351–360 of 570 posts
“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?
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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.
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'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
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I think it’s just important for everyone to recognize the new paradigm: make no comments about your coworkers whatsoever, do not complement, do not ask about their personal life, do not talk about politics, because the only safe thing to do is to be as robotic as possible.
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.
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.
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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 guide…
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.
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> I want to make a point about "culture fit" "culture fit" is one of the biggest causes of workplace discrimination and I still see it pushed in 'hiring training' as perfectly valid criteria. Things I've seen teams consider "culture" - will the candidate go to our weekly study session at the micro-brewery? - will the candidate stay after work to play multi-player games with us? - is the candidate entertained by all t…
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.
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.
[0] https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-...
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.…
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.
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> 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…
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.
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> 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…
> 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…
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> That's debatable. CS was overwhelmingly male and wasn't prestigious until recently. We're talking about the same career that's been known as a money-printing machine for the past 25 years?
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.
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.
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Please don't conflate "white men" with these assholes. I'm so tired of being blamed for the behavior of folks with the same genitalia/skin color as me.
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.
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.