Penny Arcade’s Insultingly Horrible Job

Re:Penny Arcade’s Insultingly Horrible Job by JohnBooty on Tuesday November 26, 2013 @08:56PM (#6805703)

  As an employer, you want to find these folks. 
  There's usually no downside to having these 
  absurd job postings.

There are at least a few big downsides!

1. You lose a lot of accumulated knowledge when you burn your employees out and need to hire new ones every ___ months.

2. When you're understaffed (er, sorry - "running lean") and every week is basically run-around-with-your-hair-on-fire crunch mode time, you accumulate technical debt like crazy. Pretty soon everything's held together with duct tape, because you're dealing with shit flying at you from every angle and there's often no time to do things right.

3. An unreasonable job description like that weeds out nearly all seasoned, savvy developers. (For a high-profile job like PA, maybe they'll attract enough naive young geniuses who would love to work a zillion hours a week for low pay, and that will kinda sorta make up for it)

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Re:Penny Arcade’s Insultingly Horrible Job by integraton on Tuesday November 26, 2013 @09:06PM (#6805747)

Regarding point 1, there's a widespread view in the Bay Area that it's good to get a "fresh" perspective in companies that are toxic enough to continually burn out employees, which is many companies, probably most.

Furthermore, high turnover is very, very common in VC startups, including CEOs.

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