Early on, the people didn’t really bother me for the most part as I was protected from dealing with the usual company politics as a developer. Probably, the only two things that directly affected me were this Australian guy, who kept pushing me to do a job that really wasn’t my responsibility, and an external contractor, who wasn’t a great coder but always complained and was partly responsible for the horrid code base.

Once more people started showing up like the marketing department and increase in data entry people, the company began feeling tighter. One of the data entry people, an Asian guy, just before heading out to lunch, grabbed me and was talking about how the business model didn’t make any sense. We weren’t really pulling in big numbers at the time and were solely dependent upon the venture capital money to keep us going. But the thing that irked him the most was how the entire management team was composed of white people, who probably made over 100k a year.

Now, normally that never really would bother me. But it did strike me as something to examine throughout my career from that point on as the idea of diversity was instilled in me via my studies in humanities over at UC Irvine. However, the idea that the upper management were pulling in over 100k per year while we probably made at best around 100k per month was more worrisome.

I couldn’t really complain at the time about my salary just because I had so little experience and was just trying to survive in this growing industry. Heck when I received my raise, it was huge for me. But I won’t go into detail except that I was probably getting severely ripped off, even at my level of experience.

Anyway, down the line we hired some marketing people, one guy who was the director. They would have the typical marketing parties and none of the tech people nor data entry people would be invited. It was always those closed room type of things where we’d be looked at like freaks and peons for our career choices while the marketing people were jerking each other off in their own little world of self-praise.

Either way, more pressure started to build internally as growth was the key back then. The idea was that the VCs wanted to see young companies like these physically grow to resemble “real” companies in terms of structure. Unfortunately, so few had solid business plans and being that early on in the business meant that you needed something else to stay alive at the time.

For myself nothing really changed as things were steady. We ended up hiring some Perl guru from the OC area. I recall distinctly how he made an uncomplimentary remark about some Perl class I made. While that part was true, I wasn’t all that happy about things and the way I was being treated. So I decided that because I still was earning so little yet having time at night, that I would start looking for side work.

Fast forwarding a bit, I left the company to work for the people search company and later would go to Japan. The following year was just incredibly harsh for virtually every tech company as more and more companies felt early graves as VCs began pulling their funds. The race parts company was no exception in this and they were forced to announce a pretty large layoff.

Now, prior to Techcrunch for dirt sheets, you had Fuckedcompany.com. You can think of it like a Techcrunch with the aids-like community of a 4chan prior to those sites coming out and/or growing huge. Pretty much if you ended up on Fuckedcompany.com, you were dead in the water. Sure, not all companies were completely dead but they might as well have pulled the plug.

Fuckedcompany.com though was a cathartic entity as ex-employees (or even current employees) could vent their frustrations with their anonymous style postings. There were a few really nasty comments that were made between the marketing director and one of the other people in that department. It was borderline slander and made me sad to see how so-called professionals would quickly degenerate into junior high school taunting juveniles. One comment even referred to the more-or-less useless VP’s bald head and dick size as being a key cause in the failure of the company.

Through all that shit talking, I quickly realized the passive-aggressive nature of people. Yet I couldn’t tell at that time how much subtle tension there was not to mention backstabbing. Honestly, I never really started understanding the nature of company politics and truly toxic corporate environments until working in Japan for Nikko Citigroup. But this situation was sad to me because at least from my viewpoint, I really liked most people at that company. Honestly, without them I probably would’ve quit the industry a long time ago because that company gave me the opportunity that most weren’t willing to provide.

It’s a real shame that most of the other people didn’t seem to move up and learn from that experience. Maybe one guy that I know made something from that. But the rest just disappeared into obscurity. It’s possible that most just ended up going back to normal, non-tech jobs just because of how things went down, leaving a poor taste of the growing tech industry.

The post Tech Stories: Hidden Toxicity appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

Let me preface this post by saying that I’m not 100% against advertisement. I get why it exist and I’ve worked at a few places that did advertisement. I understand the difficulty of creating a good ad, the systems that are required to display the ads and the need for awareness for companies and individuals with products and services to get out there. That said, the current landscape is gruesome and has made me cynical, paranoid and vengeful against many companies that are in this field.

First, let’s talk about the first point in how the advertisement itself blows. Ever go to a site where you do not have an adblocker enabled (or where AdBlock was bribed by said system/advertiser) and you get this annoying video with the volume pumped up to deafening levels? Who in the fuck’s right mind would ever enjoy such a thing? How would you feel if you’re put in a room where a thousand 100 Watt Marshall amplifiers surround you, cranked up to 11 and playing Slayer’s Raining Blood without warning and no escape?

That’s exactly what happens in many of these cases. You get some obnoxious ad that is vying for the user’s attention. Instead of getting the user’s attention, you turn them off completely. In fact, you not only turn them off, but you piss them off so that they never view the site again. Or in my case, I’ll do my best to individually block every single URL that loads the ad just so I can view the clickbait in piece.

Next, let’s talk about how they’re displayed. This is the worst part of everything. More than anything, the how part is where I flip my shit and start going on a murderous witch hunt for all URLs that are external, have some form of javascript or appear to be connected to a tracker. But the thing is that no one likes reading part of an article only to have it blocked with a sudden email subscription form. Or what about some other hovering element that just inhibits the natural use of the page. And there’s far worse things that happen like attempting to trap a user within a site or falsely sending a user to other sites for a commission from the click.

All of these are just plain wrong methods. Most of all, you’ll end up losing the trust of a consumer. Once you remove a consumer’s trust, you’ll have an impossible time regaining that without ample dick sucking. If you forcefully try to annoy a person to get their attention, you’re just plain doing something wrong with your lives. You’re like a fly buzzing around about to be swatted or sprayed.

Lastly, let’s talk about relevance. Considering how much fucking information people collect with all these so-called trackers, why do I continue to get the lamest, boring ads? Is it because, oh I don’t know, some asshole marketing group paid top dollar to shove them in my face? I’m just going to do whatever possible to hose their pretty little campaign. I simply don’t care what the issue is if I don’t care about it. You can’t do a damn thing about that.

Take Twitter as a prime example. I have zero connections when it comes to babies. Why the hell would a Gerber ad show up with a toddler? You know what I did? I reported the ad as being offensive/sexist and blocked the account. That’s how mad I get. Considering all the accounts I follow and the stuff I tweet, wouldn’t you think Twitter with all their so-called brilliant world class engineers determine with some of that meta data that I have zero interest in kids? Apparently not.

So the whole bid for a higher ranking in the ad world is just horse shit. It worked to make companies like Overture/GoTo/Yahoo Search Marketing/Google etc. a ton of money. But that’s only when it comes to search results. Contextualized ads are complete shit because apparently, every site I go to where I might even be remotely interested in a topic still shows me garbage, turns me off and makes me add a few hundred more URLs to my blacklist.

The thing is that I have zero issues with being advertised to. In fact, I would love to see when there’s a 20% Lego offer at Target, or a discount on some game on GoG.com. Why don’t I ever get that stuff? Or maybe even being informed about all the coolest movies that I have some remote interest in. Why doesn’t any of this stuff pop up for me? That’s the stuff I want automated into my feeds rather than me having to hunt or find out from friends.

If you’re just trying to force people to click a button so you can make your commission, do the world a huge favor by flying to Japan, climbing Mount Fuji and depositing yourself asap. No one wants you around, no one will care when you perish and the quicker you get rid of yourself or allow yourself to be an organ donor (minus the heart because clearly you don’t have one of those), the better this world will be.

The post Why Your Ad Systems Suck Ass appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

Compare this scenario to Hearthstone where Blizzard essentially has opened up their closed Beta to streamers in order to promote the game. By allowing streamers to broadcast their game to streamers’ most hardcore fans, Blizzard essentially has created a free marketing buzz for their product that has generated a huge amount of buzz where people are buying closed beta keys on the neighborhood of $300 off of auction sites. I mean, this game is going to be free in the end, yet people who hunger for new content and game play are rushing to pay for this because of how streamers world wide are demonstrating what a fun product Hearthstone can be.

You see, this is where Blizzard absolutely gets the social media thing and are taking advantage of some of the newest avenues for broadcasting their products with very little cost. Streamers from Twitch TV are quickly becoming some of the most important people to the gaming industry as they pretty much act as pseudo celebrities who can broadcast these studios’ products to fans that might not even give a game a chance.

For myself with regards to Hearthstone, I never was interested in card games. I’ve never played games like Magic the Gathering and had zero desire at first to give such a game a chance. After watching people such as Kripparian, WoW Hobbs, Reckful, Toweliee, etc. broadcast their games, I now feel compelled to give the game a try. Heck, I might even pick up a pack of paid for cards. That’s because I see how much these streamers are enjoying themselves and get to see how the game plays out. In the end, I felt that it’s going to be worth giving it a shot.

Contrast that with Final Fantasy 14 where stability and strict NDAs have pretty much soured me on giving the game a shot. I mean, Final Fantasy 14 sounded fun at first after watching Yoni’s stream. However, seeing one of her friends get banned, the problems of logging on and Kripparian’s issues at first both with the strict NDA for streaming and his inability to connect with friends on the server have convinced me in a huge part that Final Fantasy 14 will end up being a shit game. People are only playing it now because it’s the big flavor of the month (FOTM). But in watching the streamers it’s clear that on top of these other issues, the game has other problems such as lack of PVP (despite me not being a PVP type) and lack of a clear end game vision.

I suppose if you’ve been a Final Fantasy fan for a long time, this game might entice you. But for someone who already is invested in another MMORPG, as much as I complain about the game, I’ll probably continue to stick with World of Warcraft. And part of the reason is that Blizzard (slowly) does a reasonable job at iterating over the problems from the community’s mass feedback loop.

With Final Fantasy, I have a severe lack of trust in Square Enix because of it’s Japanese imperial owners (yes, I’m Japanese in ethnicity but that doesn’t stop me from calling a spade a spade). Square Enix structurally just is archaic. While they might have an edge on the graphics, sound and interface to a degree, I cannot respect a company that refuses to catch up to the way other gaming companies are progressing in the area of distribution and marketing.

Sure, I take breaks from Blizzard’s games like World of Warcraft, but that’s because I’m waiting for things to improve or get fixed. Usually, they’re pretty good about most major issues (Diablo 3 might be an exception but it’ll be a while before we see how that turns out). Yet compared to other game companies like Square Enix or EA, Blizzard still does a pretty decent job all things considered for a large conglomerate.

Going back to Blizzard’s marketing team, you have to admit how pumped you get for their games more than most companies. Like seeing the patch 5.4 trailer, despite it only being a trailer, you salivate at the desire to nail Garrosh for his crimes. Or the new Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls trailer where you have this burning need to give the Crusader class a go. Or the original Mist of Pandaria trailer that came out for Blizzcon. People ripped on the Pandaren as an April Fools joke (despite it not being April Fools), but I was really looking forward to questing in Pandaria. That whole buzz aspect is something that Blizzard is hard to match against.

Again, I’m pretty critical about Blizzard but I think I’m also fair for the most part. I’ve been a long time gamer and have seen companies and games come and go. I know what I really like in my products and I have to believe in both the game and company/team to really support it. If I didn’t have this level of passion for what I write about, I would just remain silent and sit masturbating all day and night in my bedroom (as opposed to just the afternoon).

One thing I have to respect about Blizzard is their marketing team.

The post World of Warcraft: Where Blizzard Gets it Right appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.