent discussion of unrealistic demands in tech jobs, but this isn't it.

<comment><USER24> _This is not, as far as I can tell, actually supported by the job posting itself._

They literally tell you that you'll work far more than a regular job.

[http://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/9887522?trk=job_nov](http://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/9887522?trk=job_nov)

- _We are quite literally looking for a person that can do four jobs: Web Development, Software Development, Sys Admin, and the (dreaded) GENERAL IT_

- _being pushed to your limit is part of the job_

- _and don't mind having a really bad sense of work-life balance, this is the job for you._

- _We're terrible at work-life balance_

- _work is pretty much your life_

And here they tell you that you'll be paid poorly:

- _We're more likely to spend less money on salary and invest that on making your day-to-day life at work better._

<comment><USER58> "Do four jobs" does not mean "work 160 hours/week". It just means that you'll have four different areas of responsibility.

Most of the rest is wishy-washy subjective stuff that could mean anything from "you will basically be our slave" to "this is a fantastic place to work that pays well and you get to go home early every day, but we don't want to oversell it."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Wow, I'm really divorced from the real world. The Penny Arcade ad, other than the edgy snark, reads like virtually every developer position I've ever read in the media/news business.

(yes, this is an indictment of the already troubled news industry)

</comment><comment><USER60> While I don't usually find myself in staunch agreement with some of what Marco has to say (particularly with regards to Apple), I fully endorse this post.

I found myself seething while reading the original Penny Arcade job listing. The cognitive dissonance required to _write_ it is beyond my comprehension. In particular, the nonsense about somehow justifying a below-market salary in order to " _make the office nicer_ ".

Needless to say, my appreciation for Penny Arcade as a whole plummeted drastically today.

</comment><comment><USER61> One of the few things to make me audibly laugh today. They expect you to know everything(to be THE MOST CRUCIAL person in the company), but I let it go thinking there was some perk I was going to read next which justified it.

Perks include: on call 24/7 low pay work is your life

But I guess we're not the people they're looking for, and when they do find someone they give them a high-five, a latte, and scratch their hipster beards and laugh at how materialistic we are needing money and free time.

</comment><comment><USER62> Personally, that job is not for me, but I don't see the harm in "shooting for the moon" in a job description if they think they can get a candidate that matches the criteria. Why wouldn't you try to get someone overqualified and then underpay them if you think you can? It's not PA's fault people will apply for the position or that they can sell themselves as a desirable destination for more reasons than balance and compensation.

<comment><USER63> > _" Why wouldn't you try to get someone overqualified and then underpay them > if you think you can?_

Perhaps you have a basic sense of human decency and fairness? Just because someone is naive (or just plain dumb) doesn't make it ethical to take advantage of them.

<comment><USER62> No one is forcing them to apply though. Your point would be totally valid if they were tricking people into thinking it was going to be better than it is, but they are totally transparent.

You could almost make the exact same argument about volunteering. You are asking for people to work hard and not get paid with the upside being they feel good about what they are doing. This is virtually the same thing, they are saying if the environment and lifestyle is appealing to you, and you're willing to deal with the downsides, please apply.

<comment><USER64> I think there is an argument to be made that newer developers, who might not be familiar with hiring practises, and see this job from Penny Arcade might leave thinking that's the norm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Why would this salary be _very_ low?

Sure, they say that money isn't important to them, but there's no reason to assume it wouldn't be slightly competitive.

Penny Arcade is in Seattle. If they want a chance of hiring anyone they would at least need to be in the ballpark of other job offers out there. Microsoft and Amazon pay pretty well, so I don't think this number will be as insulting as people are assuming it will be.

<comment><USER38> "Annual Salary: Negotiable, but you should know up front we're not a terribly money-motivated group. We're more likely to spend less money on salary and invest that on making your day-to-day life at work better."

They're about as clear as they can be without actually stating a number. It's gonna be low.

<comment><USER65> Low, but they have to know that if they want someone even halfway decent they'll have to be competitive.

I can't imagine they'd lowball you too much when a good developer can literally walk down the street from Penny Arcade and be at Google's or Adobe's offices in Seattle. Not to mention Amazon, Microsoft, or anywhere else in the area that pays well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Archive of the advertisement for prosperity/history — [http://archive.is/pqsJT](http://archive.is/pqsJT)

<comment><USER52> Not to be that guy, but... it's "posterity" and not "prosperity" :)

<comment><USER66> I actually did intend "prosperity" in this case, though "posterity" would work as well.

<comment><USER67> No. You did not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> This is the ... third (maybe fourth?) article on this topic today to get up into the top few posts on HN before disappearing into oblivion. Some people really don't want to have a conversation about how young tech folks are being exploited.

</comment><comment><USER69> I'm doing almost the same job, in Northwestern University for 37k year.

few highlights: 1) - Saturday night deadlines for Sunday evening. 2) - Management decides Monday 1:30am that the new release has to be Monday 9:00 am. 3) - >70h week, and always on call 4) - shitty overstressed environment 5) - might loose my job if the boss get fired, which implies loosing the status, therefore deportation. 6) - planned vacations canceled few days before, because "there's this really important last minute thing".

you people have no idea of what the life of non us citizens can be. I'll probably improve my status working for PA, but they'll never consider going trough the immigration madness.

</comment><comment><USER70> The ad does look like either an awful but honest job offer or a fairly clever collection of Bad IT Hiring Behavior jokes. No one here seems to think the latter, and like a lot of others I worked plenty of these before understanding how undervalued the position was... do we have it from the horse's mouth that this is real?

Regardless, some of the comments here are suggesting that taking advantage of people who are hard up for work, don't understand their own value, or don't have the resume to get anything else is OK as long as you're up front about it. Where did this ridiculous notion come from?

"I sold you a car, and it's a lemon, but I didn't tell you it had problems despite knowing." "I'm trying to sell this car; I know it's a lemon."

Being honest about being a piece of shit makes you... wait for it... a piece of shit. It does, however, put some of the responsibility on the applicants in this case: If you know up front you're applying for a position like this, and you do anyway, you've made your own bed. I'm not the kind of person to say that at that point you have no right to complain, but you certainly went in with an understanding of what would happen, so while it doesn't absolve the employer of responsibility for poor treatment, it does absolve them of any hint of having misled applicants.

<comment><USER71> The posting was linked by a tweet by Robert Khoo ([https://twitter.com/rkhoo/status/405150202736418816](https://twitter.com/rkhoo/status/405150202736418816)) which was retweeted by several Penny Arcade staff.

Mike Krahulik participated in a few Twitter-based discussions. One indicates that this is a replacement posting ([https://twitter.com/cwgabriel/status/405526125171843072](https://twitter.com/cwgabriel/status/405526125171843072)).

That doesn't mean it's not real, it's certainly not above anyone at Penny Arcade to poke the hornet's nest, but there's enough indications that I think it's safe to say it's legit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> For anyone that hasn't experienced it first hand: "programmer" \+ "IT/computer guy" is a recipe for professional failure. The demands are so different and balancing them is impossible. You can be an IT person or software developer but never both at the same time. It is also a sign that whomever job description doesn't understand the difference.

</comment><comment><USER73> I wish the person that left the job would show up here and tell us how it is like to work there and take care of all those items.

</comment><comment><USER74> I've debated about posting on this but I figure context is probably more helpful than not.

The person leaving this job is a close friend of mine. I agree that this is a very unusual job posting but I think it's a mistake to view it through the lens of typical startup or silicon-valley hiring. There are plenty of jobs in the industry which, on paper, look similar to this one. Low pay, lots of responsibilities, on call duties, poor work/life balance, etc. But PA isn't a normal company so a lot of the assumptions going into some of the conclusions people are drawing are erroneous.

PA is a family, which is something that a lot of startups pretend to but which is actually true in this case. The people there don't just eat lunch together they spend a lot of time in and out of the office with each other, and they tend to have pretty strong bonds of friendship with each other. The majority of people working at PA didn't interview to work there. PA tends to hire by osmosis when it can, because "cultural fit" is by far the most important factor. It's a very challenging prospect to try to hire someone into a very close nit group of friends, even more so when the job you're trying to hire for has fairly high skill requirements.

Personally I think that this job requires a fairly unusual candidate, but I think there's a good chance such a candidate exists. And I don't mean "unusual" in terms of being a "rockstar" or someone filled with self-hatred or low self-esteem.

So, let me correct (or confirm) some perceptions. This isn't a "death march" job like you'd expect in game dev or many startups. Yeah you may have to work late sometimes, and there may be weeks when you're chugging red bull, but a lot of that is up to you and how you do development, set expectations, and so on. This isn't healthcare.gov, it's mostly a bunch of content-heavy sites. You can certainly get into a crunch if you don't manage your time or your projects well but that's within your control, and you can certainly push back as much as is necessary. Unlike most startups you're not going to be expected to be in crunch mode all the time and you're not going to be expected to put in a set number of hours per week. If you do good work and prioritize well you'll be fine.

In terms of being on call, again it's not as though this is reddit or healthcare.gov or amazon.com, it's a handful of CMS deployments and a few other things. Things can, and will, go down, and the fact that you're pretty much the only person available to fix a lot of this stuff is definitely going to suck. But the sorts of problems you're going to run into aren't the same sorts of things you'll see at a typical startup. Maybe the load balancer for some site isn't working right or something, so you'll go file a support ticket w/ the VPS provider or fix it yourself as warranted. This isn't a job where you'll expect to have to get out of bed at 3am at least once a week to have to fix some bullshit code that someone else wrote. You have the opportunity to make the system work as smoothly as possible, and if you find yourself getting woken up by monitoring alerts too often that's probably due more to the choices you've made than anything else.

The reason why the job listing asks for people with a "crazy person level of attention to detail" is because you will be the entirety of the dev team (but there are designers, so you're not the whole universe). There's no QA team and not really any project management other than what you do. And accountability primarily comes from intrinsic motivation, not from someone looking over your shoulder.

As far as IT support and DBA, I don't think that's a very difficult requirement for a lot of devs to satisfy. It's not as though you have to do tech support for an office of mundanes, pretty much everyone at PA is tech savvy, the only thing you're there to do is be a resource to maybe solve some of the problems they can't, and to babysit the office infrastructure as necessary. If you feel comfortable setting up a managed switch (with the help of documentation) and building your own PC from parts you'll probably be fine.

The really bad news is that you're going to be taking a pay cut most likely. There just isn't the same opportunity to make as much money as you could in other parts of the industry. If you think you can negotiate a more competitive salary, then you can certainly try, I wouldn't rule it out. You'll still make okay money, if money isn't a big factor for you then it'll probably be fine, it should be enough to live wherever you want and have plenty of disposable income. But compared to what you could make in a profitable startup or at one of the big companies it's going to be a lot less.

The other bad news is that there's not much opportunity for growth or change. A lot of that is in your own hands but there are only so many things the company needs. If you have an ambition to learn haskell this isn't a good position for you. Similarly, there's no other dev. position to move into, you can't switch to another team working on different projects with different technology, you won't have the opportunity to become a lead or a manager, etc. The job can be what you make of it, but there's only so far it can realistically stretch, so you should consider that in terms of your long-term career goals. Of course, if you want to spend your free time working on some open source project, there's nothing stopping you.

Overall I'd reiterate that cultural fit is by far the most important part of this job. If you're excited about the possibility of working at PA then that's square one, if not then you should just ignore this job posting entirely. Beyond that, if you're competent and proficient at web dev and comfortable with getting your hands dirty with networking or hardware on rare occasions, and if you're the sort of person who wants to settle into a role where most of the time you'll be setting up content-heavy sites then this might be a good opportunity for you. It's certainly not a job for everyone, or even the vast majority of devs.

<comment><USER75> > PA is a family

> you're going to be taking a pay cut most likely.

> not much opportunity for growth or change

Are you delusional?

<comment><USER74> I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. PA is very much a family. And they are a content and events company not a software startup. They need coders but for them it's a cost center, not a profit source like at software companies. You can make a decent living at PA, definitely, but don't expect the sort of wages you'd make from a software company. Even when PA is in a period of expansion and growth that growth is nothing compared to what is typical at a tech startup.

As a rule nobody works there because of the money, and there are many examples of how PA makes decisions which lower their revenue (they could easily raise PAX ticket prices by 3-4x, for example, which would bring in over a million dollars in extra revenue per year _per employee_ ). It might be that asking a dev to forgo the sort of pay levels they'd expect from working elsewhere might be too much to ask of anybody, but time will tell I guess.

<comment><USER76> >>PA is very much a family.

Every company is pretty much a family. For all workable definitions of a family.

>>And they are a content and events company not a software startup.

Which means nearly any person who is good at software who isn't in immediate need of money should abandon them.

>>They need coders but for them it's a cost center, not a profit source like at software companies.

If your work doesn't add even that much value to the company, I'm not sure(unless you are really desperate for a job) why should even want to work for such a place.

>>You can make a decent living at PA, definitely, but don't expect the sort of wages you'd make from a software company.

Again, why would any one want to work there after knowing this.

>>Even when PA is in a period of expansion and growth that growth is nothing compared to what is typical at a tech startup.

So even in the best situation for the company, you still get screwed.

>>As a rule nobody works there because of the money,

Sorry but I totally refuse to believe in this. In fact this is a serious red flag. In most common cases, this is the most common story circulated so that employees can be paid less to make the founder little more richer.

Once you sell the story that money is evil, and workaholism till death as a holy virtue. You can now continue to demand as much work you want low prices and people have to just comply. On top of that you are selling the "We are family" story, which is in reality why you must sacrifice your life to make the head of the family richer.

<comment><USER74> You can refuse to believe all you want, no one's forcing you to apply to the job.

A lot of people do a lot of things for reasons other than money. Almost all technical books, for example, do not make very much money for their authors. Certainly not enough to justify the work they put into them. But thankfully a lot of folks still think it's a worthwhile thing to do.

I'm sure non-monetary concerns are a significant factor in everyone's job choices. Otherwise why aren't we all spammers or grifters, or selling bullshit "audiophile" equipment at crazy markups? Are there any companies you _wouldn 't_ work for even if they paid you much more than the competition? Logically the reverse must also be true, that you will work somewhere for below average because you enjoy working there.

Yes, in most _common_ cases what you say may be true, a lot of typical employers are exploitative. But PA isn't a typical case. PA very much is family. At a normal company it would be very unusual for everyone at a company to attend a coworker's wedding, but that's absolutely the way PA is. And not because of some bullshit corporate culture but just because that's how they've been and they've struggled to maintain that level of closeness even as they've grown.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> There are a lot of people here who are creating jobs.

I just have one request for you:

Create dream jobs.

Make it your mission to think of 'dream jobs', and then find a way to make them happen.

Don't start by thinking about what tasks need to be done. Don't start by thinking about how to get the most bang for your buck.

Start by thinking, "what would be a reallly-damn-cool job to have?" Then find a way to make it happen. Once you've thought up the dream job, go back and find a way to pay for it. Figure out the path you'll need to take in order to make it happen.

Create dream jobs.

Please :)

If you succeed, I promise that it will be one of the most gratifying things you ever do.

</comment><comment><USER78> For eight years of my life, I was this "Do-Everything Rockstar." I was also a student for the majority of that time. I certainly wasn't a "programming deity" \-- I was just a kid that was presented with the opportunity to learn some incredible lessons about scaling, appsec, capacity planning, etc. I also learned soft skills like how to negotiate, travel, and delegate.

The skill set absolutely exists and, for the right person, it's a great job.

<comment><USER79> I went to school with ekarulf above, can confirm he had the skillset and held that position. I can also think of a couple other folks with skillsets that covered the full gamut. Discussion about pay aside, it's not a mythical skillset. I don't know about the "Rockstar" nomenclature, but the right generalist can do a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Haven't we beat this subject to death already?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6803059](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6803059)

<comment><USER81> Don't forget this one: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799033](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799033)

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> Pretty common at startups where your actual job is often "everyone does everything". It's quite common to only have a business person and a set of one or more developers, for example. Then the developers start having to do IT and sys admin that can't be outsourced or clouded out like in the linked job ad. I think the ad is honest and it gives the impression that the PA biz guy seems like a straight shooter, personally. :)

</comment><comment><USER83> Totally understand the work life balance issue, particularly coupled with basically what's being pointed out as a sub par salary. But I really don't understand how that skill set is a premium. If you are a web developer I would expect all those skills to be part of your repertoire. I've seen worse, desired skill sets encompassing the impossible. The 20 years experience programming Java want ads, circa 2000.

<comment><USER84> The skills don't seem to be a stretch. Basically a devops guy that used to be a full stack guy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> There's really only one person behind this job listing and that's Robert Khoo. He's got great business acumen, but not a great nose in determining the job expectations for a position like this. That being said, it seems like poor form to insult the business manager of a small company without offering advice first and it is unseemly to use such excoriating language. Does this blogger fellow know Khoo?

</comment><comment><USER85> > if you [...] don't mind having a really bad sense of work-life balance, this > is the job for you.

wtf, they're not even trying

</comment><comment><USER86> I found a somewhat interesting job on odesk the other day (via a contact, I don't keep an eye on odesk). Once I informed the person offering the job what we could do for them and how much it cost, they pulled the advert and recast their plans.

tl;dr; It's not always as grim as it looks. but in this case it might be.

</comment><comment><USER87> Since we're talking about insane job ads, I saw this one recently: [http://www.splore.com/content/jobs](http://www.splore.com/content/jobs)

"You should be ready to make this startup the primary focus of your life"

</comment><comment><USER88> If I were willing to make those hours for that pay, I'd start my own company.

</comment><comment><USER89> If you are a manager (I am a CTO), Raise your hand. Put your hand down if you have never heard of Penny-Arcade.

Put your hand down if your company gets more traffic than PAX does at its peak.

Put your hand down if your work place is more fun than the Penny Arcade office.

Put your hand down if your after work parties rival Penny-Arcades.

Anyone with their hand still up is someone who would hire you after this gig. PHP devs are typically commodity programmers. As managers we will typically give you a basic programming test and fire you when you burn out. (not at my company I am saying what is typical in the space)

This is a gig that would make you no longer a commodity programmer. That is worth something. A dev who has been working in a Middle level position would do well to take this gig for 18 months, then start shopping for a better paying gig.

</comment><comment><USER90> PA has been digging its own grave for a while now. Such a crime as I love a lot of the content. Who thinks that charging for access to the html5 player is a clever model?

</comment><comment><USER91> It sounds fun and the kind of postings I'm looking for. If I'm going to waste half of my life in a company I want to be in one where everyone is dedicated.

</comment><comment><USER92> I didn't know whether to laugh or cry reading that.

<comment> rob-alarcon your nickname dude haha

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> I'm not sure how to understand this in the context of respecting human life. How does the team that created this posting think of people?

</comment><comment><USER94> you know. When I read the story, I thought it was a little too harsh. Then I read Penny Arcades job post.

(the title blog post's title is a link to the job posting)

[http://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/9887522?trk=job_nov](http://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/9887522?trk=job_nov)

That's pretty horrible.

</comment><comment><USER95> I guess the sad part is that they will still have plenty of people falling over themselves to get the job.

</comment><comment><USER96> I feel like this isn't terribly demanding position. How hard can it possibly be? They're websites aren't very complex and the system is already in place. Sounds like a full-stack-engineer-gone-maintenance position.

Honestly, sounds like a fun ride for about a year, I wouldn't mind, even if the pay is a bit low. If it's really that bad of a position, then quit. We're pretty much immortal when it comes to finding jobs anyways so it's not like you're putting your life on the line, especially if you're a single, young bachelor.

<comment><USER97> I suspect you are right, and the high qualifications just serve to filter out anyone who has compunctions about boldly lying to a small organization about what they've done and what they're capable of.

The ideal candidate is a dedicated, single 20 year old sysop/developer/con artist aspiring to turn a fake resume into a real one in 18 months.

<comment><USER96> Do you really think they're going to get enough applicants that fit that ideal profile and have a difficult time choosing?

There's likely only going to be a small pool of candidates that fit your environment, not to mention the salary let alone work responsibilities.

The ideal candidate is a young student who has tinkered with web development since he was in high school and maybe if you're lucky, one of those guys has _some_ experience scaling websites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> Sucks that you're being forced to apply, huh?

<comment><USER99> Marco's not forcing them to change it, either. They can post a shit job offer if they want, and Marco can ridicule it and call them immature losers, if he wants. The fact that a business is not literally enslaving someone doesn't mean nobody can criticize them!

<comment><USER100> And when a business _is_ literally enslaving people, we should really be doing more than just snark about it on the internet.</comment></comment></comment>


Snap! 5 is here - <AUTHOR> https://snap.berkeley.edu/site/blog <comment><USER2> Also:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17594403](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17594403)

One of the coolest ways to learn programming I've ever seen is the Snap! visual programming language, which is written in JavaScript and runs in the browser. [https://snap.berkeley.edu](https://snap.berkeley.edu)

It's the culmination of years of work by Brian Harvey and Jens Mönig and other Smalltalk and education experts. It benefits from their experience and expert understanding about constructionist education, Smalltalk, Scratch, E-Toys, Lisp, Logo, Star Logo, and many other excellent systems.

Snap! takes the best ideas, then freshly and coherently synthesizes them into a visual programming language that kids can use, but is also satisfying to professional programmers, with all the power of Scheme (lexical closures, special forms, macros, continuations, user defined functions and control structures), but deeply integrating and leveraging the web browser and the internet (JavaScript primitives, everything is a first class object, dynamically loaded extensions, etc).

Y Combinator demo:

[https://i.imgur.com/cOq8tvR.png](https://i.imgur.com/cOq8tvR.png)

[https://snap.berkeley.edu/snapsource/snap.html#present:Usern...](https://snap.berkeley.edu/snapsource/snap.html#present:Username=jens&ProjectName=y%20combinator)

Here's an excellent mind-blowing example by Ken Kahn of what's possible: teaching kids AI programming by integrating Snap! with existing JavaScript libraries and cloud services like AI, machine learning, speech synthesis and recognition, Arduino programming, etc:

AI extensions of Snap! for the eCraft2Learn project

[https://ecraft2learn.github.io/ai/](https://ecraft2learn.github.io/ai/)

>The eCraft2Learn project is developing a set of extensions to the Snap! programming language to enable children (and non-expert programmers) to build AI programs. You can use all the AI blocks after importing this file into Snap! or Snap4Arduino. Or you can see examples of using these blocks inside this Snap! project.

[https://github.com/ecraft2learn/ai](https://github.com/ecraft2learn/ai)

[http://lntrg.education.ox.ac.uk/presentation-of-ai-cloud- ser...](http://lntrg.education.ox.ac.uk/presentation-of-ai-cloud-services- integrated-with-snap-at-the-connective-ubiquitous-technology-for-embodiments- center-of-the-national-university-of-singapore-and-keio-university- on-16-march-2017-by-k/)

Use devices with Snap!:

Orbotix Sphero guide by Connor Hudson and Dan Garcia:

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/11wR53OTnofRtTtxZCmxnCUjI...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/11wR53OTnofRtTtxZCmxnCUjIlFQjnGewM21A0vmjtFw/edit?usp=sharing)

Lego NXT package by Connor Hudson:

[https://github.com/technoboy10/snap-nxt](https://github.com/technoboy10/snap- nxt)

Nintendo Wiimote package by Connor Hudson:

[https://github.com/technoboy10/wiisnap](https://github.com/technoboy10/wiisnap)

Finch and Hummingbird robots package by Tom Lauwers:

[https://www.hummingbirdkit.com/learning/snap- programming/](https://www.hummingbirdkit.com/learning/snap-programming/)

Parallax S2 robot package by Connor Hudson:

[https://github.com/blockext/s2](https://github.com/blockext/s2)

LEAP Motion by Connor Hudson:

[https://github.com/technoboy10/snapmotion](https://github.com/technoboy10/snapmotion)

Speech synthesis by Connor Hudson:

[https://github.com/technoboy10/snap2speech](https://github.com/technoboy10/snap2speech)

Arduino package by Alan Yorinks:

[https://github.com/MrYsLab/s2a_fm](https://github.com/MrYsLab/s2a_fm)

Arduino package by Bernat Romagosa/Citilab:

[http://snap4arduino.rocks/](http://snap4arduino.rocks/)

Fischertechnik ROBOTICS TXT Controller by Richard Kunze:

[https://github.com/rkunze/ft-robo-snap](https://github.com/rkunze/ft-robo- snap)

Snap! for Raspberry Pi by rasplay.org:

[http://downloads.rasplay.org/pisnap/](http://downloads.rasplay.org/pisnap/)

More Snap! extensions for CS education:

snap-apps.org provides Edgy for graphs, Cellular for multi-agent simulation, and more.

[http://snap-apps.org/](http://snap-apps.org/)

[http://www.snap-apps.org/edgy.html](http://www.snap-apps.org/edgy.html)

[http://www.flipt.org/#cellular](http://www.flipt.org/#cellular)

Netsblox for multiplayer networking.

[https://netsblox.org/](https://netsblox.org/)

<comment><USER3> I was very excited about this until I actually tried it. It is toooo slow. Donno why.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> I posted this before about a previous version of Snap!:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17056444](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17056444)

I was hoping that second one was about Scratch, the visual blocks programming language for kids, similar to Logo, based on a Smalltalk development environment (which is a lot better than X!)

If you're interested in visual programming with a powerful Scheme-like language with first class functions, closures, special forms, macros, and even continuations so you can define your own control structures, check out Snap! (The exclamation mark is part of the name, so it's easy to get excited about Snap!)

It's a descendent of Scratch but more powerful, hand-written in JavaScript instead of Smalltalk, and it integrates easily with JS code. (There's a user defined JavaScript function block that you can use to integrate with the Snap VM and the browser!)

Snap was written by Jens Mönig and Brian Harvey, who know what they're doing! ;)

[https://snap.berkeley.edu](https://snap.berkeley.edu)

Y Combinator: [https://i.imgur.com/cOq8tvR.png](https://i.imgur.com/cOq8tvR.png)

A* Pathfinding Demo: [https://snap.berkeley.edu/snapsource/snap.html#present:Usern...](https://snap.berkeley.edu/snapsource/snap.html#present:Username=jens&ProjectName=PathFinder) (press the diagonal arrow button at the top to see the block code in the development environment!)

Snap! is a visual programming language inspired by Scratch. Run Snap! in your browser at [http://snap.berkeley.edu/run](http://snap.berkeley.edu/run) The IIIA1 in the title means that this is the first tutorial corresponding to Chapter III, Section A of the Reference Manual at [http://snap.berkeley.edu/SnapManual.pdf](http://snap.berkeley.edu/SnapManual.pdf)

Snap! Tutorial IIIA1: Make a block [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bbl2fh3igQ4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bbl2fh3igQ4)

Snap! Tutorial IIIA2: Custom Blocks with Inputs: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZC2tDVYWBo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZC2tDVYWBo)

The Basics of Snap! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAxqwwg4uhk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAxqwwg4uhk)

Prototypical Inheritance in Snap! (no audio) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvlWvHgfrlw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvlWvHgfrlw)

Editing Formulas in Snap! (no audio) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahHAl3p3gEU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahHAl3p3gEU)

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes! My son is getting into Scratch (50 projects in the last couple of months), but it has at least a couple of serious limitations as a programming language, namely no return values from functions/blocks, and lists are not first-class, making it unnecessarily complex to implement data structures.

The one thing keeping him on Scratch (or rather, away from Snap) is the Scratch community/sharing. I'll have him and his friends consider joining Snap now.

<comment><USER5> Scratch lists seem relatively first-class to me. Your son could probably have fun building simple data structures with them by making blocks that take an input. He can also update a "return" variable if the situation calls for it.

[https://en.scratch-wiki.info/wiki/List](https://en.scratch- wiki.info/wiki/List)

<comment><AUTHOR> Scratch lists are not first class. You can only create them as variables; you can't create list "values" (there are no list literals) and you can't pass lists around. You can only provide lists as arguments by choosing list variables from a dropdown of certain built-in blocks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love snap! It's IMO the only visual system with them one can teach programming seriously and properly. The only problem is its slow loading speed. And I mean really slow. Any program takes minutes to load (on a iPad). In comparison, program in Scratch 3 (also implemented in JS) takes only seconds to load. Otherwise, it's a perfect system to teach children programming.

</comment><comment><USER7> What's the difference between Snap! and Scratch? They look prima facie identical.

<comment><USER2> Scratch is a simplified version of Lisp/Scheme, without many important features like first class functions, lexical closures, continuations, special forms, the ability to define your own blocks and control structures, and everything being a first class object that you can bind to variables, pass around, and return from functions.

Snap! supports all those important features of Scheme (its original name was BYOB for "Build Your Own Blocks"), with the visual interface and sprite and stage and turtle graphics of Scratch, plus it's written in JavaScript, so it's efficient and easy to integrate with existing JavaScript libraries (see "etoys2learn"!), instead of running in a monolithic Smalltalk virtual machine.

<comment><USER5> Scratch does allow you to make your own blocks with optional input. My math students use them to learn about abstraction. The most recent implementation was released last winter and is written in JavaScript.

[https://en.scratch-wiki.info/wiki/Scratch_3.0](https://en.scratch- wiki.info/wiki/Scratch_3.0)

<comment><USER8> Scratch 3 does not enable one to define new functions only new commands. Snap! user-defined functions are first-class - they can be used to define higher- order functions.

<comment><USER2> Here's the elegant Snap! visual Y Combinator:

[https://imgur.com/cOq8tvR](https://imgur.com/cOq8tvR)

Visual Lambda: Note how the gray block after the "report", shrink-wrapped around the "call (fn) with inputs (fn) []", is a visual "lambda". It looks like a "gasket" or "baggie" that insulates the code inside from being immediately evaluated, returning a closure instead.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Holiday Parties Are Key to Professional Success - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@EricJAlbright/holiday-parties-are-key-to-professional-success-d004bf4f2945#.2r7nsthwm <comment><USER2> That's amazing - "only in San Francisco" indeed. Is this girl for real or is it some kind of scam? [http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/evs/5913892937.html](http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/evs/5913892937.html)

<comment><USER3> Even if she's fake, there are others: [http://www.hireawingwoman.com/why.php](http://www.hireawingwoman.com/why.php). Social proof is definitely a thing.

<comment><USER2> Okay so not just in SF then - says that company is in NY and Boston, expanding to DC.</comment></comment></comment>


Scala 2.12.7 is now available - <AUTHOR> https://www.scala-lang.org/news/2.12.7 <comment><USER2> Nice to see that the compiler performance work is yielding benefits. This release is showing a 10% reduction in compile times compared to 2.12.6.

Release notes here: [https://github.com/scala/scala/releases/tag/v2.12.7](https://github.com/scala/scala/releases/tag/v2.12.7)</comment>


How to read a mathematics textbook - <AUTHOR> http://www.drmaciver.com/2016/05/how-to-read-a-mathematics-textbook/ <comment><USER2> I do computer algebra so I end up reading math textbooks a lot. Here's my secret: Read 5 different textbooks on the same subject. The first one will introduce names, the second will introduce concepts associated with the names, the third will begin to connect the concepts, the fourth will give you a fair idea about the subject, and the fifth will give you the higher level view so you can use it.

Be aware that this will probably take you two years of effort. But grounding in one area tends to spill over into other areas. But, hey, how could you live a full life without a good grounding in algebraic geometry over finite fields?</comment>


BSDCan: Theo de Raadt speculates on new undisclosed Intel bug [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaQpvXSa4X8&t=215 <comment><AUTHOR> Not the greatest quality video, but interesting content as Theo de Raadt discusses an undisclosed Intel FPU bug or bugs, speculation on what the bug or bugs might be, NDAs, the correct response to preserve security. Sparks fly.

</comment><comment><USER2> Is this Spectre v4 or something new?</comment>