Like Notch said... "you are an insane idiot!". What did the CEO of OMGPOP had to gain from making those remarks ? He surely didn't expect the world to take his side.. Even if Shay Pierce really was "the weakest link of the team", you just don't say that.
You just got bought for $200 million, now it's the time to show that you deserved to be the CEO of that company, by being diplomatic, respecting those around you (or who used to be around you) and now calculating your every move. Your opinion no longer just affects yourself, it affects your whole company, as well as (in a lesser extent), the company that just bought you.
What's so interesting about success is the number of
failures who try to ride on your back. Shay Pierce is
just one of many...
since the guy specifically went out of his way not to "ride on his back" because of morals.
Frankly from his tweets it sure looks like the biggest failure on the team is the CEO...they just got lucky and instead of being humble, he is doing the completely wrong thing...and if he was such a failure as an employee, why did such a great manager keep him employed
Can't stress this enough. I liked OMGPOP from the start, when they were still that obscure flash-site for 6-12yr olds. But that was before the CEO announced that he's an asshole...
"DrawSomething" most likely got popular mainly because the implementation is much better than the other Pictionary clones (which have been around forever). And that's an aspect that Mr. CEO probably wasn't involved with at all, but rather his lowly developers.
The one thing that Mr. CEO could attribute to himself would be if he smelled the opportunity early and executed on it. But he didn't. It took them 3 years to port their most popular flash-game (then called "Draw my thing") to the cashcow mobile platform.
That doesn't seem like a calculated move to brag about, does it?
A professor of mine once said that becoming a professor requires equal parts intelligence, hard work and luck. Usually I cite him to stress the importance of luck: being talented and working hard often isn't enough. However when someone says that someone else just got lucky, I cite it to make another point: without talent and hard work, luck is often useless. You need vast amounts of luck to get somewhere if you're talentless and lazy. If you are talented and work hard, the tiniest amount of luck is enough to lift you from your peers.
According to me if a person is lazy and unproductive, even luck gives up on him.
You need to work hard anyway. And you need need luck on top of it. Things work in that order.
But a lot of people first expect to get lucky and then work hard. IMO that never happens, because the person tries to reverse cause-effect scenarios. The person expects reward before work, whereas rewards always come after work, never before it.
That's what unsuccessful people say when someone becomes successful.
I think there are two reasons for the typical "he just got lucky" insult.
1) When you tear down a successful person, you get to transfer a little of their success to you. (aka "player hatin'")
2) Level playing field. It's nice to imagine that everyone has the same amount of "luck," and therefore the same chance of being successful. It's disheartening to accept that some people might work harder or have more natural talent than you. Chalking it up to "luck" gives you hope that it could just as easily happen to you one day.
"Hope is the only thing stronger than fear" - Hunger Games
Btw, I think what the OMGPOP guy wrote on Twitter was mean and dumb. He shouldn't have written it. And I don't know these guys.
And I actually believe that most success is rooted in luck (or chance or circumstance). But everything I've read about OMGPOP says that they struggled for 6+ years and finally made it big with Draw Something.
"The harder I worked, the luckier I got." - Samuel Goldwyn
I agree with you. Hard work drastically improves your chances. But there are indeed times when people hit the silicon valley lottery. I suspect marc andreessen's secretary's peers were just as hard working as she was.
Maybe he is indeed an exceptional CEO. If you rank CEO's by quality, I suspect the top half of the list has better things to do than fumble around on twitter Saturday afternoon.
You are probably thinking of Jim Clark's exec admin, and I can say as someone who supported Jim Clark, that no, she worked about 10x harder and smarter than any admin you will likely meet. I Have a hundred anecdotes, but the one that comes to mind is where she had to delay his private jet, with an "electrical failure", just so we could deliver a ThinkPad the IT organization was repairing without him even knowing it was missing. She was still lucky, but based on the number of other admins JC went through, she was also unique in her ability and work ethic.
I don't know anything about Dan Porter. I have to admit my first thought reading this was that he's another 20-something CEO who hasn't developed the communication and political skills an good executive needs. But this guy is a seasoned executive (http://danporter.org/?page_id=4). Astounding.
True. It is indeed very unprofessional. But how come people like him are held up to such high standards? When you're not anyone important you can be brutally honest and say what you want like everyone else does. But as soon as you're in the public eye you're put on this pedestal. This is what scares the hell out of me. I'm a very uncensored person who says what he means and means what he says (and am an asshole sometimes). So the thought that one day IF I'm successful in getting my business off the ground a life of censorship awaits me. :(
Then I see celebrities like Snoop Dog (who owned a porn company), Sarah Silverman (who has some of the most offensive jokes imaginable), lil john (self explanatory), Colin Farrel, Charlie Sheen, Lindsey Lohan, and other well known figures who say and do anything they want yet still have successful careers, keep starring in movies, and even get in on really good business deals and endorsements. Lets not forget the Lady Gaga / Polaroid event where during the unveiling she said "smile you're fucking famous" and other unprofessional phrases.
It's like there's absolutely NO consequence for them. I guess because it's their "image" and it's "expected". So I guess the moral of the story is, become an offensive comedian /or/ celebrity known for being crazy and work your way up towards serious entrepreneur. That way you can talk shit and get away with it. OR start out as the well spoken guy, and just 1 accidental F-bomb later, show up on the news as the bad guy and get thrown out by your company board.
EDIT: ALSO, wtf did Notch gain by saying "You're an insane idiot"?! What did he gain from his remark?
I can't speak for everyone else, but it wasn't the honesty I had an issue with, it was the reckless disloyalty and willingness to publicly burn people who've worked for you.
For sure, this guy called Zynga evil and said he didn't want to work for them, and that's the last thing you want showing up in Mark Pincus's news feed when he's just bought your company. But to shoot back in public and call him a parasite and the weakest person on the team? That's just vengeful and childish.
Forget censorship, it's just about having a shred of professional respect. Maybe he has a fat mother, or erectile dysfunction, or shitty dress sense. If you do something to upset me, what would you want me to post about you on Twitter? There's a line that even DHH-style "I'm funny because I'm callous" can't cross.
Any business relationship carries with it a certain amount of trust, and between a leader and their team most of all. Pierce said he didn't like Zynga (his personal opinion) and he was attacked by someone who had the ability to expose private information about his job performance, and who should have owed him better than that.
Personally, I wouldn't care if Porter said "Shay Pierce is wrong and doesn't know what he's talking about", or even if he said "Shay fucking Pierce is fucking wrong fucking" while hanging out of a porn-funded blimp. It's the intention, not the words, that I find offensive.
You're right. When you fire someone, experience layoffs or people quit in disgust, the best thing to do is to let it go and if some negative publicity comes back at you, the best thing to do is to kill them with kindness, especially when you were actually trying to retain said employee. Which I assume was part of the buyout deal. Yes, the employees, especially the engineers, are company assets.
"Shay is a great engineer who we were unfortunately unable to retain. I'm sure he'll do well wherever he lands." Would have sufficed as a tweet. One comes across as not being pricked by the story and if he's actually the weakest guy on the team and ends up hired by a competitor, you win.
A CEO is always recruiting and promoting, even to employees. To use the petty language that he did only weakens his position amongst his team and outsiders interested in the company.
Ok I get it now. I think being a closed up shy introverted recluse has taken its toll on my ability to understand what's socially acceptable and what isn't.
I grew up around a father that would talk shit but do good things so to me I've always discarded what people say and paid attention more to what their actions are.
> But how come people like him are held up to such high standards?
Because he is supposed to be a leader. Leaders are held to higher standards. They are supposed to have integrity and good character.
The people you cite are celebrities, not leaders. We do not take them seriously. They are there to entertain us, make a lot of money, do drugs and fade into oblivion. Comparisons are irrelevant. All that you get making comparisons is a race to the bottom.
And it wasn't that he was profane. He wasn't profane in the tweet at all. (No one really cares about profanity anymore anyway).
He went out of his way to demean another human being (who he likely knew and worked closely with) when it was really not necessary. That is the shocking, self-serving, and utterly ugly part about his statement. It shows that he lacks character.
I think some of it is the kind of comment it was as well. Negative public comments about specific employees are the kind of thing that would make a lot of people think the CEO was someone you should steer clear of, even if he weren't that high profile. If you saw it in a Tweet from a 10-person startup, it probably wouldn't make news, but it might be a red flag to potential employees. When you add to it that the guy is hugely wealthy, it just gives it an added aura of entitled-rich-asshole-looking-down-on-the-plebs.
Actually it reminds me of the kinds of reactions Sebastian Marshall gets around here for his jerky/arrogant/employee-badmouthing style of blogging, and that guy isn't even wealthy or famous (except HN-famous).
Just to be clear, you are comparing two hip hop artists, two comedians, two actors, and an avante garde pop artist to the CEO of a mobile games company? In fact you are comparing a group of individuals who are all famous or infamous in their own way for being edgy and/or a mess, to a company that makes family friendly games. There is a very large difference between the responsibilities of an entertainer and a CEO. The responsibilities of some of the aforementioned celebrities could arguably include being "offensive". Witness the scorn heaped upon Eddie Murphy when he decided to shed his Raw persona and turn to family movies.
If you are worrying about having to censor your public persona in the future, go into a line of business where being edgy is part of the attraction. However, it is never a good move, whether as a CEO or public figure or basic human being to get up on a soapbox and say bitchy, petty, mean spirited things. The OMGPop CEO is not speaking "brutal honesty", he's just acting like a dick most likely because his ego has swollen out of control by the sale and the success of Draw Something and he can't stand that this "little guy" is pissing on his parade. This is the behaviour of a child, not a leader.
Lastly, this isn't about "holding people to high standards", as if it is some sort of conscious thing we participate in. In societal interactions there is a implicit understanding of the range of acceptable behaviour for a public figure, it is unconscious and breaching those boundaries will have immediate emotional consequences on how people perceive you. If Snoop Dog says fuck or calls himself a pimp nobody will blink, if he punched a child in the face people would immediately react negatively. Likewise if he stopped all of his Snoop persona and started working for the Rick Santorum campaign. If you are the CEO of a company that makes family friendly mainstream games, people expect that you will act like an adult in possession of self-control are good judgement. If you are the CEO of a company that sells coke spoons, maybe less so.
Notch is able to say what he did because he has garnered significant good will, and because it embodies the mass public reaction to the OMGpop tweet. If he tweeted this kind of thing all the time he would lose that good will eventually. As a one off though.. it IS idiotic and insane to publicly belittle former employees as a CEO.
Moral of the story is don't be a dick in public view, unless you are in public view for being a dick ;)
Those people you name are all artists who make their living performing. "Professional" for them has a different meaning. But they still can't say anything they want without censure. Look at how much crap Kanye West took for "Imma let you finish", for example. You will very rarely find them talking trash about people they've worked with, and when it does it often has consequences. Megan Fox, for example, got fired from the Transformers movie because she said some unprofessional things about the director. Her co-star said, "Criticism is one thing. Then there's public name-calling, which turns into high-school bashing. Which you can't do."
More importantly, they're not executives or leaders. Dan Porter is in charge of hundreds of people. How he treats the people who work for him isn't some minor thing; it's the essence of management. His tweet made him look like a petty asshole, and his non-apology confirms that for me.
When you're nobody, nobody listens. If I say one of my co-workers is useless, the only people who are going to care about it are people who need to know that information - the other members of my team, and the boss. It's a private matter
When the CEO of a recently acquired company says it, it's not a private criticism anymore, it's a public shaming. He could have found a way of being honest to the developer without mocking him on twitter
The other celebrities you mention don't get criticized Because they have a limit. They say stupid things, but stop short of direct, public, unprovoked personal attacks.
Celebrities can get away with a lot, but they don't have carte blanche to say whatever they want. For instance, Lady Gaga's comment indicates that she has some business acumen. I guarantee she wouldn't have gotten away with saying something like "Nobody cares about Polaroid. This is about me.", which probably better reflects what she was really thinking. But since she said something that reflects well on her business partner, she can ultimately get away with using a bit of salty language.
It's not so much how offensive you are, but whom it's directed at and what the relative power balance is. Powerful or famous people will usually only attack or make fun of those who are more famous or powerful than them.
I seriously doubt this guy was being brutally honest. If this guy was so awful, why did they keep him? It sounds much more likely that he's lying about how bad this fellow was out of spite.
If he really was awful and got called on it, that would be one thing. But to be libeled for no reason other than writing up your decision not to take a new job is terrible. Nobody should do that, CEO of something or not.
People like him are held up to high standards because they have responsibilities and are paid accordingly. It's called leadership. Leaders watch what they say.
As for celebrities acting badly, this doesn't make it particularly admirable. I should point out that no F-bomb was used by the CEO in question - he merely showed a complete lack of class. There really was no upside. A lot of people wouldn't have known, or perhaps wouldn't have cared, that Shay didn't join the new company.
I'd suggest that the OMGPOP CEO be very careful about what he says. Saying someone was the "weakest link" in a team with no backup might lead to defamation proceedings.
You just got bought for $200 million, now it's the time to show that you deserved to be the CEO of that company, by being diplomatic, respecting those around you (or who used to be around you) and now calculating your every move. Your opinion no longer just affects yourself, it affects your whole company, as well as (in a lesser extent), the company that just bought you.