No matter how Pincus might try to spin it, announcing this the same day as the iPad Mini event just shows once again how much of a sleazeball he really is.

You can lay a lot of sleaziness at Pincus's feet, but announcing your bad news on a Friday, when it gets mixed with other bad and important news, is just good strategy. If the news will get the least play on that day, he even owes it to the shareholders to do it that way.

What exactly is the ethical way to announce layoffs?

I may be missing your point, but today is Tuesday.

His point is that there's no great time to announce layoffs, and it's perfectly acceptable to announce it or any other bad news at a time when it will get the minimum media attention. Everyone does it, and it's in the best interest of the company.

Besides, whom does it really help for the news of layoffs to get lots of play? If there's a salient case for this move being sleazy, it only holds up if he's actually wronging some party in the process.

The only argument I can really think of is that the more other employers that hear about it, the easier time the laid-off have finding jobs, but that's a very tenuous argument to make

His point was that even though the event was shadowed by Apple, there's still three days left of mainstream news coverage. There's a reason bad news is announced on a Friday, after all, and arguably this story could receive more coverage than one broken on that day.

No, that's PR business. What would be sleazy is if he undercut so that remaining employees still have swords hanging over their heads. "Cut once, cut deep."

Zynga has almost 3000 employees? Jeez. That's more than Twitter.

Zynga's got a lot more products to support than Twitter does. Their homepage lists 18 games.

There's over 40 games.

Source: I (still) work here.

Any thoughts without any sort of backlash?

And I just got an email in my MIT email about Zynga interviews..

Any good company continually looks for new talent, even when they have to let go some of the existing talent. I had the weird experience of coming to work for NetApp the Monday after their first layoff in history the previous Friday. Youch!

Having been at Intel when they were both laying people off and hiring, it is sometimes a function of corporate strategy shift, where the people you have can't fill the jobs that you want to have and their jobs are becoming irrelevant. Intel decided to get out of the DRAM business in '84 and those folks who did DRAM weren't the same kind as the ones who do CPUs apparently.

I wouldn't call Zynga a good company.

There are lots of other great places to work in Boston. Email me (see profile) if you're looking.

I'm surprised they had 2000 employees.