[HN Gopher] Video game developers at Activision Blizzard say the...
___________________________________________________________________
Video game developers at Activision Blizzard say they'll walk out
Wednesday
Author : waynekerr
Score : 444 points
Date : 2021-07-27 18:04 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.axios.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.axios.com)
| sandworm101 wrote:
| 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.
| joe-collins wrote:
| I have been playing WoW since the first year, and the
| developers have my full support.
|
| I know several current and former Team 2 (WoW) developers, from
| QA up to leads, and they are all unified in their rejection of
| their executives.
|
| And I live nearby, so I'll be joining them on the pavement
| tomorrow.
| etempleton wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| supergirl wrote:
| maybe the average gamer won't care. but who will want to work
| for activision now? even the existing employees are walking
| out.
| thesausageking wrote:
| 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.
| jrsj wrote:
| They've already been struggling with this too because
| everyone knows they pay like shit and work people to death
| mdorazio wrote:
| 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.
| nomrom wrote:
| Doesn't mean it can't change. It has to start somewhere.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| usefulcat wrote:
| 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).
| sandworm101 wrote:
| 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.
| syshum wrote:
| While many gamers may not care, which i dont think is true but
| accepting that premise. Blizzard has been doing their best to
| piss off gamers anyway.
| gambiting wrote:
| 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.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| > 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.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> 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.
| username90 wrote:
| Then why did Activision Blizzards stock just drop 8%? Clearly
| the market believes they wont recover nicely after this.
| lupire wrote:
| drops are temporary expressions of fear.
| pb7 wrote:
| If they're guaranteed to be temporary, you ought to buy
| in and make easy money, right?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 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.
| Beached wrote:
| I'm not sure, the numbers on twitch don't even scratch the
| number of unique individuals who own consoles / buy games.
| borodi wrote:
| Atleast inside the mmo community streamers are very
| relevant. On the start of july a famous streamer started
| playing FFXIV and look at google trends
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F064ln09
| etempleton wrote:
| 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.
| gambiting wrote:
| 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.
| beerandt wrote:
| Which is more of a reason that they probably won't stop
| giving Blizzard money over this.
| marricks wrote:
| 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.
| lupire wrote:
| white collar walkouts came out of the Google Walkout that had
| no effect.
| irrational wrote:
| Man, how terrible must their working conditions be that they talk
| about what day, instead of what hour, they will leave for home.
| madamelic wrote:
| 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.
| whymauri wrote:
| 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.
|
| Agree that this seems a tad late.
| [deleted]
| woxko wrote:
| Anybody knows if this is going to affect the release of the
| remastered Diablo?
| booi wrote:
| Hopefully it does
| prohobo wrote:
| Unlikely, since the remaster is being done by a different
| company (contract).
| woxko wrote:
| I see. I know they pulled this off with Warcraft 3 and it
| failed spectacularly. Let's hope it works out better this
| time. Thanks!
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| AB actually bought them, so they're now AB employees.
| [deleted]
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Did we learn nothing from Warcraft 3 Remastered? Don't
| preorder, don't look forward to it. They have to prove it's
| good, we can't trust anymore.
|
| Plus, you know, I'm not buying it because Blizzard is straight
| up ghoulish.
| adamrezich wrote:
| 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.
| endemic wrote:
| Yeah, I'll just play from the original discs.
| woxko wrote:
| I'm not going to preorder, but I'm looking forward to it -
| what they've shown is good, and I think they recognise W3R
| was a mistake.
| aeoleonn wrote:
| Ever heard of Path of Exile 2? It's the spiritual descendent of
| Diablo
| dreyfan wrote:
| 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?
| void_mint wrote:
| 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.
| dreyfan wrote:
| 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.
| ffffwe3rq352y3 wrote:
| Got bills to pay.
| masterof0 wrote:
| Blizzard is not the only company in CA.
| ffffwe3rq352y3 wrote:
| 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?
| healsdata wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| masterof0 wrote:
| 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.
| dzonga wrote:
| across all industries, workers keep getting shafted n abused.
| reason, why worker protections are weak. it could be warehouse
| work at PepsiCo where they just 'won' to work 72 hours a week
| instead of '84'. it could be the game industry where females are
| driven to commit suicide.
|
| because the corporation comes first. however, no actionable
| changes will come anytime soon, since corporations have
| politicians in their pockets. and the plebs are told behave and
| you'll join the owning class.
|
| working at a fAAng doesn't mean you know have power over the
| senator like Zuckerburg does.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| "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?
| liambates wrote:
| After reading a little more about the CCO, her response does not
| surprise me in the slightest...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Townsend
| tehjoker wrote:
| "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.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| She also is a C-level and has worked there for 4 months. She
| has zero insight to this problem.
| scruple wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Bulatao
| runlevel1 wrote:
| > 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.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| bagacrap wrote:
| 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.
| dleslie wrote:
| 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.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > 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]
|
| Is that a popular measure?
|
| [0] https://globalnews.ca/news/4178326/amazon-vancouver-
| tech-wor...
| dleslie wrote:
| I think most folks are unaware, really.
|
| 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.
|
| https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/employment-
| standards-a...
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Interestingly, that party and the people in charge of the
| "tech policy" are all Indians aren't they? [0][1]
|
| It makes sense they would pitch offshoring and low cost
| for programming since they saw it working for their
| country.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagmeet_Singh
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navdeep_Bains
| Apocryphon wrote:
| > Singh was born on January 2, 1979, in Scarborough
| district of Toronto, Ontario
|
| > Bains was born in Toronto, Ontario on June 16, 1977
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Not sure what's the point being made
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_nationality_law#Citi
| zen...
| Apocryphon wrote:
| 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.
| dleslie wrote:
| 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.
|
| 0: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/koma
| gata-m...
|
| 1: https://www.welcomebc.ca/Choose-B-C/Explore-British-
| Columbia...
|
| 2: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/chin
| ese-ca...
| void_mint wrote:
| 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.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| 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.
| dleslie wrote:
| Considering the popularity of Japanese-developed, Polish-
| developed, German-developed, and other foreign-developed
| games... I don't think sharing American culture matters
| much.
| MAGZine wrote:
| 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.
| dleslie wrote:
| 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.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| 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.
| dleslie wrote:
| It's been seamless for us for 5y.
|
| 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.
|
| It works great.
| void_mint wrote:
| 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.
| dleslie wrote:
| I haven't been a subcontractor for 7y.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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.
| planet-and-halo wrote:
| 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.
| dleslie wrote:
| 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.
| dleslie wrote:
| 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.
| wayne-li2 wrote:
| 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.
| vkou wrote:
| 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.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > 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.
| yupper32 wrote:
| A company full of entry level devs is a company doomed to
| fail.
|
| Entry level devs typically suck. Source: A former entry
| level dev.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| What person in their right mind would go work for a company
| that just fired all it's staff for demanding better
| conditions?
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| edoceo wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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_
|
| There is daylight between unions and anarchy. In that
| daylight are California's general labor laws and the NLRA.
| pope_meat wrote:
| 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"
| stale2002 wrote:
| Nobody cares about the technical definition of an obscure
| political philosophy.
|
| Everyone knew what they meant, when they were talking
| about "Anarchy". And we dont care about the irrelevant
| political movement.
| pope_meat wrote:
| I care, so, you're off by one at minimum.
|
| And for an irrelevant political movement, it sure takes
| up a lot of FBI resources.
| stale2002 wrote:
| Yes, it is pretty irrelevant to this conversation and
| most everything.
|
| Everyone knew what this person meant, and then you came
| in and started talking about something that was not what
| anyone was talking about.
| Alupis wrote:
| > 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.
| reader_mode wrote:
| >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.
| 0x500x79 wrote:
| 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.
| postalrat wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Kiro wrote:
| In what industry do you work where spaghetti code is not
| the norm?
| 0x500x79 wrote:
| Absolutely, that is exactly what I was saying.
|
| 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.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| 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?
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| 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.
| jjice wrote:
| 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.
| ctvo wrote:
| 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.
| boba7 wrote:
| I don't give a fuck about their pussy drama tbh. Get back to
| work.
| waythrifty5746 wrote:
| Good, walkouts are an effective way to drive organizational
| change. We had massive walkouts at Wayfair due to our policy of
| selling furniture to US Customs concentration camps that held
| tens of thousands of children. Only took Wayfair a few years to
| somewhat change their policy in a roundabout and nondescript way,
| but at least some movement took place.
| [deleted]
| underseacables wrote:
| Or demonstrate that the business is not viable in its current
| form. Perhaps blizzard should shut down.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Ah, those (in)famous concentration camps that instantly turn to
| migrant shelters when democrats are in power.
| jjdin14 wrote:
| If illegal immigrants aren't given free food and boarding in
| a hotel they're literally in a concentration camp!
| madamelic wrote:
| Maybe an asshole question, but did this change in policy occur
| pre or post election?
|
| I can't seem to find an article of them changing policy, only
| that the outcry happened in late 2019 which made me wonder.
| [deleted]
| jjdin14 wrote:
| US customs never had concentration camps holding children, they
| did have places for holding illegal immigrants though.
| ihumanable wrote:
| I'm sure those children will feel so much better when you
| explain the difference.
| jjdin14 wrote:
| Maybe their criminal parents who put them in that situation
| should be the ones doing the explaining.
| dang wrote:
| Previous related thread:
|
| _California sues Activision Blizzard over unequal pay, sexual
| harassment_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27922841 -
| July 2021 (461 comments)
| 0x500x79 wrote:
| 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?
| ev1 wrote:
| > 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...
|
| Sexism:
|
| [2018] https://kotaku.com/inside-the-culture-of-sexism-at-riot-
| game...
|
| [2018]
| https://twitter.com/MiniWhiteRabbit/status/10269232332814213...
|
| [2019] https://www.vice.com/en/article/evyz7p/over-100-riot-
| games-e...
|
| COO specific:
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/riot-games-suspends-coo-scot...
|
| - tbh just google riot games farting
|
| CEO specific:
|
| [Feb 2021] https://www.wired.com/story/riot-games-ceo-culture-
| complaint...
|
| [Mar 2021] https://www.dailyesports.gg/alienware-has-
| terminated-its-spo...
| 0x500x79 wrote:
| 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.
| ttyS1 wrote:
| 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.
| 0x500x79 wrote:
| 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.
| chojeen wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Can't help but feel I dodged a bullet.
| kryogen1c wrote:
| > 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.
| carlisle_ wrote:
| 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?
| kryogen1c wrote:
| > You're the first person to mention 'sexism' in this
| comment chain. Why is an investigation predicated on
| sexism?
|
| ...i actually have no idea. i was gonna say maybe i read
| it in another comment, but i dont see any other comment
| talking about sexism.
|
| i dont know what im on about. sorry folks!
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| I appreciated the honest fault acceptance. That was
| refreshing. Thanks!
| ttyS1 wrote:
| the way i read it, the starting point is that the culture
| is bad enough that this kind of sexual assault is
| considered perfectly protected and acceptable at the
| highest levels, which implicitly does not bode well for
| anything else.
| username90 wrote:
| Activision Blizzard stock dropped 8% today, this is much larger
| than what happened at Riot.
| madamelic wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| johncessna wrote:
| > 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
| dangerbird2 wrote:
| Samus isn't exactly a good example. The reward for winning
| Metroid is literally seeing her in a 8bit bikini
| [deleted]
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Good times
| stnmtn wrote:
| Peach was and still is just a damsel in distress in any
| non-sports mario game.
|
| Samus is covered up entirely by armor, and when she's not
| she's in a skin-tight suit that shows off every single
| curve
|
| Mrs. Pacman... I'll give you that one.
| johncessna wrote:
| 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.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| This is incorrect. Depending on the time you beat the
| game in, Samus would have progressively less clothing in
| the end:
|
| https://metroid.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Metroid_endings#M
| etr...
| mgkimsal wrote:
| 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.
| long_time_gone wrote:
| I'm not sure any of your examples actually support your
| stance.
|
| - Mrs. Pac-Man is not a human. That said, the marketing
| shows her in full make-up, laying in a seductive pose. Now,
| compare that to marketing and images of Pac-Man.
| https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/tw-
| mspacm...
|
| - Samus was shown at the end of the original Metroid as a
| slim woman in her underwear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
| Samus_Aran#/media/File:Samus_a...
|
| Other images show her as a young, curvy, attractive,
| blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/Samus_Aran#/media/File:Zero_Su...
|
| - 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
| himinlomax wrote:
| > 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.
| foobarian wrote:
| 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.
| ssully wrote:
| 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?
| pb7 wrote:
| 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.
| omgitsabird wrote:
| > considering women playing video games only became socially
| acceptable a few years ago
|
| What?
| madamelic wrote:
| 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.
| username90 wrote:
| > "female gamer == Candy Crush"
|
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_video_games#Genre
| _pr...
| [deleted]
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| username90 wrote:
| My link contains a survey of 270 000 gamers on what kinds
| of games they play, I didn't base this on anecdotes.
| ggsurvivor wrote:
| Gamergate started when someone pointed out that some shit
| game got positive reviews from a game reviewer that was
| having sex with the game developer. Fake narrative right
| from the start.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| Gamer gate was Zoe Quinn cheating on her boyfriend with
| game "journalists" in order to get marketing for her
| Depression Quest game. That is the core of it and NOBODY
| contests those facts. The rest of the misandrist
| narrative is just Quinn and said journalists grabbing on
| to the social justice zietgiest in an attempt to do
| damage control.
| crooked-v wrote:
| > and NOBODY contests those facts
|
| 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.
| speeder wrote:
| 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.
| crooked-v wrote:
| > The misoginy accusations came later
|
| 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).
| speeder wrote:
| 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.
| crooked-v wrote:
| > the Quinnspiracy thing became just the straw that broke
| the camel back
|
| The 'Quinnspiracy thing' was harassment and rape and
| death threats on blatantly false premises.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| 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.
| slg wrote:
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| 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.
| crooked-v wrote:
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| Sources for this, please?
| crooked-v wrote:
| The citations section of the Wikipedia article has
| literally hundreds from various reputable sources: https:
| //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy#Referenc...
| madamelic wrote:
| This is fascinating. I'll have to look into this more.
| From my brief understanding, there are multiple
| narratives of what "true" Gamergate is.
|
| I could very likely be wrong and have been misled about
| the core issue of Gamergate. Thanks for the kind
| correction!
| crooked-v wrote:
| 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.
| username90 wrote:
| 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.
| input_sh wrote:
| 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.
| username90 wrote:
| 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.
| crooked-v wrote:
| She didn't cheat the game review system.
| username90 wrote:
| 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.
| stale2002 wrote:
| I don't see what the big deal is that you keep bringing.
|
| Why does it matter so much to you whether or not 60%, or
| 59% of the people engaging in the harassment were sexist?
|
| It is still bad, regardless if we get the literal exact
| percentage correctly of precisely how sexist each
| individual was.
| input_sh wrote:
| 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?
| username90 wrote:
| 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.
| crooked-v wrote:
| 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.
| input_sh wrote:
| 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.
| howaboutnope wrote:
| 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".
| badthingfactory wrote:
| > 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?
| 0x500x79 wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > 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
| ttyS1 wrote:
| > ... In Saudi Arabia?
|
| Funny you mention this:
| https://www.esportsinsider.com/2020/07/lec-neom-saudi-
| arabia...
| andrewzah wrote:
| "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.
| nitrogen wrote:
| The people talking down are the people who think gamers
| are beneath them (but might play NFL or CoD on their
| console). AKA jocks vs. geeks.
| tsumnia wrote:
| 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.
| andrewzah wrote:
| 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.
| tsumnia wrote:
| > 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.
|
| [1] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
| madamelic wrote:
| 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.
| brian_cunnie wrote:
| > 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| 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.
| madamelic wrote:
| > '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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > 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.
| endtime wrote:
| > My point is that there is any controversy when there is
| a game where the female main character is not explicitly
| sexualized
|
| Samus Aran?
| a_t48 wrote:
| https://images.nintendolife.com/7ec23ee6efba1/zero-suit-
| samu...
|
| Yeah totally unsexualized
|
| Edit: yes, this is an image from Smash, but she gets a
| bikini picture in Fusion as a "reward"
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Your reward for beating Metroid faster is Samus wearing
| progressively less clothing at the end.
| [deleted]
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 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.
| username90 wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| 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.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| 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).
| buzer wrote:
| > nor any talk about "bulge physics"
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/GirlGamers/comments/adbb5b/devil
| _ma...
| madamelic wrote:
| 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.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 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.
| rustybelt wrote:
| 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.
| vagrantJin wrote:
| _Since anecdotes and all_
|
| > 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...
| blacktriangle wrote:
| It's not about having female characters in games, that's
| never been a problem.
|
| It's about totally rewriting history to appease the modern
| woke sensibility that people were complaining about.
| madamelic wrote:
| 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.
| crooked-v wrote:
| 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.
| madamelic wrote:
| 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.
| dralley wrote:
| >It's about totally rewriting history to appease the modern
| woke sensibility that people were complaining about.
|
| Nobody ever complains about gold-plated rifles, hipfiring
| LMGs, or frankly the entire existence of portable automatic
| weapons in a WWI game.
|
| If you don't like it, it is what it is, but don't hide
| behind excuses like "historical realism" and "rewriting
| history".
|
| Battlefield is not ARMA, if you took out everything that
| wasn't historically accurate there would be basically no
| game left, at all.
|
| I'm not aware of many historical instances of pilots
| jumping out of planes in mid-air to snipe other pilots and
| jump into _their_ planes.
| syshum wrote:
| >>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
| kook_throwaway wrote:
| >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?
| mchanson wrote:
| yes.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| He really isn't.
| lksaar wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| adamrezich wrote:
| 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?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 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?
| adamrezich wrote:
| 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?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 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.
| adamrezich wrote:
| well that sure sounds a lot like building a strawman out
| of some random debris but ok.
|
| I do question whether making gaming communities less
| toxic is a "good" thing. of course, anyone is welcome to
| do anything they want to their communities, and if they
| think making them less toxic is some combination of
| altruistically good, potentially profitable, and plain
| ol' good PR, then good for them. however, not everyone
| who plays games _wants_ to play their games in a
| sanitized environment, and not everyone takes everything
| said in anger to pseudononomous handles on the Internet
| personally. when Call of Duty 4 Remastered was made free
| on PS+, I wholly unironically had a lot of fun having the
| CoD4 online experience for the first time in years,
| complete with epithets and bong rip sounds in my headset.
| I kind of miss the days of 360-era Xbox Live vocal
| toxicity; I always found it amusing. of course I
| understand that it 's not everyone's cup of tea, but
| personally I find experiencing raw competitive energy in
| online games to be kind of weirdly exhilarating. Dota 2
| wouldn't be the same without the Russians and Latin
| Americans cursing at each other as well as me, in
| incomprehensible abbreviations of their native tongue.
|
| so again I have no issue with companies sanitizing their
| online communities, except that I take issue with the
| idea that said sanitization is somehow morally,
| altruistically good, as though preventing someone from
| calling someone else--whose sexual orientation they're
| more than likely entirely unfamiliar with--a "faggot,"
| will cause them to somehow reevaluate their life and
| linguistic choices going forward, thus making the world
| an objectively better place in the process. this seems
| absurd on its face, yet it seems like people actually
| believe it implicitly. sure, it might make your game more
| friendly to more people (again, increasing your company's
| profits), but, like, c'mon. not only is the idea that the
| actions of a corporation that coincidentally
| theoretically increases their profits could be a form of
| altruistic moral do-goodism hilarious on its face, but
| also, it raises the question of whether or not the
| "toxic" core audience that fell in love with your
| franchise in the first place will continue to buy future
| installments. (again, it's up to the corporations to make
| this value judgement--maybe they'll get enough new,
| toxicity-adverse people to play (and _keep playing_ )
| their games, enough to more than cancel out the toxic
| boys leaving!) but pretending it's an act of justice or
| something is just silly.
| fpgaminer wrote:
| > Am I missing something here?
|
| 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.
|
| It's a qualitatively different experience.
| username90 wrote:
| 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.
| madamelic wrote:
| Sorry, should've been more specific.
|
| 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.
| kook_throwaway wrote:
| Thanks for the perspective.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| 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.
| puchatek wrote:
| 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.
| bin_bash wrote:
| > 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.
|
| What game are you referring to?
| imbnwa wrote:
| The Last of Us Part II I presume
| edoceo wrote:
| Wild! Heres a summary https://collider.com/last-of-
| us-2-controversy-explained/
| username90 wrote:
| It is about battlefield 5, the last of us was last year.
| More specifically people didn't like the depiction of
| world war 2 in this trailer:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7ZpQadiyqs
| dralley wrote:
| I love how the "realism" crowd has no issues with jumping
| out of planes mid-air to snipe a pilot (and then steal
| their plane).
|
| Or jumping from the third floor of a building onto a
| cobblestone street and then running away as if you had
| barely tripped.
|
| Or having a WWI game where half the server is carrying
| automatic weapons.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| > Or having a WWI game where half the server is carrying
| automatic weapons.
|
| It's completely beside the point now, but I do actually
| remember people being pissed off about that.
| dralley wrote:
| There's a distinct difference in volume, if so.
| imbnwa wrote:
| Thank you for the correction
| madamelic wrote:
| Battlefield 5.
|
| I like the fact that someone else responded with another
| that also works.
|
| It shows how frequently this happens.
| himinlomax wrote:
| 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.
| amatecha wrote:
| Cyborg woman? You mean the woman with an arm prosthetic?
| Come on.
| himinlomax wrote:
| Ah yeah, my bad, just call it a prosthetic and it's
| totally period-appropriate.
| slg wrote:
| 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].
|
| [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOII2izC7XU
| slg wrote:
| There are literally too many to name, but this one comes to
| mind[1].
|
| [1] - https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/horizon-forbidden-
| west-aloy...
|
| EDIT: 4 responses within minutes of each other all pointing
| to a different game just underlines my "too many to name"
| comment.
| andoriyu wrote:
| That was satirical, lmao.
| amatecha wrote:
| Here are a few more...
|
| Battlefield: https://www.salon.com/2018/05/26/women-in-
| wwii-game-once-aga...
|
| Rust: https://www.vice.com/en/article/d7y7jj/this-game-
| is-forcing-...
|
| Outriders: https://www.reddit.com/r/outriders/comments/ly
| zmz3/srsly_so_...
|
| Horizon Zero Dawn:
| https://twitter.com/apexalphaj/status/1398826689992482819
|
| Total War Rome 2: https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/total-
| war-rome-ii-female-cha...
|
| The Last Of Us Part 2: https://collider.com/last-of-
| us-2-controversy-explained/
|
| The Outer Worlds: https://steamcommunity.com/app/578650/d
| iscussions/0/27330478...
|
| Apex Legends: https://gamerant.com/apex-legends-female-
| complaints-response...
|
| I could keep going...
| bitwize wrote:
| 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.
| madamelic wrote:
| 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.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 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.
| madamelic wrote:
| Rust is a _really_ fun one since not only does it force
| you into a gender, it also forces you into a race.
|
| It was _very_ telling about all the dudes getting mad
| that they were being forced to play not only as a woman
| but also non-white.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Same thing in Subnautica: Below Zero
|
| ...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.
| bin_bash wrote:
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| Returnal, perhaps?
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| I haven't heard anything about Returnal but maybe it's
| because Samus Aran already dominates that genre.
|
| In fact, the only time I ever hear complaints about Samus
| Aran is when they make her more submissive and less of a
| badass.
| [deleted]
| fxtentacle wrote:
| 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.
| pseudo0 wrote:
| 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.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Agree. The official story trailer suggested that it would
| be quite similar to the first game, but then it wasn't.
| fidesomnes wrote:
| _O_ my god, _who_ cares?
| vmception wrote:
| 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
| oceanghost wrote:
| 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.
| soverycool wrote:
| It's acceptable racism for this person to say something so
| abhorrent.
| madamelic wrote:
| 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.
| soverycool wrote:
| Yes, I know you're full of sexist, racist opinions you
| want to share with us all.
| t-writescode wrote:
| 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.
| ahtihn wrote:
| Yeah no, it's not the responsibility of men that do
| nothing wrong to call out other men.
|
| If you said that it's the respinsibility of all black
| people to call out black criminals for their bad
| behavior, you'd rightfully get called a racist.
|
| I don't see how this is different.
| ballenf wrote:
| 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).
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| But that's a patently sexist retort. Peter and Sue are
| equally responsible for Ron's abhorrent behavior.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| 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.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Links?
| Daishiman wrote:
| > 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?
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| 15155 wrote:
| Were the bulk of these programmers solving problems with
| engineering and logical reasoning as they might today?
| mcguire wrote:
| Yes. More so.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| That doesn't align with most accounts of how computing
| was performed in the 50's and 60's.
|
| For instance, Knuth was seen as an anomaly because he
| would operate the keypunch as fast as the secretaries and
| would keypunch his own programs.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Revisionist history
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| tomp wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://developers.hp.com/sites/default/files/Intl%20Wome
| ns%...
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| 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.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| 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.
|
| Here's a comment I wrote in response to a similar point
| addressing the topic:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26767280
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > 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.
| mftb wrote:
| 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.
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| kelnos wrote:
| 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.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Domestically, certainly not post dotcom crash.
|
| 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...
| leetcrew wrote:
| 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.
| kazinator wrote:
| Oh, I got an earful at home when I dropped out of
| engineering in around 1991 to go into CS.
| majormajor wrote:
| > 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.
| ehutch79 wrote:
| 20 years ago i had to show people in a cs course how to
| turn on their computer. they were only there because of
| the dotcom bubble.
|
| Brogrammers were a thing back then, and were problematic
| even then.
| [deleted]
| majormajor wrote:
| My mistake, rounding error. 15-17 years ago, my CS
| courses _after_ the bubble burst were rather different.
|
| CS in _high school_ even during the dot-com bubble,
| though... NOT popular.
| kelnos wrote:
| 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.
| jcelerier wrote:
| It's money-printing but definitely not prestigious in
| most cultures when compared to doctor, lawyer, professor
| (even when it makes more money)
| xenihn wrote:
| 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.
| slumdev wrote:
| It's still not prestigious.
|
| Joe Average envies Bill Gates.
|
| Joe Average does not envy MS programmer #7413 who does
| device driver maintenance.
| bifrost wrote:
| Not entirely true, the "tax them to death" crowd in SF
| are very envious of "Tech Workers" who are largely
| programmers.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| If they could create value, they would. But instead they
| whine.
| bitwize wrote:
| 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).
| psyc wrote:
| 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.
| bifrost wrote:
| 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.
| somehnacct3757 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| golemiprague wrote:
| Women should work in banks and hospitals, when they infiltrate
| creative endeavours it just creates havoc and drag the whole
| organisation down. It is funny but the theoretically more liberal
| people in the music industry and other performing arts got it
| long time ago, that's why most of the people on the production
| and creation side of things are men and the women are mainly just
| the singers and performers. The computer geeks of SV never really
| understood women and that's why they are standing there baffled
| trying to figure out how comes they are the most "sexist"
| industry when they are so woke and all voted for Hillary. It is
| just funny to watch.
| Animats wrote:
| Union, Yes!
| yosito wrote:
| 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.
| pmarreck wrote:
| 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.
| psyc wrote:
| 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.
| mempko wrote:
| Would you have preferred no ribbing? I think most people,
| including men, would.
| underseacables wrote:
| 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.
| vkou wrote:
| 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.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I mean if you're not able to tell when people are
| uncomfortable yea. Otherwise just be respectful.
|
| One of the blizzard employees killed herself after being
| sexually harassed and you're trying to play this off by
| making a strawman.
| void_mint wrote:
| 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.
| madamelic wrote:
| Yes, that is a valid response.
|
| 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.
| andrewzah wrote:
| 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.
| fleddr wrote:
| 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.
| TMWNN wrote:
| [...]
|
| >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.
| fleddr wrote:
| 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.
| andrewzah wrote:
| 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.
| fleddr wrote:
| "Idiots ruin things for everyone else."
|
| 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.
| void_mint wrote:
| 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.
| fleddr wrote:
| "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.
| brazzy wrote:
| It's generally enough to just not be an asshole. But if
| that's too difficult to you, sure.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Seems to be too difficult for you.
| ben_w wrote:
| 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)?
| arsome wrote:
| Eh... take a look at some of the shit that was reported in
| the lawsuits, seems a lot worse than mis-interpreted
| "ribbing".
| void_mint wrote:
| 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.
| craftinator wrote:
| > 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.
| arbitrage wrote:
| > Sexual harassment was punished severely, but at the
| lowest levels possible, and wasn't often reported.
|
| So, not severely, then?
| craftinator wrote:
| > So, not severely, then?
|
| 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.
| void_mint wrote:
| > 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]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_assault_in_the_Unite
| d_S...
|
| I would say that the punishment seeming severe is mostly
| a display.
| craftinator wrote:
| 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.
| kenjackson wrote:
| 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.
| brazzy wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Now how often is that actually the case?
| jjk166 wrote:
| > 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."
| elliekelly wrote:
| 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.
| jonchang wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27922841
| FanaHOVA wrote:
| Some extracts from the lawsuit:
| https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/activision-...
| colinmhayes wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Wild
| xbar wrote:
| 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.
| ozarkerD wrote:
| 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?
| tstrimple wrote:
| 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?
| tpmx wrote:
| The money, and the kind of people it attracts.
| [deleted]
| elliekelly wrote:
| > How do things get this far?
|
| The tone at the top.
| s5300 wrote:
| Yeah, just Google Blizzard Activision court case files/summary
|
| Pretty fucked situation
| __s wrote:
| https://www.polygon.com/22595703/activision-blizzard-employe...
| quotes demands verbatim
| pengaru wrote:
| I suppose this is one feature of actually going to the office
| worth noting.
|
| Staging a virtual walk out where everyone just doesn't sign into
| Slack, Github, and/or read email for a day wouldn't have the same
| impact.
| bennysomething wrote:
| One of the demands
|
| "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?
| j_walter wrote:
| > 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.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| 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.
| danparsonson wrote:
| 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.
| easterncalculus wrote:
| 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.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Weinstein did his crap for years, the US gymnastics assaults
| went on for years.
|
| Both gatekeepers for Hollywood and the Olympics.
| madamelic wrote:
| 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.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| 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.
| j_walter wrote:
| 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.
| GerraldJolkb wrote:
| 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?
| danparsonson wrote:
| 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.
| abrawill wrote:
| You don't have to be a victim to do something about it.
|
| When any of us remain silent when we witness or hear about
| abuse we are allowing other people to be victimized now and in
| the future.
| j_walter wrote:
| 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.
| abrawill wrote:
| 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.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Wow this plus the exodus of players moving to FFXIV is probably
| making for a pretty wild month at Blizzard.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| 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.
| qmmmur wrote:
| 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?
| Hamuko wrote:
| HR works for the company, not for you.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| 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.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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.
| spicybright wrote:
| 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.
| cletus wrote:
| 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.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _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.
| mhuffman wrote:
| >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.
|
| [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/026540750809
| 670...
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _Yes, you are an outlier._
|
| Fair enough
|
| _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.
| phoric wrote:
| This is just my understanding, but I believe in social
| sciences r values are usually quite deflated and a
| coefficient of .47 is extremely high.
| bennysomething wrote:
| 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?!
| kgantchev wrote:
| 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.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| 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.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| 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.
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| 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
| kqr wrote:
| 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.
| overgard wrote:
| > 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.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 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.
| bennysomething wrote:
| 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.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| 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).
| hkt wrote:
| 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.
| eloff wrote:
| > 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.
| mcguire wrote:
| The filing: https://aboutblaw.com/YJw
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| 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.
| cletus wrote:
| > 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).
| throwequality wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Is this true in all cases? Planned Parenthood is taking a
| clear political stand, whereas say, Google is just a
| software company in the adtech industry.
| throwequality wrote:
| Political beliefs / affiliation (especially when mainstream)
| is a protected class though. Was this individual also
| "bringing it to work"?
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| The explanation I heard was that a bumper sticker on their
| car outed them.
| throwequality wrote:
| 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.
| nineplay wrote:
| > 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 the Star Wars lingo we
| use?
|
| If you don't find these discriminatory, think about how well a
| recent poster from Gaza would have done with them. Not well, I
| suspect
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25849054
| Kiro wrote:
| 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.
| RussianCow wrote:
| 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.
| nineplay wrote:
| 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?
| Kiro wrote:
| 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.
| tolbish wrote:
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
|
| [0] https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-
| samples/hr-...
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| 'any time you make a decision' is a discrimination
| between choice A and B.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| 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).
|
| https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/small-business/small-
| business...
| Kiro wrote:
| 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?
| hermannj314 wrote:
| I wish I knew.
|
| 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.
| Rapzid wrote:
| 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_.
| bennysomething wrote:
| 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?
| nineplay wrote:
| 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.
| cronix wrote:
| 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.
| AOsborn wrote:
| > 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.
| nineplay wrote:
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > Do you dislike them because they seem kind of boring?
| Get over yourself.
|
| Why'd I care about that? I only need them to write great
| code 8 hours a day. What they do outside of that is
| (mostly) irrelevant.
| cletus wrote:
| 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.
| Cosmin_C wrote:
| 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.
| dougmwne wrote:
| This is an old hiring manager joke that's been around for
| enough decades that someone was sure to try it.
| nineplay wrote:
| 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".
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| CobaltFire wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_names
| cletus wrote:
| 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.
| CobaltFire wrote:
| Thanks for the follow-up!
|
| 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.
| dougmwne wrote:
| No.
|
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > You better be able to articulate what job-relevant
| reason is behind your dislike
|
| I have to work with them? If they have a shitty
| personality that's going to be hard.
|
| I'd much rather select for unconscious biases than hire
| terrible people just to satisfy some people's idea of
| what is politically correct.
| dougmwne wrote:
| 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.
| munk-a wrote:
| Being a poor communicator and bad team contributor is a
| thing you can pretty easily articulate without falling
| back on "doesn't fit the culture".
| GuB-42 wrote:
| 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.
| vsareto wrote:
| What companies do those things? That actually sounds like
| fun.
|
| The Star Wars lingo probably gets old though. It should
| really be Expanse lingo if they want to stay cool.
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| 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
| psyc wrote:
| I always thought the belters _were_ doing jar jar
| impressions.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| 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.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| 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.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| 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.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| 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.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It is strange, because the workers know that any slight
| uptick in productivity is going to be captured by Nadella
| and fellow 0.1%ers.
| jonathanlb wrote:
| 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.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 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.
| yarg wrote:
| 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.
| rdaystrom wrote:
| Aren't all swords double-edged? I would think that a
| single-edged sword would simply be a knife. Or an axe.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Sabers? Katanas?
| rascul wrote:
| Also falchions, scimitars, sabres, cutlasses, and
| falcatas. Additionally, I have some double edged knives.
| sangnoir wrote:
| 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.
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| jacobrussell wrote:
| > 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"?
| yarg wrote:
| She'd dress up for christmas and halloween, nothing that
| bad.
|
| Other than that she sat in the corner (nearish the pool
| table) being inoffensive.
|
| The second edge: there is the risk that healthy aspects
| of a prevailing culture will be eroded for the sake of an
| overly vocal regressive minority.
| cableshaft wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-06-22-activision-bli...
| Ntrails wrote:
| 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
| cableshaft wrote:
| Yeah I think once I got to like, 10 million I'd just pull a
| Joe Rogan and do whatever I felt like at that point and not
| work a proper job anymore.
|
| And I'm a long way away from getting that, unless one of my
| investments pulls a GME or something.
| ecshafer wrote:
| That's a good point. Most people that would retire at $100M
| would probably retire at $10M, and thus wouldn't make it to
| that $100M level.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I don't really think this is true. They can end up spending
| a lot of that 100m on a car collection.
| cableshaft wrote:
| 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.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I agree, I just disagree that they aren't working for the
| money.
| mehlmao wrote:
| 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.
|
| Activision Blizzard's Chief Compliance Officer released an
| absolutely disgusting statement in response to the lawsuit:
| https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1418619091515068421
|
| It's surreal knowing that she is also complicit in the war crimes
| committed at Abu Ghraib
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Townsend#Career).
| beebeepka wrote:
| 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.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| 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.
| blibble wrote:
| the parent company gave the Diablo 2 remake to another studio
| inside Activision (i.e. not the Blizzard studio)
|
| so... more of that: fewer and fewer Blizzard IPs developed by
| "Blizzard"
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| unsigner wrote:
| 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.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| 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.
| foobarian wrote:
| 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.
| VRay wrote:
| 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
| fxtentacle wrote:
| 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.
| thrower123 wrote:
| 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.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Hasn't WoW been "hemorrhaging" users since the days of Wrath
| 11-13 years ago?
| [deleted]
| throwawayswede wrote:
| How will they virtually walk out?
| foolinaround wrote:
| the lawsuit :
| https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/activisonsuit.p...
| devwastaken wrote:
| A 50 man raid group forming outside Blizzard to take on the final
| boss, blizzard management.
|
| No king rules forever, my son.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Remember the line that follows: "Control must be maintained.
| There must always be a Lich King."
| edoceo wrote:
| Leeerooyyy Jeeennkkiinnsss!!
| [deleted]
| ngngngng wrote:
| Aw geez, stick to the plan!
| ksec wrote:
| At least I have chicken!
| [deleted]
| DelightOne wrote:
| Link didn't work for me.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210727183853/https://www.axios...
| serverholic wrote:
| How much lower can Blizzard go? Fans have been disappointed in
| Blizzard for awhile but now not only are fans pissed off but
| employees are pissed off.
| RobRivera wrote:
| the chicken scene from footloose comes to mind.
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