The ladder is about the ping pong league they run, and he's joking that it's not a benefit because he's not winning. He decided he preferred to get a lower salary for a job he enjoyed more. He said he can wear four hats because "The reality is that one highly motivated, highly skilled person can handle all of this. You do not need to be constantly working IT, or constantly managing servers or writing code. There’s a lot there, yes. This is a job that will keep one person fairly busy. Two people might find themselves spending a lot of time on /r/aww."

So either you're really reading a lot between the lines to see what you want to see, or you didn't read it.

He posted this on his current employer's public forum, after all.

I did not get that after re-reading the post. While I thank you for clarifying the point which changed the tone of the post dramatically(bad juxtaposition if you ask me, really), I'd also like to point out allegations of did you read the post are, in general, not constructive ad hominem(that whoever you're replying to is incapable of reading and etc.) and uncalled for.

They rationalize it because they are working for themselves (read: their VC) to death.

* No, the conditions are not awful...I love this company

* No one here has been scammed into working as hard as they do, and the implication that we’re all blind fools with low self esteem for being here is honestly insulting.

* There won’t be any taking advantage of starry-eyed young twenty-somethings.

He explains why he's leaving directly and clearly, (including "No, I did not burn out.") and that he likes working there. You're assuming he's lying, which you can't know.

He very obviously loves the company, but it's not a healthy love.

It's clearly not for everybody, but it's not at all difficult for me to imagine that it's very much for some people.

> That’s like saying everyone would be fulfilled by getting married and having 2.5 kids.

Not everyone has the same utility function.

I don't think I can do that here, though. You're totally right in that people have different utility functions, but I believe that there are some things that are just objectively bad and unhealthy, and whether or not you think you enjoy them or "like" them, they are still bad for you, and possibly bad for others.

I don't want to live in a world where it's ok for a company to create a position like this guy was in, and have that be the norm. No, it's not like that, but the more we apologize for companies that do that, and the more we say, "oh, it's ok for that person to work in those conditions; if you don't like it then pick another job", the easier we make it for companies to think that those kinds of things are ok for everyone.

And then there's the wage issue. Bottom line: if you are working the jobs of more than one people, you should be paid more than one person. This guy took a pay cut to do more work. That's certainly a reasonable thing to do if compensation comes from other (healthy) angles, which appears not to be the case. The job posting for his replacement explicitly says they're cheap-ass bastards who aren't going to pay what you are worth or what the job duties merit.

That's not just a company I don't want to work for. That is a company with staffing practices that are actively harmful to individuals and the industry as a whole.

edit: @wvenable puts it so so so well a bit below: "I guess I'm old and tired of my peers devaluing their own skills and time."

Basically this whole issue seems to be a case where a significant part of the compensation is non-monetary (essentially, working at PA), and people whose utility functions assign that compensation zero value are getting bent out of shape about the fact that there exist people whose utility functions assign that compensation high value. (For the record, I'm in the group who assigns it zero value.)

This needs to be protected by applicants valuing their time. I guess I read the current guy's description differently than you did; to me, it seemed his multiple-job job required significantly more time than the norm.

I think I distinguish between forms of non-monetary compensation as being good and bad (or healthy and unhealthy, if you prefer). Again, this is all relative, but I think at least on a base level we can probably find common ground here. Accepting lower pay because a place to work is "cool" falls squarely into the unhealthy pile for me. Perhaps it temporarily raises your happiness level (which is of value!), but it's fleeting, and, well, temporary. Accepting lower pay because you're underqualified and the job will be a bit learning experience for you seems reasonable, as would accepting equity in lieu of pay (e.g. a recently-started company) if you think it might be worth something later to compensate. These sorts of things can have lasting impact on your life and are actually useful.

As I said, I just worry that things like this can inspire other companies to do similar things. Right now it's fairly easy to get a job at a good company if you're a developer with some chops. Demand is high and supply is still not quite meeting that demand. But what happens if that changes? If there's a strong culture of paying people market rates and avoiding my-company-is-cool type compensation in lieu of cash, perhaps people can expect a reasonable wage standard when the market is more competitive. But every company that tries to feed applicants some feel-good bullshit about how it's ok that they pay people less because they're just so cool... well, that jeopardizes that.

Or perhaps I'm just worrying about nothing.

To me, this reads as "This needs to be protected by applicants changing their utility function." Applicants do value their time. Everyone values their time. They just value it differently.

Your claim basically hinges on your belief that some aspects of utility are objective. The essential point of your argument then, as I understand it, is that you want job applicants to correct their utility functions according to that objective evaluation, to help out the rest of us whose utility functions are already 'correct'.

This would actually be pretty cool, but the trouble is that you really are not going to have much luck trying to convince everyone else to agree with your utility estimates, even if they do strike you as objective. I think I would probably agree with many of them, personally, but they cannot be made normative.

At the end of the day I agree that you are probably worrying about nothing. I'm not going to claim that the market does an excellent job of setting salaries. There are a lot of irrational agents at play in that market, and the results are skewed accordingly. That said, I think this particular brand of irrationality is highly unlikely to be a driving force.

(With my apologies to Pearl Jam)

Well, duh, presumably he'd like to get a job at some point in the foreseeable future, and bad-mouthing your former employer is a wonderful one-way ticket to food stamps.

>No one here has been scammed into working as hard as they do

"Scam" is subjective. Of course nobody thinks they've been scammed. If you think you've been scammed, you quit. But if someone works basically illegal hours for below-market pay at a high-visibility company whose great overall contribution to society is a three-panel webcomic, well, it walks like a scam, quacks like a scam, and flies south for the winter.

>the implication that we’re all blind fools with low self esteem for being here is honestly insulting.

You don't have to be a blind fool to make a bad decision, and you don't have to hate yourself to sell yourself short. The reason we say these people are being exploited is quite simple: everything about their situation fits perfectly with the exploitation hypothesis. But you know what? This is par for the course in the world of "art". If you want to work in the "art" industry, like for a webcomic or a video game studio, be prepared to be paid less for more work than in some respectable field, unless you find a way to exploit the situation, cf. Thomas Kincaid.

Of course people call it exploitative, but it's really market pressure. There's no shortage of starry-eyed twenty-somethings to take advantage of, so the whole industry does it because, seriously, who's going to turn down free money? Why would you hire someone for a decent job at a respectable salary when you can make someone's life hell for a fraction of the price without any real impact on your bottom line? That's all Penny Arcade is really thinking.

Of course there's a word for people who think like this: Homo economicus. There's also a shorter word with less Latin: despicable. Penny Arcade is despicable. Period.

>There won’t be any taking advantage of starry-eyed young twenty-somethings.

But there is. It's their business model. It's part of the business model of a litany of "cool" companies where, in lieu of a fair salary, you get to put on your Facebook "I work at Penny Arcade", and, I dunno, maybe people think it'll get them laid or something.

You can't ignore a person's status when you're considering what they're saying. This poor bastard's comments have a direct and measurable impact on his future earning prospects, and having Hacker News ruminate over his situation for half a week is steadily decreasing his prospective income for the rest of his life. These are facts, not opinions. This is what happens when you bad-mouth your employer, because the deck is stacked against you.

>He explains why he's leaving directly and clearly, (including "No, I did not burn out.") and that he likes working there

In conclusion, no shit, Sherlock. Would you hire someone who said they burned out at their previous job because it sucked? Of course not.

If the person hired is also satisfied in the position, I suspect that will make no difference to the naysayers.

But it's not that easy for a company to keep employees happy. Many who pay market rates have mostly miserable workers. To me, a genuinely satisfied employee is never an example of a moral or other mistake by a company.

From the comment it's pretty obvious this is a two person job and getting a single dev is a business mistake.

There's no way that wasn't intended to have a double meaning.

Even if they find someone who's just as skilled and motivated, that person won't have the key experience of "I built all this" and will have to spend a much larger fraction of time on maintenance/extension.

Ultimately PA will have to hire multiple people to do all this stuff. If they're smart they'll recognize it now, rather than when the smart, motivated person they do hire starts to fail.

The bottom of the ladder is takin outta context, I am pretty sure he is referring to his position in the ping pong standings and joking about the ping pong table.

Salary is poor may also be considered "fair" based on his comment:

    It is true that I am paid below market value, but not so significantly as folks on the internet assume.

I say this as someone who went through that exact situation: I worked at a small company for five years out of college, and was on-call for 24/7 for most of that. Someone called me on my goddamn honeymoon (which was basically the only real vacation I took during the interval) to troubleshoot a minor issue I had left explicit instructions for before I left.

They were very good with salary increases, and I didn't get more than a 5% raise out of switching jobs. But I went from working 50-60 hours a week, plus perpetual on-call, to working 40 hours a week.

I loved working there, loved the people, had a lot of fun but ... I wish I'd left years earlier. It wasn't worth it. It's hard to admit it, when you love a job that doesn't love you back. But I will never go back to working the job of two people unless I'm getting paid the salary of two people.

A normal web dev job, with limited on-call and not a lot of travel, perhaps, but unless he's being paid in the high-$100s, the travel and on-call requirements alone would have made him, in actuality, paid vastly below market.

I'm also intrigued to learn that he worked for Amazon as his one and only job out of college, before joining PA. With respect to the Amazonians on HN, his experiences working on a frontend team (with the requisite and insane oncall) at Amazon may have helped normalize a job description that to most of us here seems shocking and deplorable.

Amazon's salary offers to new undergrads is on the low end of normal (it's a standardized package, almost zero wiggle room on the compensation front). They're also infamous for their oncall system - a major contributor to their sky-high attrition rate. Turnover at Amazon is insane. I'm willing to bet that in his 3 years at Amazon, Kenneth would have seen just about every single person on his team turn over. In fact, if he was at Amazon for 3 years he's already way over the average tenure for devs, and likely the most veteran member of his team.

If you're coming from this environment, the PA deal is only moderately crazier. If you're coming from, well, most sane development jobs, the PA deal would seem absolutely off its rocker.

I spent 2 years at Amazon. I learned a ton, I worked with some great people. But boy, if you think Amazon is a "normal" gig, I've got a bridge to sell.

I say this as someone who went through that exact situation: I worked at a small company

SOP for small companies, except the market value bit, you'll usually get less.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/screenlife-part-1 http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/screenlife-part-2

"he probably has no idea what a market salary looks like"

Amazon doesn't pay as well as Google, but Amazon salary is really far better than you'll get at anything other than the four big tech companies for a normal SDE.

It would be like a textbook case of the Stockholm syndrome -- only, despite trying quite hard, he doesn't come off as that keen about his captors or his environment anyway...