In the suit, the state even attempted a mediated resolution to prevent it from going to court. But Blizzard refused to cooperate, essentially taunting the state to bring a case, which they now have.
It really makes you question whether Bobby Kotick is the right guy as CEO. Not only did he fail to demonstrate ethical leadership, but his handling of this crisis is massively destructive of shareholder value.
Less glib, this past year has taught me that a lot of companies are led by genuinely unintelligent people. The number of short sighted, self destructive, and downright childish behavior coming from the C suite of even some big companies has been nearly endless. The idea that Blizzard is led by someone so impulsive that he basically goaded the state into suing him is unsurprising.
Even if they are found guilty on all charges, it wouldn't affect their bottom line too much.
But there may be other factors. Companies that sacrificed employees for the public mob did get into problems with their employees.
If they are found guilty, which I think is very likely, their statement is indeed not too smart though.
There's a reason that "meritocracy" was invented as a term to mock the state of things. It's a myth. It was always a myth. A joke.
The people selling the notion that the way things are is the result of a meritocracy is the secular Western equivalent of people using caste as a justification for shabby treatment of have-nots.
They've also seemed to have forgotten that they're located in California. This is the type of thing you might say if you were in Texas and wanted to politicize the issue in the hopes of getting Greg Abbott to take your side. But here, it's just digging a deeper hole. I'm dumbfounded that any PR department would sign off on this.
Edit: snipped the bit about Hero's of the Storm since that was post acquisition
Perhaps that makes him the "right guy as CEO". You know, culture fit.
(It's not all Bobby's fault though: pre-Activision Blizzard folks are named too.)
That's mostly bad, because they won't bring cases that are worthy but risky to their career.
When they do ultimately bring a case, though, it means it's strong.
How many hands did that pass through and nobody was brave enough to strike that line? It adds nothing positive.
Yikes.
Perhaps I'm a cynic but I assumed that was the "compromise" version of the language and the original draft was worse.
In this case they're kinda pulling in different directions and ... I dunno probably best to just stick to one topic as far as a press release goes.
It's about ethics in game journalism! Er, ethics in government?
The sad part is that I suspect many of the individuals involved actually believe that sentiment.
I see it more as them either waking up to the relative supremacy of and latent unaccountability afforded to the modern Big Corporation, or finally being bold enough to drop the pretense of being an "equal" member of society. There is no need to be polite when your company's position is secure and permanent.
That is, the government and society being mad at them does not matter, for their profits are still guaranteed. The only question is whether the stock will go up right after losing the lawsuit, or a few days later.
additonally, a phone number of "Kotick (Activision)" was photographed on Epstein's rolodex
I personally would never want him as a leader, yet alone a CEO. Ethically, I wouldn't be okay.
Now the standard is just a flat out lie.
Used to be either no comment or getting the shit out yourself with apologies appeal to emotion and move on.
There are so many Trump-style statements I read in news every day. An article from ProPublica today on China's extra judicial kidnappings abroad had quotes from CCP that could have been Trump but flipped.
It's scary that the truth doesn't matter anymore to a significant %, and another significant % are just so flustered and overwhelmed they move on.
Maybe they think their customers are more Gamer-gatey types, and will side with them over a bunch of underpaid, sexually-harassed female employees.
So far the markets haven’t reflected that. How long does it normally take for serious allegations to start affecting the stock price?
Some said they didn't care about sexual harassment from certain political parties and just used it as a political cudgel. Those that genuinely fought for reproductive rights got completely shafted and I think they are even worse than before.
Also, it's bad for small business owners, because then the large businesses could see what they are paying and much more easily poach employees.
Edit: To clarify, I'm absolutely in favor of pay transparency laws. But any time you make a government policy, there are always winners and losers. It's always a balance between how much you're harming the losers and who they are. In this case, the losers would be the businesses and their owners, which is all that I'm pointing out. But I'd say that the employees should be the winners here, and I say this as a business owner myself.
That sounds a bit like (apologies for the strawman): "small business needs to be able to exploit employees to survive."
If small business can't survive without that, perhaps the problem lies elsewhere?
I don't follow - to rephrase what you're saying, it's bad for small business owners because their (underpaid) employees will be paid more by (larger) other businesses?
Sounds like the employees of said businesses will overwhelming benefit if what you're saying is true.
And it would make poaching of employees from small businesses easier because they suddenly know about the salaries that they didn't have a clue about before? I don't know what you think the recruiters at of the big players do all day, I would bet they have very good ideas what all the other players pay. If anything it would help small businesses who don't have the money to pay top recruiters.
[1] http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2021.pdf (14th place in 2021)
[2] https://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset=sdg...
This would not be the case if the pay transparency that parent describes were already a thing, because I would have the same ability to check the salaries of that company.
But without that mandate happening, whoever moves first loses. That's why salary transparency should be mandated, because otherwise no one has any motivation to move, so no one will.
If you were the best person on your team and were being paid the least you wouldn't want to know? I honestly don't understand your view.
Were you...being serious?
Then I remember when a recruiter told a friend on speakerphone that they thought he wasn't a culture fit and he asked what they meant and the recruiter said "Everyone here is young and they were worried you're too old."
I didn't say anything, he didn't ... at that time we needed a job / to break into the industry, not to get our names out there in a fight about a place that didn't want to hire guys like us. (We're both doing fine now.)
If you're going to be awful, at least...don't obviously violate federal law while being awful?
This is a really weird complaint to me. Maybe I was just always an old curmudgeon, but when I was a naive young computer boy I got along great with the old guys I worked with. Plus they have accumulated wisdom. Maybe disrespect for accumulated wisdom is one of the reasons software sucks so bad these days. Damned kids...
What do you mean "maybe"?! It has always been the case.
I am not even that old -- 41y/o currently -- and I work professionally as a programmer ever since ~22 and I always noticed how 99% of all programmers I ever worked with, when faced with advice from seasoned veterans, were like "meh, this doesn't apply to us, we'll figure out our own solution" which, sadly, goes exactly like you think it would, at least 90% of the time.
It still burns me up a little but at that point I 100% understood his call and honestly not sure I would want to go all the way down the road fighting it too...
Which is perfectly legal, as long as the target isn't over 40.
This is what allows so much harassment (both general and sexual) to go unchecked. It's better to shut up, bag some amount of experience and move on to a better job than it is to actively fight against it.
It is super, super critical for you to know: this happens where you work, too.
No, not "this could happen where you work." I'm telling you that if you work with women in engineering, they deal with this shit anywhere from weekly to hourly.
It comes from "the nice manager," from a QA on another team, from a tech lead, from a customer.
Misogyny and harassment are happening around you, and you need to be looking for it.
If your first thought upon reading this was "well, I'm just glad that could never happen here," you are wrong, and you need to be on your guard.
You seem to imply that women on the internet are not actually in the industry? Not sure what you're saying here, unless you mean IRL, in which case,
it is likely that women are not as comfortable talking IRL to men about these issues as they are online. I'm not a woman, but I sure am more comfortable discussing these things online. Seems like it would go both ways.
> Some don’t perceive any problems at all,
A person's perception or lack thereof of a problem does not mean that the problem does not exist. Millions or billions of people are discriminated against every day without knowing it in the moment, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen or cause harm.
My girlfriend works at a woman-led software company, where most of the people on her team are women, and from her description, that type of shit just doesn't fly there. It is her first time working at a company where this is the case, and she's loads happier.
For whatever it's worth, she landed her current role by attending some local "women in tech" meetups for a few months, and a woman she met from there was hiring.
I think it's important for any women reading this thread to know that software companies do exist where women are treated fairly, and it might be worthwhile to seek out those companies.
I'm also certain no-one has committed suicide due to sexual harassment by the company's employees
(note that I don't actually believe this supposition, I'm just following it to the logical conclusion.)
I disagree.
You should be reporting it if you witness it, but not actively LOOKING for it.
It's not my job, nor yours, to go actively LOOKING for these problems. It is my job, however, to report them should I see them happening. That's just common sense.
I believe that the leadership team doesn't encourage sexual harassment where I work. I know that people get fired for harassing others.
Maybe I'm naive and all the CEOs at all the tech companies encourage their subordinates to harass women. Or maybe you just need to get another job, at a place that doesn't suck. Or maybe you just need to read the article.
I think summoning a threat everywhere is keeping more women out of tech than cases were sexual misconduct actually did happen.
But insisting I care while women engage in illegal sexism for their own benefit is an abusive, one-sided relationship.
Study after study confirms that women are preferentially hired and receive privilege in education. Study after study shows women dominated fields like HR and education are incredibly sexist. Women are allowed to organize on the basis of sex for more sexist privilege at most universities and businesses. Ask any man who has worked in a majority female department if lewd comments, inappropriate pictures, etc happen there.
When women do their part to end sexism, I’ll care.
Until then, it’s just entitled whining.
/s
Even if that’s true, which lol, I love “we may have ruined any number of women’s lives in the past but surely you can’t hold us accountable for that today!”
https://www.newsweek.com/activision-blizzard-lawsuit-female-...
I hope these individuals will be able to find good work elsewhere when blizzard inevitably ousts them. California should be fining Blizzard into the ground, but given Blizzards response they've calculated out how much it'll cost and figured it's cheaper to do this.
Given the sexual harassment and exploitation of women in other industries like Hollywood and how often this is either encouraged, actively ignored or swept under the rug by the executive level of other gaming industry companies I believe that giving this the label of "gamer culture" is just dishonest at this point because it implies that the people playing games are the "true root of the problem". I'm not accusing you of doing that, don't get me wrong.
Enforcing the image of the "evil gamer" is of course an easy way to diffuse responsibility and push it off to some imaginary group (it's not 1995 anymore, gaming is no longer some sub- or monoculture) so that the poor big executives never catch too much negative PR.
I'm sure the people in charge love the "it's a large scale problem of society or gaming culture" narrative.
Nah, I think the tone of their response shows that they think that a PR strategy based in rolling the dice on getting culture-war attachment and hoping that the upcoming recall succeeds before the case is resolved, resulting in an Administration from the faction whose rhetoric they are mirroring, who might then be inclined to dismiss the case.
Since the PR strategy doesn't really constrain their substantive legal strategy, and there is some chance of that PR strategy actually working (though it seems remote), its maybe not a bad idea, ignoring moral and ethical considerations.
Then you don't know gamer culture, they only attack apparent wrongdoings, these accusations are far from baseless so there is nothing to rise up against. Instead you should expect the gamer culture to attack the Blizzard employees suspected of wrongdoing in that manner. Which, if you look around is what you will find in most forums, people are really angry at Blizzard about this, nobody is calling for attacks on these women.
There's a lot of value in polling the wisdom of crowds. Pending discrimination litigation is almost certainly not a good use case.
I also hope we're not watching the Next Horrible Thing to come from the Internet unfold before our eyes.
I have yet to see reddit takes on this as awful as the ones right here.
> In a tragic example of the harassment that Defendants allowed to fester in their offices, a female employee committed suicide while on a company trip due to a sexual relationship that she had been having with her male supervisor. The male supervisor was found by police to have brought a butt plug and lubricant on this business trip. Another employee confirmed that the deceased female employee may have been suffering from other sexual harassment at work prior to her death. Specifically, at a holiday party before her death, male co-workers were alleged to be passing around a picture of the deceased's vagina.
(I had to manually type that out because the source doc is a scanned PDF; might have typos)
source: https://aboutblaw.com/YJw
Am I wrong or does the statement make no indication that the sexual relationship was non-consensual?
Feels like we are making massive assumptions here.
> In Cox regression analyses adjusted for a range of sociodemographic characteristics, workplace sexual harassment was associated with an excess risk of both suicide (hazard ratio 2.82, 95% confidence interval 1.49 to 5.34) and suicide attempts (1.59, 1.21 to 2.08), and risk estimates remained significantly increased after adjustment for baseline health and certain work characteristics. ...
> The results support the hypothesis that workplace sexual harassment is prospectively associated with suicidal behaviour.
What you are missing is the knowledge that harassing people can hurt them. It can. And linked is some science to back it up in case you wanted a source.
Maybe having pics of your vagina passed around the office might not make you suicidal, but it might make someone else suicidal.
Perhaps one way to find out is to present the facts of the case to a judge\jury with expert testimony and let them figure it out.
Male employees drank on the job and came to work hungover, the lawsuit said."
Isn't that the big selling point of game industry - the hours can be terrible but the free snacks/beer/games culture keeps people there?
The other stuff seems pretty bad.
I'm reminded of allegations of the K-pop industry basically being a soulless meat grinder because it has no trouble finding kids who will do anything to be a K-pop idol.
That's most of the music industry. Startups play the same game by paying in lotto tickets.
I really want to get back into gamedev. Maybe 2024/5 I can seriously consider it again.
And because we were engineers we'd sometimes work past six on a Friday when others are at the bar. Sometimes I'd go have a beer with them and then go back to write some code because something struck me.
Sure I drank 'on the job'. That's part of why software engineering is fun. I get to do my job with these things included.
I don't know, I'm just asking other's opinions here.
Frat house culture at a company is universally shitty.
I don't know, I'm just thinking aloud here.
- If you invite everyone to do X, who's likely to refuse? Are they going to feel excluded or mocked? If you don't care about your second class employees, there are more important issues you don't care about.
For example, excluding the gluten intolerant from a homemade cake is different from excluding some Jews from a deliberately pork-only barbecue.
- If someone happens to do or say X, could someone consider it a problem? If such people are present, X should be forbidden; if such people aren't represented in the company, usually they should. A line between requiring employees to have a somewhat thick skin and requiring everyone else to be nice needs to be drawn, and everyone should be aware of it.
For example, if the "frat house" insults absent customers and competitors with anecdotes of their incompetence, it is likely to be harmless (although a symptom of bad attitude); if jokes are about some ethnic group it's a serious problem because such employees are either successfully avoided, or openly offended by some rotten apples.
- If A has some unpleasant interaction with B, do the consequences depend on who A and B are? Why?
For example, if the owner's dog is forgiven for biting someone while the intern's dog is against company policy it isn't a good workplace.
I'm not sure what diversity and equality have to do with anything. That would mean that I should also hire stupid and unqualified people to make things equal. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with being stupid, some of my best times have been with stupid people. But 50% to 75% of the world is stupid, and most unqualifed, so that would me 95% or more of the company's workforce should be stupid and unqualified, as that is a true reflection of diversity and equality. And, if one is going to be actually diverse and committed to equality, probably 98% of men are sexist, although 97.8% would deny it. So should 98% of males be excluded from the workforce? Or is hiring sexist males promoting diversity and equality?
>For example, excluding the gluten intolerant from a homemade cake is different from excluding some Jews from a deliberately pork-only barbecue.
That's just your personal opinion. Some gluten intolerant people might be just as offended.
>For example, if the "frat house" insults absent customers and competitors with anecdotes of their incompetence, it is likely to be harmless (although a symptom of bad attitude)
Yes, I have never worked in a company that has never had insults to customers who don't get it. That's pretty normal and understandable. But it is like a group of good friends, and there's always one person in the group who is an idiot, and everyone talks shit about him even in front of him, but you hang out with him anyways, because he's your idiot.
>if jokes are about some ethnic group it's a serious problem because such employees are either successfully avoided, or openly offended by some rotten apples.
Yes, that's true. But personally, I don't consider that "frat house" behavior.
>For example, if the owner's dog is forgiven for biting someone while the intern's dog is against company policy it isn't a good workplace.
Eh, again, this is just your opinion. Some people are allowed perquisites. I mean, I don't mean a dog biting per se, I take it that you said that as a general concept. But in general, everyone in a company is not absolutely equal. But f-ck biting dogs, I'd kill a dog if it bit me hard and probably beat the sh-t out the owner, too - f-ck the job, that is beyond the pale. But that is because I'm a manly man and would not put up with that shit. I know where my lines are and when someone crosses them. Or, if the dog bit me kind of lightly but with evil intent (growling at me before biting), that's when I would manage up and tell the owner that the dog is not coming back, too bad. I've done that before when my boss is clearly in the wrong, and have never once got any pushback for it. And I'd do that no matter who it bit, anyone at all.
This is a big reason why me and my other female engineer friends ask about gender ratio during job interviews: sometimes a mostly male organization will be treat its female employees fine, but sometimes it will disrespect them, harass them, and treat them like garbage.
Let's compare to something analogous like recruiting an executive or manager to take on to a dysfunctional org/team. We don't ask "well if the good managers don't join, how will it ever get better?". We create incentives to get these better people to join (or let the ship sink). But we intrinsically look at it as a burden worth compensating, and I'd expect companies with this level of bad PR to look at doing the same.
To quote one (awful) take,
> I’ll care when women worry about misandry.
Want to see the perpetuation of misogyny in the tech industry occurring in real time? Just take a skim through the rationalization, defensiveness, and whataboutism littering the bottom and following pages of this thread. This is a community including a high proportion of engineers and engineering leadership and the problems endemic to our industry are on full display in this filing and in the responses posed by more than a few members of this community.
If anyone reading this is privileged enough to have been insulated from these problems before, has truly been skeptical about whether this is a problem in our field today: this should be all the proof you need.
Edit: Enough users have opted to downvote this comment that it now sits at -2 and I think I am entitled to at least a reply explaining why.
However this one line seems like it would be hard to prove:
They(women) were also assigned to lower-level positions and passed over for promotions, despite doing more work than their male peers in some cases
I know many people who are really good at filling out their TPS reports, and never break the rules. They don't ever get promoted, because they do so much in their current role, and since they never break the rules, they never get to be highlighted for "showing initiative." Though if the rest of it proves to be true, it would not look good.
"... In another example, a female employee who worked at Blizzard Entertainment was assigned to a lower level, denied equal pay, and passed over for a promotion despite multiple factors that suggested she earned it: (1) highly rated performance reviews; (2) she generated significantly more revenue in her marketing campaigns than her male counterpart; and (3) she ran almost twice as many campaigns as her male counterpart."
Though combined with all the other allegations it doesn't look like it's just standard corporate unfairness/politicking.
There are plenty of other factors at play in viewing a candidate for promotion. Leadership ability, experience, overall operation knowledge, seniority, and etc. Bringing in revenue is only a fragment of the considerations.
It looks damning on the surface, but she could tank a portion of the review that is critical to being promoted and still rank highly.
This is a situation that it's best to reserve your conviction until it plays out in court.
Junior marketers who run a litany of extremely expensive campaigns, generate a lot of revenue at the cost of negative ROI, and act shocked when losing the company's money is frowned upon.
Its a civil case. If it goes to trial, the standard of proof is “preponderance of the evidence” (basically, on the evidence presented, is the allegation more likely true than false), not the criminal standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt”.
Systematic gender discrimination in promotions (absent a smoking gun like a document in which that is outright stated, or testimony of multiple ex-managers to having been involved in such a policy) may be challenging to demonstrate even in that context, but it is very far from impractical.
Mostly off topic: I wouldn't consider myself a gamer (anymore), and I get that it's about high revenue examples, but I thought "Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush" was quite the structural anapest to begin the article.
Yes, lawsuits (both private and public) over sexual harassment and pay discrimination have a lot of history.
> From years of experience in the art of existing as a human, I would guess A-B can't possibly be the only organization with these problems, but if a lawsuit like this has happened before, it must have been targeting a much lower profile company that flew under my cultural radar.
DFEH is, since last year, involved in (by intervening in an existing class action) a similar suit against Riot Games that blew up after DFEH objected to a proposed $10M settlement saying it should be more like $400M. That case has slid off into a mess I can't quite trace easily; it looks like the DFEH and DLSE public claims, plus one private plaintiff who never signed an arbitration agreement are proceeding in court and other private plaintiffs were forced into arbitration but may also benefit from the public claims in court.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/gaming/ubisoft-ceo-a...
I should at least hurry and play my copy while the servers are still running, I guess.
I'm tired of playing games whose companies are actively hostile to the players (and to be fair after the whole Artifact debacle I'm starting to feel this way about Valve too).
When I was younger I never considered myself someone who would be playing older games (early 2010s and older) instead of the latest ones. I used to be so excited for the new releases. But a game without microtranscactions, little to know DLC and a good modding scene has become more important to me than the newest stuff. It's honestly been disheartening as a gamer to have lost my enthusiasm for the newer stuff. But maybe part of that is just getting older and busier as well.
On the bright side my hardware is plenty powerful for the games I play, which is great considering the silicone shortage and all.
[0]https://twitter.com/skrutsick/status/1418006293495762944?s=2...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27911924
then 2 hours later this news appeared
apparently there's worse news coming out later this week too
https://old.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/op1t7m/activision_bliz...
Apparently their office was basically a frat house.
Ironically, GamerGate started as an expose on how dishonest and corrupt video game journalism had become, though it all went downhill from there. And now journalists dishonestly hijack GG to push whichever agenda suits them, though at least this time the writer didn't act as if it was still relevant today.
