Ex-Zynga engineer here. I could see a lot of hatred in his post. Couldn't see credibility.
Creepy stuff:
Spying on players. Getting intimate gaming data, their habits, their networks, and how to effectively monetize given X.
This never happened. Zynga doesn't do behavioral targeting at all.
Creepy/bad stuff in my view:
All decisions are short-term. Let us build X games in Y months.
Bad code quality. There is a team which optimizes for the bad code written by engineers at high speed.
Good stuff:
Speed - They are really aggressive. And they never think twice to throw away something if there is a better alternative.
Decisions - Right or wrong, decisions are made with least and things progress.
Meritocracy - I wouldn't call it pure "meritocracy", but when they know you are a smart guy who can ship stuff, they'll love you in $ and positions. I know several young people at VP/GM positions.
Data-driven - I see this as huge plus. Lot of companies are clueless because of not enough feedback-data. A/B testing, phased rollout, metrics are mandatory for any product/feature.
Zynga is 100% data driven. Zynga is not a tech-company, it is a product-manager-company. Product managers are more statisticians than PM. All decisions are from numbers.
Creepy stuff:
Spying on players. Getting intimate gaming data, their habits, their networks, and how to effectively monetize given X.
This never happened. Zynga doesn't do behavioral targeting at all.
Creepy/bad stuff in my view:
All decisions are short-term. Let us build X games in Y months.
Bad code quality. There is a team which optimizes for the bad code written by engineers at high speed.
Good stuff:
Speed - They are really aggressive. And they never think twice to throw away something if there is a better alternative.
Decisions - Right or wrong, decisions are made with least and things progress.
Meritocracy - I wouldn't call it pure "meritocracy", but when they know you are a smart guy who can ship stuff, they'll love you in $ and positions. I know several young people at VP/GM positions.
Data-driven - I see this as huge plus. Lot of companies are clueless because of not enough feedback-data. A/B testing, phased rollout, metrics are mandatory for any product/feature.
Zynga is 100% data driven. Zynga is not a tech-company, it is a product-manager-company. Product managers are more statisticians than PM. All decisions are from numbers.