I'm pretty sure the company is doing this mainly for publicity among gamers. I wonder though: will they actually be able to find a good developer to hire.
Shouldn't we look at the reverse? P[programmer|gamer]? Because with this process, you'll only get gamers. The trick will be to find programmers among them.
Now, there's also the self selection bias. So it's more like P[Programmer | Gamer & Has Read Hell of a Job & Followed Through]…
Surprising lack of information about the company, or the job.
Sounds cool, but they should really have limited it to people who realistically would re-locate to Israel and have experience. Otherwise, it's just a PR stunt.
BBR Saatchi Israel is on the hunt for a great programmer, and it's taking its recruiting to the place where most of them are hanging out: in the realms of 'Diablo 3.'
Actually, this is quite genius: PR company links itself to a market leader that's doing an awesome job of totally fucking up merging a P2P micro-payment model with a traditional single player game, snarkily hinting that some decent PR would smooth things over (especially with its history of nation re-branding, couldn't go amiss with said relations with the Korean and now German and French governments ~ http://saatchi.com/news/archive/mm_award_success_for_kosovo_...) thus pitching a meta-advertisement to Activision / Blizzard's huge marketing budget (roughly ~$550mm according to the last company papers).
Or it could be a move totally lacking in irony and just plain "Get down with the kids" painful.
Jury is out: however, I'd suspect that Tel Aviv's thought processes are somewhat more sophisticated... this the modern version of "a nice game of chess".
Within 7 minutes, a down-vote, while the comment "fredoliveira 25 minutes ago | link
This is quite sad. Signs of a company struggling to be relevant, and failing terribly."
that displays a lack of awareness of the company is left alone - although the company has had its problems, the Tel Aviv department won the 2012 Cannes Lions placement for "Blood Relations" (http://www.canneslions.com/work/2012/direct/entry.cfm?entryi...) which suggests that they're anything but creatively bankrupt.
But, go on... Downvote ALL the content, especially the stuff you don't like, that's what popularity contests are for!
Eh, I figure the downvote brigade hits stories quickly and the rest of us who read things thoughtfully and don't have time to check constantly will get to it after a few minutes and issue corrective votes. ;)
Having worked at a high end ad agency for a bit a long time ago my first reaction to this is to feel really bad for their customers. If they're willing to squander this level of their own resources on something so random they're almost assured to be doing ten times worse to their client accounts.
<strike>CEO</strike> Intern getting to level 60 ~ 12 or so hours @ $0 / hr
1,000,000 Diablo III gold ~ $4
Cheap Chinese Sword ~ $96
Single / static webpage ~ $200
57 seconds Video using a)existing office, b) in game footage but with voice
over ~ $100
4 x evenings of <strike>CEO</strike> HR department online interviews: $included in their salary
Potential for the CEO to be exposed as totally incompetent at playing Diablo III, and a huge gaff as he's trolled by the fetid swamp of D3 players, thus generating vast swathes of "the internet is a bridge full of trolls" tutting from places such as metafilter.com: priceless.
I can think of many criticisms, but cost / level of resources is hardly massive, unless I'm missing something... could you expand?
Ah, I apologise - I thought they were offering a real-world replica.
I'm also fascinated on how they're going to do this: I'll offer good money that says within 5 minutes of logging on they're either town-PK griefed, chat channels are flooded by gold-selling bots or their account is banned for non-RMAH advertising within the game.
[Disclosure: I do not own a copy of D3, nor have I played it]
You can't kill other players in D3 (yet, there is upcoming PvP patch, although that will be arena-bound, so you still won't be able to kill other players while in PvE mode).
I understand why you're confused, that seems like a rational (if rather lowball) understanding of the resources you'd use. In reality an agency used a team: brainstorming sessions with senior staff + one or two graphic artists doing multiple concepts and then multiple revisions of the final, a copywriter, one or two doing the video work + outsourced voiceover + a creative director half time + senior staff/ceo sign off + ceo diablo training + analysis of metrics and a post campaign review. And don't forget the time that's being spent on outside pr.
When you are completely based on billable hours (like all ad agencies) you need to consider internal projects as using resources like they were client billed. So the CEO is ~$300-$450/hr, CD ~$200-$300, tech & art $100+. Time isn't free if people are salaried in any business.
Oh and that's going to be the CEO online because this is going to attract other industry folks, some of which will know him personally.
Thank you, I understand the metric used now, although I'd say you'd have to offset the costs against traditional print advertising (e.g. 1/2 page advert in Guardian / Ha'aretz jobs section etc).
~ This begs the question, which I assumed (down thread): if the CEO is the one actively engaged, and he looked rather uncomfortable / wooden in the video, then there surely has to be some kind of agreement with Activision/Blizzard to use their Brand like this. i.e. Any and all such arrangements for third parties must have sign off by them (or "why can't I use the D3 franchise / name to sell my porn parody", see http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Inworld-Employment/Still-... for reference).
Thus, I tend towards the meta position I mentioned below: that the real cost is being born by that ~$500mm advertising budget, not Saatchi & Saatchi, and this is meta-advertising.
Jury's out: whether or not this is as clever as I'm imagining will be born out in the next few nights...
That certainly would make a bit more sense, but I'm not sure how likely it is - It doesn't seem like Blizzard has a relationship with S&S and it seems unlikely that they'd hire creative so far away from their offices in California.
"<strike>CEO</strike> Intern getting to level 60 ~ 12 or so hours @ $0 / hr"
I'll just note that while I did saw unpaid internship posts in other countries, I never saw it in Israel. It is definitely unheard of in the high tech industry, but as I've never heard of unpaid internships in any other sector I'd bet it is not the norm in other sectors as well.
1.000.000 Gold is 2-3 USD/EUR, the sword is worth nothing.
Pretty cheap for a programmer lead.
Also being a developer, I have not once met another hacker. Not that devs don't play games but so do tons of other people as well. I think it's a false assumption that you are going to find more programmers ingame.
Tech monoculture is going to persist so long as you have stuff like this be exalted, rather than condemned.
Of all the cultures for this industry to embrace, gaming -- where players exploit the veil of anonymity to be sexist, racist, homophobic, etc. -- is one of the poorest choices.
I like programming, a whole lot. I don't really like gaming . That shouldn't be a problem.
They are pre-screening - they aren't looking for you. So it's only a problem for people who don't like gaming.
If the entire tech world did this, then yes, it would be a problem.
I like gaming - but I really don't want to work for a place where gaming dictates the conversation. So in this case, I know I wouldn't want to work at this outfit... so for me it's not a problem, it's helpful information.
>Of all the cultures for this industry to embrace, the internet -- where users exploit the veil of anonymity to be sexist, racist, homophobic, etc. -- is one of the poorest choices.
FTFY
You're saying that just because other gamers are sexist, racist, and homophobic, the entire tech industry has to avoid any mention of it even if they genuinely find the games fun and entertaining? The advertisement itself isn't offensive, so your argument is just as absurd as berating tech companies for recruiting on online forums, or even the internet in general.
Companies have cultures that might not be all-inclusive. I heard of a company (I want to say Palantir, but don't quote me on that) where breaking the build required taking a shot. Non-drinkers wouldn't fit in very well, but while the company was still small it was worth it to have a strong culture and keep their existing employees in a close-knit group.
Like my sibling said, you wouldn't like working here anyway, and I'm sure there are places with a strong culture that you would fit into, and that I might not.
There's enough actual sexism/racism/etc in the industry to worry about that, rather than worrying about totally innocent things which enjoy massive support from a lot of people, including people of good will whose ears you will require the next time actually outrageous behavior happens.
If one were, hypothetically, of the mind that the cultural signifiers of geeky tech guys needed to be demonized to avoid scaring e.g. women out of the profession, one would be advised to tiptoe around that conclusion and avoid explicitly linking those cultural signifiers to evil behavior, because one will shortly be forced into making arguments like "Mentioning Diablo 3 in a job interview is spiritually akin to sexual harassment." One will lose those arguments, in a flamboyantly destructive fashion, and the next time one makes well-founded arguments such as "Corporate outings at a strip club are not appropriate", one will be remembered as some variant of an "implacable harpy who would be equally offended if the meeting had mentioned Dungeons and Dragons."
P.S. I am probably not the guy who you'd want as your #1 ally on this issue, but I know that guy, and he literally has Warhammer tattoos. If you're making an anti-Xism movement which can't accept him as an ally because he's culturally alien to you, your anti-Xism movement will have less success than you probably want it to have.
It isn't that cultural signifiers of geeky tech guys are demonized; it is that racist and sexist video games like this are grossly inaccurate signifiers of geeky tech guys. Equating the two unfairly tars us with the brush of every foul-mouthed 17-year-old on XBox live.
That's not related to any specific game. It does show up exponentially more in games where you are paired up with an anonymous matchmaking system. The majority of online games on consoles use that type of game finding.
Alternatively, games like Counterstrike or Minecraft are made up of servers that are privately run. Most of these are actively moderated by the owners and/or a consistent group of players. If you don't follow the rules and guidelines of the server you are kicked and banned. It can take a while to find a server you like, but once you do, the gameplay experience is vastly better.
Some players also happen to be fun, helping and nice.
Some more players like to look tough but they're good people underneath.
If you're expecting everyone in the world to behave, like if they still were in a boring classroom, and is going to discriminate them otherwise - this is not good then.
It has no localized version right and no native offering? Do you get served by eu.battle.net for euros? us.battle.net for $$$?
Is it popular? Do people play much in Israel?
Disregard my previous comment since I misunderstood which one of my comments you were replying too. My apologies.
Do you have the choice? When you type battle.net, where do you land by default? This is meaningful since european version is like 30% more expensive compared to US version so having the "choice" is nice.
I'd think it would be more likely: "what's the % of players with access to Western standard credit cards for the RMAH". Any country with an acceptable level of security for the "big four" is welcome at the table: nation states who lack this infrastructure, file under "who gives a shit".
One of the really interesting things about Activision/Blizzard is the limitations of their 'Pacific' servers: they only reach four countries in the region (Asia for players in South Korea and the regions of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macauhttp://us.battle.net/support/en/article/diablo-iii-global-pl...), which totally ignores Singapore, Australia and China.
Australia has large amounts to do with a national level of bastard like behaviour by a major corp.
China: I've had some interesting feed-back on the 'whys' of Chinese gaming being so hard to crack: specifically ~ there's two gov. departments fighting over the jurisdiction of judging "gaming content as acceptable", lack of resources to both, and (of course) total lack of understanding of the medium. As it can take 6+ months just to get official acceptance, and torrents / gold farmers / business minded Chinese cannot wait that long, the issue obviously comes down into the "cheaper to buy an account registered to >not China< and if/when it gets banned, move on". Suffice to say: most users use Steam etc & just lie about their location. Top tip: whoever cracks this, either via software, or political introduction & making the Party get a % cut with decent time-lines will make billions. HN really should think about this; imagine the Steam level profits... spread onto a couple of billion people.
Singapore: no idea why this isn't supported. Singapore is modern [business minded], has some seriously large bandwidth infrastructure [your google terms: bank dark pool hsbc] and is very 'pro-business'. I've no idea why Activision hasn't made the jump into just "doing Asian servers" and plumping for a Singapore based exchange, which could neatly divide their market into 3 manageable chunks.
That last one has puzzled me. I'm not getting paid to analyse it, however, and I suspect that once I started, I'd be either too interested or too disgusted to ignore the findings.
I don't think RMAH is so important. Asia has no RMAH at all and that doesn't discourage the sales. It's very very hard to make money from AH comparable to the cost of the game (60$) - a player will need to sell 400$ of goods to achieve that. Not realistic.
You can still sell game (boxes) for cash, make quick cash and forget. That's why they include Russia, for example.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that making arabic translation is going to cost N times the regular translation due to to bidi issues and dialects.
Australia is told to be in US zone. I don't really get how they manage ping. So it isn't excluded.
45 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 36.2 ms ] threadhttp://imgur.com/gallery/RgqxZ
I think that's a pretty smart and blindingly obvious approach. They'll probably be flooded with applicants hopefully some of them are actually coders.
I do think they'll end up with a majority non-coding turnout though. Is this the first time this kind of thing has been attempted?
You're better off looking for coders and weeding out non gamers.
Now, there's also the self selection bias. So it's more like P[Programmer | Gamer & Has Read Hell of a Job & Followed Through]…
Sounds cool, but they should really have limited it to people who realistically would re-locate to Israel and have experience. Otherwise, it's just a PR stunt.
http://creativity-online.com/work/saatchi-saatchi-israel-job...
Actually, this is quite genius: PR company links itself to a market leader that's doing an awesome job of totally fucking up merging a P2P micro-payment model with a traditional single player game, snarkily hinting that some decent PR would smooth things over (especially with its history of nation re-branding, couldn't go amiss with said relations with the Korean and now German and French governments ~ http://saatchi.com/news/archive/mm_award_success_for_kosovo_...) thus pitching a meta-advertisement to Activision / Blizzard's huge marketing budget (roughly ~$550mm according to the last company papers).
Or it could be a move totally lacking in irony and just plain "Get down with the kids" painful.
Jury is out: however, I'd suspect that Tel Aviv's thought processes are somewhat more sophisticated... this the modern version of "a nice game of chess".
Within 7 minutes, a down-vote, while the comment "fredoliveira 25 minutes ago | link
This is quite sad. Signs of a company struggling to be relevant, and failing terribly."
that displays a lack of awareness of the company is left alone - although the company has had its problems, the Tel Aviv department won the 2012 Cannes Lions placement for "Blood Relations" (http://www.canneslions.com/work/2012/direct/entry.cfm?entryi...) which suggests that they're anything but creatively bankrupt.
But, go on... Downvote ALL the content, especially the stuff you don't like, that's what popularity contests are for!
Retail Diablo III ~ $60
<strike>CEO</strike> Intern getting to level 60 ~ 12 or so hours @ $0 / hr
1,000,000 Diablo III gold ~ $4
Cheap Chinese Sword ~ $96
Single / static webpage ~ $200
57 seconds Video using a)existing office, b) in game footage but with voice over ~ $100
4 x evenings of <strike>CEO</strike> HR department online interviews: $included in their salary
Potential for the CEO to be exposed as totally incompetent at playing Diablo III, and a huge gaff as he's trolled by the fetid swamp of D3 players, thus generating vast swathes of "the internet is a bridge full of trolls" tutting from places such as metafilter.com: priceless.
I can think of many criticisms, but cost / level of resources is hardly massive, unless I'm missing something... could you expand?
I'm also fascinated on how they're going to do this: I'll offer good money that says within 5 minutes of logging on they're either town-PK griefed, chat channels are flooded by gold-selling bots or their account is banned for non-RMAH advertising within the game.
[Disclosure: I do not own a copy of D3, nor have I played it]
When you are completely based on billable hours (like all ad agencies) you need to consider internal projects as using resources like they were client billed. So the CEO is ~$300-$450/hr, CD ~$200-$300, tech & art $100+. Time isn't free if people are salaried in any business.
Oh and that's going to be the CEO online because this is going to attract other industry folks, some of which will know him personally.
~ This begs the question, which I assumed (down thread): if the CEO is the one actively engaged, and he looked rather uncomfortable / wooden in the video, then there surely has to be some kind of agreement with Activision/Blizzard to use their Brand like this. i.e. Any and all such arrangements for third parties must have sign off by them (or "why can't I use the D3 franchise / name to sell my porn parody", see http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Inworld-Employment/Still-... for reference).
Thus, I tend towards the meta position I mentioned below: that the real cost is being born by that ~$500mm advertising budget, not Saatchi & Saatchi, and this is meta-advertising.
Jury's out: whether or not this is as clever as I'm imagining will be born out in the next few nights...
I'll just note that while I did saw unpaid internship posts in other countries, I never saw it in Israel. It is definitely unheard of in the high tech industry, but as I've never heard of unpaid internships in any other sector I'd bet it is not the norm in other sectors as well.
Tech monoculture is going to persist so long as you have stuff like this be exalted, rather than condemned.
Of all the cultures for this industry to embrace, gaming -- where players exploit the veil of anonymity to be sexist, racist, homophobic, etc. -- is one of the poorest choices.
I like programming, a whole lot. I don't really like gaming . That shouldn't be a problem.
If the entire tech world did this, then yes, it would be a problem.
I like gaming - but I really don't want to work for a place where gaming dictates the conversation. So in this case, I know I wouldn't want to work at this outfit... so for me it's not a problem, it's helpful information.
FTFY
You're saying that just because other gamers are sexist, racist, and homophobic, the entire tech industry has to avoid any mention of it even if they genuinely find the games fun and entertaining? The advertisement itself isn't offensive, so your argument is just as absurd as berating tech companies for recruiting on online forums, or even the internet in general.
Companies have cultures that might not be all-inclusive. I heard of a company (I want to say Palantir, but don't quote me on that) where breaking the build required taking a shot. Non-drinkers wouldn't fit in very well, but while the company was still small it was worth it to have a strong culture and keep their existing employees in a close-knit group.
Like my sibling said, you wouldn't like working here anyway, and I'm sure there are places with a strong culture that you would fit into, and that I might not.
If one were, hypothetically, of the mind that the cultural signifiers of geeky tech guys needed to be demonized to avoid scaring e.g. women out of the profession, one would be advised to tiptoe around that conclusion and avoid explicitly linking those cultural signifiers to evil behavior, because one will shortly be forced into making arguments like "Mentioning Diablo 3 in a job interview is spiritually akin to sexual harassment." One will lose those arguments, in a flamboyantly destructive fashion, and the next time one makes well-founded arguments such as "Corporate outings at a strip club are not appropriate", one will be remembered as some variant of an "implacable harpy who would be equally offended if the meeting had mentioned Dungeons and Dragons."
P.S. I am probably not the guy who you'd want as your #1 ally on this issue, but I know that guy, and he literally has Warhammer tattoos. If you're making an anti-Xism movement which can't accept him as an ally because he's culturally alien to you, your anti-Xism movement will have less success than you probably want it to have.
I think we may be a little far 'round the bend here.
> players exploit the veil of anonymity to be sexist, racist, homophobic, etc
Not that the game was racist or sexist. Not a gamer, but have heard that the verbal communication on some networked games is rough.
Not sure if that should reflect on the game, though. It's a phenomenon of anonymous systems (see chat roulette for example)
Alternatively, games like Counterstrike or Minecraft are made up of servers that are privately run. Most of these are actively moderated by the owners and/or a consistent group of players. If you don't follow the rules and guidelines of the server you are kicked and banned. It can take a while to find a server you like, but once you do, the gameplay experience is vastly better.
Some more players like to look tough but they're good people underneath.
If you're expecting everyone in the world to behave, like if they still were in a boring classroom, and is going to discriminate them otherwise - this is not good then.
It has no localized version right and no native offering? Do you get served by eu.battle.net for euros? us.battle.net for $$$? Is it popular? Do people play much in Israel?
Do you have the choice? When you type battle.net, where do you land by default? This is meaningful since european version is like 30% more expensive compared to US version so having the "choice" is nice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_in_Israel
Note: this might be a little too meta for HN
http://diablo3-arena.com/new-diablo-iii-global-play/ Europe - For players in the European Union, Eastern Europe, Russia, Africa, and Middle Eastern countries such as Israel and the United Arab Emirates.
I see what they did here. Still I wonder why no Diablo in Arabic. All work and no play does make Jack a dull boy.
One of the really interesting things about Activision/Blizzard is the limitations of their 'Pacific' servers: they only reach four countries in the region (Asia for players in South Korea and the regions of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau http://us.battle.net/support/en/article/diablo-iii-global-pl...), which totally ignores Singapore, Australia and China.
Australia has large amounts to do with a national level of bastard like behaviour by a major corp.
China: I've had some interesting feed-back on the 'whys' of Chinese gaming being so hard to crack: specifically ~ there's two gov. departments fighting over the jurisdiction of judging "gaming content as acceptable", lack of resources to both, and (of course) total lack of understanding of the medium. As it can take 6+ months just to get official acceptance, and torrents / gold farmers / business minded Chinese cannot wait that long, the issue obviously comes down into the "cheaper to buy an account registered to >not China< and if/when it gets banned, move on". Suffice to say: most users use Steam etc & just lie about their location. Top tip: whoever cracks this, either via software, or political introduction & making the Party get a % cut with decent time-lines will make billions. HN really should think about this; imagine the Steam level profits... spread onto a couple of billion people.
Singapore: no idea why this isn't supported. Singapore is modern [business minded], has some seriously large bandwidth infrastructure [your google terms: bank dark pool hsbc] and is very 'pro-business'. I've no idea why Activision hasn't made the jump into just "doing Asian servers" and plumping for a Singapore based exchange, which could neatly divide their market into 3 manageable chunks.
That last one has puzzled me. I'm not getting paid to analyse it, however, and I suspect that once I started, I'd be either too interested or too disgusted to ignore the findings.
(HN: short sharp comments: bollocks to that!)
You can still sell game (boxes) for cash, make quick cash and forget. That's why they include Russia, for example.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that making arabic translation is going to cost N times the regular translation due to to bidi issues and dialects.
Australia is told to be in US zone. I don't really get how they manage ping. So it isn't excluded.