Zynga Employees Celebrate After Being Fired

How would you react to being laid off? Zynga New York's entire office staff, those responsible for OMGPOP's Draw Something development, received the bad news yesterday that they would be seeking new employment. Surprisingly, they all celebrated with a "boozy, hoodie-shredding party."

That's according to Business Insider, which cites an anonymous former OMGPOP employee that recounted the event. At first, the team took the firing personally - the cuts were said to help Zynga's mobile strategy, but with OMGPOP now laid off and nearly the whole Farmville 2 desktop team surviving the cull, the irony wasn't lost on them.

"We thought, 'You just laid off your most talented mobile team,'" the former employee told Business Insider. "We were totally under-utilized." Then came the realisation that they were no longer owned by Zynga - long seen as something as a corporate villain by gaming communities online - which was follwed by jubilation.

"Most layoffs are sad. You imagine big corporate settings where security is there to lead people out of the office so they don't make a scene. This was the opposite," the source continued. "Music was being played loudly, and people were ripping up Zynga hoodies and T-shirts. Anything that was Zynga was completely left there. The sentiment felt positive."

The article reads that, "Zynga trophies, golden statues that are gifted to employees during quarterly meetings, were strewn. Beer was guzzled as people swapped stories about the good-old startup days... The former OMGPOP employees say they never felt welcomed by their publicly-traded employer, which may be why yesterday's layoffs didn't sting much."

Zynga announced yesterday that it would be laying off some 500 staff across the company, closing down its New York, Los Angeles and Dallas offices in the process.

Following the cull, a Reddit poster who claims to be a former Zynga employee has begun an AMA (Ask Me Anything) and revealing apparently candid details about his time with the company. None of the Reddit activity has been totally verified right now though, but if true it's an eye-opening account of how a once-powerful social games company fell on its own sword.