If you haven't read the state of California's claims here you should. It's the result of a two year investigation and the claims are.. shocking.
I want to make a point about "culture fit". "Culture fit" in a company typically comes down to "we like you" and the reason why people like other people is that they are like them. Similar age, background, whatever. It's why Stanford grads probably like other Stanford grads.
This "we like you" can and does lead to discrimination.
But here's the even darker side of this. Toxic cultures of sexual harassment as alleged in the complaint against Activision-Blizzard always come down to a few key individuals who then "spread" by hiring or promoting other people who are like then. I doubt this is ever explicit. It's more that you can sense a fellow predator (make no mistake: they are preying on vulnerable staff).
So without intervention this toxicity will tend to spread. Those who oppose it will leave. Those who tow the lines get promoted.
And it's leadership's responsibility to root this out and eliminate it. Heads should roll here. Maybe even J Allen Brack's and/or Bobby Kotick's. If you want to take credit for the successes you also have to take responsibility for the giant failures here.
Oh and whoever wrote and sent out that statement about how the state was pursuing this was why so many businesses are leaving California needs to be fired. It was so utterly tone deaf and irrelevant.
Culture fit doesn't have to stretch that far - it does not need to be pervasive and it does not need to be toxic.
We had a guy from Gaza in our office - he complained about informal emails sent to invite people for drinks because it was sinful, he complained about a manikin that got dressed up at special occasions because it was immodest.
I don't know what lines to draw here - but be careful when playing with double-edged swords.
Recently, I saw a paradigm that I liked. Instead of seeking candidates for "culture fit" seek them for "culture value-add". In other words, a candidate may fit the culture now, but not necessarily in the future. The value-add paradigm forces one to think about the direction in which the current culture should grow.
So if I'm hiring someone at what point am I allowed to use my own personal discretion? Am I allowed to dislike someone? Am I allowed to say I don't like them so please don't hire them?
It reminds me of an article about MDMA and fascist groups and how one leads to the other. I don't have a link, the article was terrible anyways, but the base idea, supported by scientific studies was interesting.
I don't know if a friend of yours took MDMA, but my friend told me that it is pretty much impossible to be aggressive under its influence, you can't help but love everyone. So, how can it lead to hate?
The explanation was that MDMA strengthens the bounds between people, and the closest people are within that group, the more the outside of the group is seen as a threat, a threat you have to protect your group against. Think of an aggressive mother protecting her baby.
So yes, I see how "culture fit", can lead to harmful discrimination, even when centered around positive values and topics as harmless as Star Wars and craft beer.
As a compliment to this point :
Tgings I'd consider valid culture fit criteria :
1) does this candidate have a positive attitude about the work that they do?
2) is this candidate respectful to the clients they work with? (E.g. a coworker of mine routinely calls our client contacts a "fucking bitch" on internal calls.
These aren't really possible to evaluate in the hiring process, but can be a big problem once theyve already been hired.
Is it discrimination if I own a company and only hire my friends who are into the same things as me? Serious question because I don't understand how that's different, if it is.
As a side note (and a fully conjectural query), do you think that the desire of control of a branded monoculture in the work place is one of the reasons for the push to bring employees back to the workplace?
You can separate the culture of Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter as easily as any brand, like Nike and Reebok. Those cultural brands are surely dissolving without the guiding hand of in office guidelines.
Someone in another thread suggested that this is basically what you expect to happen when a bunch of college kids from well off families leave school and form a startup: They want to pretend they are still in college, but now getting paid for it.
I want to make a point about "culture fit". "Culture fit" in a company typically comes down to "we like you" and the reason why people like other people is that they are like them. Similar age, background, whatever.
There are plenty of people who like each other that have nothing in common. The idea that the reason people like people is because they are like them just feels ridiculous to me, but maybe I am an outlier. Personally, the more someone is like me, the less I like them.
But the bigger, weirder argument you seem to be making is that you shouldn't hire people that you like. I would say life is too short to be spending it around people you don't like, if you can help it.
I say that it is very possible to hire only people you like, and still end up with a diverse workplace free from abuse. You just need to start with good leaders.
>There are plenty of people who like each other that have nothing in common. The idea that the reason people like people is because they are like them just feels ridiculous to me, but maybe I am an outlier. Personally, the more someone is like me, the less I like them.
Yes, you are an outlier. There is a very large amount of studies that show that people like people that are like them.
I don't think it's precisely that people like people like them - it's that they like people who approve of their choices. The easiest way to signal that is to make the same ones.
The culture fit thing is the sort of keyboard warrior psychologist analysis that we all love... completely made up and is, in fact, how you get a toxic culture in a company.
I agree, people I like the most don't share most of my interests at all. Yet time and time again all I hear is that "not like me" means a different skin colour or gender. It's like race and gender are the only differences but at the same time I'm being told there's no differences between races and genders. Which is it?!
I have always viewed personalities as essentially waveforms, which when combined may exaggerate certain aspects, negate others, or complement them in other ways that make the resulting form more... well, pleasurable, for lack of a better word. I visualize it this way not for woowoo^1 purposes but just to make sense in my mind why some personality traits and quirks in others seem to boost parts of my own, or adjust spikes of my own personality that I view as too strong (i.e. I am generally very introverted when alone I'm a group, but a close friend who "evens out" that aspect of me can lead me to being more gregarious).
^1: it is, however, curious that similar visualizations can be found in woowoo circles
You can like people that is very different in the surface but share the psychological matrix of values. It can be extraterrestrial that you will like him/her as old friends in an instant. On the other hand you will not like someone that has a subverted or inverse matrix of values. An example of the inverted values are the radical left describing conservatives. It's a fundamentally incompatible world-view, completely irreconcilable even if they are biological twins.
Bobby Kotick is worth $600 million according to a brief Google search. That's enough fuck you money I'm surprised he hasn't just retired yet. Of course, when you can convince the board to pay you $155 million more, that's a good incentive to keep working I guess. Especially since work at that level is probably just a handful of meetings in a boardroom and a few more on the golf course per year (I don't mean CEOs in general, but CEOs of large corporations like his, where the decisions boil down to pretty much "How many absurd microtransactions can we get away with in Call of Duty this year?").
Anyway I highly doubt his head can really roll from this.
Anyone with a net worth over about 100m (and many a fir chunk lower) isn't working for money anymore. He hasn't retired to enjoy his wealth is imo because the jobs selection bias excludes the sorts of people who would do that
I agree with most of your comment but I want to add one level of nuance.
There's a bad way to do "culture fit" which you describe. There's also a good way: list the things you want in your culture (openness to criticism, appetite for learning, honesty, unafraid of challenges, or what have you) and then you construct questions specifically to find those things out, grade the result and weigh together into a culture fit score.
The good way to determine culture fit is to ask the candidate about the specific things you want in your culture, not go by general feeling because then you're indeed measuring something your biased System 1 likes, which is probably just the chimpanzee in your brain trying to determine how likely your blood relations with this person is.
I agree with 98% of this :-). And it absolutely flows from the top. What is more, good leadership knows this and understands that no matter how something happened, they are responsible for it. The entire games industry however has a reputation for being "bad" at empowering good leadership.
But let's talk about 'culture' for a moment.
In my experience, the tech workers in the US make their "work" their "life" way too frequently to be healthy. What I mean by that is that they do not choose to separate their "work" life from their "non-work" life in any meaningful way. As a result the parts that would nominally be "non-work" like friendships where you travel together, or date, or share political affiliations, or other causes, are not kept separate from your "work" life.
It isn't easy. People interact on social media and at work and so if you're angrily criticizing the plight of the Palestinians on social media, your pro-Israel co-worker may bring that conflict into work with them, which make it harder to get things done. And even when you support the notion that employees are their own people and what they do in their own time is their own business, and not to bring it to work, it shows up anyway.
For a long time people have advocated to "not bring your work home." That helps you maintain family relationships because at home that is your priority. We now also have to "not bring home to work."
I am aware of the situation of an excellent engineer who lost their job because at "home" they were a supporter of the policies of an administration that many of their co-workers despised. I can assure you from my experience with this person that their technical capabilities were in no way diminished by their political preferences, and yet their company saw the "disruption" as a bigger threat than the loss of talent.
So ActiBliz really needs to be corrected here, and firmly, because they allowed a non-professional culture to emerge and flourish within their company at the expense of many of their employees. But it isn't just "bro" culture, it is any non-business culture.
It is one of the under appreciated complexities of what a good manager can overcome.
> It isn't easy. People interact on social media and at work and so if you're angrily criticizing the plight of the Palestinians on social media, your pro-Israel co-worker may bring that conflict into work with them.
There are many dimensions to this:
1. Is Alice speaking for the company or can be construed as speaking for the company? Like does her Twitter profile say "VP of X at Y" and is a verified profile? Like I know there are certain topics that have been in the news about my employer that I simply won't comment on because I never want to be quoted in the press as "Employee of X said ...". That's just common sense. And you can also be (rightly) terminated if your actions or statements reflect badly on the company or the company otherwise has to spend time dealing with;
2. Assuming the first person isn't speaking for the company and the second person is simply aware of their social media presence, it gets a lot trickier. I can sit here and say "just do your job" but would I be saying that if I were African-American and my coworker was spouting some White supremacist crap on Twitter? Probably not. There are degrees too. Reposting links on your personal Twitter in your free time is one thing. Putting up a Confederate flag in your cubicle is something else;
3. You should generally be comfortable with what your employer does. So let's say you're deeply evangelical and completely anti-abortion. Should you work for Planned Parenthood? Probably not. I mean if you can and want to, that's fine. But there are limits on what an employer should be expected to do to accommodate your views.
> ... and yet their company saw the "disruption" as a bigger threat than the loss of talent.
Obviously specifics matter here but let me express some generalities.
If you express views where your coworkers don't want to work with you because of those views then yeah you've created a problem. Even for an engineer the technical side isn't everything. You will still need to work with people. Supporting homophobic policies when you have a gay worker means you've brought something into work that has disrupted that work (as an example).
> Oh and whoever wrote and sent out that statement about how the state was pursuing this was why so many businesses are leaving California needs to be fired. It was so utterly tone deaf and irrelevant.
It is tone deaf and irrelevant, but they should not lose their job over that. Let the person who has never held a poor opinion throw the first stone.
If I was a PR person and I had the choice of not doing my job and agreeing with toxic boss that "California is forcing businesses out by not ignoring my type of toxic behaviour, put that in!" or being bullied and possibly fired for raising the point that they are maybe not 100% right...
Not that this is what happened, still bad bosses reap bad behaviour.
> I want to make a point about "culture fit". "Culture fit" in a company typically comes down to "we like you" and the reason why people like other people is that they are like them. Similar age, background, whatever. It's why Stanford grads probably like other Stanford grads.
I mean I do kind of agree, but I'm not sure if "hire people you dislike" works either? It probably needs to be more of a situation of like "if you're a stanford grad the world isn't just other stanford grads" or something.
Hire people you can work with. People who disagree with you and challenge your way of thinking are good to have around as a check on your biases. You don't have to like them.
Maybe the main thing is that hiring needs to be done in a way that is more about assessing fitness for the task than culture fit.
Professionals should be able to cope with culture clashes. Fundamentally, if someone isn't professional enough to get along with people who aren't from the same monoculture, they're not fit to work in a modern office.
I find it greatly insightful that when the Swedish government studied gender segregation in the education system, the most common reason men left the profession was "culture fit". It highlight how culture fit is not specific to one industry or one gender, but rather as an universal aspect and likely major root cause in gender segregating behavior.
The issue goes much further than simply "we like you". How safe one feel in ones choices and decision is heavily influenced by choices of peers. If other Stanford grads work at the same place I do, then how bad can the decision to stay be? Similar, if every Stanford grads left, then is the decision to stay still safe or am I missing something.
The relation between culture fit and the probability that someone will commit a crime (like sexual harassment) seems less direct but I suspect there are an connection there. At a society level we know that mixing demographics will reduce trust, and with reduced trust we see an increase in crime.
I think you are making a lot of assumptions here. Were it even the one responsible for hiring that misbehaved?
It is correct to be angry about this, but your answer seems to be vindictive. Next step is to wait for the verdict.
> So without intervention this toxicity will tend to spread.
Most businesses operate without sexual misdemeanor happening. On the contrary, I doubt the measures now announced by Kotick will ever be non-toxic. Because here you institute a group that will turn on random employees as they see fit. It is the wrong medicine in my opinion.
Useful would be to accuse the people responsible and use the law against them in a court of justice without arbitration.
Kotick voted for group punishment and I don't really understand how anyone would want to work at Activision to be honest because that isn't the way to get a non-toxic workplace. I doubt we will see much cooperation here.
This seems to largely match a lot of the same things that happened with Riot Games over the last couple of years. I am hoping that these actions can help spread awareness of any issues that may be present at Blizzard and past, current, and future employees won't face the same issues. It is a long road to be traveled to get there.
I hope that the current WFH situation doesn't detract from the walkout. A lot of the visibility raised when Riot went through this was outside of the Riot gates where employees were congregated.
Without speculating on the claims, I do find it interesting that the DFEH has lawsuits against both Riot Games and Blizzard for similar issues. I recall reading that Riot's response was that the DFEH was not working in good faith: are both of these companies aligning their responses, is the DFEH out of line, or is the industry just that broken?
> I do find it interesting that the DFEH has lawsuits against both Riot Games and Blizzard for similar issues
Yes, because Riot's C-level executive was literally dry humping interns and shoving their ass into faces and still has their job? Clearly "visibility" has not worked past creating PR articles.
Does DFEH have the same problem with any other major game studio there that isn't embroiled in this type of behaviour?
I've played League before. The player base is ludicrously, absurdly toxic, and if they are hiring anything from there, then, well...
DFEH is a California entity, so I don't think it's fair to talk about all other major game studios. Most of the articles you posted are all stemmed from the same start: The Kotaku article. The wired article is from the same author noting that COO was not fired (and other employees that are employed by CEO have had complaints).
It looks like EA is based in LA and isn't under investigation by the DFEH, but Riot and Activision/Blizzard are two of the biggest game studios in CA, right?
Yes, the C-level executive that dry-humped employees, "ball-tapped" employees, and any other inappropriate behavior should be removed... but that actually isn't included in the DFEH lawsuit, IIRC.
> literally dry humping interns and shoving their ass into faces
statements like this are why i have no interest in investigating allegations of sexism because neither of these things are sexist.
is your starting point that we're supposed to assume this is only being done to women? assuming women are being treated differently is a poor premise for proving women are being treated differently. or are you implying that doing the same thing to men and women is sexist to women? either way, its a very poor argument and calls into question your judgement.
> is the DFEH out of line, or is the industry just that broken?
No chance DEFH is out of line.
The tech industry is strongly biased in the favor of white men in my opinion and video games even more so, considering women playing video games only became socially acceptable a few years ago. It's still common for men to talk down to women on video games, to the point where the overwhelming majority of women do not use voice comms or make their gender known.
Think about all those men complaining that a video game _dared_ have a female character or even more so, a non-conventionally attractive one gasp. That was in 2018... That's the _average_ person who is making a video game.
> considering women playing video games only became socially acceptable a few years ago.
... In Saudi Arabia?
> It's still common for men to talk down to women on video games, to the point where the overwhelming majority of women do not use voice comms or make their gender known.
It's common for men to talk down to men on video games too ("talk down to" is a very mild phrasing). Turns out there are a lot of jerks who play video games, and for $reasons they tend to skew male (but we're still talking about a tiny minority of men; this isn't an indictment of men; the predictable "10% of m&ms are poisoned" rebuttal is inherently sexist, racist, etc).
> Think about all those men complaining that a video game _dared_ have a female character
I'm not sure which game you're talking about, but I suspect you misunderstand the criticism. There have been thousands of female video game characters going back to the dawn of the industry. Many titles which prominently feature female characters have done very well (e.g.., Tomb Raider, Final Fantasy, etc). I'm guessing there has never been significant controversy because a video game featured a female character, though no doubt there has been controversy about specific characters (e.g., Battlefield 1's and Battlefield V's wildly disproportionate emphasis on female WWI and WWII combatants) or about the cringe deployment of token diversity characters.
> biased in favor of white men
There's not even good evidence that CS is biased in favor of white men. The only "evidence" is that the demographics skew toward white men, but that's almost certainly minimally related to bias in the field because
1. There are tons of Asians (male and female) in the field as well
2. Demographics remain relatively constant despite a much more welcoming environment and a decade-long push at all levels of the pipeline to incorporate more women and non-whites
3. Women achieved near gender parity in law and medicine without any similar concerted effort during a time when the fields were overtly hostile to them
4. The countries with the most gender equality have more stereotypical occupational demographics, including women in tech
> The tech industry is strongly biased in the favor of white men
That's debatable. CS was overwhelmingly male and wasn't prestigious until recently.
> video games even more so
I wonder how much of that we can attribute to DOOM. The DOOM devs wanted to make an hyper-violent game centered around Demon and heavy metal, and that reflected in the culture at id (not the violence). And they made a bunch of money which spurred copy-cats and got investors thinking game devs had to look like this to be profitable.
> Think about all those men complaining that a video game _dared_ have a female character or even more so, a non-conventionally attractive one gasp.
> Think about all those men complaining that a video game _dared_ have a female character or even more so, a non-conventionally attractive one gasp. That was in 2018... That's the _average_ person who is making a video game.
> It's still common for men to talk down to women on video game
I only play games where you can't tell anyone's sex (Starcraft 2 for instance) and you get insulted all the time. You get insulted when you're playing badly, you get insulted when you're playing too well, you get insulted whether you're a man, a woman or a dog.
> Think about all those men complaining that a video game _dared_ have a female character or even more so, a non-conventionally attractive one gasp. That was in 2018... That's the _average_ person who is making a video game.
Mrs PacMan? Samus? Peach? That was all before 1988
Based on my observations the vast majority of "men" talking down girls in video games are teenager boys, most of whom eventually grow up and stop doing that. Admittedly some never grow up, perhaps they're more likely to be heavy gamers and even become game devs?
Anyway, I think any spaces dominated by teenagers will always be pretty toxic places, no matter if we're talking about schools or gaming servers. I have no idea what could be done about it, other than proper supervision by staff or server moderators.
>It's still common for men to talk down to women on video games, to the point where the overwhelming majority of women do not use voice comms or make their gender known.
Gamers talk down to everyone on video games and have since they have been invented. This sounds like a new group of people entering an existing space and not understanding the dynamic (namely incessant shittalking). I can't even count how many strangers have not so kindly informed me of their sexual adventures with my parents. Am I missing something here?
My lack of knowledge of the DFEH and other cases they have tackled are probably the reason for my question. The rebuke from Riot was more data driven in which they point out a few misleading claims from the DFEH: https://www.pcgamesn.com/riot-games-lawsuit-dfeh-response. Both Blizzard and Riot have a similar response stating that the DFEH is out of line, misrepresenting claims, or baseless. It either points to very bad SoCal video game company cultures or maybe there is some merit to the rebuttles. Maybe the real answer is somewhere in between.
Crossing my fingers for widespread changes either way. The video game industry has a long-standing reputation for many other things besides just not being inclusive.
>>considering women playing video games only became socially acceptable a few years ago.
Ohh Please, I remember vividly playing my Grandmother in Sonic the Hedgehog on the original Sega Genesis many decades ago. That trope is just plain incorrect and a complete revisionist history
> The tech industry is strongly biased in the favor of white men
Who cares?
I'm a black man, have been gaming since 6 years old, and never once in my circle of friends or family questioned silly things like potential political implications of 3D cartoons that I can manipulate. If I want a black, yoked mofo with a giant sword and a colourful pony sidekick with a red peacock feather in a video game - I know what I have to do.
Start my own gaming company to build games to do just that.
> It's still common for men to talk down to women on video games, to the point where the overwhelming...
Ofcourse, it's video games not nobel prizes, not civil engineering projects, not...
When was it ever not "socially acceptable" for women to play video games, what society is that referring to?
edit: I'll assume this is about the US then. At any rate, my earliest memories of playing video games with female friends go back to the 1980s, and I don't recall a single moment where that wasn't "socially acceptable".
> considering women playing video games only became socially acceptable a few years ago.
It should be mentioned that this was different from the usual exclusion of women. Women were mostly discriminated from outside the group of those playing games.
> That was in 2018... That's the _average_ person who is making a video game.
The average person who was making a video game was upset at themselves for putting non-conventionally attractive females in the games they were making?
It is extremely possible that DFEH is either not the authority, ill equipped by the legislature to be the authority, and or bungled their own case, while it being simultaneously possible that the companies are problematic and that individuals are marginalized and hurt in a way unrelated to doing a good job
The industry is broken. Self-identifying gamers are one of the most toxic online communities long preyed on by groups like pick-up artists and men's rights activists. The games targeting this group of self-identifying gamers have overindexed on machismo for decades. Every problem can be solved with violence and the reward is fame, money, and women. Why is there Overwatch porn and not Candy Crush porn? For marketers these gamers are fish in a barrel.
Game companies who make games for this audience rely on this audience as their talent pool because no one else will build these games on absurd timelines at great cost to every other aspect of their life. They are in effect paid in 'cool points' which matter only to those already hazed or yet-to-be-hazed.
Appeal to public opinion is generally a great idea but there is a risk. Activision gets no sympathy from me, but I also don't think the answer will come from the masses.
I'm not sure that most gamers really care about sexism in the gaming industry. Video games are synthetic, we don't really see the people behind them. At least in movies we see the actors. If push comes to shove, I think most gamers will still be lining up for the latest AAA title no matter what they hear about the company that created it. Imho change therefore has to come from something other than public opinion. This lawsuit is exactly that: the government enforcing a code of behavior because the market clearly cannot do it on its own. The system is working.
The thing is, your "average gamer" won't know or care about any of this. I work in the industry and according to our own stats the "average gamer" is a 20-30 year old, owns a console, and buys exactly three games every year - fifa, CoD, and one other title that got the most advertising that year.
I used to live with such guys at uni, had them as flatmates - you wouldn't catch them dead talking about video games, "nerd" was probably the worst insult for them, and they religiously bought every single Fifa every year to "play with their mates" and CoD to play some multiplayer. Year on year. So yeah, I'm absolutely tempted to believe those stats, and I'm also absolutely tempted to believe any backlash from this will be minimal to Activision.
Forgive me but that sounds... outdated? With the proliferation of e-sports and people making a living on twitch and all, it just seems a little unbelievable.
I believe those stats for most games, but not for WoW, which is still Blizzards cash cow. Those players are invested in the community. Same largely goes for Overwatch. Blizzard has cultivated a community over the years and has their own convention.
> I'm also absolutely tempted to believe any backlash from this will be minimal to Activision.
Consumer backlash is not the intended means/outcome here. Blizzard is being sued and there is massive organizing within the company. They will likely end up paying out lots of money in compensation to the employees who were wronged, heads will roll, and the toxic culture will end up being cleared out forcibly (like what happened at Uber). Consumer backlash is an orthogonal concern.
>> fifa, CoD, and one other title that got the most advertising that year.
Then I am very out of touch with the average having never bought any of those games, nor do I own a console. My recent purchases would be the Valve index and subnautica. The only "AAA" title in my steam library is ES:Oblivion. I'm probably not Blizzard's target market, but I am also not a broke kid. Give me a game I want to play and I will pay for it.
The biggest Blizzard fans I know personally are pretty fed up.
From a fan perspective many are disappointed and/or concerned with the direction of WoW, Overwatch, and other Blizzard franchises from a gameplay perspective.
And from what I understand, the WoW community is talking about the recent news with many seeing this as the same leadership that is making poor decisions about the games they like as the same leadership behaving badly in the workplace.
Where they'll feel it the most is in hiring. Everyone in the industry is watching and if they don't fix their house, it will be very hard for them to hire and retain the engineers and designers who build and run their games.
Ehh, maybe.. Lots of people want to make games, and the games industry is notorious for having a perpetual labor glut (relative to most SW development, at least). That's why compensation and working conditions both tend to be significantly lower than average there (again, for SW dev).
Don’t think I agree with this. Rampant sexism and general abuse of workers has been an open secret in the game development world for many years now, and people still line up to work at the big studios because they love games.
Project oriented companies have the luxury of trying out new cultures one team at a time - if they get management buy-in.
The real danger comes when the project fails, for any reason at all. People who like the new direction self-select into the experiment, and if the experiment fails they are more likely to find themselves laid off, give notice, or be disillusioned and stick around anyway.
I am very suspicious, for instance, if this is what happened at GM with the EV1. Effectively the rabblerousers got put onto a project, which they cancelled it quite abruptly and then backed away from the green vehicle space for a very long time.
But that too makes a dangerous assumption. This behavior is not uncommon. Having a reputation for such behavior may just attract similar people, people who want to work in such environments. While they would probably get fewer women, they might get more of exactly the wrong type of men.
Are you lumping in the workers of Blizzard with the "masses" of gamers saying actions by either wont have a consequence? That's what it reads like.
I think ultimately the workers staging a walk out or even stopping work would have the quickest and surest effect. The government setting labor standards isn't always the most effective, not to mention no one knows the pain suffered or actions needed more than the workers themselves.
Two years ago, during the Blitzchung / Hong Kong incident, I deleted the Battle.net account I had held since Warcraft III. I would encourage everyone else to do so too. It's definitely easier now that Blizzard no longer makes the best (or even good) games in any genre.
> Why it matters: Walkouts are a drastic measure for developers in a largely non-unionized field, a testament to just how angry employees currently are.
It sends a message, but I wouldn't say it's _that_ drastic considering the demand for developers and difficulty hiring in the Orange County area.
Yeah I don't think Blizzard is going to be able to bring in scabs to replace software devs. This comment reveals how poorly the industry is understood by outsiders, or at least this one journo.
> Yeah I don't think Blizzard is going to be able to bring in scabs to replace software devs
The game industry is overflowing with college educated, computer science degree wielding, software developers eager to work on a big game project. Few will ever touch Engine code - the rest are easily replaceable.
This is part of the reason companies like this are able to get away with things that other industries aren't able to. Everyone wants to work on the next AAA title - few want to toil away making ads more clickable...
So yes, they'll replace the walk-outs with "scabs" in short time, and move on.
Not to mention - this is a tiny percentage of Blizzard employees - and seems to have morphed into a beef with the binding arbitration agreement - not better employment treatment. "As of Tuesday, signatures surpassed 2,600 current and former employees" - and later on the article states "A group of roughly 300 employees across Activision Blizzard". That's out of 9,500 employees at Activision - you can find 3% of any workplace that's outraged by anything. My guess... wait it out a couple months and everyone forgets this ever happened.
If devs aren’t unionized, there’s no such thing as scabs right? Blizzard can just terminate all the disgruntled employees and hire other devs, perhaps more desperate or entry level or morally ambiguous, whatever.
Of course the institutional knowledge lost will be drastic.
I don't think they'll introduce "scabs" simply because it would be a marketing _disaster_.
However, I work in the industry, and I think you'd be shocked by how replaceable American developers are. Huge amounts of artistic labour _is_ done cheaply, and in relatively decent quality, oversees in countries like South Korea, China, Japan, and to a lesser extent, Thailand.
Here in Canada, we have a thriving industry that includes both primary developers and developers who focus on outsourced work. Most of my career has been involved with shops that were sub-contracted labour from American studios.
I don't think any dev would have a hard time finding fresh out of school devs who are willing to be abused at the chance for a job at a big name in an over saturated industry. That's the sad truth about it. Too many people want to develop games for game developers to have much if any bargaining power. Dispelling notions of how cool or glamorous working in the industry is may help with that.
Last year, or was it the year before? COVID messes with my perception of time, they had another big walkout over the events in Hong Kong and a big name gamer in one of Blizzard's tournaments refusing to tow the party line in regards to the CCP. I'm curious how many of the employees who walked out then are still around today and how many that are will also be walking out now.
I think it would be very telling about a good many things. Did Blizzard sack them all for contributing to bad PR? Did they retain them but threaten them if they stepped out of line again? Or do they feel empowered and walk out both times?
Isn’t game dev overflowing with people? I’ve heard salaries for places like EA and people seem to make a lot less there than in comparable non game jobs.
This is interesting, given that Activision itself was founded by disgruntled Atari developers who'd walked out...whereupon the then-CEO of Atari, a former textile company executive who'd referred to the developers as "towel designers", discovered that he couldn't just call up a temp agency and have them send over a bunch of people who could cram a fun, playable game into 4K of memory.
That's what 30 years and extreme growth does to a company, can't expect them to remain the same when entire new waves of people join over the course of decades.
Does anyone have any more specific information aside from "widespread sexism"? It would be good to know exactly what is prompting this walkout, and exactly what changes they're hoping to achieve with it.
> The suit also points to a female Activision employee who took her own life while on a company trip with her male supervisor. The employee had been subjected to intense sexual harassment prior to her death, including having nude photos passed around at a company holiday party, the complaint says.
Absolute degeneracy. I don’t understand how a professional workplace could devolve to this. I have trouble talking about non work matters for more than a few minutes, How do things get this far?
Honest question: Guys often "rib" each other, it's part of the culture among males.
When you throw women into the mix and they get "ribbed" (perhaps for being "one of the guys," as it were) does this often become sexual harassment?
Perhaps the culture of "ribbing" needs to go away for everyone, or at least from the workplace, but it has always been the case for me that a close friend or acquaintance typically only "ribs" you when they know you know they're not being serious. (That is why the definition of ribbing is "good-natured teasing".)
Of course, the danger there is misinterpretation (perhaps with self-fulfilling negative expectations primed by media, but I digress)
I may be biased, I spent 4 years in the military where ribbing was literally CONSTANT (it was worse than anyplace else I've worked) and the women there really had to have a thick skin. (I'm also 49 years old and a lot has changed.)
Note: Some of the claims made here go far beyond "ribbing". I'm not talking about those.
Harassment intentionally includes observers. If you do something to someone, and a third party observes it and is made uncomfortable, that is harassment in the workplace.
To say "Guys are just ribbing eachother" ignores people that observe that behavior and find it uncomfortable/hostile/toxic. This is also an extremely generous description of what happened. Women were harassed, both sexually and not. Their pay was lower, their performance reviews were tougher, they were fired more frequently. Worse, they were groped, sexually harassed/assaulted, one of them commit suicide over it. To compare "guys just ribbing" to what happened is a real gross take.
> I may be biased, I spent 4 years in the military where ribbing was literally CONSTANT (it was worse than anyplace else I've worked) and the women there really had to have a thick skin. (I'm also 49 years old and a lot has changed.)
"Women have to have thick skin" is just nonsense to not have to type "The women are harassed relentlessly". It's also worth noting that the military is a toxic cesspit for sexual abuse. Comparing any sane workplace to the military is a joke. Nobody should want to be like the military, including the military.
> it has always been the case for me that a close friend or acquaintance typically only "ribs" you when they know you know they're not being serious.
As long as everyone is in on the joke, it's fine. I've never heard of a situation where all parties agreed something was a good natured joke and it was still labelled sexual harassment. In virtually every case the "I was just ribbing" is conveyed after the fact in the same tone of voice as "It's just a prank bro" - even if it was genuinely innocent on the harasser's part, it obviously wasn't apparent to others, and that "if" is often questionable.
A really simple rule to follow is "if you don't know how someone will react otherwise, treat them politely with kindness and respect." This rule works in 100% of situations and costs nothing to follow. No one has ever or will ever say "man I wish the first time I talked to that guy he teased me about my physical appearance, what a jerk for denying me that taste of his quick witted humor."
> That is why the definition of ribbing is "good-natured teasing".
The problem is that there may not in fact be anything "good-natured" about it - on both sides - yet the culture forces the recipient to act like it is or they will be punished.
In other words: the only way in which that kind of thing is not toxic is when a recipient can at any time say "that's not funny, stop it!", and the reaction will be a sincere apology and an actual stopping.
The culture of ribbing at work probably needs to go. I've worked in environments with lots of ribbing and some with virtually none. The one with none is way more comfortable. Sometimes the ribbing can cause comradery, but often ends up being a source of friction, even amongst all males.
I've witnessed ongoing sexual harassment in the game industry, and there is nothing good natured about it. Often it was ribbing, but it was also overtly sexual, demeaning, and clearly a game to see how badly they could affect the victim before she went to HR. Which never actually happened, at least not that became public knowledge.
I was ribbed a lot too, but obviously not sexually. And I still really could have done without it.
Women can and do participate in “ribbing” and understand things like jokes and context but sexual harassment is not the product of women misunderstanding or misinterpreting men ribbing them. The difference between ribbing and sexual harassment is pretty clear: the things that are said aren’t said in good fun. They’re said to intimidate, embarrass, and demean.
What do you mean by “ribbing”? Especially in the context of your military culture (about which my entire knowledge comes from hoping the fiction I read was based on more than imagination)?
Readit News
I want to make a point about "culture fit". "Culture fit" in a company typically comes down to "we like you" and the reason why people like other people is that they are like them. Similar age, background, whatever. It's why Stanford grads probably like other Stanford grads.
This "we like you" can and does lead to discrimination.
But here's the even darker side of this. Toxic cultures of sexual harassment as alleged in the complaint against Activision-Blizzard always come down to a few key individuals who then "spread" by hiring or promoting other people who are like then. I doubt this is ever explicit. It's more that you can sense a fellow predator (make no mistake: they are preying on vulnerable staff).
So without intervention this toxicity will tend to spread. Those who oppose it will leave. Those who tow the lines get promoted.
And it's leadership's responsibility to root this out and eliminate it. Heads should roll here. Maybe even J Allen Brack's and/or Bobby Kotick's. If you want to take credit for the successes you also have to take responsibility for the giant failures here.
Oh and whoever wrote and sent out that statement about how the state was pursuing this was why so many businesses are leaving California needs to be fired. It was so utterly tone deaf and irrelevant.
"culture fit" is one of the biggest causes of workplace discrimination and I still see it pushed in 'hiring training' as perfectly valid criteria.
Things I've seen teams consider "culture"
- will the candidate go to our weekly study session at the micro-brewery?
- will the candidate stay after work to play multi-player games with us?
- is the candidate entertained by all the Star Wars lingo we use?
If you don't find these discriminatory, think about how well a recent poster from Gaza would have done with them. Not well, I suspect
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25849054
We had a guy from Gaza in our office - he complained about informal emails sent to invite people for drinks because it was sinful, he complained about a manikin that got dressed up at special occasions because it was immodest.
I don't know what lines to draw here - but be careful when playing with double-edged swords.
I don't know if a friend of yours took MDMA, but my friend told me that it is pretty much impossible to be aggressive under its influence, you can't help but love everyone. So, how can it lead to hate?
The explanation was that MDMA strengthens the bounds between people, and the closest people are within that group, the more the outside of the group is seen as a threat, a threat you have to protect your group against. Think of an aggressive mother protecting her baby.
So yes, I see how "culture fit", can lead to harmful discrimination, even when centered around positive values and topics as harmless as Star Wars and craft beer.
1) does this candidate have a positive attitude about the work that they do?
2) is this candidate respectful to the clients they work with? (E.g. a coworker of mine routinely calls our client contacts a "fucking bitch" on internal calls.
These aren't really possible to evaluate in the hiring process, but can be a big problem once theyve already been hired.
You can separate the culture of Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter as easily as any brand, like Nike and Reebok. Those cultural brands are surely dissolving without the guiding hand of in office guidelines.
The Star Wars lingo probably gets old though. It should really be Expanse lingo if they want to stay cool.
There are plenty of people who like each other that have nothing in common. The idea that the reason people like people is because they are like them just feels ridiculous to me, but maybe I am an outlier. Personally, the more someone is like me, the less I like them.
But the bigger, weirder argument you seem to be making is that you shouldn't hire people that you like. I would say life is too short to be spending it around people you don't like, if you can help it.
I say that it is very possible to hire only people you like, and still end up with a diverse workplace free from abuse. You just need to start with good leaders.
Yes, you are an outlier. There is a very large amount of studies that show that people like people that are like them.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/026540750809670...
^1: it is, however, curious that similar visualizations can be found in woowoo circles
Anyway I highly doubt his head can really roll from this.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-06-22-activision-bli...
There's a bad way to do "culture fit" which you describe. There's also a good way: list the things you want in your culture (openness to criticism, appetite for learning, honesty, unafraid of challenges, or what have you) and then you construct questions specifically to find those things out, grade the result and weigh together into a culture fit score.
The good way to determine culture fit is to ask the candidate about the specific things you want in your culture, not go by general feeling because then you're indeed measuring something your biased System 1 likes, which is probably just the chimpanzee in your brain trying to determine how likely your blood relations with this person is.
But let's talk about 'culture' for a moment.
In my experience, the tech workers in the US make their "work" their "life" way too frequently to be healthy. What I mean by that is that they do not choose to separate their "work" life from their "non-work" life in any meaningful way. As a result the parts that would nominally be "non-work" like friendships where you travel together, or date, or share political affiliations, or other causes, are not kept separate from your "work" life.
It isn't easy. People interact on social media and at work and so if you're angrily criticizing the plight of the Palestinians on social media, your pro-Israel co-worker may bring that conflict into work with them, which make it harder to get things done. And even when you support the notion that employees are their own people and what they do in their own time is their own business, and not to bring it to work, it shows up anyway.
For a long time people have advocated to "not bring your work home." That helps you maintain family relationships because at home that is your priority. We now also have to "not bring home to work."
I am aware of the situation of an excellent engineer who lost their job because at "home" they were a supporter of the policies of an administration that many of their co-workers despised. I can assure you from my experience with this person that their technical capabilities were in no way diminished by their political preferences, and yet their company saw the "disruption" as a bigger threat than the loss of talent.
So ActiBliz really needs to be corrected here, and firmly, because they allowed a non-professional culture to emerge and flourish within their company at the expense of many of their employees. But it isn't just "bro" culture, it is any non-business culture.
It is one of the under appreciated complexities of what a good manager can overcome.
There are many dimensions to this:
1. Is Alice speaking for the company or can be construed as speaking for the company? Like does her Twitter profile say "VP of X at Y" and is a verified profile? Like I know there are certain topics that have been in the news about my employer that I simply won't comment on because I never want to be quoted in the press as "Employee of X said ...". That's just common sense. And you can also be (rightly) terminated if your actions or statements reflect badly on the company or the company otherwise has to spend time dealing with;
2. Assuming the first person isn't speaking for the company and the second person is simply aware of their social media presence, it gets a lot trickier. I can sit here and say "just do your job" but would I be saying that if I were African-American and my coworker was spouting some White supremacist crap on Twitter? Probably not. There are degrees too. Reposting links on your personal Twitter in your free time is one thing. Putting up a Confederate flag in your cubicle is something else;
3. You should generally be comfortable with what your employer does. So let's say you're deeply evangelical and completely anti-abortion. Should you work for Planned Parenthood? Probably not. I mean if you can and want to, that's fine. But there are limits on what an employer should be expected to do to accommodate your views.
> ... and yet their company saw the "disruption" as a bigger threat than the loss of talent.
Obviously specifics matter here but let me express some generalities.
If you express views where your coworkers don't want to work with you because of those views then yeah you've created a problem. Even for an engineer the technical side isn't everything. You will still need to work with people. Supporting homophobic policies when you have a gay worker means you've brought something into work that has disrupted that work (as an example).
It is tone deaf and irrelevant, but they should not lose their job over that. Let the person who has never held a poor opinion throw the first stone.
Not that this is what happened, still bad bosses reap bad behaviour.
I mean I do kind of agree, but I'm not sure if "hire people you dislike" works either? It probably needs to be more of a situation of like "if you're a stanford grad the world isn't just other stanford grads" or something.
Professionals should be able to cope with culture clashes. Fundamentally, if someone isn't professional enough to get along with people who aren't from the same monoculture, they're not fit to work in a modern office.
The issue goes much further than simply "we like you". How safe one feel in ones choices and decision is heavily influenced by choices of peers. If other Stanford grads work at the same place I do, then how bad can the decision to stay be? Similar, if every Stanford grads left, then is the decision to stay still safe or am I missing something.
The relation between culture fit and the probability that someone will commit a crime (like sexual harassment) seems less direct but I suspect there are an connection there. At a society level we know that mixing demographics will reduce trust, and with reduced trust we see an increase in crime.
It is correct to be angry about this, but your answer seems to be vindictive. Next step is to wait for the verdict.
> So without intervention this toxicity will tend to spread.
Most businesses operate without sexual misdemeanor happening. On the contrary, I doubt the measures now announced by Kotick will ever be non-toxic. Because here you institute a group that will turn on random employees as they see fit. It is the wrong medicine in my opinion.
Useful would be to accuse the people responsible and use the law against them in a court of justice without arbitration.
Kotick voted for group punishment and I don't really understand how anyone would want to work at Activision to be honest because that isn't the way to get a non-toxic workplace. I doubt we will see much cooperation here.
I hope that the current WFH situation doesn't detract from the walkout. A lot of the visibility raised when Riot went through this was outside of the Riot gates where employees were congregated.
Without speculating on the claims, I do find it interesting that the DFEH has lawsuits against both Riot Games and Blizzard for similar issues. I recall reading that Riot's response was that the DFEH was not working in good faith: are both of these companies aligning their responses, is the DFEH out of line, or is the industry just that broken?
Yes, because Riot's C-level executive was literally dry humping interns and shoving their ass into faces and still has their job? Clearly "visibility" has not worked past creating PR articles.
Does DFEH have the same problem with any other major game studio there that isn't embroiled in this type of behaviour?
I've played League before. The player base is ludicrously, absurdly toxic, and if they are hiring anything from there, then, well...
Sexism:
[2018] https://kotaku.com/inside-the-culture-of-sexism-at-riot-game...
[2018] https://twitter.com/MiniWhiteRabbit/status/10269232332814213...
[2019] https://www.vice.com/en/article/evyz7p/over-100-riot-games-e...
COO specific:
https://www.businessinsider.com/riot-games-suspends-coo-scot...
- tbh just google riot games farting
CEO specific:
[Feb 2021] https://www.wired.com/story/riot-games-ceo-culture-complaint...
[Mar 2021] https://www.dailyesports.gg/alienware-has-terminated-its-spo...
It looks like EA is based in LA and isn't under investigation by the DFEH, but Riot and Activision/Blizzard are two of the biggest game studios in CA, right?
Yes, the C-level executive that dry-humped employees, "ball-tapped" employees, and any other inappropriate behavior should be removed... but that actually isn't included in the DFEH lawsuit, IIRC.
statements like this are why i have no interest in investigating allegations of sexism because neither of these things are sexist.
is your starting point that we're supposed to assume this is only being done to women? assuming women are being treated differently is a poor premise for proving women are being treated differently. or are you implying that doing the same thing to men and women is sexist to women? either way, its a very poor argument and calls into question your judgement.
No chance DEFH is out of line.
The tech industry is strongly biased in the favor of white men in my opinion and video games even more so, considering women playing video games only became socially acceptable a few years ago. It's still common for men to talk down to women on video games, to the point where the overwhelming majority of women do not use voice comms or make their gender known.
Think about all those men complaining that a video game _dared_ have a female character or even more so, a non-conventionally attractive one gasp. That was in 2018... That's the _average_ person who is making a video game.
... In Saudi Arabia?
> It's still common for men to talk down to women on video games, to the point where the overwhelming majority of women do not use voice comms or make their gender known.
It's common for men to talk down to men on video games too ("talk down to" is a very mild phrasing). Turns out there are a lot of jerks who play video games, and for $reasons they tend to skew male (but we're still talking about a tiny minority of men; this isn't an indictment of men; the predictable "10% of m&ms are poisoned" rebuttal is inherently sexist, racist, etc).
> Think about all those men complaining that a video game _dared_ have a female character
I'm not sure which game you're talking about, but I suspect you misunderstand the criticism. There have been thousands of female video game characters going back to the dawn of the industry. Many titles which prominently feature female characters have done very well (e.g.., Tomb Raider, Final Fantasy, etc). I'm guessing there has never been significant controversy because a video game featured a female character, though no doubt there has been controversy about specific characters (e.g., Battlefield 1's and Battlefield V's wildly disproportionate emphasis on female WWI and WWII combatants) or about the cringe deployment of token diversity characters.
> biased in favor of white men
There's not even good evidence that CS is biased in favor of white men. The only "evidence" is that the demographics skew toward white men, but that's almost certainly minimally related to bias in the field because
1. There are tons of Asians (male and female) in the field as well
2. Demographics remain relatively constant despite a much more welcoming environment and a decade-long push at all levels of the pipeline to incorporate more women and non-whites
3. Women achieved near gender parity in law and medicine without any similar concerted effort during a time when the fields were overtly hostile to them
4. The countries with the most gender equality have more stereotypical occupational demographics, including women in tech
That's debatable. CS was overwhelmingly male and wasn't prestigious until recently.
> video games even more so
I wonder how much of that we can attribute to DOOM. The DOOM devs wanted to make an hyper-violent game centered around Demon and heavy metal, and that reflected in the culture at id (not the violence). And they made a bunch of money which spurred copy-cats and got investors thinking game devs had to look like this to be profitable.
> Think about all those men complaining that a video game _dared_ have a female character or even more so, a non-conventionally attractive one gasp.
Links?
I'm so tired of being blamed for the behavior of folks with the same genitalia/skin color as me.
What game are you referring to?
What?
I only play games where you can't tell anyone's sex (Starcraft 2 for instance) and you get insulted all the time. You get insulted when you're playing badly, you get insulted when you're playing too well, you get insulted whether you're a man, a woman or a dog.
Mrs PacMan? Samus? Peach? That was all before 1988
Anyway, I think any spaces dominated by teenagers will always be pretty toxic places, no matter if we're talking about schools or gaming servers. I have no idea what could be done about it, other than proper supervision by staff or server moderators.
Gamers talk down to everyone on video games and have since they have been invented. This sounds like a new group of people entering an existing space and not understanding the dynamic (namely incessant shittalking). I can't even count how many strangers have not so kindly informed me of their sexual adventures with my parents. Am I missing something here?
Crossing my fingers for widespread changes either way. The video game industry has a long-standing reputation for many other things besides just not being inclusive.
Ohh Please, I remember vividly playing my Grandmother in Sonic the Hedgehog on the original Sega Genesis many decades ago. That trope is just plain incorrect and a complete revisionist history
> The tech industry is strongly biased in the favor of white men
Who cares?
I'm a black man, have been gaming since 6 years old, and never once in my circle of friends or family questioned silly things like potential political implications of 3D cartoons that I can manipulate. If I want a black, yoked mofo with a giant sword and a colourful pony sidekick with a red peacock feather in a video game - I know what I have to do.
Start my own gaming company to build games to do just that.
> It's still common for men to talk down to women on video games, to the point where the overwhelming...
Ofcourse, it's video games not nobel prizes, not civil engineering projects, not...
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edit: I'll assume this is about the US then. At any rate, my earliest memories of playing video games with female friends go back to the 1980s, and I don't recall a single moment where that wasn't "socially acceptable".
It should be mentioned that this was different from the usual exclusion of women. Women were mostly discriminated from outside the group of those playing games.
The average person who was making a video game was upset at themselves for putting non-conventionally attractive females in the games they were making?
It's about totally rewriting history to appease the modern woke sensibility that people were complaining about.
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Game companies who make games for this audience rely on this audience as their talent pool because no one else will build these games on absurd timelines at great cost to every other aspect of their life. They are in effect paid in 'cool points' which matter only to those already hazed or yet-to-be-hazed.
I used to live with such guys at uni, had them as flatmates - you wouldn't catch them dead talking about video games, "nerd" was probably the worst insult for them, and they religiously bought every single Fifa every year to "play with their mates" and CoD to play some multiplayer. Year on year. So yeah, I'm absolutely tempted to believe those stats, and I'm also absolutely tempted to believe any backlash from this will be minimal to Activision.
Consumer backlash is not the intended means/outcome here. Blizzard is being sued and there is massive organizing within the company. They will likely end up paying out lots of money in compensation to the employees who were wronged, heads will roll, and the toxic culture will end up being cleared out forcibly (like what happened at Uber). Consumer backlash is an orthogonal concern.
Then I am very out of touch with the average having never bought any of those games, nor do I own a console. My recent purchases would be the Valve index and subnautica. The only "AAA" title in my steam library is ES:Oblivion. I'm probably not Blizzard's target market, but I am also not a broke kid. Give me a game I want to play and I will pay for it.
I know several current and former Team 2 (WoW) developers, from QA up to leads, and they are all unified in their rejection of their executives.
And I live nearby, so I'll be joining them on the pavement tomorrow.
From a fan perspective many are disappointed and/or concerned with the direction of WoW, Overwatch, and other Blizzard franchises from a gameplay perspective.
And from what I understand, the WoW community is talking about the recent news with many seeing this as the same leadership that is making poor decisions about the games they like as the same leadership behaving badly in the workplace.
The real danger comes when the project fails, for any reason at all. People who like the new direction self-select into the experiment, and if the experiment fails they are more likely to find themselves laid off, give notice, or be disillusioned and stick around anyway.
I am very suspicious, for instance, if this is what happened at GM with the EV1. Effectively the rabblerousers got put onto a project, which they cancelled it quite abruptly and then backed away from the green vehicle space for a very long time.
I think ultimately the workers staging a walk out or even stopping work would have the quickest and surest effect. The government setting labor standards isn't always the most effective, not to mention no one knows the pain suffered or actions needed more than the workers themselves.
No king rules forever, my son.
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Activision Blizzard's Chief Compliance Officer released an absolutely disgusting statement in response to the lawsuit: https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1418619091515068421
It's surreal knowing that she is also complicit in the war crimes committed at Abu Ghraib (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Townsend#Career).
It sends a message, but I wouldn't say it's _that_ drastic considering the demand for developers and difficulty hiring in the Orange County area.
The game industry is overflowing with college educated, computer science degree wielding, software developers eager to work on a big game project. Few will ever touch Engine code - the rest are easily replaceable.
This is part of the reason companies like this are able to get away with things that other industries aren't able to. Everyone wants to work on the next AAA title - few want to toil away making ads more clickable...
So yes, they'll replace the walk-outs with "scabs" in short time, and move on.
Not to mention - this is a tiny percentage of Blizzard employees - and seems to have morphed into a beef with the binding arbitration agreement - not better employment treatment. "As of Tuesday, signatures surpassed 2,600 current and former employees" - and later on the article states "A group of roughly 300 employees across Activision Blizzard". That's out of 9,500 employees at Activision - you can find 3% of any workplace that's outraged by anything. My guess... wait it out a couple months and everyone forgets this ever happened.
Of course the institutional knowledge lost will be drastic.
However, I work in the industry, and I think you'd be shocked by how replaceable American developers are. Huge amounts of artistic labour _is_ done cheaply, and in relatively decent quality, oversees in countries like South Korea, China, Japan, and to a lesser extent, Thailand.
Here in Canada, we have a thriving industry that includes both primary developers and developers who focus on outsourced work. Most of my career has been involved with shops that were sub-contracted labour from American studios.
Last year, or was it the year before? COVID messes with my perception of time, they had another big walkout over the events in Hong Kong and a big name gamer in one of Blizzard's tournaments refusing to tow the party line in regards to the CCP. I'm curious how many of the employees who walked out then are still around today and how many that are will also be walking out now.
I think it would be very telling about a good many things. Did Blizzard sack them all for contributing to bad PR? Did they retain them but threaten them if they stepped out of line again? Or do they feel empowered and walk out both times?
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Wild
Pretty fucked situation
When you throw women into the mix and they get "ribbed" (perhaps for being "one of the guys," as it were) does this often become sexual harassment?
Perhaps the culture of "ribbing" needs to go away for everyone, or at least from the workplace, but it has always been the case for me that a close friend or acquaintance typically only "ribs" you when they know you know they're not being serious. (That is why the definition of ribbing is "good-natured teasing".)
Of course, the danger there is misinterpretation (perhaps with self-fulfilling negative expectations primed by media, but I digress)
I may be biased, I spent 4 years in the military where ribbing was literally CONSTANT (it was worse than anyplace else I've worked) and the women there really had to have a thick skin. (I'm also 49 years old and a lot has changed.)
Note: Some of the claims made here go far beyond "ribbing". I'm not talking about those.
To say "Guys are just ribbing eachother" ignores people that observe that behavior and find it uncomfortable/hostile/toxic. This is also an extremely generous description of what happened. Women were harassed, both sexually and not. Their pay was lower, their performance reviews were tougher, they were fired more frequently. Worse, they were groped, sexually harassed/assaulted, one of them commit suicide over it. To compare "guys just ribbing" to what happened is a real gross take.
> I may be biased, I spent 4 years in the military where ribbing was literally CONSTANT (it was worse than anyplace else I've worked) and the women there really had to have a thick skin. (I'm also 49 years old and a lot has changed.)
"Women have to have thick skin" is just nonsense to not have to type "The women are harassed relentlessly". It's also worth noting that the military is a toxic cesspit for sexual abuse. Comparing any sane workplace to the military is a joke. Nobody should want to be like the military, including the military.
As long as everyone is in on the joke, it's fine. I've never heard of a situation where all parties agreed something was a good natured joke and it was still labelled sexual harassment. In virtually every case the "I was just ribbing" is conveyed after the fact in the same tone of voice as "It's just a prank bro" - even if it was genuinely innocent on the harasser's part, it obviously wasn't apparent to others, and that "if" is often questionable.
A really simple rule to follow is "if you don't know how someone will react otherwise, treat them politely with kindness and respect." This rule works in 100% of situations and costs nothing to follow. No one has ever or will ever say "man I wish the first time I talked to that guy he teased me about my physical appearance, what a jerk for denying me that taste of his quick witted humor."
The problem is that there may not in fact be anything "good-natured" about it - on both sides - yet the culture forces the recipient to act like it is or they will be punished.
In other words: the only way in which that kind of thing is not toxic is when a recipient can at any time say "that's not funny, stop it!", and the reaction will be a sincere apology and an actual stopping.
Now how often is that actually the case?
I was ribbed a lot too, but obviously not sexually. And I still really could have done without it.
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