27 votes

The story of why I left Riot Games

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3 comments

  1. KnopeWyatt2020
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    I'm a woman who worked in the video game industry during Gamergate and I was not surprised at all by the "movement" because it reflected attitudes I was already long familiar with. Riot isn't the...

    I'm a woman who worked in the video game industry during Gamergate and I was not surprised at all by the "movement" because it reflected attitudes I was already long familiar with. Riot isn't the only company with these problematic behaviors. For me, the final straw was my physically abusive ex (who also worked at the same company) stalking me at work. I filed a complaint with HR and they had a laughable mandatory "harassment training." Not only was the training a joke to the attendees, they put me in the same training session as my ex.

    This was just the final push to move to straight software. There were lots of other incidents, such as guys following me to my car at night, guys passing around pictures of breasts during work, guys hacking my Facebook to post sexual comments...not an ideal work environment, but HR simply moved me to other areas each time instead of fixing the issues.

    That's not even addressing how immature development feels - note how in the article the guy mentioned he was implementing agile! Video game development lags behind badly in professional development standards. Tech debt is insane. We were using spreadsheets for QA years after JIRA (just as an example) became common. It's not cowboy coding anymore, but the industry is so popular they can get away with shoddy and frustrating development and HR practices.

    Edit: Sorry for the edits, first time on tildes

    15 votes
  2. Taco
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    All that, to protect the image of being "edgy", even at the risk of legal liability. That's some pretty out of wack priorities.

    All that, to protect the image of being "edgy", even at the risk of legal liability. That's some pretty out of wack priorities.

    10 votes
  3. StellarV
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    You know, back in my day they were called Q&A's haha This was really uncomfortable to read but it's great that he came out and is talking about it. I don't really blame him for not doing more....

    The Friday kicked off with an AMA with Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill, where they shared stories about how taking Talent Acquisition seriously since the early days had been key to Riot’s success. (For those who haven’t heard the term before, AMA stands for “ask me anything”, and it refers to a loosely-structured type of interview popularized by Reddit.)

    You know, back in my day they were called Q&A's haha

    This was really uncomfortable to read but it's great that he came out and is talking about it. I don't really blame him for not doing more. It's hard for someone to do much more when the toxic views are so entrenched without jeopardizing your career and even then nothing might change if they spin it the right way. I've worked in similarly toxic environments and it's pretty much impossible to stand up and challenge it. Unionizing workplaces can help by providing a third-party to go to for these kinds of concerns.

    7 votes
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