> A fish rots from the head. Are you sure about that? Doesn't it rot from the guts outwards?
Hmm in theory it would start to rot from where it has the biggest exposure to air and or bacteria...so my highly scientific theory: It starts from the head because gills, but the stink comes from the guts (lack of fresh air) ;)
It's not about taking it literally... it's a proverb. It means organization or militaries or whatever else usually goes bad due to leadership, not due to the people at the bottom of the hierarchy. I thought this was obvious.
Kotick has taken a dishonorable path. He should be first person out the door. Situation in the industry feels kind of bleak to me now. One of these days I am going to be able to trick my investors into letting me start a game studio. I really don't understand why there isn't more intense competition at the AAA tier. I know for a fact I can do it cheaper and faster. Not sure about better, but I'm willing to fail a few…
That's basically what AA games are, and are sometimes somewhat successful...but usually not as successful as AAA games. Then you have the indie and solo developers flooding Steam with mostly low-quality games with a few gems...making it extremely difficult to get noticed. So not only do you need a game idea that is attractive to gamers (AAA games are established franchise with decades of releases and marketing), it also has to be implemented well (see the failures of this years CoD and Battlefield) AND you need a huge marketing budget to get your game in front of eyes (maybe you could get lucky going "viral") to stand out from everyone else.
Didn't he also write a letter on behalf of the HR/People manager around the sexual misconduct claims and then put her name on it ? It may have been Helaine Klasky - I'll find the article.
No, it was Townsend's, the one cited in OP too https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/qvl4xd/bobby_kotick_ac... She later left / was made to left the company
Many companies I consult for in the US won’t provide a negative reference but instead answer all reference questions with: “I can confirm that they were employed here from MM/YY to MM/YY”. If you hear that it means it didn’t end well. Otherwise, many managers are happy to give a positive reference.
We had a strict HR policy of “name, rank, and serial number.” We were only allowed to confirm dates of employment, and were required to direct all referrals to HR. Our HR was run by lawyers, and was very tight about all kinds of policies. In one case, I once had to lay off a couple of employees. HR policy demanded that I do a “perp walk” to HR, before telling them in an HR ambush. I felt that this was unnecessarily h…
The American culture of layoffs always surprised me. In Poland, for a typical work contract, the law mandates 1-2 months of layoff time. That is, the layoff decision is given two months in advance, but you keep working for those two months. Also, there are no surprise "security will escort you to the door where you can wait for your personal things" layoffs. I guess because people don't get taken by surprise with a layoff and are given enough time to find a new job, there is much less concern and acts of employee retalation
> In a letter to employees made public in October, Ms. Townsend said Activision had “exited” 20 employees and another 20 had faced disciplinary action. “We know there’s a desire to know about the outcome when misconduct is reported,” Ms. Townsend wrote. “Sometimes, there are privacy reasons we can’t share. But where we can, we will be sharing more information with you. We will also be providing you regular, aggregate…
"Smells to me like major scrapegoating."
My bet is on security engineers and QA. If I could bet on this - I would have my money on those people being fired. Always annoying at meetings, constantly being downers /s
We had a strict HR policy of “name, rank, and serial number.” We were only allowed to confirm dates of employment, and were required to direct all referrals to HR. Our HR was run by lawyers, and was very tight about all kinds of policies. In one case, I once had to lay off a couple of employees. HR policy demanded that I do a “perp walk” to HR, before telling them in an HR ambush. I felt that this was unnecessarily h…
The American culture of layoffs always surprised me. In Poland, for a typical work contract, the law mandates 1-2 months of layoff time. That is, the layoff decision is given two months in advance, but you keep working for those two months. Also, there are no surprise "security will escort you to the door where you can wait for your personal things" layoffs. I guess because people don't get taken by surprise with a l…
In the US, it is usually an ambush. I think that union shops can negotiate something like what you describe.
Punishment for allowing that shit to happen in the first place, and for not doing anything about it until forced to? Either way, it’s hardly a punishment. He’ll undoubtedly get a nice golden parachute.
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He gets paid millions per quarter to deal with issues like this and to stop them from happening which he is not doing.
If he wasn't an executive he would have been fired a long time ago.
> They fired 20 people, not the CEO Oh no, he's trying to save face and trying to make it look like he fixed the issues - even though he was a participant and he allowed this culture to develop.
I might be out of the loop, but what is indicating that, this is what actually happened?
Setting culture is a large part of leadership. Most likely one of two things happened: a) the leadership was complicit in the culture, b) the leadership was too weak to prevent a toxic culture from festering.
In either case, the leadership is not fit for, ahem, leadership.
I really wouldn't boycott anything over workplace culture. If their product is good I will buy it. In the case of Blizzard their products haven't been good for a long time. I'm ok with supporting a company that's evil. I am consuming petroleum, plastic, the news media, etc. all the time. Anyone who suggests otherwise comes across as somewhat delusional and a little self obsessed to me. Blizzard would be the least of…
One can be more discerning of where they spend their discretionary income than other necessities like gasoline.
Will they give you a magnitude attached to those liabilities? Anybody can falsely sue for defamation, so you need an average cost value beyond the mere possibility of lawsuit to get a true representation of the problem.
The cost may be minimal, but the value of giving a bad reference is zero.