171–180 of 328 posts
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I'm sure they could figure it out based on when their employment with Activision-Blizzard ended. Do they want to risk being wrong with the guess and passing up a good employee because of it? Possibly not.
I feel like that's an uncharitable take. Even if you take a very nihilistic view of company morality... for simple liability reasons, most places don't want someone fired for sexual harassment. But it's trivial for those fired to not get caught. For example, it's likely some (not a majority, but some) people are leaving Activision Blizzard over what's been uncovered, they could claim to be part of that group. Or they…
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Why would you be ineligible for rehire after a downsizing?
Maybe because when downsizing you pick the lowest performers that for whatever reason you haven't already fired
"Lowest performers" doesn't imply bad performers (e.g. a strong team of A & B players).
Also downsizing can happen in different ways. For instance: "we're closing this whole site and laying off everyone who works there," or "this project failed [due to bad leadership], so we're laying off the whole team."
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I deleted my Blizzard account when they censored and banned a Taiwanese e-sports competitor for speaking out on Hong Kong. It's a shame because I had been planning to give WoW classic a try. Edit: While the tournament was held in Taiwan, Blitzchung is actually a native of Hong Kong.
while i do understand the plight of HK's fight, it does make sense that a non-affiliated individual should not be able to make political statements on someone else's platform, unless with prior consent. The competitor should be free to make his case in his own platform(s), but not on a platform he doesn't own if the owners of that platform doesn't want to affiliate themselves with the political discourse.
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I'm sure they could figure it out based on when their employment with Activision-Blizzard ended. Do they want to risk being wrong with the guess and passing up a good employee because of it? Possibly not.
> Do they want to risk being wrong with the guess and passing up a good employee because of it? Would it be illegal to ask if they were fired in connection with this push? If the candidate answers no, they’re clean or a liar. If they demur or confirm, you have your answer.
So I presume HR had a chat and offered them a pile of money to resign - or if they didn't accept, indicated there would be an investigation into their behaviour.
Presuming they didn't choose option 2 and lose - when asked, nobody's going to say they left for sexual misconduct.
How did it get this bad?
Blizzard was never a privately held company or not in the sense that founders had real autonomy. I believe Michael Morhaime had a lot to do with why Blizzard could do what it did. I remember reading in interviews that he defended the soon(tm) mindset and steered the owners away from chasing quarterly reports. I also believe that Chris Metzen was a key figure in upholding a geeky and fun culture. I was genuinely impre…
I don't think this was the case, and that rather WoW's success forced the company to become more professional but the sexual harassment culture was so ingrained that the company couldn't shake it off. The name thrown around the most due to the lawsuit was Alex Afrasiabi, who was hired in early 2004 to work on WoW (which released November 23, 2004). You can also take a look at WoW's credits [1] and see the mention of "sexy HR girls" or their internal tenth anniversary video [2] from 2001 that covers why they hired their first female employee.
A couple of weeks back the youtube algorithm decided to show me the youtube channel of one of the Warcraft 3 level designers who worked for Blizzard from 1998 to 2003, and in one of his videos, made 4 years ago mind you, he's pretty clear on what the culture was like there [3], with the choice quote "if I wanted to bring a sexual harassment lawsuit against Blizzard ... I could have easily done that."
The guy also said that Rob Pardo (lead designer of Starcraft, Warcraft III, and WoW, and now founder of Bonfire Studios since his ejection from Blizzard in 2014) was particularly toxic. And it seems he's not the only one with the same sentiment [4]. The other Rob from that tweet I'm guessing was Robert Bridenbecker [5], who was with the company since 1995. These were people that had to have been working closely with Morhaime due to the nature of their positions, so keeping them around for so long despite the outstanding HR complaints doesn't bode well.
Is it worth following and supporting the new gaming ventures if this is the culture those veterans fostered and had grown accustomed to?
[1] https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/world-of-warcraft/cre... [2] https://twitter.com/GameAnim/status/1420581827698302980 [3] https://youtu.be/kVWyf7mzVR4?t=945 [4] https://twitter.com/gamedevconnie/status/1418946551834157056 [5] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-22/inside-ac...
Question, when these people find a new job will the person hiring them know?
How many managers and executives were fired? My fear is that individual perpetrators have been fired but not the leaders who buried complaints or their own inaction dissuaded victims from complaining. A fish rots from the head.
> A fish rots from the head. Are you sure about that? Doesn't it rot from the guts outwards?