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.
He should have insinuated being a recovered alcoholic instead, that works for me when I feel I'm being unduly pressured.
As someone who doesn't care for drinks, the quickest way to shut-down all that drinks-are-vital-to-our-culture talk is to declare that I used to have a problem with the drink, but I'm sober now, and watch them stammer something about the event being optional.
Not the OP, but some people are offended by the mere mention of drinks, and that looked like the case there. I personally don't like to go out for drinks, and this can be detrimental to my career, but I wouldn't impose my preference on others.
Honestly - some people just don't like the feeling (me) and some other people (south east asians in particular) are allergic and overly sensitive to booze. There are really, really easy ways to talk yourself out of drinking situations.
> There are really, really easy ways to talk yourself out of drinking situations.
Absolutely, but in my experience no other reason shuts down attempts at negotiating/cajoling/follow up questions/suggestions to "just show up and grab a soda" faster than pleading the alcoholism. It appears AA gets more unquestioning deference compared to any other personal/health/religious reasons
Makes sense though- when you have a religious objection to alcohol, someone drinking it near you isn't going to cause actual extreme bodily harm to you.
Just tell them you don't like drinking. We organize the same kind of meetings over at where I work, and if someone says they don't like drinking, we tell them that water is fine, if they say they don't want to join for whatever or no reason, then we say fine and let them know that the meeting will be always open to them.
Good point. We'll change the meeting description to include this note about water (or anything else), this way we can skip the whole conversation and go straight to the meeting.
It's much easier to take the habits of early employees and call that "Company culture" without considering the reasoning or consequences. If Engineer #1 used to go on drinks on Wednesdays to cope with stress after the weekly release, 100 engineers later it becomes engrained as "company culture" to drink on Wednesdays at the same bar (which was on the way to his home) even though releases are now done on Thursdays and the bar is out of the way for most people.
Is there such a thing?
Sometimes it's better to stick with what you like instead of spending days figuring out how to include everyone.
We'll just adapt the meeting if we see someone doesn't fit.
> he complained about a manikin that got dressed up at special occasions because it was immodest
Uhhhh... dare I ask to explain what was going on with said mannequin? What kind of “special occasion” requires this... ritual?
Also, I can’t tell whether you are implying that it would have been better for your coworker to have been filtered out because you think they are too sensitive, or if you are implying that your office asks weird things of people. What is the “double-edged sword”?
OR some of these squabbles over lifestyle preferences should not be contested in an office space because people should not be living out their personal lives through office decorations or in anyway identifying with the office in such a way that the hefty and meaningful word "culture" implies. Everyone should have ample personal space and personal time and lives of their own. You shouldn't remember whether the office mannequin needed to be removed. That's a trifle.
At some point you have to give people incentives to actually want to work in an office culture. Stringent office professionalism is an ideal that is held up in conflicts, but no workplace looks that way.
Managers will quickly identify emotional needs and this adherence to neutrality is a telltale sign that something is bothering you. My task would be address that but also keep it from affecting other employees.
Makes me wonder if that particular individual would complain about a Pride Month email being "sinful". As a gay man I would refuse to work with someone like this.
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?
You better be able to articulate what job-relevant reason is behind your dislike and be able to express it in those terms. If you go with your gut feel alone, you could be easily selecting for physical attractiveness, extroversion, a nice smile or some of the many less acceptable biases. Maybe you have perfectly diverse personal discretion, but most people choose copies of themselves or attractive members of the opposite sex.
If you can't do better than "shitty personality," I guarantee I wouldn't hire you. On the other hand, "Unwilling to respect colleagues they wouldn't personally be friends with" is a valid reason to make a no-hire decision.
"Can you tell me about a time you didn't get along with a colleague and how you worked through that situation?" One of my go-to questions and often illuminating. A good answer I have heard somewhat often ends with, "Stupid Jerk was never my friend, but we figured out how to work together and produce value anyway."
A lot of behaviour is obvious in aggregate but hard to identify in particular cases.
If you make a job posting, get 5 applicants, interview 3 of them and hire 1 it's hard to point a finger and say you did (or didn't) do anything wrong.
But let's say over the course of a year you receive 10,000 applications for various positions and 15% of those are African American. Now say that 10% of applicants get to the interview stage but none of the African American applicants made it to the interview stage then, in the very least, that looks bad. You would need to justify why that's the case.
Discrimination can be subtle. A lot of people who are discriminatory but don't think they are. In the US, for example, you have what are called "second syllable names". These are names that are traditionally AFrican American (eg Lakisha). I vaguely recall reading a study where someone took a bunch of resumes for assistant positions and for a bunch with "first syllable names" they replaced just the name with "second syllable names" and there was a statistically significant decrease in response rate.
So your personal discretion doesn't extend to unlawful hiring and firing practices.
Sidestepping the parent (and the mention of the studies; I have heard of but not read them) to ask you a question:
Where did you find/learn the term "second syllable name" and "first syllable name"? I tried looking it up and struck out (aside from some requests for baby names like that), though it's quite descriptive and makes perfect sense.
It did lead me to the wikipedia article [0] about African-American names, which enlightened me a bit on the origins of some of those.
I believe (but I'm not 100% certain) that I personally first heard this term when I heard about these studies. I remember it because it's something that hadn't occurred to me.
But that's the thing: your mind is capable of making these subconscious connections. So if you happen to be discriminatory against African Americans, names are going to be a signal whether you realize it or not.
I'm oddly reminded of some TikToks I've seen recently where people talk about how they're unintentionally conditioned their dogs with things like "Thank you, good meeting" as something they always say at the end of a Zoom call and their dogs perk up because they know they're going to get attention, go for a walk or whatever.
Forming a connection doesn't require intent from either party.
I'm very aware of the biases that I gained growing up in my household and do my absolute best to crush them. That's why this term stuck out to me; it's not something I had heard but makes absolute sense when I look at how people in my family react to names.
This reminds me of a practice a recruiter used to boast when I applied for a job - throwing half the applications in the shredder without even reading them because they didn’t want to work with “unlucky people”. Albeit I was mildly curious about what mental gymnastics the person did to end up with such a frivolous way of not doing his job, I never left a building quicker ever since.
Someone company or gov organisation I can't recall who removed all names and gender data from their application process, it decreased the likelyhood of a woman getting hired. Everyone keeps saying we're all stained with some original sin of not being able to hire without awful biases, we're not to be trusted with our own thoughts.
While that trial didn’t have the desired result, didn’t it show or at least strongly suggest that gender and background are factors in recruiting in aggregate?
We can speculate what this means. One possibility is that the Australian public service overcompensates for gender bias by having a lower bar for female candidates. I can’t say if that’s true but this does seem to support the idea that some increase diversity with a lower hiring bar.
I remember the study about "second syllable names" and I remember a lot of people justifying it. "A good candidate would use a 'professional' sounding name".
And I'm sure none of those people justifying it in such a manner would similarly reject candidates that used a false name on their first pass for "acting in a dishonest manner". It's sort of a damned if you do damned if you don't situation unless you're cool going by Steve for the next few years.
Why don't you like them _and_ which of those reasons will affect their job performance?
Do they dismiss any approaches besides their own? Do they think mentoring is a waste of time? Do they think that their code is so obvious that there's no point in documenting? Do they think their code is so perfect that unit tests are unnecessary? These are good reasons to dislike someone and not hire them.
Do you dislike them because they seem kind of boring? Get over yourself.
They made Steve Jobs work the graveyard shift at Atari because he stunk so bad (he'd go weeks without showering) no one wanted to work with him. That had nothing to do with his skills or job performance, but everything to do with disrupting the work environment to the point where others couldn't perform to the best of their ability.
> Why don't you like them _and_ which of those reasons will affect their job performance?
> Do they dismiss any approaches besides their own? Do they think mentoring is a waste of time? Do they think that their code is so obvious that there's no point in documenting? Do they think their code is so perfect that unit tests are unnecessary? These are good reasons to dislike someone and not hire them.
> Do you dislike them because they seem kind of boring? Get over yourself.
This is an interesting discussion that brings a lot of vitriolic comments.
A counterpoint that you seem to be dismissing: building a successful team often requires a good cultural and team fit. Hiring just on 'merit' alone doesn't guarantee success.
Consider the example of hiring a 'superstar' that the other team members do not like which would consequently impact the performance of the team as a whole because they don't work optimally. For the manager in charge of the team, culture fit is an important factor alongside others.
You bring up the really interesting question - is discrimination justified? If it makes the team better, if it makes the product better, if it makes the company better, then maybe the right thing to do is hire the fun white guy instead of the boring brown girl.
If people believe that, then I'll only ask that they acknowledge it. Next time someone talks about gender disparity or race disparity, stand up and say "Yep, hiring isn't fair, the disparity isn't related to innate skills"
It would be a relief, frankly, if every one would just say that and agree on it. The problem is usually that when issues of race and gender disparity come up, a lot of posters then insist that hiring is perfectly fair and balanced and it must be the 'culture' of some races or the 'brain chemistry' of some genders that is the real problem.
I think there is a much more valid reason if people were being absolutely honest. Powerful and privileged people have spent generations spilling blood and other less violent measures to get on top and stay on top. Being on top only happens through threat of force and excercise of power. The people at the bottom will replace the people at the top if presented with the opportunity. Even if most people are content to live in equality, some will seek advantage and pull up their group. Otherwise kind and cooperative people rarely have any interest in lowering their status. Identity politics seek to treat symptoms but don't touch the root cause. The root cause is probably in our DNA and no social technology has yet proven able to tame the will to power.
And just to make it clear, I don't believe any group has any natural advantage over another, just historical and geopolitical advantage.
You make very good points - sometimes the best discussions are well down in the comments.
Currently, while men hold the majority of the economic and political power in the US. From a purely Machiavellian viewpoint, why should they hire anyone besides other white men? They only stand to lose if business and politics become more egalitarian.
What's changed in the past century or so is that it can no longer appear blatant - "we're better because we say so" isn't cutting it anymore. Still - maybe given a chance a lot of them will find a way to hire each other. "Team culture" is as good an excuse as any.
It seems more like a prisoner's dilemma situation, where hiring from an in-group only works if you trust other members of the in-group enough to return the favor. Otherwise they could "betray", hiring a better candidate from outside the group who will perform better in the role. The person betraying would get both a better employee and the social kudos of having a diverse hiring record. I'd expect the trust strategy is a lot more common among fraternities, religious groups, diaspora communities, etc where community bonds are much stronger.
And to restate your point, the business may gain greatly from diversity in leadership, but the in-group mainly stands to lose. If they don't stand to lose then it's not really power sharing, is it? In my experience, these efforts hit the wall the moment they seek any real piece of the power pie. That's the difference between talks-the-talk and walks-the-walk.
Do you mean diversity in race and gender? I thought the argument was that there's no differences between races and gender? I actually genuinely believe that everyone should be treated equally but your line of thinking seems to suggest race and gender matter in decision making, its contradictory.
So the only reason you get to the top is through force? That's ridiculous, in modern society people also get to the top through competence. When I look around at successful people I know it's because they worked hard, have the experience so that their judgement is respected. In other words people look to their authority on their given domain. Who do you mean in your day to day life that used violence to get there?
Can you elaborate a bit on your first point -- hiring the fun person over the boring one. Are you implying you are selecting culture over diversity, or that the persons perception of fun is biased by their preferences?
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.
This is quite a stretch to start connecting "love of your neighbor" to fascism. Now I start to understand the shift of Coinbase and Basecamp no politics policies. You can't win these games
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.
I think these two things are not examples of “culture fit”, but rather common work requirements. I don’t think there’s a company hiring specifically people that have negative attitude about the work they do and who are disrespectful to clients.
In my opinion, evaluation of culture fit is about things that are specific to the company, not “good” vs “bad”, but rather “we do this way, although other ways might be valid in other companies” and “we don’t do this way, although doing so in other companies has merit”.
For example, “we work as a family”. Surely work in this kind of company might bring more joy to some people, but will degrade work-life balance. Other company might have a culture of “work-life balance”, and if observed strictly, it will reduce the quality of team work, but will be much better long term for mental health of employees.
Both cultures are possible, and there are certainly people with strong preference for one culture or the other. I think it is crucial to articulate what kind of culture you have in your company, and select candidates who fit.
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.
> Is it discrimination if I own a company and only hire my friends who are into the same things as me?
Yes, any time you make a decision which treats people differently on any basis, is it is discrimination.
What you probably mean to ask is whether it is illegal discrimination. For which the answer is more complicated. It doesn't seem to be directly illegal discrimination, unless “into the same things” itself directly involves protected characteristics like religion. But it could still be illegal as disparate impact discrimination [0], if it has differential impact on a protected axis without sufficient business necessity.
If you are in the US, federal discrimination laws only apply if you have a certain number of employees.
Your state may have a specific and more restrictive law, but you are free to be as discriminatory as you want until you have at least 15 employees (under Federal law).
The difference between 15 and 20 on just age discrimination seems very arbitrary. How did they even come up with that instead of just putting it together with the rest of the stuff?
I have never found any source remotely close to it but it would be nice if we had a revision history on laws so we could see who added what lines and why. I'm guessing it is out there in some official record.
Serious answer: Yes, but it's legal discrimination. If you were doing so based on sex, race, or other protected class it would be illegal discrimination.
Yes. But then hiring itself is discriminatory unless it's random.. The whole point of interviews is to discriminate.
Back to the spirit of your question; it is legal discrimination. Frankly I support your ability to hire who you want at your company within legal bounds. I also support teams hiring people who will go to the pub so shrug.
If that implies that you're taking potential jobs away from people who would be better qualified, then absolutely. If the alternative is to just not hire anyone, then I don't see the problem—at that point you're basically paying friends to keep you company at your job.
Are you hiring them because you know them and you trust them? That is not discrimination. Are you hiring them because you want to win the tech-company beach volleyball tournament? That's discrimination.
You could probably get away with it. Would you feel good about yourself? Would you feel pissed if you found out that you didn't get a job you really wanted, only because another company was trying to fill out their rugby team?
Not really following your example, but let's say I hired them because I wanted to have someone to play multiplayer games with in the office. I give them money, and we both have a good time. The question is whether it's discrimination or not. To spice up the (highly hypothetical) example even more: I don't really need to hire anyone but I'm rich and want to be surrounded by friends so either they get hired to play games with me or the job isn't happening at all. No-one is missing out on the job... but could it still be discrimination?
Also, whether I trust them or not does not seem to matter according to your sibling comments.
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.
I suspect the majority of it is that a lot of managers are finding themselves at loose ends. A typical manager in an office environment spends a lot of time interacting with the people working under them. Now they're not able to do the majority of their work and... the people under them are still performing, often better. It would take an exceptionally self-aware person not to flinch from that truth.
Speaking from experience, the “culture” at Microsoft and Google (at least) definitely varies more between teams and divisions than between those two companies on-the-whole.
Fair enough. Nadella's hard push for the return is curious to me (I'm in the Seattle area, and close-ish to the campus with quite a few friends who work in a single team, so I'm a bit myopic, I suppose). They all seem to do well remotely, and I do also. I probably do work less hours, on the whole, but I produce more... so I dunno how that factors in. I can't speak to their quality of work, though.
I'd be curious to see how the productivity data working remotely scales out for people at different levels. As a new college hire I found that both working in the office and open offices improved my productivity, often explicitly at the expense of productivity for more experienced developers (because they were spending time answering my questions).
In the short term, it would be better for the more experienced developers to be more productive, because their time was worth more, but eventually the experienced developers will leave. If new people aren't trained to replace them fast enough, the system becomes unsustainable.
There are several other areas where eliminating certain activities provides short-term productivity gains at the expense of long-term cohesion. All hands meetings about company direction can be delayed for a month with no negative impact, but if I skip all large company meetings for a year I'd have a much harder time prioritizing tasks (it's unclear which contribute directly to the company's long-term plans and which are busy work) and no idea how to route serious issue only tangentially related to my team.
It's entirely possible there's a looming but currently well-hidden pipeline issue companies are anticipating and trying to avoid.
Full disclosure, I'm in my late forties, so there's a definite impact on my work flow there. I honestly think that a hybrid style is the best, but I don't need to be in more than once a week (if that - usually) to be completely honest. Most of my communications are done over Slack, in office or not =[ my team is small and we just aren't that chatty of a group except on certain subjects. We're excited about Dune, and I'm sure everyone not in our team is ecstatic that we haven't gone back to the office yet. When we have a work question, we put it in the Slack channel. Stands ups have moved to Slack as well, which are great because I can reference exactly what was said and not a summary email by a "Scrum Master" like I'm in some corporate fantasy sports league- no offense to scrum masters out there. I've met some cool ones. We email our progress and it's handled and update on JIRA. I dunno, there seem to be enough tools for me.
But, if you're starting out, it's a pain in the butt. When to ask questions and who to ask. Where to get guidance about what, and code reviews have to be done in person. They're super intimidating already (for me anyway). Meeting a core group of people your age at a company is important, as well. That's where you spend so much of your time and those social interactions can't be ignored. I keep in touch with people from jobs I worked at 20 years ago. They will help your network in life and career in the future, and that is all being stunted..... sorry. Got off track. But all important issues, depending on what stage of your life/career you're in.
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 really doubt that listening to people try to emulate the belter language and lingo is any better than listening to jar jar impressions (or klingon...), but it's hard to be say until it happens, so... bring it on
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.
There is a very large amount of studies that show that people like people that are like them.
The link you provide shows a coefficient of .47 for actual similarity, and .39 for perceived similarity. I'm not good at statistics, but that seems like a far cry from "the reason why people like other people is that they are like them." which is the line I was replying to. If I'm understanding it correctly it would be more accurate to say "people are somewhat more likely to like someone who is like them." If that's what was originally written, then I probably wouldn't have replied.
> The link you provide shows a coefficient of .47 for actual similarity, and .39 for perceived similarity. I'm not good at statistics, but that seems like a far cry from "the reason why people like other people is that they are like them." which is the line I was replying to. If I'm understanding it correctly it would be more accurate to say "people are somewhat more likely to like someone who is like them." If that's what was originally written, then I probably wouldn't have replied.
r, or Pearson's Correlation Coefficient [1], is a value from -1 to 1. for r < 0, the variables are negatively correlated, for r > 0 the variables are positively correlated, and for |r| ~= 0, the variables are uncorrelated. 0.47 and 0.39 are high values of correlation.
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'm not too greedy. Give me enough money I won't feel too guilty spending a half million on a Lagoon 40 catamaran and a quarter million on a Lamborghini Huracan and enough for a single-family beach house on Lake Michigan or Lake Superior, (and enough investments I can 4% withdraw about 70k a year) and I'll be satisfied.
when you get to a point of getting a car collection, you don't spend you start to invest in car collection, hence why you shift buying preferences to exotics with good track record of appreciating in value and simply lease everything else
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).
Depending on the bumper sticker, that's either absurd and a dangerous precedent -- or perfectly valid. Based on what you've described, I can only guess it is the former and not the latter.
IANAL but in California, it is certainly illegal to fire someone because they displayed a mainstream political party's bumper sticker on their car, even if it is not mainstream at the state level.
> 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.
I like lots of people I disagree with, why is not liking someone the key some problem? In fact I'm not sure anyone has defined the problem of with hiring people you like other than some unsubstantiated claim that we only like people of the same colour and background which in my experience is nonsense.
This. I love my disagreeable friends because having robust dialogue is fun for most of my ilk (although it is interesting that women have told us they (mistakenly) think that we are bitterly arguing, which makes them feel uncomfortable).
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.
2K, Disney, Niantic, Unity, WB, Roblox, Marvel are some others that are CA based that I can name off the top of my head.
The parent post does make a decent job of pointing out that it's pretty rotten, from the top to the bottom.
The players at the bottom are terribly toxic, the C-levels are allegedly just as bad.
I am curious if this is more about culture - I would imagine EA and Niantic for example to have a relatively boring office, just normal cubes and meetings. Just engineers and designers going to work.
Riot and Blizzard both have large flagship franchises that they practically decorate their offices around, statues and all. When I was talking to recruiters in the past, Riot stood out as one of those "don't bother applying if you aren't absolutely shitting passion for our games out of every hole" as culture fit.
I think Roblox is as big based on revenue, Unity has a very different development model, but the others seem a lot smaller than Riot/Activision-Blizzard.
My point about the C-Levels is that it is primarily 1 C-level who is being spoken about: The COO. While there was an allegation against the CEO earlier this year, it was found to be unsubstantiated and thrown out because the claimant was proved to have stolen money/scammed Riot and falsified the claim. I am not sure if it's fair to group all of the other executives into the same bucket as the COO.
I can see how the culture is playing a part in it. Riot has softened up on the "need not apply if not a gamer" in the past couple of years, but many of the people who started that are still there. I guess my big question is: Why Riot/Blizzard? Are they the worst companies in California right for sexual harassment and inclusion? These have been the two prominent DFEH cases against tech companies in the past couple of years.
I can't find anything about "thrown out because the claimant was proved to have stolen money/scammed Riot and falsified the claim"; the closest was Wired in March ('The three-person special committee, a part of Riot’s board of directors, is made up of Youngme Moon, a professor at Harvard Business School and the only publicly-named member of Riot Games’s board. She is joined by two male C-Level executives at the Chinese tech giant Tencent, which owns Riot Games. The company declined to name these members of the special committee.', which seems really one-sided)
I'll agree on Unity, apples to oranges, but 2K/T2 as a company is 3b revenue. EA is 5.5b revenue. Nexon is ~3b revenue. FrontOfficeSports and several other sites says League of Legends property was 1.75b for 2020 - both Niantic and Roblox exceed that as single games. Disney and Lucasgames are massive. Why aren't these lined up for DFEH suits or repeatedly being complained about by ex employees?
It is in the court filings, they are spread out and hard to find sometimes. In particular there is a link https://www.invenglobal.com/articles/13558/riot-games-ceo-fi... which outlines evidence of witness tampering, and other actions of the plaintiff. I believe some of the other filings have more information.
I honestly don't know, but I do think there is something with Riot/Blizzard culture that might make this type of behavior "normalized?". I guess my questions are more surrounding DFEH and tech in general. I don't know if Riot/Blizzard are the worst companies in the state, or are they?
> Riot and Blizzard both have large flagship franchises that they practically decorate their offices around, statues and all. When I was talking to recruiters in the past, Riot stood out as one of those "don't bother applying if you aren't absolutely shitting passion for our games out of every hole" as culture fit.
I interviewed at Riot when I was trying to move back to Saint Louis. I could not muster up very much enthusiasm for League, and you could just feel the room shift into "just get through this interview ASAP" mode.
> 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.
You're the first person to mention 'sexism' in this comment chain. Why is an investigation predicated on sexism? Why is sexual harassment not sufficient to warrant an investigation?
> 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
"it's common for men to talk down to men on video games too"
This is very tone deaf.
I have spent probably thousands of hours playing games (with a mic) and the % of times I've been "talked down to" is very small, and it was never because of a natural property about me (that I'm male, etc).
Literally every woman that I've played with who has used a mic or otherwise presented themselves as female has faced vitriolic harassment (and/or sexual harassment) for no reason other than that they were female. I've been in lobbies with them and suddenly see men becoming -far- more judgemental and critical about the female player's ability/skill than usual. This is why a lot of women don't use mics at all or otherwise identify themselves as female in online games.
The "talking down" (or just general random toxicity) that men sometimes face from other male players is not even remotely comparable.
I think the poster's "talk down to" was more referring to the general "shit talking" people do in games. Even if you have a generic username and never speak, people will talk crap, be a jerk, or whatever. Even games that provide built in messages can get converted into trash talk (Rocket League, Overwatch, etc.). Having something "identifiable" just lets trash talkers switch from "you're terrible" to something else.
Well, sure, those things exist. What I'm getting at is that the % of it that happens purely because I'm -male- (or another natural property about me) is basically zero. Either they're just being belligerent in general or they perceive me to be underperforming (rightly or wrongly).
Whereas when I play with women who e.g. use a mic, very frequently it's like a switch gets flipped and people start being weird, overtly sexual, or just flat out insanely critical of every little thing the female players do. If we start losing the round (in e.g. Overwatch), they start blaming the female players unfairly, etc.
Obviously this is all anecdata but from everyone that I've spoken to it's a very common experience, hence most of my female friends just eschewing the mic entirely or only playing with specific groups instead of general matchmaking.
> a switch gets flipped and people start being weird, overtly sexual, or just flat out insanely critical of every little thing the female players do
I have no doubt that this occurs and I've even intervened in that type of behavior before; I think I hold more toward the "Greater Internet F---wad Theory" [1]. People will act like jerks and attack you for whatever traits you have. Adults trash talk 12 year olds; 12 year olds trash talk adults.
I'm not saying people should grow thicker skin, but rather that we haven't really figured out a way to NOT have trash talking. Maybe collaborative style games over competitive, but even then, those require interactions and communication, which leads us back to Penny-Arcade.
The difference between "squeakies" is everyone was a squeakie at one point. It's basically an internet right-of-passage whether that is right or wrong.
Regardless, all squeakies get to stop being squeakies eventually. Women don't get that option. Women don't get to grow out of being women or being harassed for who they are.
I mean, I don't disagree with you that having a thick skin on the internet, but it's unfair that men get to make women feel unwelcome in online spaces simply for being women.
There's a large chasm between friendly teasing and harassment.
> every woman ... has vitriolic harassment faced (and/or sexual harassment).
I experienced being treated differently when I was playing a very attractive Blood Elf Warrior in World of Warcraft ten years ago: a fellow adventurer would continually give me gifts (valuable in-game items).
The third time this happened I realized he wasn't being generous—he was courting me! I had to come clean.
I messaged him, "Dude, I gotta tell ya: I'm not a girl in real life."
"You're not?"
"No, I'm a balding man in his mid-forties."
Long pause, and then he replied, "I gotta take a cold shower."
I never heard from him again, but he seemed like a nice guy who was trying to get a girlfriend by doing nice things for her, and I hope he found what he was looking for.
Aren’t all blood elf warriors equally attractive? Assuming any given female blood elf warrior is actually a female IRL needs a major reality distortion field.
You'd be surprised how many folks fall into this distortion field though (and I fully agree with how silly this is). It's enough such that my partner and many of her female friends only play female avatars in private games.
> '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.
My point is that there is any controversy when there is a game where the female main character is not explicitly sexualized. You are absolutely right that there are beloved female main characters, but they are almost always shown and viewed in a sexualized manner rather than as a human being.
And yes, there are definitely 'sexualized' men (God of War) but they never seem to be explicitly in there as sexual objects rather than as part of the story. Like, if you took Lara Croft out and replaced her with a red square, would that game be regarded as the same? Probably not.
People legit get mad about Aloy (Horizon Zero Dawn) being unattractive and "looking manly". Maybe not a massive controversy, but enough that I, someone who passively follows video game news, know about it.
I agree thought that my original post was poorly worded and not specific enough about my perceived reception of female characters in video games. I was trying to incorporate "female main character" and "unattractive female characters" into one point and failed.
> I agree thought that my original post was poorly worded and not specific enough about my perceived reception of female characters in video games. I was trying to incorporate "female main character" and "unattractive female characters" into one point and failed.
Fair enough, thanks for acknowledging as much. :)
> You are absolutely right that there are beloved female main characters, but they are almost always shown and viewed in a sexualized manner rather than as a human being. And yes, there are definitely 'sexualized' men (God of War) but they never seem to be explicitly in there as sexual objects rather than as part of the story. Like, if you took Lara Croft out and replaced her with a red square, would that game be regarded as the same? Probably not.
Even still, Lara Croft seems like every bit as much a "human being" as the average male main character? And I don't buy your "red square" example--it's not like you could replace any of the ripped shirtless dudes in various video games with a red square and have the same experience either.
I actually believe that female characters are probably sexualized a bit more often than male characters, and male characters are regarded as objects of violence quite a lot more than female characters. But if there is a loser here, it's not obvious to me that it's the female gender.
What is wrong with sexualized characters anyway? It's escapist entertainment. Are men now forbidden from enjoying attractive women in media? Absolutely don't harass people or discriminate, but this posture against sexualized characters is weirdly puritanical, especially considering the long history in games of non-sexualized, empowered female protagonists.
> What is wrong with sexualized characters anyway?
The answer probably heavily depends if you ask an US American or a Frenchmen. Same with bro culture, that I don't see intrinsic in tech and much more a product of other influences.
There's also an infamous (at the time, anyway) shot of her in Other M. Of course, if you're familiar with the story it's obvious that there's nothing like sexual objectification involved. It makes perfect sense that she's on the floor unconscious in the Zero Suit with her ass pointed directly at the camera, because she was just attacked without warning by a man who she's uncharacteristically submissive toward.
People also got mad about Tifa's bust size apparently being reduced to a more realistic level in FF7R. It's nuts that we just kind of accept this as a culture.
We also accept a whole lot of impossibly jacked shirtless dudes but there's barely any public outcry against this. Even worse, video games are extraordinarily violent (I play lots of FPS games, so I'm not criticizing fans of violent games per se) and anyone concerned about the effects of violence on society is lambasted as a pearl-clutching conservative parent from the 1980s.
Both absolutely true. However, regarding overly jacked dudes, there is no history of women in gaming culture harassing developers for putting a beer gut on the male protagonist of a video game, nor any talk about "bulge physics" or whatever the equivalent of "jiggle physics" would be.
I think that speaks to the relative paucity of women in "gaming culture" rather than the purity of women. Were there a concentrated community of female gamers, I wouldn't be surprised if they levied such complaints (consider for example any of the commentary on male Olympic divers in predominantly female circles).
I was thinking about that after walking away for a bit.
I don't _hate_ sexualization of characters. Like, totally. Let's make sexy characters that we all adore, but let's not make it a default where female characters _have_ to be sexy.
I am all for the ridiculous boob sliders or boob physics or whatever, I think it is just that there is an expectation in video games that a female character has to either be sexy or not exist.
If there was a widely accepted place for female characters that are just another character, just a human being existing, just like male characters are, then we could have a space where you have those like hyper-attractive female characters just like games currently have the Adonis-attractive male characters.
Yeah, I agree with that. Tifa had a huge rack, but she was also a fully fleshed out character and not really sexualized outside of being a nebulously romantic interest of Cloud's. Her bust size was reduced in the remake because, and I'm guessing here, they were going for a more realistic look than the superdeformed look of the original and it would have been out of place [0].
The problem is that the backlash was entirely in the form of man-children making this out to be some woke appeasement move because they can't ogle quite as much volume of virtual knockers. And even worse is that, as a culture, we just kind of shake our heads at this and ignore it.
[0] Barret is still ripped as fuck, but his proportions are much better. The Rock actually looks like that.
Try and replace attractive men and woman in movies with average people and see how quickly movie sales will drop. Men and woman enjoy watching attractive men/woman doing interesting stuff.
If 1% of a fanbase of 10 million gets mad then you have 100k angry people. And of those a percent or so will be insane people who likely will murder someone in real life at some point, its just statistics. And those one thousand insane people will create a lot of ruckus, but that doesn't mean their views are shared with the community in general.
> 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.
> We're talking about the same career that's been known as a money-printing machine for the past 25 years?
20 years ago it was fairly frequently perceived as both very nerdy in an unpopular way and in imminent danger of being outsourced entirely.
It's sad how many people who had to put up with bullying for their interests back then quickly became bullies themselves when they had the opportunity. Of all people, we should know better.
Man. I went to high school in the late 90s, and we didn't even have a CS course. We did have a "programming" class, and it was taught using Pascal. It wasn't a required class, and only the "nerds" (such as myself) took it. And my high school was a brand-new school that was branded as a "tech magnet" school, in a relatively well-off area.
You certainly can have a career that's lucrative, but not prestigious. I've been coding for over 25 years and in that time, have been referred to as a "nerd", "geek", etc... pretty much the entire time. Not prestigious monikers. Most people that I encounter do not act as though my career is a "money-printing machine", but rather that I do some, strange, arcane, thing that they could never approach (or would want to), that is very difficult, but yes, finally, makes money. They see my title as prestigious, but not programming. The people I see with different attitudes about programming/prestige/gender are much younger (<30). I don't fully understand their attitudes yet.
To be honest though - geek and nerd have become prestigious monikers. I think that management and sales still reign supreme in terms of prestige but skilled individual contributors are being more recognized as cogs that make a company run smoothly... and after the 00's worth of culture we've seen a shift where technical aptitude has become more praiseworthy.
I guess that depends on where you are. I still don't think of geek and nerd as conferring prestige. IMO they just aren't (as) stigmatized anymore, and are mostly neutral descriptors.
And fifty years ago it was incredibly female dominated - the "male shift" in CS is easy to observe and pretty handily defeats any of those false claims you'll see about "men's brains being wired" for programming. It's important to remember that men muscled women out of programming initially once the field became seen as something more than a secretarial position.
As you pointed out CS was once secretarial work. But what constituted CS also underwent a transformation during that time period. No one was muscled out so much as barriers to entry broke down thanks to market forces.
I am a programmer like my mother before me - but while I've had it easy working in high level language like C++ and PHP she worked in binary and, only toward the end of her career assembler. She made banks work using nothing but low level machine instructions which far exceeds the rudimentary stuff I'm doing today. Eventually she graduated up to management and project planning, but this was back in the day where individual contributors never made much money directly - if you wanted to keep getting raises you had to career track switch to management.
I don't disagree that programming itself did significantly shift, but it's been perpetually getting easier, not more difficult, to work professionally at.
This is patently untrue. Men started to dominate when it turned from a "secretarial" position into an engineering job, as they did in ... wait for it ... actual engineering.
> once the field became seen as something more than a secretarial position.
It's not just perception; "Computers" used to refer to employees performing calculations manually for numerical methods. Then "Computer Operators" were secretaries translating assembly instructions written on paper into the correct octal code to punch on cards to feed the machine. They got the instructions from engineers. The teletype made their work obsolete, but you can still see the demographic shift in "Computer Related Occupations" as aggregated on government data.
I think you have to go to the 1940s and 1950s for programming being a “secretarial position”. That was 70 and 80 years ago.
It’s not even a valid comparison at that point, it’s too different. CS back then was completely different than today or even the recent past. As one example, computational complexity wasn’t even a thing until the 1960s with Hartmanis and Stearns.
There was a lot more time spent on inputting programs and data than today.
And not just more so - but more so with worse tools to do it with. There are really hard problems in development these days that we all deal with - and we only deal with them because we're standing on the shoulders of giants - most of whom were women.
Common wisdom was that going to be completely outsourced in "the next decade". Then Google, Facebook and the rise of SV proved all of them wrong.
Internationally? No. In a lot of countries there's no track for ICs, no staff engineers and you are supposed to go into management. Programming is seen as brick-laying. Ironically, that's one of the reasons outsourcing failed so bad...
It was prestigious to be a computer-adjacent business person for the past 30 or 40 years. But there wasn't much prestige involved in the actual work of building, or programming, computers (unless you became rich and turned into a business person).
In my experience prestige has been a lot more about which company I worked at than the role. If anything my being a programmer detracted somewhat from prestige outside the company, while adding to it only within.
Its a bit more recent than 25 years, probably 2003-2005 maybe.
When I was a young "computer nerd" who went off to college we had a pretty decent CS program but it was awfully dusty to those not into it. I think there were maybe 5-10 "great" CS programs in the US, now major cities have 2-5 real "learn to code" programs outside of colleges.
In 96, a "programmer" could make decent money but it was defo not a money printing machine.
It paid significantly less than other engineering fields, and much, much less than specializations in finance, medicine and law (which artificially constrain supply through various gatekeeping mechanisms) up until recently, when the wage-fixing and anti-poaching policies were quashed.
There were also two periods in the past 25 years where it was very difficult to find work, especially for entry-level, without there being an especially large glut of engineers. Dot-com bust and the 2007 recession.
known by whom? I got halfway through my CS degree before I realized software paid significantly better than other STEM work, and I'm in my twenties. my parents weren't convinced it wasn't all a waste of time until I showed them my first offer letter.
I believe the common response here to this sort of comment is "yes, not all men, but too many men", and that it's the responsibility of men to call out the men they see being that kind of deplorable on their actions, to reduce the frequency of those men.
Shaming all men for what a (bad) subset of men do is sexist. Shaming all white men for what a (bad) subset of white men do is sexist and racist.
Shaming all black men because some black men are criminals is racist.
Highlighting that the (good) majority should call out the (bad) minority is reasonable. Blaming the whole is not. It's true regardless of the target race, or sex, or gender, etc.
"Men" is both a social and biological differentiator. They are the only ones with power to stop this if they want to. We can play philosophy but reality is what it is. Sexism continues because men look the other way, not because women endure it.
It still feels so strange to me to criticize an entire race or gender lump for a perceived trait of that group (here, the trait of not calling out sexism enough).
I mean, I could've probably left "white" out and it would've been just as accurate.
I do apologize for my "shoot from the hip" and should've been less specific about "white men" vs "men". I can't be totally sure of a racist undertone in tech since I am white. I don't know _for sure_ if PoC men feel the same discrimination.
> 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.
My guess would be the poster is referring to The Last of Us Part 2, where criticism of the storyline was presented by most mainstream media as people hating the female lead character. But one could also easily argue that it's the actions taken in the story that cause people to hate her.
Most people I know took issue with the bait and switch, as anyone watching the promotional material would have expected something quite different than Abby... playing golf. It reminds me of a similar tactic film journalists used with The Last Jedi, deflecting to complaining about fans' alleged bad behavior rather than taking a hard look at whether the criticism is merited. It's a lot easier to find a handful of the dumbest criticisms on Twitter and dunk on that strawman though I suppose.
...which it should be noted is actually a lackluster sequel with an incoherent plot regardless, so not all of the negative reviews are by racist misogynists.
ITYM Horizon: Forbidden West. They changed Aloy's face to make it less attractive and feminine since the first game, perhaps to check some "anti-sexualization" checkbox on some designer's list. No one had a problem with her appearance in the first game, but the sudden Seth Rogenization of her face was offputting, like an actor getting plastic surgery and looking not only worse, but very not like themself.
I hadn't heard that. I had seen that controversy but took it as the same issue coming up and more people complaining she wasn't conventionally attractive, rather than the studio 'dulling down' her looks on purpose. TIL.
I guess I totally missed what Aloy looked like during the first game and didn't realize they had changed how she looked.
To be honest, I actually like how she looks now. She looks like you'd expect someone to look like in a post-apocalypse world and looks like someone you'd pass on the street.
From a cursory glance at the comparison shot I'd say it looks like she got a bit older and her face saw a lot more direct sunlight. Pretty reasonable changes if you ask me.
But they said 2018 which implies there is a specific game in mind. Forbidden West was announced in 2020. Based on other answers it sounds like Battlefield V.
I understand this is a common theme but I was actually curious which specific game they were talking about.
It was not criticized because there was a woman, it was criticized because there was a cyborg woman when it was supposed to be a WW2 game.
And I think it was indeed a really stupid picture. Also my grandmother was a prisoner of war of the nazis and got real medals. That fantastic representation of women in war is just idiotic and distorts history to the point of absurdity.
Does calling her a "cyborg women" automatically mean it isn't period-appropriate? My 2 minutes of research seems to indicate that there is nothing anachronistic about the tech[1].
It really does earn that Metacritic score, doesn't it? Almost a perfect game in every way. No plot holes, no silly characterization, totally fun game from start to finish.
Look up what sparked Gamergate. It was largely based in men getting mad about women calling games out for being misogynistic.
I am sure some was valid criticism. I am not really a fan of "every game must be progressive", etc. but the fact men got mad that women dared criticize video games should say a lot about the state of the video game industry.
Not only that, but also, for a long time, video games just weren't marketed to girls at all. All video games catered to males and were specifically targeted as such.
It's mainly the Wii, Nintendo DS and Switch that were a big on-ramps for women into mainstream gaming. Even now, many men assume "female gamer == Candy Crush" or some other weird idea. Or joke that if you are a woman on a video game that you _must_ be a trap.
That wasn't what Gamergate was about at all. What started it was first Doritogate, and later the Zoey Quinn and Anna Anthropy Business (both cases of women getting lackluster or bad games reviewed just because they had some kind of relationship with the journalist, Zoey her boyfriend accused her of seducing the journalist, and Anna Anthropy was roomate of journalist that covered her games).
The misoginy accusations came later, and only then the whole thing morphed into a culture war thing.
Yes, threats happened, nasty stuff happened, but part of it was false flag too, for example Brazillian police arrested a Brazillian that was making death threats in the name of Gamergate, but also was making such threats in name of a ton of other random organizations, the guy just liked to see the world burn and was self-professed progressive.
The misogyny was the driving force from the start. The original 'Quinnspiracy', before it became 'Gamergate', was a harassment campaign organized around the blatantly false claim that Quinn had slept with a gaming journalist to get good reviews of her work (the only mention he ever made of her work was before they even met).
The guy that made the accusations was her former boyfriend, and seemly not a gamer.
Around that time people were also upset with other journalists, the Quinnspiracy thing became just the straw that broke the camel back, and gamers weren't upset because she was female, they were upset because Kotaku kept making shitty articles.
It is mostly true though. Of course all genres has some women but they skew very heavily in that direction. Strategy games etc barely has any women at all, especially the more complicated ones. Instead they mostly play puzzle games, and more social games like mmorpgs or story based games like rpg's.
I don't know what mmorpgs you've been playing but they hardly count as social games anymore. I used to play MUDs and those tended to be pretty evenly gender divided and all about that social aspect (at least the ones I played). MMORPGs today are closer to either the MOBA or an RTS with twitch based responses and tactical understanding being key to play at the top levels.
I don't have a full knowledge of everything, but I can say with certainty that there are several women who can clean up in AoE2 - even with its top echelons being male dominated (and a relatively non-toxic community from what I've seen). I think that women tend to go unseen intentionally in a lot of video games, avoiding mic use if possible and masquerading as men to avoid sexual attention and abuse.
If I remember correctly, the gamergate controversy was about a female indie developer dating a male indie game journalist. I can imagine why that would make people search for conflicts of interests.
Nope. Gamergate was about an abusive former boyfriend of a female indie developer stepping waaaaaay out of line, exposing details of their relationship in a blog post, while also claiming she slept with a game journalist (and then later saying he had no evidence of that).
That journalist briefly mentioned her work once (before she started dating that abusive boyfriend), so conflict of interest argument never made any sense, because... you know, he never actually wrote a review of any of her games.
It then spiralled even more out of control, targetting even more female developers for even more bullshit reasons. Brianna Wu was the target because she mocked Gamergate. Felicia Day was doxxed just for saying she was scared to even mock Gamergate (knowing what happened to Wu). Anita Sarkeesian for daring to kickstart a YouTube series about how women are represented in video games.
In other words, Gamergate was about absolutely nothing but misogyny.
Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend claimed that she was dating a gaming journalist to get good reviews. She was dating that gaming journalist, but the only things he'd written about her work were from before they'd met. Despite that, an endless parade of assholes on the internet immediately used that to justify harassment, doxxing, rape and death threats, hacking of accounts, etc.
The ex-boyfriend wrote a post about her infidelity. I have seen the claim that he constructed the story to maximize impact, but the fact that she cheated on him was not disputed. Also the other claim was that the positive coverage was made before they were dating, not before they met, you have to take their word that they were not involved earlier so that point is rightly controversial.
My take is/was similar to David Pakman's: there's evidence of non ethical behavior in the videogame journalism and how the topic was handled, but so what? it's not really one of the greatest issues that plague mankind at this moment. With that in mind, I bear no doubt that the whole thing was astroturfed to culture war topic by right talking heads. But this is in my opinion mishandled on the left, as I dare to say most of the people following the event were not really involved in politics, and were fed a narrative by the misogynists and anti-sjw types.
This is like saying WWI was about the life of an Austrian royal. Yes, you might be technically right, but it grew so big and so many people were fighting for so many different reasons that the specific spark isn't that relevant.
The post you're responding to is just repeating the same 'just asking questions' crap that led to the harassment campaign in the first place.
What actually happened is pretty well-documented: a woman developer made a short game about dealing with depression to which various people then responded with rape and death threats; her ex-boyfriend lied about her sleeping with a gaming journalist in exchange for good reviews (the only things said journalist ever wrote about her work was before they met); and thousands of people then jumped on that as a justification for further harassment, doxxing, and wild conspiracy theories that persist to this day.
Is there any documentation why people harassed her that isn't just speculation? The gamer culture works just like twitter mobs, they attack things for almost no reason and do it hard, harassment and death threats etc. There is no big plan or conspiracy behind it, just thinking that maybe she slept with some reviewer to increase her score is enough to trigger the hate mob.
With that said, I'm not saying it was justified. Gamers are biased against women, yes. Gamers overreact and harass people who don't deserve it, yes. But they don't just harass any woman who publishes games, there are thousands of women who do that and nobody cares. It requires a spark, just like a twitter mob, and they become relentless attacking the target. And of course, if you accuse them of misogyny here they start attacking you, since they didn't attack her due to misogyny, similarly how when a twitter mob attacks a man with little evidence they don't do it due to misandry, they just attack someone they think did something wrong.
Speculation? Her former boyfriend wrote a blog post detailing their relationship (and lying that she slept with a game journalist, something he later said had no evidence of), someone posted it on 4chan, they tried to spin it as "ethics in game journalism" discussion (which never made any sense since he never reviewed any of the games she worked on). That's all there is to it, and it's pretty well documented.
You speculated about the motive of the harassers, not the actual chain of events. Nothing you say here says that the harassers attacked her for being a woman instead of attacking her for cheating the game review system.
I didn't speculate shit, I read those threads as they were happening. You know what they've boiled down to? She was a woman (with a couple of feminist takes), this dude made allegations against her, therefore let's doxx her.
> instead of attacking her for cheating the game review system.
Again, he never reviewed any of her games, so unless your argument is that no game journalist should ever date any game developer under any circumstances, what system was she cheating exactly?
You put way too much credit in the intelligence of hate mobs. People attack others for nonsense all the time. And I don't view gender bias as misogyny. Women are biased to believe women and men are biased to believe men, that is just natural. So men accusing women leads to male hate mobs, and women accusing men leads to female hate mobs. Of course male hate mobs are usually more vicious, but the workings are the same.
I didn't say she did. Hate mobs can attack people for things that aren't true, happens all the time. There is a reason why we don't use hate mobs in the justice system.
For example, lets say a twitter mob attacks a man for something he didn't do. Is that misandry? No, they did it thinking he actually did it.
Gamergate was a harassment campaign organized against women in gaming. It was organized by men who were assmad that a female game developer released a game with a mental health theme rather than the usual focus on skill and violence favored by men, to critical acclaim. Her dating and sexual history were brought into it because that is a common tactic used by men to undermine women and discredit their achievements.
Once again -- men got mad because a woman dared to release a game that didn't cater to their expectations or desires. That's Gamergate in a nutshell.
For anyone wondering, there was plenty of harassment, doxxing, and a number of rape and death threats against Zoe Quinn entirely because people hated her short game Depression Quest for being "political" or "not a game", well before the term 'Gamergate' or any of the 'ethics in journalism' conspiracy nonsense even came into the picture.
Quinn's ex-boyfriend, who made the original claims, later explicitly said:
> To be clear, if there was any conflict of interest between Zoe and Nathan regarding coverage of Depression Quest prior to April, I have no evidence to imply that it was sexual in nature.
For further context, the only coverage the journalist in question made of Quinn's work was before they had met, and well before the April in question.
>For further context, the only coverage the journalist in question made of Quinn's work was before they had met, and well before the April in question.
The article was published March 31st, and they started dating in early April. What's your definition of "Well before"?
> 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.
That's general smack talk, which can be brutal, but is besides the original point. The bigger point is that if a woman's sex is revealed, say by using voice chat, then it is inevitable until they are harassed and insulted for being a woman and receive misogynistic insults. Do you understand why that is different from general insults?
It's not all that different, it's just extra ammunition. If they hear you are a male with a lisp or your voice sounds hispanic or black, they will attack that too. The gender part is just low hanging fruit but all of it is equally fucked up.
I tried playing Heroes of Newerth at some point, which was a DOTA clone with voice comms. Right in the first round I get told that I need to be raped and murdered by some punk. I didn't take it personally but that's a very bad onboarding experience and a good learning opportunity for game designers. It's also likely it's the type of game that attracts the more aggressive/testosterone driven player.
Contrast that to say World of Warcraft or LOTRO where most people are very nice, and any ladies that come up on voice comms are treated with respect. This is just anecdata I guess.
> 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
- Princess Peach is exactly the type of "conventionally attractive" character the poster was mentioning. A young, white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, damsel-in-distress - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Peach
Peach was one of 4 playable characters in Super Mario world 2, released in 1989.
The Samus reveal in Metroid is notable for the exact opposite of what you stated. There were no curves or skin tight anything. This continued with Super Metroid.
It's MS Pacman, IIRC. And... while they were shown having a kid together, I don't think any formal wedding ceremony was ever shown. Quite progressive for its day.
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?
It's not trash talk. I can handle trash talk. It's stuff like "Ah, a f_cking girl. Cool guys, now we are going to lose", before the round even starts, or "Get back to the kitchen, B_TCH" or just harassing me until I leave the game, either through team-killing or preventing me from playing.
And if everyone is "behaving", I get treated differently in PUGs than just another team member. I don't want that. I don't want special attention or treatment. And then you get harassed for your social media or phone number or get incessant in-game messages or get asked if you're hot or some other variation of thing that isn't "Yo, you, we are doing X, Y, Z. Sound good?" like you are just part of the team.
Just wanted to say, as a male, I had this exact experience. I was playing Pavlov VR using my wife's account. Steam profile avatars float next to people in that game, so people assumed I was female. I didn't have a mic, so I couldn't correct them. A group of people started repeatedly asking whether I was female, not for any purpose other than "hurr durr female," and then ultimately hunted me down. I forget exactly what the game was (there are custom games, so it changes from map to map) but it was exactly the feeling you describe here, of "this is totally unrelated to anything in the game."
It was eye-opening, and I'm sorry you have to deal with it.
This should be a "challenge" (if those are still a thing), to be performed by anybody who believes that the issue doesn't exist. Create a female account for some online game and see how much fun you will be allowed to have with it.
There are meme "speedrun any%" videos on YouTube for this sort of thing, so there are probably some real ones out there.
FWIW I made a female character on FFXIV (partly to see if this sort of thing would happen) and never encountered this. Maybe I put out a male vibe with how I move and play (I heard we jump around a lot more). But in my experience that game's populace skews far more heavily female than normal, and a lot of the guys I met also play as female characters so maybe that's why.
The trash talk isn't the issue. When I, a male, join a multiplayer session I'm largely ignored. If I'm talked to, yes it's usually to trash talk me.
But when a female joins a session, they become the center of attention. They can't simply play the game; everyone is watching them and wanting to interact with them. In addition to that, the conversations from other players isn't just trash talk, it usually includes a heavy mix of flirting and sexual advances. Not funny, trolly, trash talk sexual advances. But intentional advances.
Not to mention the stalking outside of that session that females can experience.
The vast majority of people joining a multiplayer session are there to relax and have fun. Not get hit on by strangers on the internet, be the center of attention, or be open to harassment even after the session.
But that applies to anywhere though. As a man you can sit alone in a bar and nobody will bother you, as a woman lots of people will come up and start to speak with you and possibly get angry if you don't want to speak with them. The fact that the same happens in games isn't evidence that there is something particularly wrong about gamers, rather it is the exact same social game that happens in all leisure spaces.
Of course it would be better if women didn't have to deal with it, but you can't just blame this on gamers since men everywhere does the same thing.
This doesn't match tho, atleast in my various experiences in MMOs. The stuff female friends had to deal with for being female is pretty big.
Unwanted dick pics and other unwated advances, stalking, people masturbating in voicechat. Comments like "do you really want to listen to females"/"she's sleeping with xyz to get a raidspot".
I never had to deal with that. I get a generic idiot/retard/kys comment every now and then and that's it. No stalking, no dick pics.
yeah, you're missing the potential on-paper profits to be made from making video games more accessible to a wider audience by sanitizing them and their communities. whether this change is is a good idea in the long run or not can be debated, but that's where the last decade or so of rhetoric against "toxic gamer culture" is coming from, regardless of what is said.
could any of the downvoters please tell me how I'm wrong?
Having been a gamer for over 30 years now I can assure you that "toxic gamer culture" is very much a thing. You think swatting people is something a healthy culture of good-natured ribbing does?
I didn't say it wasn't a thing, and taking things to that extreme isn't really having a good-faith discussion. I said that "toxic gamer culture" has always been a thing, until these large corporations realized that sanitizing it could, in theory, lead to more people playing their AAA games, thus resulting in higher profits. what's controversial about this statement?
The way you start by questioning weather or not making things less toxic is a good idea and put quotes around "toxic gaming culture" sure makes your post read like you were brushing off the whole thing as some kind of overly-woke-brigade cancel-fest or something.
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?
I didn't get that vibe, but can definitely understand that. I actually disliked it at first until I realized I was being lumped in with people who had an agenda I didn't have ("Women didn't fight in wars! Women avatars should only be allowed to play Medic!")
I mean, Battlefield has never really been about super serious war simulator, it has always had a goofy undertone.
Battlefield has always been a little wacky. They had an offshoot game that was TF2 meets BF, everything cartoon-y. Then their _main line_ games for a few years involved a rogue group of US soldiers who blew stuff up, drove around in golf carts and had humorous lines. After that, they had a game that was cops-and-robbers meets BF.
People who mix up ARMA and BF, and I don't say this to be mean, probably aren't real Battlfield fans. Battlefield has never _necessarily_ been about realism or pure historical accuracy.
There has always been wacky tactics that aren't just purposefully put in but explicitly promoted by their trailers (see Zooking, Rendzooking and my favorite, loopzooking.)
Like, yeah, I too was thrown off by the triple amputee woman in the trailer. It was a little weird, I thought / hoped they were going for a cyberpunk / time-traveling motif but nope. I am more than happy to discuss how DICE & EA has ruined Battlefield though, that much I do agree with and likely ties into poor marketing and PR.
You can see how they're going all-in on the 'wacky' part with the trailers for BF2042. Driving away from a tornado in a tuk-tuk, a knives vs defibrillators battle, etc.
I am so excited for BF2042. I've had to remind myself a few times about not pre-ordering it.
I hope, with the weather stuff and higher end hardware, they lean more into destructive environments. I am still kind of surprised they haven't and have been re-using the same destruction and relying on a single scripted large-scale destruction.
I want to get that feeling of the first time using a grenade launcher to open up walls but even better.
I guess it may be more about game design and keeping maps accessible rather than a technical limitation or a lack of desire on DICE's part.
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.
Whether we like or not, streamers are very influential to the gaming community, all of the games that blew up in the pandemic (among us, fall guys...) Blew up because of streaming.
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.
Yeah, absolutely - but Activision is a behemoth compared to Blizzard. I'm just saying that WoW players will probably care, but in general customers of Activision likely won't notice.
> 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.
The 'problem' with people who are invested in you is that when you do something they really don't like, up to and including breaking their trust, they push back instead of leaving.
They will stick with you through little fuckups, but if you want to make a big change, for better or worse, then you're going to hear about it.
It's why ex-smokers and ex-drinkers complain about having to stop hanging out with their old friends. It's not just the temptation to revert, there's also social pressure for you to be the old you. If you want to go the other direction and become an ass, you're in for a similar treatment.
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.
The video game company I worked at was a disaster of spaghetti code that was written by engine developers/jack-of-all-trade developers with no semblance of caring about maintainability. Every milestone was a new disaster of tech debt that was built upon the foundation of previous tech debt.
It was difficult to hire new grades or less experienced developers because the cost to train them in the custom frameworks, infrastructure, and other technologies was exceptionally high.
It was terrible and there weren't a lot of excuses for it. My only point is that there are a lot of nuances to hiring from the talent pool.
If it's so had to train in new people it sounds like you already have a spaghetti code problem.
You might want to get an outsider to take a look at your custom frameworks, infrastructure, and other technologies to see what can be done to straighten that out.
However, When the leadership is not aligned with this goal of approachability or maintainability of the software then it is not possible for new engineers or people to bring change. The old guard needs to be influenced or removed, which is a challenge when they are the ones who created (and continue to promote) the crap that causes this.
>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.
I was under the impression that junior devs aren't that hard to come by in any development category (a specific type of junior will be more likely to join a AAA team for sure). I suspect senior staff is harder to get just like any other industry - but I have no insight into this industry.
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.
It's difficult to understand how bloody stupid mass-firing of employees is, in order to protect a culture where a small minority harass and abuse others.
It's also difficult to understand how a billion-dollar business gets to this point, with what seems like zero adult oversight, but it is what it is.
Putting unions and anarchy as polar opposites...you have no idea how pro-union anarchist are, because they're extremely pro-union.
I gotta give the state props for that trick, made the word dirty with a flawed definition, a bit like how the CIA made the term "conspiracy theory" mean nutjob, and not "criminal conspiracy by those in power"
People in the QA department that are enduring the terrible conditions just for a shot at a game designer/programmer role.
The video game industry has a real problem retaining talent because so many people glorify how "fun" working on video games must be. There are always replacements, but they aren't always good.
It may be a step up for many. What's a shit-job for you might be a step-upping stone for someone else, who's opportunity selection is more limited than your own.
> 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.
Walkouts of this sort are considered protected activity under the NLRA, regardless of whether or not the people involved belong to a union.
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.
Having worked with overseas contractors on a number of projects, I can say my personal experience is that the work product varies wildly in quality, shop to shop. I wouldn't say it's "relatively decent quality" in any universal or guaranteed sense.
Not that American developers are necessarily more skilled, just that the lack of a culture and sometimes language barrier is pretty evident in the resulting work product, in my experience.
Considering the popularity of Japanese-developed, Polish-developed, German-developed, and other foreign-developed games... I don't think sharing American culture matters much.
You've missed the point. The point is, cultural (and time differences, language differences, etc) differences slow down collaboration. it has nothing to do with specifically american (or german, or polish) culture.
How many roles do you think to be outsourced by the polish or japanese? not a lot, which keeps them efficient.
especially in creative endeavours, its best to keep things colocated.
Like I said, I work in the industry. I've worked on several projects with teams on more than one continent.
The much-repeated "it'll slow down collaboration" is only a factor of how terrible your company's communication strategy was at the outset. If your company worked entirely verbally and contained little to no digital communication or memory, then you'll have a terrible time.
100% remote work makes intercontinental collaboration almost seamless. My current employer has teams on every continent, except Africa (so far), and we've been at it for over half a decade.
I worked at a video game company that outsourced to russia, and have worked with contractors my entire career--so i think i have some insight on the matter, too :-)
the video game company had a outsource good shop, with competent developers on the other side--the first big hurdle if I'm frank. they weren't cheap. sure, cheaper than local talent, but not gangbusters savings. If you don't want a mes in your codebase, paying for quality contractors is a must because you need to let them work independently.
even then, they were only ever given work that would be very discrete, so that they could work on it independently without getting blocked.
that is not collaborative, which is the point I'm trying to make. Is it constructive? sure. but is it collaborative? no. and it can't be--there was a 12h difference between the two zones. they were trying to go to bed while we were having coffee.
at my last gig (non-gaming), we also had people in: shanghai, sf, nyc, sheffield, and tel aviv. want to try and do collaboration like that? even as a digital-first company that has good hygiene around remote work? it doesn't work: just look at a timezone calendar. So then you're stuck partitioning work so that everyone can be constructive in their office hours, and don't need to worry about what is going on, on the other side of the globe. but again, that's not collaboration. that's six teams all doing their work independently and having routine touchpoints to try and synchronize the independent threads. synchronization takes time, effort, focus.
I'm not saying you can't get work done remotely, which is what I think you think I'm saying. I'm saying that if your work is partitioned to be collaborative, timezones more than anything are going to make a mess of your plans, and then add in cultural, langauge, etc barriers on top of that.
I cannot be more direct about this, it is not seamless, or even close to seamless, in general, to work across continents such as you describe.
Maybe you've cracked a nut here, and we'd all benefit from your wisdom, experience, and stories, but that is not the experience most folks have working across continents or cultures.
We did crack the nut: we stopped being ameri-centric, and we rejected the notion that productivity must be directly observed during the process to be measured. We rejected "core hours" and we rejected ephemeral vocal communication. If it's not on record it has no value to us.
We have people working at all hours of the day. We have teams split across continents. We have team meetings, but we schedule them a week or more in advance, and even then they're optional. We make prodigious use of Miro, Basecamp, and other collaboration tools. We don't consider any collaboration "finished" so much as "in progress" and often a "meeting" could take course over days, as team members from around the world chime in. There has never been, and will never be, an office.
I think this person is mostly just being self congratulatory. It's not seemless, they're a subcontractor, without being too directly disrespectful, their view is heavily skewed towards singing the praises of cheap outsourced labor.
> 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.
The situation in Canada is interesting: their own government heavily pitched the country as an outsourcing destination, boasting Canadians devs are worth 50k less than American ones. [0]
What's more, here in BC the NDP (left-leaning labour party) stripped Tech Workers of the majority of their labour rights. Not even meal breaks were saved.
I doubt it has anything to do with the ethnicity of MLAs _now_ because the change happened _twenty years ago_.
That said, British Columbia has had a sizeable, and growing, Indian population since roughly around the time of joining Canada. The Komagata Maru incident[0] was the precursor to an influx of immigration from the punjab.
After English, the three most spoken languages in BC are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Punjabi[1]. The ethnic chinese population arrived in basically two waves: as early settlers during the western expansion, they were pivotal in the creation of the railways and as foundational members of small towns[2]. And then the transfer of HK to CN brought an influx.
Both politicians are of Indian extraction and descent but not only were born in Canada, but grew up there entirely. It's incorrect to claim that "their country" is India and not Canada. Second generation immigrants are not necessarily well-versed in nor even aware of the goings-on of their ancestral homelands.
Though technically you are correct on both counts. By dint of being born after 1950 but before 1992 to Indian fathers, they may be considered Indian citizens. And based on the ancestral comment in this subthread, it does seem like being an outsource destination is working out for Canada. But only technically correct.
To my mind, the hardest part of scabbing a game studio is picking up where dev teams left off.
Game engines and pipelines are savage beasts, and often heavily customized and under-documented (everybody using them "just knows how they work;" internal cultural knowledge and on-the-job training are the standard operating procedure). You'll need a particular type of developer or artist to come up to speed quickly on the pipelines and toolchains studios in-house develop, even given the relative standardization of the Activision space.
I've been a part of teams that were hired to "finish" certain major products, and I definitely agree with your perspective.
We usually ended up ripping out much of the original development code because it was too brittle/broken/undocumented to bother continuing forward with. Rewriting from scratch was often faster and had more predictable results.
Someone on HN recently posted a Jonathan Blow talk, "How to Save Civilization," that argues the normal evolution of technology is not a linear progression upwards, but actually slow degradation due to loss of knowledge and maintenance. I think this is a perfect example of why.
This is part of the advantage of the "Unix Philosophy": many small, easily understood processes that work in tandem to produce a complex outcome. Each individual process is less prone to knowledge decay.
However, this is moot in gamedev. We throw everything away before starting the next project because we don't "own" the IP from the last project.
I also strongly suspect that game development slightly favors a monolithic approach because performance is key, and it's extremely hard to maintain maximum performance with thick abstractions. Inevitably, you find out you can do something faster if you stop making a function call or treat a binary representation in two different ways in two different places in the code and abstractions leak and break.
Unless all the small processes are designed with a very firm pattern underpinning them that happens to be the correct pattern to maximize efficiency, you'll inevitably find a situation where two subsystems need intimate knowledge of how each other work to maximize performance.
Also work in the industry (but in the US as an employee, not a subcontractor), totally opposite opinion. Outsourced labor is similar to Associate-level responsibilities. The reasons assholes don't get fired in the games industry is because experience and skill is so difficult to find.
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.
It really is the element in the complaint that stands out.
First, pay and promotion discrimination are widespread and are less shocking. Acceptable? No. I like DFEH's authority to go hard after companies to get this addressed, but I somehow shrug and say "Let the lawsuit parade begin. Ok, Blizzrad can go first."
Second, some of the anecdotes in the Blizzard complaint come off as problematic but not shocking. "Cube crawls" which seem like "get drunk at work" parties that led to sexual harassment: getting drunk at work is a management-stupid recipe for trouble. DFEH Lawsuit worth? Less obvious.
Third, the named executive who was a creep comes off as a problem for that creep. He was let go quietly and management didn't otherwise change. It's hard to tell if this is worse than average for creep executives. Lawsuit worthy by DFEH? Unlikely on its own: management acted to address the issue.
But the suicide. The victim was exploited, harassed, and abused as an employee. The complaint insinuates that her traveling coworker had demeaning sex toys on hand. It's not obvious if she was the intended subject of the coworker toys, but it is implied. Her suicide seems to have been preventable and, therefore, tragic. More than anything else it suggests that the other elements of the complaint led her to a feeling of hopelessness in her work environment. It is not a stretch to imagine that she was not alone in that feeling as a result of that environment.
RIP, victim. The lawsuit will bring insufficient justice for you and negligible peace for your family. Perhaps it will begin some broader change.
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?
How does it happen? There are still people throughout this thread downplaying this and making it seem like it's not a big deal. People have been bringing up the issues of sexual harassment in our industry, but folks like James Damore have a lot of support in believing it's just that women are just less interested in technology and don't suffer from any discrimination. You've got literal incels on this site threatening violence and getting support for blaming their problems on feminism. The signs of this behavior are everywhere and women (in particular) have been talking about it for ages. Why has it been so easy to write them off? Efforts to stop these sorts of environments will get companies labeled as "going woke". To me this Activision / Blizzard situation is inevitable when so many of our communities are willfully blind to these behaviors and have been for decades. What isn't being reported on?
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'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.
Can confirm true from experience. To be fair, the military (USMC experience only) is structured to intentionally harass all members below certain ranks continuously, with the idea being that it keeps them sharp and willing to follow orders that put them or others directly in harm's way. Sexual harassment was punished severely, but at the lowest levels possible, and wasn't often reported.
> Sexual assault in the United States armed forces is an ongoing issue which has received extensive media coverage in the past. A 2012 Pentagon survey found that approximately 26,000 women and men were sexually assaulted that year; of those, only 3,374 cases were reported.[1] In 2013, a new Pentagon report found that 5,061 troops reported cases of assault. Some are optimistic that this increase in reports is indicative of victims "growing more comfortable in the system".[2] Of the reported cases, only 484 cases went to trial; 376 resulted in convictions.[3] Another investigation found that one in five women in the United States Air Force who were sexually assaulted by service members reported it, for one in 15 men.[4]
> A survey for the Department of Defense conducted in 2015 found that in the past year 52% of active service members who reported sexual assault had experienced retaliation in the form of professional, social, and administrative actions or punishments.[5] In addition to retaliation against soldiers remaining in active service, many former service members who reported sexual assaults were forced to leave after being discharged. Reasons for discharge included having a "personality disorder" or engaging in misconduct related to the sexual assault such as fraternization or (prior to the end of don't ask, don't tell) homosexuality, even if the homosexual conduct was non-consensual.[6]
I think people may be missing the connection between punishments being with severe, and kept at a low level. A platoon will do a lot more to punish someone than a battalion.
Justice under the UCMJ is similar to how a grand jury operates, where the highest ranking officers will hear a case with evidence, and make decisions about guilt and punishment. Platoon level punishment is much more freeform, and tends to ignore those rules about type and duration of punishment; much more corporal in nature.
Probably could have phrased it better. The military culture is very different than civilian culture, jokes and turns of phrase that would be completely unacceptable in the civilian world are common, and the tolerance for them is higher. It's very much like the difference between working an office job, and going out to a seedy bar; different culture, different expectations and rules.
But as for what I said, there was a lot of borderline sexual harassment (and much of it that I witnessed not involving females at all) that went unreported. But when something was reported, it stayed at lower levels most times, and involved squad and platoon level justice, which is very, very severe. Like more severe than is allowed under the UCMJ.
> "Women have to have thick skin" is just nonsense to not have to type "The women are harassed relentlessly".
Which is also a false translation (and thus a strawman) of what I said. The vast majority were treated quite damn well.
> It's also worth noting that the military is a toxic cesspit for sexual abuse.
I did some Googling here and found that in 2013, 0.9% of all military members reported sexual assault. I don't know how that compares to civilian life, and I'll just toss this out there, I bet this varies A TON by military branch, and I will leave it at that.
> Comparing any sane workplace to the military is a joke. Nobody should want to be like the military, including the military.
You sound like a person who would never make it in the military. I learned a lot of good things in the military: Integrity, diversity, work ethic, respect, adventure, confidence, attention to detail, and what an actual 8-hour shift felt like (which I would never see again; most work for corps done since has gone over 8 hours/day). I also had an absolute blast after work and on weekends, it was a happy coming-of-age time for me. Perhaps it was due to it being the USAF and not the USMC, but it was positive for me.
> Which is also a false translation (and thus a strawman) of what I said. The vast majority were treated quite damn well.
I copied and pasted exactly what you wrote.
> I did some Googling here and found that in 2013, 0.9% of all military members reported sexual assault. I don't know how that compares to civilian life, and I'll just toss this out there, I bet this varies A TON by military branch, and I will leave it at that
If you care to educate yourself, in another post I made in this thread I referenced the actual data on sexual abuse in the military. The dramatic majority goes unreported, and the cases that do get reported face retaliation from superiors. It’s a toxic cesspit.
edit I'll just add them
> Sexual assault in the United States armed forces is an ongoing issue which has received extensive media coverage in the past. A 2012 Pentagon survey found that approximately 26,000 women and men were sexually assaulted that year; of those, only 3,374 cases were reported.[1] In 2013, a new Pentagon report found that 5,061 troops reported cases of assault. Some are optimistic that this increase in reports is indicative of victims "growing more comfortable in the system".[2] Of the reported cases, only 484 cases went to trial; 376 resulted in convictions.[3] Another investigation found that one in five women in the United States Air Force who were sexually assaulted by service members reported it, for one in 15 men.[4]
20% of women reported.
> A survey for the Department of Defense conducted in 2015 found that in the past year 52% of active service members who reported sexual assault had experienced retaliation in the form of professional, social, and administrative actions or punishments.[5] In addition to retaliation against soldiers remaining in active service, many former service members who reported sexual assaults were forced to leave after being discharged. Reasons for discharge included having a "personality disorder" or engaging in misconduct related to the sexual assault such as fraternization or (prior to the end of don't ask, don't tell) homosexuality, even if the homosexual conduct was non-consensual.[6]
52% of active service members who reported experienced retaliation. 52%. Getting discharged for homosexuality as a result of _non consensual_ homosexual contact. Tell me again about all that integrity and respect in the military.
> You sound like a person who would never make it in the military.
I don’t care, truly at all, if you think I’d make it in the military. I criticized an obviously disgusting group (that you’re a part of), and you’re making a judgement of my character out of adversarialism.
And then misparaphrased it with a crystal clear bias.
> I criticized an obviously disgusting group (that you’re a part of) and you’re making a judgement of my character out of adversarialism.
Ah yes. Adversarialism, after you make a blanket statement like that is totally surprising, lol.
The fact is that the chance of sexual assault in the military is low, and reporting of it is improving, and the exact number of incidents cannot be known, only speculated on. But apparently, if 2% of Muslims become suicide bombers, all Muslims are bad, according to you; and if most rapists are men, then all men are assholes, according to your reasoning; unfortunately that is what I'll generously call "illogic"; you can speak to countless military members who had good experiences, but if a few women (and a handful of men) got fucked over, then I guess the whole system is fucked, eh?
Good luck applying that to society at large (which, by the way, is IMPROVING along with the military).
Making approval depend on perfection (instead of consistent improvement) is the enemy of good, once again
> Ah yes. Adversarialism, after you make a blanket statement like that is totally surprising, lol.
Skips the whole post.
> The fact is that the chance of sexual assault in the military is low
Where did you get the "low" figure from? I wouldn't call it low at all. I would call it insanely high.
> But apparently, if 2% of Muslims become suicide bombers, all Muslims are bad,
You're saying a lot of very ridiculous things. If an institution condones sexual abuse, it is fair to point it out.
> Good luck applying that to society at large (which, by the way, is IMPROVING along with the military).
I guess it all depends on how you look at it (meaning, if you choose to throw your hands up and say "it's going great!" without actually paying attention).
> Making approval depend on perfection (instead of consistent improvement) is the enemy of good, once again
Who brought up perfection? I'm saying it's an absolute shitshow, for which there is data to corroborate. You're saying "no it's improving", based on legitimately 0 data at all.
> 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.
Literally my entire 80's high school experience is peppered with instances (at a constant rate) of being ribbed and being unable to say "that's not funny, stop it!" because it "wasn't cool".
Are you saying my entire generation grew up in toxicity?
I mean... It's entirely possible, even if it seemed more innocent at the time.
I’d say that, yes. Bluntly, the entire American school system looks pretty bad from the, in my case, outside perspective of someone who went though UK Catholic secondary school (‘secondary’ is an almost but not quite perfect match of US high school).
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.
> They’re said to intimidate, embarrass, and demean
OK so, since this mentality absolutely and wantonly pervades "male culture", the real problem is male toxicity to other males which spills over towards women?
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)?
1.
a riblike structure or pattern, especially a band of knitting in rib.
"a fleecy sweatshirt with ribbing at neck, cuffs, and hem"
2.
informal
good-natured teasing.
"he took a good deal of ribbing with the utmost good humor"
I already knew the definition, I was asking for examples. Were they sexual, anatomical, scatalogical, combative, suggesting one person was someone else’s toy, something else, or all of the above?
let's see... anatomical (I got called "HEED" because my hat size was larger than anyone else's there (it's a reference to So I Married An Axe Murderer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-OCjvbV2Z4))... sexual (your manliness was often called into question, usually humorously), combative (sometimes your reputation was called into question)... There are probably more categories of teasing I saw
But like... just don't comment on people's bodies. That's weird as heck. If you aren't having sex with them, commenting on their breasts or making sexually charged statements at work is insanely inappropriate.
One story I heard was that a women with large breasts was having a blast playing at an internal Battle of the Bands and one of the judges said, in front of the crowd on a mic, "I like your big... talents".
WHAT THE F___?! How can that be said at a work event and HR isn't like throwing down the gauntlet.
How hard is it to not make inappropriate comments about someone or their body? It's -exceedingly- easy to not be a creepy dick to one's coworkers and fellow human beings.
One only has to act like a robot if they have zero social awareness or tact.
I would agree that this is easy, but I did run into a weird edge case.
First to be clear, I would never comment on anybody's body or clothes, especially not in the workplace. This is not to comply with some rule, I wouldn't have the urge to do that in the first place. It's weird and unneeded.
Anyway, the edge case. My female coworker is very passionate about making custom dresses. One day, on the day before our country's Queen's Day, she comes to work in an absolute master piece of a custom dress, dedicated to the festivities to come. The quality of that dress, the attention to detail, was out of this world. All custom made.
She walks over to a group of devs (five men, one is me) and basically presents the dress, yet without saying a word.
And now comes the awful thing. By chance, all of us had one of those mandatory "ethical workplace" trainings the day before. And this literal example, some guy commenting on a dress was used as an example of an absolute no-go.
Which sounds reasonable to me, in every context but this one. I had a strong urge to compliment her on her skill and the incredible result of her tireless effort. Surely, she worked on this forever, and this was to be a proud moment of display.
But we all kept our mouth shut, and picked the safe side of things. She left defeated, perhaps humiliated.
I know, it's a very uncommon situation, but the dynamic is interesting. In the gray zone area, most people would prefer to better be safe than sorry. Which almost every time is best anyway, but not this time.
I'll end with an aspect much more common. Feedback, as in professional feedback. Recently a study showed that VCs are far less critical towards female founders compared to male ones. Males would get very direct, sometimes harsh, and detailed negative feedback, whilst women would get the far less usable vague sugar-coated version of it.
Supposedly, out of fear. It shows hyper tensions, paranoia. If that gets out of hand, women and other minorities will be treated as radio-active objects, which is in nobody's interest.
The way I see it, really bad men (subject of article), cause this distrustful relation between perfectly good people.
>But we all kept our mouth shut, and picked the safe side of things. She left defeated, perhaps humiliated.
Anti-sexual harassment training, and more broadly the discouraging of socialization between men and women, has also reduced the opportunity for men and women to marry. The flip side of the male executive no longer being able to chase his secretary around a desk to try to pinch her on the butt is another executive not being able to politely court the secretary he is in love with (and vice versa).
I don't have a good answer for how to get the one without the other, but both are consequences of modern sensibilities.
There's different takes on this. To me, the workplace is free of romance or any sexual advance of any kind from my part.
I would never go beyond minor superficial personal interest (how was your holiday) at the coffee machine, and it ends there. Even if interest was shown in me, I'd deflect. Not going to happen.
That said, I do agree with the larger overall point that in today's digital and more sensitive world (don't have a better word), it likely is harder for people to connect that way.
I think one of the main tenants of allyship (I'm comfortable having weirdos call me "woke" for using the word allyship) is being accepting when told you did something wrong, and working to cultivate relationships in which a person is able to _simply_ say "I didn't like that", to which that feedback is taken seriously and responsibly.
I mostly think the argument "Well men will just start treating women and minorities will start being treated like radio active objects" is cultivated and pushed forward by men that aren't willing to hear they did something wrong. Binary thinking is _the problem_. If you make a comment with good intent, but it was taken poorly, the fear is you'll be labeled as a bad person/sexist/whatever. In reality, if your intent is good, and your response to being told you did something wrong was "I'm sorry, I won't do that again", nothing else really has to happen.
"I mostly think the argument "Well men will just start treating women and minorities will start being treated like radio active objects" is cultivated and pushed forward by men that aren't willing to hear they did something wrong."
I agree. It's a narrative from the "bad" men, yet it can instill paranoia on the good ones, where they become too careful.
Is this "walking on eggshells" thinking justified? No, I think in most interactions good intent would be detected, and occasionally a minor "correction" follows if not. None of this should be even in the domain of HR reports, job loss, the like. Like you said.
But still, despite that, I do see minor paranoia on the rise.
As in the example I gave regarding the dress. My heart was screaming to say the nice thing, the compliment she deserved so much, but I picked the safer option.
Likewise, code reviews. With a male engineer, I would simply say this: there's a mistake in your code. It's over here. Here's why it's a mistake, and what its impact would be if left unsolved. A fairly clinical and dry transfer of information.
With a female engineer, although I don't want to, I find myself to be far more careful. I aim to remove any trace or shred of a doubt of the message, or the tone of the message, coming across as in any way being dismissive, oppressive, "mansplaining", name any possible negative feeling one can have about critical feedback.
It takes me 3 times as long, and I don't know if it helps at all. But it's another example of minor paranoia straining work relations.
It's an odd thing to realize that the men concerned in the article specifically treat women in a bad way, yet at the same time normal (say, good men) might treat women too carefully.
I don't have a solution, these are just observations.
> Which sounds reasonable to me, in every context but this one. I had a strong urge to compliment her on her skill and the incredible result of her tireless effort. Surely, she worked on this forever, and this was to be a proud moment of display.
I get what you’re saying, and the context of the training would give me a warning siren in my head too (even though it is implicit that the no-no is with regard to the dress that someone is wearing), but you can complement someone’s handiwork or effort directly without using the word 'dress' — “Skilful haberdashery” is a very different tone than “nice dress”.
Although you do need to ask the person involved, as there’s no way a (male) internet stranger like me is going to read your coworkers’ mind.
Yes, those are a bit more nuanced. As noted in the sibling comment, part of this is also coming across as someone who listens when people voice their concerns.
For the dress issue, it really just depends on the context and your relationship with the person. If it's your -friend- who you actually know makes custom dresses as a hobby, why would they be upset at a (genuine) compliment? My friends who pay attention to clothes and I give out (genuine) compliments to each other all the time. With a stranger I don't do that unless it's like something that truly stands out. I've been genuinely complimented on my coats and blazers by random strangers numerous times and I think nothing of it. But social environments like bars and cafes are quite different from contexts like office environments, particularly male-dominated workplaces.
I don't know the exact reasoning about the "ethical workplace" training, but I imagine it's a blanket thing since some people just don't know how to give compliments without being creepy about it, or just use it as a proxy to hit on the person. Of course companies large enough for ethical trainings would want to play things as safe as possible. Idiots ruin things for everyone else.
Anyway, I find it hard to believe anyone would take offense at something like "hey, did you make that dress? That's awesome!". But this is also why working at a large corp is probably my least favorite option when selecting a job.
"Males would get very direct, sometimes harsh, and detailed negative feedback, whilst women would get the far less usable vague sugar-coated version of it."
This is definitely an issue and I don't really know how to deal with it other than not hiring people who would take offense at something like honest feedback. That is more of a company-level cultural issue where people are afraid to give honest feedback lest they be accused by an idiot of being <X-ist>. I don't think that culture would develop if they had higherups who they could trust to fairly evaluate the situation. Higherups who are not afraid to go "yeah, no, that's not being <X-ist>, that's just the same level of feedback everyone else gets" if that's truly the case... or higherups who reliably can go "yeah, there seems to be a discrepancy here based on gender and we should take appropriate measures".
...this is a lot of words to basically agree that sometimes edgecases require some additional pondering. Context is very important, and knowing who you're dealing with is also very important. None of this matters if you're dealing with people who assume everything is done in bad faith and you're out to get them, etc. Life is short so just say "alright", and move on. Now, if multiple people start saying similar things... then maybe it's time to do some self-reflection.
I think that sums it up nicely, and indeed was my main point.
The female engineer we've worked with on a daily basis for years, in a very friendly, cooperative and relaxed team. So very far from a stranger to us. She's one of us, basically.
I'd agree that it would be incredibly unlikely that if we did make that compliment, anything bad would happen. But the fact that all five of us shut up regardless, I find telling.
I guess it's math, in a way. If there's a 1% change of getting into trouble for trying to say this nice thing, not saying anything means the chance is 0%, so the better option.
Yes, in the case of the feedback problem with the VCs, it was actually women taking issue with the lack of real critical feedback. They wanted it, they didn't want the muddied down overly protective version.
> They wanted it, they didn't want the muddied down overly protective version
At some point it becomes an exercise in futility to try to separate (in a way that 99% of everyone will accept) honest criticism of a woman's work by a man, from "mansplaining", and that to me is the problem
> One only has to act like a robot if they have zero social awareness or tact.
Just noting here that the vast majority of people do not have 100% perfect social awareness or tact, and making this the bar for harsh judgment of human behavior is arguably inhumane.
Yeah the parent's comment is just a person refusing to have any amount of tact. Harassment isn't defined as an isolated incident, nor is it immediately a huge deal. Almost all rational humans have some amount of tolerance for ambiguity, if you really can't possibly fathom what would or would not be offensive to a person, you have absolutely no business working alongside other people.
Not to mention, a lot of what was reported couldn't possibly have been ambiguous. Commenting on a coworker's breasts (the report of a woman repeatedly being questioned on whether her breasts were real, and then having a manager demand to feel them to verify) is just totally unacceptable.
In the case of Blizzard, the more relevant advice is "Don't grope your coworkers, don't give subordinates unsolicited advice on how to perform sexual acts, don't get drunk at work and hit on your coworkers, don't sleep with subordinates, and don't distribute nude pictures of your coworkers over e-mail. Also, don't retaliate against people who report harassment."
I think a moderately intelligent, moderately socialized human being may be quite capable of avoiding this minefield of do's and don'ts without being a robot.
I would have preferred some lighthearted ribbing. Again, it can be interpreted as a sign of intimacy. I don't know how else to explain it. One of my best friends actually ribs me a lot. And because I am self-confident and candid, I can take it.
Heck, my significant other and I rib each other plenty. We know each others' strengths and weaknesses. It is arguable that being fine with some ribbing is proof of comfortableness with oneself and a lack of insecurity.
But, yes, people like you exist. I once teased a former boss for his fear of puppies (yes, puppies. Not just "dogs"... Puppies) by playing a prank where some puppies barked from behind his desk. He jumped. It did not fly very well. Actually, in hindsight, perhaps don't tease your boss, even if you think you're on good terms with them...
"Staff are asking Activision Blizzard to adopt new recruiting, hiring and promotion policies to improve representation across all employee levels."
What exactly does this means? What is "representation across all employee levels" and why not competency?
In the US-based company I work for, we have a "diversity and inclusion" program that had resulted in promoting cafeteria managers to director level and hiring any (all) applicants of certain races in certain countries (varies by country) because targets had to be met. I have a friend in US that was told by all his mentors : "come on, you are a white male, you have no chance to be promoted". Is this what these people want?
Interesting. I've been thinking that based on how high up the chain of command the allegations suggest Activision's cultural problems are, it seemed a lot like the only way for Activision to "right the ship" would be to replace senior leadership (including possibly up to the CEO level).
I found that outcome unlikely, but if the employees put pressure on ownership in this way, it may perhaps create enough incentive for the ownership to oust the top-level leadership. Not sure.
1 day doesn't seem enough to do anything. At least 3 days if not a week would be much more effective.
They have leverage because activision can't hire scabs, and news employees will have to ramp up for months before they're useful on current projects. They have contractual deadlines to meet, I'm sure.
Last I heard, Blizzard was hemorrhaging WoW users as well. Not a great run for them over the past couple years, with the terrible Warcraft III remaster as well.
Blizzard is done for. Everyone important left. There's no one to work on StarCraft 3 / WarCraft 4 and their reputation is deservably not what what it used to be only a few years ago. Like almost until the "you all have phones, right" moment.
Activision ruined the company. Sure, the market changed but Blizzard was doing much better under Vivendi.
What would, "Blizzard is done" look like? Are you suggesting that the IP (Overwatch, Warcraft, Starcraft) would be shut down, all employees laid off or incorporated into Activisions other departments?
I could not imagine any business abandoning billions of dollars of IP like that.
They have the IP but they are struggling to hire talent to do something useful with it. So there's a chance that they will milk their IP with smartphone gambling until it dries out.
Some people believe that has already happened, which is why we have the Diablo mobile partnership and no new StarCraft 3.
Warcraft alone I can't imagine shutting down. There is a certain community of people that more or less lives in that parallel universe and it would be pretty disruptive to abandon it. It's like buying access to a virtual bar for $15/mo where you reliably get together with your warcraft nerd birds of a feather.
They're pulling in ludicrous amounts of money, and it's pretty clear from the quality of content over the last 8 years or so that they're not investing more than a tiny fraction of it back into the game
They'll just continue to invest less and less in actual playable desktop games and more and more in toxic mobile dogshit as time goes on
We're almost guaranteed to see a shift to mobile games. HotS on mobile, Warcraft4 as a freemium mobile "strategy game" - ditto with SC3. They may occasionally sink cash into large PC primary titles but I think mobile is going to be the way they milk that cow from here on out.
But this is the sensible thing to do, talent leaving or not.
A universe where Blizzard shifts to mobile because of business reasons is indistinguishable from a universe where Blizzard shifts to mobile because "everyone left", so your hypothesis isn't falsifiable.
But I don't think the Blizzard of 2005 would make that shift just because there's a sensible business case for it. It'd be like Paradox shifting to mobile.
"Frances M. "Fran" Fragos Townsend (born December 28, 1961) is the former Homeland Security Advisor to United States President George W. Bush from 2004 to 2007, and is currently executive vice president for corporate affairs at Activision Blizzard."
The Bush administration was the kind of place to sell illegal wars and cover up torture programs, so this lady is fine with sweeping dirt under the rug.
You know... Brian Bulatao [0] stood out to me, as well, when I was recently looking at the Activison Blizzard leadership page. It's certainly interesting to me that these folks specifically ended up in executive leadership at a games developer.
“believe that our values as employees are not being accurately reflected in the words and actions of our leadership,”
Sorry they pay you to do a job, not reflect your values. And anyway whos values? I'm pretty certain values are a personal thing, how can the leadership possibly reflect all their employees values?
Blizzard hasn't produced a decent game in two decades, all the original talent have long departed, and now it's just a sexist cesspool. How about they quit instead of simply walking out?
Generous to think the original talent didn't cultivate the sexist cesspool it is today. I certainly don't extend them that grace. Morhaime was involved. Kaplan was involved. Nobody in executive leadership is innocent.
Oh I'm not defending the original talent whatsoever in regards to the cesspool, sorry that came out as connnected. I'm only saying they were responsible for making good games and all that remains is a toxic culture.
Some of the folks you're probably grouping in with "original talent" were responsible for building the sexist cesspool. Many of the complaints, both in the lawsuit and by (ex-)employees are not recent events.
Some people don't like having to find a new job in another company that treats their employees better, or simply don't care enough. That's what you see people who have been harassed/assaulted not quitting and just "taking it". It blows my mind, that someone that can work at blizz, prefers to be harassed to just quitting and finding a new job, is not that this company is their only option, even if you are in a visa, is it really worth it to be sexually assaulted just to keep your immigration status? I guess every person is different.
True. If they all quit I'm most could find jobs relatively quickly. However, that isn't true for everyone. Is it really worth the risk of not being able to find a job and or getting worse pay?
a friend told me I should get WC3 a few years ago so we could play together, so I bought it and the expansion from Blizzard's website, but never got around to playing it. after the remaster came out, I thought to myself, well, now's as good of a time as any to play the originals. then I discovered that anyone who had a copy of the originals had their copies replaced with a gimped version of the remaster, and you had to buy the remaster to remove said gimping. absolutely deplorable, I won't buy another game from them again.
People are walking out? Based on the former Blizzard employees, mostly white males, who have commented in previous threads, it didn't seem like a big deal.
Wonder why they're walking out on a nothingburger.
As much as I do support them, Blizzard employees frequently strike me as obsessed with social media perception and staying woke rather than doing what's right even if it is inconvenient for them personally.
The ones who are actually affected don't work at Blizzard anymore. The time to walk out was _years ago_. There's no chance it was wide-spread knowledge that one of the executives was assaulting people at work and yet no one was frustrated by that fact.
From what I've heard of the working environment, it's borderline impossible to be employed there without at least _seeing_ what was going on to your colleagues. I mean, I remember reading about sexual harassment there in 2018, at which point it had _already_ been going on for a while.
Did the women go to HR? If so, just fire all of HR and get a new HR. Did they not go to HR? That's on them and no one should feel bad for them then. No one should be persecuted for not solving your problems for you.
I know law offices like very much to get public opinion on their side with strategic leaks so that they can push for a settlement ASAP. If things go to trial, it's likely to come out that their clients are gold-digging scumbags who didn't follow the process through HR like they were trained to do.
It's not clear whether HR was actually empowered to stop things here. The lawsuit alleges that in at least one case, a harasser's behavior was escalated multiple times to the Blizzard president, and multiple times he declined to fire the guy.
There are literal documented stories in the case of people complaining to HR and having the issues swept under the rug by them. Did you even do a modicum of research before posting this?
> The suit was followed by an outpouring of current and former employees saying they’d been harassed or mistreated at the company.
I never understand why in the world we currently live in there are so many people willing to be silent for so long. Weinstein did his crap for years, the US gymnastics assaults went on for years.
This probably isn't a popular opinion...but when victims choose to remain silent they are complacent in allowing other people to be victimized in the future. A sexist culture is one thing, but straight up sexual assault is a completely different issue.
Simply? You lose, most of the time, when you "come forward". There is no parade, there are no articles in the New Yorker about your bravery, you just lose your livelihood, your dreams, and sometimes your life.
It's a sad, often poorly understood reality about whistle blowing, given the heavy survivorship involved. For every success story you hear, there are dozens you don't hear about, because nobody believed them, they were successfully demonized, or because it wasn't "big" enough to really, ultimately matter to American society in a way that could effect change.
That's why it's so impressive when people to come forward anyway, knowing this. It's far from "risk free" to come forward, and usually it's a gigantic negative experience, sometimes rivaling the original abuse itself in negative impact on your life. It's one thing to have the worst day of your life happen, now imagine having to relive it publicly, forever.
Exactly this. In such situations the culture of abuse is deeply embedded in the organisation, so everyone from senior management through HR down to junior staff will turn on you; they'll make your work environment unbearable, berate you for any compassionate leave you're granted (assuming you can squeeze that much out of them), hold 'investigations' that exhonerate the company and the accused even in the face of blatant video evidence, downgrade your performance appraisals, and, since senior staff tend to have friends at other companies in your industry, potentially make it difficult for you to get a job elsewhere. Anyone who comes forward in such circumstances (having, let's not forget, already suffered bad treatment through no fault of their own) demonstrates a great deal of bravery.
Nassar is not a good example to compare to - I can't speak to the Weinstein case as I haven't followed it well, but with Larry Nassar athletes were bringing up his actions and their discomfort pretty regularly. One athlete was kicked off the team, if I remember correctly.
The FBI was also extremely negligent - the special agent working the case was inquiring about job opportunities at the place he was investigating.
As for victims "choosing" to remain silent, you have to understand two things:
1. The victims are most often children, and often do not understand that his actions were not okay, especially when the team says they are, and calls them hysterical for feeling disgusted with him.
2. The older victims don't want to have their careers ended by speaking up to power.
Between the way the team and the FBI handled this it's really hard to argue that this is the victim's fault. The people they trusted let them down for decades. You can (and should) educate children about what is right and wrong, but you also need to be willing to investigate claims and ensure people feel comfortable to raise them.
I couldn't agree more...but many people chose to remain completely silent when abuse happens. The culture surrounding this has changed a lot in the last 20 years yet we keep having these types of events that people pile on only after one person comes forward. Then all of a sudden it's a pattern of abuse and a way bigger issue to fix.
And this is where all of us need to actively cultivate a company culture where we maximize everyone's ability to feel safe especially when things go seriously wrong.
Apparently, this does not happen at enough places.
Yeah, it's almost like people keep silent because of the power imbalance that leads to the abuse and blaming the weak because they aren't able to stand up to the strong is the wrong thing to do.
They could stand up to the strong, but they choose to go along with it for their own personal reasons (ie, make it in Hollywood or become an Olympic athlete). However even after those things happen the abused continue to keep silent.
Aside from the other comments here, another thing to consider is that it's usually incredibly painful to relive abusive treatment, let alone potentially having to endure the humiliation of having it dragged out into the public, where a million and one disinterested onlookers will potentially pull the victim apart and blame them for what happened. Unless you've been in such a situation yourself, you can't imagine what it's like.
who is going to listen to you if you stand up to the strong? unless you have support of anyone in the media (who would also be willing to put their reputation on the line) your message isn't going to go anywhere. not to mention, you think things like 'black cube' suddenly don't exist any more?
It also didn't help that he was a doctor who taught his methods in medical classes and was regarded as a forerunner in the field of sports medicine, especially around gymnastics.
Very few people would've been able to call him out on it because no one had enough experience to call him out on his BS. The only reason he got caught was because he got bold and took it too far.
Victims are silent because there are consequences to speaking out, not only restricted to negative reactions which I believe are rare aside from the accused.
Not only can it destroy your career, there are also consequences when you confide in family and friends. They will treat you differently and maybe you don't even want
that and put everything behind you.
Legally there might even be low chances of recourse because you have no evidence. Especially when celebrities are involved, the requirements for that are high.
This might not be something you can change with culture and is intrinsic to the respective crimes.
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.