I'm really surprised that Blizzard thinks a state suit against them for sexual discrimination, harassment, and a litany of odious behaviors by managers is best answered by calling them "unaccountable State bureaucrats," as they did in their PR damage control release. It's like they think it's 1995 and MeToo never happened.
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.
Another day, another situation where the best way forward was “we don’t comment on ongoing litigation”.
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.
You'd be surprised how many people in upper management have very fragile egos, regardless of the company. Childish behavior is very common in the industry. I can't even begin to count the number of times I've had to call senior members out and the only reason I could do that (unfortunately) was that I am a dude. I really sympathize with anyone who has to deal with these people.
I think it's a little far-reaching to apply a pretty serious psychiatric evaluation (i.e. something meant to diagnose a significant mental deviation from the norm) to a pattern of behaviour that's incredibly common. Because it is so common, it becomes the norm. It is therefore more reasonable to assume it really is childish behaviour.
Certain personality disorders become much more prevalent in certain jobs. CEOs are much more likely to be sociopaths than the general population, for example. Is it a stretch to assume that NPD might be similarly more common in high status positions?
I find this very unpersuasive. Especially where it is arguing against claims not commonly made by such studies:
> We also found that leaders with psychopathic tendencies were slightly less effective at their jobs in terms of fostering productivity.
Usually the argument is that sociopaths rise to this level of power and eventually flame out. I’ve never seen any argument that sociopathy tends to make you a good CEO, but rather than it makes you more likely to rise to that level.
> Less glib, this past year has taught me that a lot of companies are led by genuinely unintelligent people.
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.
> It's like they think it's 1995 and MeToo never happened.
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.
They may intend to take this all the way to the Supreme Court, and with the court's current composition, there's an excellent chance they win and even get the underlying statute neutered or struck down.
If the executives think it's anything remotely resembling a reasonable use of company assets to fight workplace discrimination laws on constitutional grounds, the board should fire them, and if they don't, the shareholders should fire the board. ATVI is a large publicly traded corporation. It's not Hobby Lobby.
That’s not how this stuff works at all. This is a dispute over the facts, and how much money the facts are worth, and to whom. Someone in California DOJ had a 15 minute meeting with their people and ATVI people and already decided that ATVI is going to face a fine to be paid to its female complainant former employees, the next three years of lawsuit is a ceremony enacting that.
Unless they are picked on for a very successful boycott, it's going to be mostly aversion from current and potential employees, with Google-like staff evaporation but with much lower attractiveness.
Does Activision have backup studios in "developing countries" or other clever plans?
Its interesting to see how the quality of the games Blizzard produces and the company culture both seemed to decline sharply in lockstep after being acquired by Activision in 2008.
After 2008 Blizzard produced Hearthstone, Overwatch and Reaper of Souls which consensus 'fixed' Diablo 3 and were all pretty great. So I can't comment about the culture but I disagree with the general narrative that Blizzard's games have gone off a cliff. That might still be coming, but it hasn't happened quite yet.
Edit: snipped the bit about Hero's of the Storm since that was post acquisition
In my opinion the downfall of Blizzard started even earlier in 2004. Ever since World of Warcraft their writing and worldbuilding has stumbled off a cliff. StarCraft's storyline was fantastic and its world spectacularly gritty. The weird whirring mechano-head of the adjutants and bodily entombed dragoons are just some examples of the kooky minds working at the studio at that time.
With the cartoonish push that World of Warcraft presaged I saw the wider ambitions to appeal to everyone which washed out the magic for me. Blizzard wasn't alone in this but it broke my heart as a kid who grew up on Sabriel and The Book of the New Sun and Baldur's Gate and EverQuest to watch all those game companies lurch forward to a blank-eyed glossed future.
Meh. It is an undeniable direct Warhammer 40K plagiarism: before coming up with their own StarCraft universe, Blizzard tried and failed to secure rights for Warhammer 40K setting. So it is easy to see the source of their 'inspiration'.
They had many bright moments, but this one is not one they came up with themselves.
I think Starcraft and Warcraft before it are both stellar examples of inventive remixing and borrowing from existing worlds. That is very different from plagiarism.
Games Workshop does not own the copyright on nearly-dead-warriors-entombed-in-exoskeletons. Nor did they invent the idea of the nearly dead being sustained by cybernetics, or of using robotics to assist those of limited physical ability. We all are inspired by things.
It's especially odd to talk about about "Warhammer" or "Starcraft" as if they are managed by a single human, when in fact all of these worlds are written and envisioned by a multi-generational army of creative people who are all drawing on sources to come up with ideas. Are all of the employees of GW who write about dreadnoughts plagiarizing the employee who came up with the idea?
Starcraft copied a lot more than just that from Warhammer.
Tyranids giant biological hive mind that rapidly adapts to new environments consuming or infecting existing species to plunder their genetic advantages. Also have plenty of units that looks rather similar to their Zerg equivalents.
The basic look of space marines and Starcraft marines are completely different why they toned down the skulls and well that’s about it.
That’s fine at least they didn’t copy the ancient psionic technology using Eldar who, wait never mind.
So what you're saying is that we shouldn't respect creative works that are too similar to their inspirations and you think a good example of the creative work we should respect is...Warhammer?
"It’s all in here, the neolithic bones of our current game system. Borrowing heavily from Tolkein, you get all the standard Fantasy races, standard beasties (heck even the Balrog is in there by name), and so many others...There is no Old World, no Warhammer world, no history, just some little crazed and revolutionary rules for using units of fantasy lead miniatures to fight out epic battles."[1]
Tossing a huge range of different properties in a blender is fine, ripping off a single property is just lazy. Which sounds more original pure Harry Potter fan fiction or ER the TV show + Harry Potter + Cheers the TV show.
Draw evenly from M*A*S*H + Dresden Files + Mass Effect + Dexter and your going to end up in some strange and interesting places. Play through Starcraft 1+2 on the other hand and the story is fine if a bit bland.
I absolutely agree that Blizzard's worlds are weaker than Games Workshop's. GW has a real talent for genre fiction, where Blizzard struggles with the basics of plot structure.
The thing I disagree with is that Blizzard's problem is that they 'copied.' Everyone copies! The bits that Blizzard copied are the most compelling part of Starcraft. The reason it is weak is that they were not better at drawing on the ideas of others. They did not understand what was compelling about 40k, so they create this unsatisfying narrative mishmash.
Warhammer FB -> Warhammer 40k is a great example of this being done better. You could type out the same kind of demeaning summary of Warhammer 40k as you did for Starcraft: "Tyranids are gross, chitinous just like Geiger's xenomorph; the Eldar are just space-high-elves; The squats are just space dwarves." It's all true, as far as it goes. But - because GW is better than Blizzard - they went further and added other ideas (many of which also came from other works). The problem is never that they drew on other sources. In fact, looking at other worlds and using the core of what 'works' about that world before transforming it is at the center of basically all good works.
> Tyranids giant biological hive mind that rapidly adapts to new environments consuming or infecting existing species to plunder their genetic advantages. Also have plenty of units that looks rather similar to their Zerg equivalents.
Tyranids barely existed when Starcraft got released, most of the things you talked about was created by games workshop afterwards, so likely they copied Starcraft instead.
Tyranids where part of the 1987 version of 40k and barely mentioned. Genestealers were first introduced in the board game Space Hulk published in 1989 and introduced into the Tyranids well before Starcraft’s release date.
1993, featured the Tyranids in the supplemental books Wargear and Codex Imperialis, and then later in their own devoted army Codex.
By comparison Starcraft 1 is from 1998 at which point Tyranids had gone through multiple revisions and had fairly close to their modern lore.
>Tyranids giant biological hive mind that rapidly adapts to new environments consuming or infecting existing species to plunder their genetic advantages.
Sounds like GW copied that from Heinlein's Starship Troopers, or maybe Enders Game.
Ditto the Space Marines.
Culture is just copying/remixing, all the way down.
Enders game’s alien are quite different from both they aren’t a single unified hive mind but a species of queens and mindless drones using biological technology rather than literally being the ships or having a wide range of forms, also no rapid evolution or gene stealing etc. Starship Troupers share even less they don’t even use starships, aren’t a unified hive mind, etc their both great example of sci-fi space biological armies being a fairly huge space for different ideas.
Remixing at least involves using multiple sources, my only real issue is SC both only copied from 40k and changed so little. It’s like the figured after just crossing just past the line of copyright infringement was enough and they would go no further. But hey they did the same with the original Warhammer game to make Warcraft and that worked out just fine for them.
Like dreadnoughts? I'd argue fantasy and science fiction is all iterating over itself endlessly and there's creative ways of doing it. Plunging dragoons into a liquid bath puts dragoons at something of a cross-section of evangelion and 40k tomb-mech.
I could go on. The ghosts exhaling poison vapor with spider eyes or hydralisks vomiting buckets of saliva. Sunken colonies with their long knife-tongues; the Creep. As a whole I think Blizzard really made something special.
I grew up on Warcraft 2, and to me the cartoonish look of WoW was a direct continuation of the art style from that game. I was in the WoW beta. The first time I played it my initial reaction was that it looked exactly like I had stepped into Warcraft.
I see your point with Warcraft 2 though I do think a lot of the art from then leant more to the gritty like this one [1] that shows a troll squaring off with a human.
I think initial development/prototyping was done as an offshoot of the WC3 engine so in a sense you were stepping into Warcraft. That's not to take anything away from the great design and art direction consistency between these titles - just that it also had a practical technical component.
I agree with this. Early Blizzard games had amazing worldbuilding and great single player experiences, with good multiplayer options.
After WoW's success they seemed to try to pigeonhole all of their properties in the same direction, SC2 and D3 were quite clearly online/multiplayer first with single player as an afterthought, and the world depth felt lacking. Hearthstone's alright but feels like it has too much focus on PvP games and loot box mechanics.
Hearthstone's aesthetic reminds me of the parallel world of stuff that religious groups always make (Christian music, Christian books, etc), and I found it really offputting.
> With the cartoonish push that World of Warcraft presaged I saw the wider ambitions to appeal to everyone which washed out the magic for me.
You're looking at it through rose tinted glasses. Blizzard has always been about a cartoonish look. That's why I like their games. Realism always falls into the "uncanny valley" territory for me.
The fact that Diablo 3 needed to be "fixed" supports the narrative. Also the fact that executives didn't realize it had been fixed and cancelled the 2nd Diablo 3 expansion. The Warcraft III remaster was a disaster. Three out of the last four World of Warcraft expansions have been poorly received. There does seem to be a pattern of decline.
Well, I think SL is alright. I wouldn't say I love it, but I do that's more of a symptom of core gameplay mechanics rather than particular content. What do you dislike about SL?
This is a common sentiment I hear from people who bailed during WoD and have just been looking at public commentary about the rest. Everyone I spoke to in-game were at least meh about BfA, loved Legion, and were still stoked on SL until the new patch just took a bit too long. There are legit criticisms of all of them, but to say they're shit is just silly. Those same people also tended to love MoP fwiw.
My only real criticism is related to the majority of all game content being kind of irrelevant, because there isn't a long road to max level and no scarcity of exp. However, I did level through BfA content, and it was really well done.
I'm odd in that I actually loved WoD, aside from Garrisons. Legion had it's moment of greatness, around the fourth patch it was great.
BfA and Shadowlands are incredibly bad, for casual players there's really nothing interesting to do, and raiders and stuck behind meaningless time gates. It's quite sad to see my friends list now, no one is playing - and a new patch has just been released.
I'm a huge fan, but I've also stopped playing. Blizzard feel like they've been ahead for so long they forget what made their games great. Saying that though, it only takes on incredible expansion for everyone to jump back.
I've gone back to level through WoD, and I was very impressed with Draenor and HFC. I have no personal qualms with that expansion other than what I hear about.
I think I agree with your commentary about SL, but I just said the same thing in a different way. BfA had a bit more interesting content though in that respect. They were not 'incredibly bad' by my estimation, just have their various flaws.
With regard to friends list, I stopped playing shortly before new patch drop, but mostly because it's summer and WoW in general just makes it way too easy to spend time indoors. I was following the world first race though, and would love to raid SoD and do BGs. But, before letting my sub expire I went and farmed out all the Mechagon mounts and most interesting rare drop mounts, had my fill of Nathria, and a bit of Mythic+ as miserable as that is. Could have been more fun with a proper gaming setup and guild, but I knew summer was coming up and I'd want to dial my playtime back to zero.
In fairness to WoD the leveling experience really was great. However they utterly gutted combat mechanics which I think is a big part of why people coming from MoP into WoD hated it so much. And then the content drought...
> I disagree with the general narrative that Blizzard's games have gone off a cliff. That might still be coming, but it hasn't happened quite yet.
Have you played the last 2 World of Warcraft extensions? Or Warcraft 3: Reforged, the only "new game" they released since 2016, which is also commonly known as Warcraft 3: Refunded? [1][2]
I've been saying this, jokingly, for awhile now: Blizzard is a law firm that just happens to make video games. I'm sure they went this route because they think they can win (I mean clearly, right? Who goes to court thinking they'll lose). Anyways, not super insightful either way but they do litigate a lot.
It's an interesting point. On the other hand, many of these state prosecutors are very afraid of losing: many of them have gone the "golden career route" of name-brand schools and law firms, and shy away from any possible failure.
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.
I'm inclined to agree with you, honestly- my comment was more just me musing aloud about Blizzard's hubris in the face of the law. They've also lawyered up and ruined a lot of good vanilla WoW private servers, which I think adds to their hubris- fighting a state in court is going to be a lot more involved than telling a few nerds online to stop running a WoW server.
Anyways, I think you're correct and I personally look forward to Blizzard losing.
My vague understanding is that federal prosecutors are the extremely conservative ones, but state are more likely to prosecute - for instance because the AG is elected and wants to be seen doing something.
These state Human Relations/Civil Rights board are headed by appointed officials from the executive branch (not the AG). They generally pass on many cases (when you want to sue your employer you have to submit your case there first and they pass on the vast majority even though many of those cases have strong merits) so if they’re picking up the case that generally means it’s strong
Not sure. A case like this brings extreme publicity. And loosing would not necessarily attributed to the lawyer. In that case it would be an industry that suppresses women.
AKA the guy that single-handedly turned Google's culture from transparency-first to siloing-first by making looking at "need-to-know" information a fireable offense[1].
The Catch-22 here being, of course, that you don't know that you didn't need to know until you know.
That's to say, the only way to know if you have violated this policy is by violating it.
The result was, unsurprisingly, that where sharing permissions for documentation were default company-wide earlier, it quickly became "you need to know the right people to ask to get access to it".
Google, with its mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", thus made its own technical documents unsearchable in internal engines (and thus, disorganized), inaccessible, and therefore, useless.
Everything that drops from that person's mouth is toxic.
> I'm really surprised that Blizzard thinks a state suit against them for sexual discrimination, harassment, and a litany of odious behaviors by managers is best answered by calling them "unaccountable State bureaucrats," as they did in their PR damage control release. It's like they think it's 1995 and MeToo never happened.
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.
> It's like they think it's 1995 and MeToo never happened.
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.
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.
If there is one lesson from me too movement then that fighting back is often the best strategy. Kavanugh fought back and is now justice. Matt Gaetz fights back and is still in congress. Biden did not even acknowledge accuser and is now president. People who apologized or resigned often suffered much more dire professional consequences. Blizzard could have misjudged situation but may have also acted strategically that settlement will bring onslaught of bad publicity and new cases.
me too didn't achieve much I think. I doubt it did convince anyone and there is still some bad aftertaste with the Kavanaugh process.
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.
It also managed to absolutely torpedo an incredibly popular series - don't forget that Kevin Spacey went down during MeToo as well.
I know that women still feel frequently disempowered in the workplace but I hope the movement helped them feel like they've got more widespread support than they did before. Once upon a time sexual harassment claims were seen as direct attacks on the success and health of a company "Gosh Susan, if you just told us in private we'd deal with it - instead you've cost all these people their jobs" - I think that impression has very much shifted. If you're being harassed then the company is failing at it's mission, any ill effect that comes to the company as a result of the report is a consequence the company should've (and failed to) protect themselves from by having a more robust and responsive HR department.
Blizzard's full response: "The DFEH includes distorted, and in many cases false, descriptions of Blizzard’s past. We have been extremely cooperative with the DFEH throughout their investigation, including providing them with extensive data and ample documentation, but they refused to inform us what issues they perceived. They were required by law to adequately investigate and to have good faith discussions with us to better understand and to resolve any claims or concerns before going to litigation, but they failed to do so. Instead, they rushed to file an inaccurate complaint, as we will demonstrate in court. We are sickened by the reprehensible conduct of the DFEH to drag into the complaint the tragic suicide of an employee whose passing has no bearing whatsoever on this case and with no regard for her grieving family. While we find this behavior to be disgraceful and unprofessional, it is unfortunately an example of how they have conducted themselves throughout the course of their investigation. It is this type of irresponsible behavior from unaccountable State bureaucrats that are driving many of the State’s best businesses out of California."
Classic - “The picture the DFEH paints is not the Blizzard workplace of today."
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!”
“We’re willing to fully cooperate with the state government. Sexual harassment and discrimination isn’t tolerated at this company and we will root out any sources of it and remove them expeditiously”
But I think admitting guilt might not be a good move either way. My question was a bad one anyway since it'd be hard to know if any response would be well perceived.
And? Every large company has sexual harassment to some degree. It's all a matter of whether the company actually responds to it. Saying the accusations are a sham looks much worse then saying you'll investigate.
Some details of the case are a grab bag (I'm not sure I see how "male employees proudly came into work hungover" is an incident of sexual harassment), but there are multiple accusations here that are both far beyond the "every large company" level and clearly implicate senior leadership. They probably should have been less... toxic about it, but a good response can only go so far if the underlying incidents are true. Personally, if I worked for Blizzard, anything other than a vehement denial would have sent me right out the door.
That's not to rule out the possibility that it was just a panicked response nobody thought through in detail, since there's gotta be a big overlap between people responsible for this message and people responsible for stopping sexual harassment.
"male employees proudly came into work hungover" is an incident of sexual harassment when a female employee who did the same thing would be subject to discipline or termination. The men are excused with "well boys will be boys" or "no harm, no foul".
I worked at Blizzard for 6 years and I assure that the female employees in my team drank just as much (and in some cases more) than the male employees and there was no discipline for either men or women.
"We won't comment on ongoing litigation. We are conducting an internal investigation. We will discipline anyone who violated our code of conduct. We are committed to being an inclusive and equitable workplace."
Most of the links or posting doesn't even describe what was the causes, problem and the case is all about. As soon as I saw "suicide" I thought this was very serious. So I had to dig one up myself.
Question for lawyers: could lying in this sort of public statement expose Blizzard to further legal repercussions (fresh criminal offenses, informally irritating the California DFEH and the judges, proving they are in bad faith, etc.) or are they free to make up any bullshit they find useful?
I hope that this is used for good, and not evil, but knowing "gamer" culture all of these individuals are going to receive harassment and doxxing. There's a lot of money on the line for Blizzard and those involved in professional "esports" by extension. This is why people don't speak.
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.
> but knowing "gamer" culture all of these individuals are going to receive harassment and doxxing
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.
Bobby Kotick and "gamer culture" are extremely distinct, Activision isn't really a company in good standing in the wider community. Especially not with fans of Blizzard games.
They would still buy their games though, they buy everything...
> I hope these individuals will be able to find good work elsewhere when blizzard inevitably ousts them. California should be fining them into the ground, but given Blizzards response they've calculated out how much it'll cost and figured it's cheaper to do this.
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.
Assuming rational actors, it must look pretty bad from the top of the inside to yolo this kind of hail mary.
I wonder what this looked like passing by legal? I mean if PR let this out, assuming they even have that kind of throttle, surely the lawyers would want to take a long look. This will definitely come up in court, wont it?
> but knowing "gamer" culture all of these individuals are going to receive harassment and doxxing
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.
All of those on the list at least as of last night are former employees. Obviously nobody who wants to keep their jobs would come forward publically (or, apparently, to their leadership)
I hope this gets handled with the delicacy and nuance it deserves, and seeing Reddit involved feels like I'm watching a train wreck take place in slow motion.
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.
Some of those replies are from men too, commenting on the awful behavior they saw. Possibly some are victims as well, but I didn't see any tweets like that.
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.)
It's amazing when cultures are so bad that people whose sole job is recruiting fail to follow the most basic federal regulations involved in their job (assuming your situation was in the US).
If you're going to be awful, at least...don't obviously violate federal law while being awful?
This may not have been a violation. Age discrimination is only illegal if the person is over 40. You could easily be “culture fitted out” for being mid-thirties when everyone at a startup is early to mid twenties. And yes, it really is that bad in SV (or at least was pre-COVID, not sure if anything has really changed).
That's federal - some states have laws protecting people less than 40 as well. Also, fun fact, but reverse age discrimination is 100% legal in every state. It's entirely legal to say "We gave X the job because he is 55 and you're only 45", but it is illegal to say "We gave X the job because he is only 45 and you're 55"
> "Everyone here is young and they were worried you're too old."
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...
> Maybe disrespect for accumulated wisdom is one of the reason software sucks so bad these days.
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's probably not really about work itself. More like they like to get drunk after work, spend time together or whatever, and they don't expect someone older to do that with them. Basically, they want a new friend, not only a colleague.
Which is even less explicable to me. I get along with my coworkers, but I don't hang out with them after work because I have my own life and work is just the thing I have to do to support living it. Why in the hell would you want everyone you work with to be your drinking buddy? And what sense does it make for a company to give up access to all that experience for that?
It's not only in silicon valley. My first company (in Switzerland) was like that. It was a start-up, mostly with people in their 20s fresh out of uni, no family and often expats/not from the area. Basically, people without their own life there, so of course colleagues become friends, and people recreate the university lifestyle they've just left, except this time you're getting paid. I think the appeal is clear if you're in that situation.
my recruiter from Twilio said they were were ready to make an offer to me but was hesitant to give it to me because I was white. They wanted to wait until they interviewed more diverse applicants
I thought about it but 1. I wasn't the person being discriminated against and 2. The friend wasn't going to report it for the reason I noted. I understood / respected that choice.
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...
Lots of things are blatant. However, it takes a lot of money to run something through the legal system, and, if you win, you may still not be in a better position.
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.
There is an exception for perjury. Although it’s unlikely that the company does not settle first, you could then try to have the recruiter deny saying so in a sworn statement. The two-party consent laws do not apply when used as proof that someone perjured themselves
Except he was on speaker phone and there were at least two people on the other line, which provides a witness to the statement and it is not just a he said/she said anymore.
> 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)
Relationships within a reporting chain are a classic example of bad business ethics, because there's obvious opportunity for favoritism and bias, and most corporate policies disallow it (in favor of moving folk to other teams or similar).
More important IMHO in power differentials like this are the other side of that: punishment or worse.
Whether it's a real explicit threat or not, it's built in.
women especially have had these experiences for decades. I'm sure almost any women on HN has a story about some superior being inappropriate and the pressures around that.
Exactly. I don't care that Bill Clinton cheated on his wife, they may have an arrangement for all I know. I care that he used his position as the most powerful man on the planet to sleep with a young intern. As a counterpoint JFK and Marilyn Monroe doesn't bother me at all, the power balance was much closer in that case and she was more than capable of navigating those waters.
Or else what though? Get fired? I mean for instance, it's not like a man can just offer to have sex with their male supervisor to keep their job if they're straight. So the dynamic is also partly brought upon by the woman herself. It's very unfortunate but lets not act like she had 0 autonomy and no consensual actions involved here.
There's also a power dynamic at play which can make person to submit to their superior's advances to avoid any negative outcome. It's quite hard to consider such a relationship consensual.
Heh, downvoted. Guess people don't like thinking about the implication.
(For those who don't understand, the parent comment is willfully ignoring that most sexual relations between subordinates and managers are coerced. In this particular case, the implication was that she might be passed over for promotion, fired, or even blackballed if she didn't engage in sex.)
If someone is so humiliated by this that they commit suicide why would they go through the emotional agony of going to court and having their humiliation litigated in front of a judge and to be put into public record under their name forever?
Welcome to the complete ineffectiveness of the legal system to prosecute sexual assault and harassment. "Nothing we can do" has been the universal response to every woman I know who has experienced criminal assault and harassment.
> 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.
Fucking disgusting. Reading this makes my blood boil.
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.
Say you ask about the ratio, in an interview. I would tell you, but, like most companies I've worked at, I doubt the answer would impress you. What do you do with the information? If you base your decision on it, and I presume pass over the company for having a poor ratio, how is that company ever supposed to change?
I've thought often about this, but fundamentally no woman should feel obligated to fix this issue at a prospective company. You should be prioritizing yourself, your career, and your comfort. It's hard to ask someone to take on the uphill battle when there are so many other teams or companies that are safer bets.
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.
This is definitely part of it. If I get the impression that at least it's something the company cares about and is working on, that helps.
But also, as you mention, many companies have disappointing gender ratios, so it's not like I'd pass on a company purely because of that. It's more like another data point to consider. And conversely, if a company does have a higher portion of female engineers, that will weigh strongly in its favor.
Scrolling down this thread and reading the flagged and greying comments makes my blood boil all over again.
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.
I guess the reason you're being downvoted is that you're complaining about comments which have already been downvoted, which brings nothing to the discussion, and also you're drawing conclusions about a community that does not exist.
If you have a great company culture, and it involves an occasional beer on Friday afternoon, I don't think it's a problem, but if you're having a problem preventing inappropriate jokes, groping, etc. then alcohol is certainly not going to help. I don't think it's the biggest issue listed, but it does (to me) suggest that upper management was not taking the situation seriously.
Beer on Friday afternoon means everyone is relaxing instead of being busy with end-of-week deadlines for releases, progress reports, meetings etc. It is a good situation that offsets some of the inappropriateness of drinking and partying at work.
As a woman in tech, the problem is that men start hitting on you when they’ve had a few beers. This happens extremely frequently, so much that I have personally decided to discount what people say to me when they’re drunk at company events
Interesting. I wonder if the sector influences that. I've never seen men hit on women coworkers at happy hours. I Actually had a woman coworker start talking about going to a strip club after one and taking a bunch of other men and women there and inviting me too. I have to say, that wasn't something I was expecting (I was only there a year at that point). I'm in finance IT. I haven't noticed it in the office either. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if it happens on a small scale. I've had 2 women say... "stuff"... to me in the office before.
I dont know bro. it really depends on where I work. I agree that in some places that yes it was work work but at others it was a way of letting our guards down and coming together as a team. This helped relationships in the office since we were all drinking together...albeit this tended to be with select individuals (i.e. we would avoid invite those who were too serious). After a few drinks, we would debate work topics and right the wrongs of the world. In some companies, this is where the wheels are set in motion and opens up new channels of communication. Drinking together creates some kind of bond.
I do have a policy of not sleeping with anyone from work so that helped me have good boundaries and avoided trouble..
This is a sexist comment and could be career-ending if made by someone of the opposite sex. For a demonstration why:
"The problem is that (class of people that encompasses billions of unrelated individuals worldwide) start (any kind of negative action in particular)"
No matter what you fill those variables with, it remains a broad, harmful generalization. I'm sorry you had to work with
unprofessional assholes that won't take 'no' for an answer, but your experience is not license to slander literally half of the planet.
> As a woman in tech, the problem is that men start hitting on you when they’ve had a few beers.
> I'm sorry you had to work with unprofessional assholes that won't take 'no' for an answer, but your experience is not license to slander literally half of the planet.
You've broadened the original statement to say more than was commented. The original did not say "all men" or even "only men". Quite the disingenuous interpretation turned around to try to make up a controversy.
Is there any reason to believe that the "men in tech" are significantly different from all men? If anyone made sexist claims about women in tech, would they not actually be sexist because the claims are just about women in tech and not women in general?
If you're against the broadening the reading of claims, do you think that Garcia Martinez should be reinstated at Apple? For reference, he was fired over claims of sexism, because in a book he published before being hired, he wrote something along the lines of "Bay area women are weak, Eastern European women are strong"
> Not one sentence beginning this way in this context will ever be anything other than a sexist generalization.
> That was the point being made
It was not, as you accidentally recognize:
"I'm sorry you had to work with unprofessional assholes that won't take 'no' for an answer"
which recognizes that the sentiment/point does not apply to all men.
You are making a subjective interpretation, so I stand by the fact that you are being disingenuous and your interpretation is wrong on that basis, until specifically addressed.
> I think it's plain at this point that you are not approaching this in good faith
I'm not being critical of the point by picking a narrow interpretation (they meant to be critical of all men), despite acknowledging the limits of the point in the same post. Therefore, I'll disagree with the quoted assertion, as well. Good luck with whatever.
Please educate yourself on how this shuts down debate over intolerant behavior. The tolerance of other men is required for activity like this - and /obviously/ there are many men who find this behavior awful but also clearly /not enough/ to stop it from happening.
Yes, of course, not all men do this shit. But it’s enough to have a considerable impact on people. Usually there’s a small number of abusers and then a large group of people tolerating or egging on the abuse. This is why they’re describing a “frat bro” culture in the legal suit.
> mentioning a class of people without qualification colloquially means 'all'
Does it? I've never heard that usage and think you're probably inferring things. But there are cases where local language varies. In those cases you should try to understand the intent behind the statement. It's clear to me the writer did not intend the statement you're trying to attribute to them.
Do you say "I had lunch with friends" or "I had lunch with some of my friends"
It’s whataboutism. It’s changing the subject. It’s not grappling with the actual problem being presented. It’s presuming a bad faith attack on you via the group of words chosen. It’s about you having a desperate fear of being accused of something you didn’t do - it should be obvious that someone saying “men” is not literally talking about ALL MEN but you pretend as if it isn’t, and hijack the conversation.
Your argument in a vacuum I have no problem with - the frequency it comes up in order to distract from the context in which it comes up is troubling to say the least, and is something often done by bad faith actors. I’m not accusing you of bad faith - however, I’d invite you to look at the directionality of where the conversation has gone. Namely, very far away from the person being harmed and squarely into your feelings of being excluded.
For posterity I repost your original comment.
OP
> As a woman in tech, the problem is that men start hitting on you when they’ve had a few beers.
YOU
> I'm sorry you had to work with unprofessional assholes that won't take 'no' for an answer, but your experience is not license to slander literally half of the planet.
Your argument is as if the OP was saying that half of men on the planet come and hit on her specifically and inappropriately. For fucks sake.
I feel very ambivalent about your comment. Parents comment is sexist and you are absolutely correct in saying that men can and are fired at some workplaces for making similar comments that generalize women.
At my brothers old dev job the women drank with the men. And by drinking I remember visiting and seeing one of the woman devs with a half empty bottle of rum and a can of coke at her desk. FWIW, the boss was an alcoholic, though thankfully the happy kind of drunk. Weird shop for sure.
As far as I know, the big selling point is that you get to work on video games instead of CRUD apps or adtech or "Uber for X". I've seen several anecdotal reports of people tolerating a seriously sketchy work environment because as far as they know, the alternative is not working on video games.
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.
> 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 was only in the industry for 6 months, but this was the best part by a mile. No one gave a shit as long as you weren't blocking them on some task. I genuinely never felt so alive and intimidated. Watching what some people could do under the influence was just staggering to me at the time.
I really want to get back into gamedev. Maybe 2024/5 I can seriously consider it again.
This stuff always seem strange to me. We had a bar at the office. We used to drink at the bar. That's the point of a bar.
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 worked for AB a few years back and it was easily the worst job I've ever had. Incredibly toxic work culture, and frequent gaslighting by managers. I'll never work for a big games company again after that experience.
I had been considering resubbing and trying out The Burining Crusade in WOW, but then I found Final Fantasy XIV. I've played many FF games over the years. My cousins played FFXI but I was too young to play at the time so I never got to. I love MMOs and for me there is nothing like the excitement of playing a good MMO with friends. It's just nice to play a game whose leadership makes the player base feel as if they are important. Obviously we can never know what is actually going on behind Square Enix's doors but Yoshi-P makes me believe the things he says are true at least.
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.
Most of this sounds horrifying, and if its true I hope they throw the book at them.
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.
TFA excludes it, but from page 12 of the filing [0] there's an example of someone with measurably worse performance getting promoted ahead of a female colleague:
"... 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."
If you've got a dev that codes absolutely brilliant bug-free code at a lightning pace - you give them an honorary title bump and a pay bump appropriate to their performance while keeping them in about the same role. Organizations with role based salary caps that are more generous to management than individual contributors are acting in a self-destructive manner.
What were the responsibilities of the promoted position?
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.
As an aside, I've seen poor results from (2) and (3) a few times, regardless of gender.
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.
> However this one line seems like it would be hard to prove
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.
So....if you're a single guy, and you start a company and you WANT to have a party place with frat house attitude and exercise your right to the pursuit of happiness in life, I take it that a company founder that is a guy should only hire other single men that share those same values?
I don't know, I'm just asking other's opinions here.
It is fine as long as your fratboy culture doesn't include nor ignore sexual harassment or sexism. At the end of the day it is your responsibility as an employer to provide a safe and fair work environment for everyone, it is illegal to not do it. Lots of women love partying, they aren't really a problem, the problem is that a some guys harass women at parties and you as an employer will need to take that seriously if partying happens at work.
I mean, that's why I wrote that should one hire single men only. That way, there won't be any type of sexism or harassment. I am beginning to think that the Islamic way of strictly separating men and women makes sense. Let women work at companies founded by women, and men with men. That way, everyone wins, so it seems to me.
If your purpose is working rather than debauchery, diversity and equality become practically important as moral guidelines.
- 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.
hmmm....I don't see debauchery and working as mutually exclusive as you do. I think it would be ok to take a day once a month or quarter and everyone drink alcohol until the puke, and the rest of the time work hard on reaching goals.
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.
If you want a party place with a frat house attitude, you should start a social club, not a company. There is no legal way to run a company like that. Hiring only men is illegal. Creating a hostile work environment for women is illegal.
I find the comments section here to be about 60/40 men who believe it to be a problem, and men who are denying there are problems or minimizing/excusing them, which matches my experience w men in workplaces. Long looong way to go.
I am a man and I haven’t seen anything like this in my workplace but I can say I have been sexual harassed by several women at two of my old jobs. So statistically, if men are less likely to be targeted then it must be happening. So even though I haven’t seen it outside my own experience, it’s scary to think how much of it is likely happening behind the scenes. I say this as a father of two daughters and husband to a woman who was physically assaulted by her former boss.
I’m sorry that’s happened to you, and I think that’s a good perspective. It’s sometimes hard to grapple with something that one doesn’t personally experience, but I’m glad people are slowly becoming more aware.
I would hope that there are a majority of men who do think it is a problem but for whatever reason are silent on the issue. Case in point, I was not going to comment.
Various regulatory agencies have the power to initiate torts against companies or individuals who are violating the law in addition to making criminal complaints. In most cases, a regulatory action is civil and not criminal. Your company dumped chemicals in a river that you knew probably were bad for the fish? The company will get hit with a civil action. It is possible that the specific person who decided upon this course of action or knowingly helped out will face individual criminal charges, but in most cases corporations do not face criminal charges.
On topic: Does anyone know if there is some precedent for lawsuits like this? 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.
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.
> Does anyone know if there is some precedent for lawsuits like this?
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.
I was referring more to "the state of California" being the plaintiff, for which giantg2 gave me the minutiae I was interested in. I hope it's obvious that I didn't think this was the first sexual harassment/pay discrimination case in recorded history. Thanks for pointing out DFEH's existence and involvement with the Riot Games hubbub; that was useful information that served as a good jumping off point for my skim research.
They are being sued u der California law. I think that specific law is fairly new and I can't recall any big cases in the news about it, but there may be stuff that wasnt reported. The other possibility is that places settle out of court in private negotiations. Either way, my impression is that there isn't much out there.
That is technically true overall, but when it comes to software development and especially gaming they are very much in the minority. So much so that at most gaming companies of 50-100 folks you can count the women working there (outside of the art department) on one hand.
I don't disagree that women are treated badly in a lot of situations, but unless we want to define away the word majority like we did literally, then women are not a minority.
As much as I would love to see the company crash and burn due to how they've butchered Blizzard, they aren't going anywhere. They'll settle the lawsuit out of court for an undisclosed sum, their stock price will take a temporary hit, and in a year you'll never even notice that it happened.
I agree it should be done, but the main downside is that a single pay number lacks a lot of nuance. At companies with open pay policies, a lot of times you will see one person complaining that another person is making more than them, and then a long meeting has to take place where all the special skills of that other person are explained. Having to do that repeatedly would get onerous.
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.
For employees, working at a large company that has already achieved economies of scale is probably a better paycheck -- they have the budget to be able to pay you better.
For society, though, we definitely don't want those small businesses (which don't have the same efficiencies or economies of scale) to be boxed out by large corporations across the board.
Not that this means that we shouldn't have pay transparency (people can and should be able to make their own decisions), but the inability of small businesses to match the salaries of huge corporations is pretty unavoidable.
> 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.
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.
This sounds like grasping at straws, I mean your arguments against pay transparency is that there would be some more meetings and that somehow this would enable big companies to easier poach employees of small business? I don't know where you work, but discussions about salary are such a small blib in the overall number of meetings, that even if (and that's a big if) pay transparency would increase the number of those meetings by a factor 10, it would hardly register for the vast number of employees amongst the flood of other stupid meetings.
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.
Federal mandates are non-starters politically in America, for better or for worse, especially in regards to speech and privacy. There is a massive cohort of Americans who vehemently oppose the government mandating what they must publicly share about themselves. This doesn't seem feasible.
this is why we are a Republic of States, and we're supposed to care more about state and local elections than the Federal ones, but it seems like nobody learns this from high school civics class anymore (myself included).
exactly! this is why our Republican (not the party) system of government is so great, different states can try different things and other states can learn from each other, both in what to do, what not to do, and even "well, that worked for that state, but I don't think it'll work well for us." it's a neat system, and one that I feel is increasingly underappreciated, as everyone wants all legislation to be done at the federal level.
It depends on the size and diversity of the company. If your company size is small and they list 10 tech leads and only one has 20 years experience, or a masters, or is female, then it's pretty easy to work that back to them. They've shown similar things for anonymous medical records not being so anonymous.
So larger populations and smaller number of attributes would probably make it better, but not foolproof.
No matter what the company will know everyone's salaries. The question is mainly whether you want to be ignorant, or not. Usually these things (at least with the government) don't list experience, or educational attainment.
"Usually these things (at least with the government) don't list experience, or educational attainment."
Seems pretty useless without that. Those are huge factors.
"The question is mainly whether you want to be ignorant, or not."
That's not the only question. The other question mostly being discussed here is if you want anyone to be able to know your salary by working backwards from the published list, specifically in small companies.
> Seems pretty useless without that. Those are huge factors.
The point is to allow for more transparency, not perfect transparency.
> That's not the only question. The other question mostly being discussed here is if you want anyone to be able to know your salary by working backwards from the published list, specifically in small companies.
In practice this doesn't matter, but even if this were an issue you could exempt employers with fewer than 100 employees.
The point is to create a range in which both current and prospective employees can refer to. Obviously it's not perfect as that would require all information which would be a privacy concern.
Are you arguing knowing nothing is better than knowing something?
"Are you arguing knowing nothing is better than knowing something?"
No one is saying that. That is a gross misinterpretation of my statements.
"The point is to create a range in which both current and prospective employees can refer to."
A range based on what? The point being discussed here is equal pay. Ranges dont help if you have all the women at the low end and the men at the high end, hypothetically. If you just want to post salary ranges by position you can do that without publishing individual salaries.
Even with that said, I work at a small enough company where anonymous salaries could still easily be associated with an individual, and I would still not like that, for privacy reasons.
Sure, and the upside is a strengthened position as a prospective employee. As an employee or prospective employee to a new organization, what's the downside?
If you are currently underpaid, it could reduce you leverage with the prospective employer. I have 2Xed my pay because a new employer didn't know my current rate.
They still wouldn't know your rate. As I mentioned before, pay transparency isn't necessarily personally identifiable. Hypothetically you could've 4X'd your rate. Maybe your 2X rate is actually a lowball. Who's to say?
yeah, it really all comes down to implementation. How much information is available an to whom.
Being able to look up anyone by name in a public registry and see their exact salary would probably be a worst case This is the current state for public employees.
Anonymized data for companies larger than a certain size with job class (like levels.fyi[1]) would probably be a best case. However, if you want to get meaningful information about sex, race, age, & gender, this information quickly becomes identifiable for even moderate companies.
Given the amount of tracking that's possible today, I think that anybody who cared would be able to easily determine your exact salary if the salary of every position at a company were published.
IDK in your country, in mine the downside was that we all knew such pay gap is mostly non-existant, so they mandated a pay gap law but data is locked under trade unions gatekeeping.
In my country most salaries are mandated with trade-union agreements, even variable compensations. Only very specific and niche cases behave outside that framework.
If any trade union or person believed that there was a real pay gap in any company, they could sue and win if true. Even way before current law.
With the new law, it's even easier, as they get access to all the microdata basically.
By this logic, racial and gender pay gaps should never have existed. Why didn't any visionary CEO in America hire blacks instead of whites in 1950 and save 50% on labor?
Because they were also kept out of the schools that would give them the qualifications to work those jobs. No cost savings if your engineer or accountant was never trained. So companies hired them for the menial jobs which paid less universally.
Not that there were zero, just that they were rare due to entry barriers. If you have evidence to the contrary I would love to see it rather than listen to your pathetic attempt at a clever put down.
I don't know, but I don't find it hard to furnish ideas. Colleges used to try to ensure they didn't produce more professionally qualified graduates than there were entry-level positions for. Perhaps colleges only graduated fewer black students than there were openings in black-owned enterprises?
I presume you are from Spain, which indeed is one of the top countries in the Global Gender Gap Index [1] but its unadjusted gender pay gap still sits at 11.9% (2019 provisional) [2]. Yes it's called "unadjusted" for a reason (gender pay gap is a broad phenomenon and can't be described with a single statistics and that's why we have the Index) but it is far from "non-existant".
Trade Unions have access to companies microdata now. If there such pay gap, there's no excuse now.
I don't really want to get into a large discussion, but I know the data sources of these studies as I used them pretty often, and you'll have to be pretty creative, either with data or with definitions.
This issue for me is very linked with my distrust of academia, is not just this issue.
I went to uni (sociology) in my mid 20s and I wasn't impressed with the ethical standards of the field, let's say that.
Gender pay gap is not just about the wage equality in the same companies (AFAIK this is what the 2021 law concerns). It can for example also arise from the selective employment, which effectively segregates the labor force by gender. If my reading of the Global Gender Gap Index is correct, the disparity of estimated earned income in Spain is 34.9% (score 0.651), which suggests this scenario.
> I went to uni (sociology) in my mid 20s and I wasn't impressed with the ethical standards of the field, let's say that.
This honestly sounds like conspiracy believers. If you feel a particular statistics is flawed (perfectly possible by the way) you ought to give a counter evidence, not your anecdote.
That's mostly an effect of what women study, and motherhood.
There's a discussion about nature/nurture, the gender paradox and all that behind those figures.
> This honestly sounds like conspiracy believers. If you feel a particular statistics is flawed (perfectly possible by the way) you ought to give a counter evidence, not your anecdote.
I don't really want to vent out publicly here, I already did too much, but someone influential in this field was my professor. This professor admitted, maybe without being aware of so, that the results of the research being conducted in that moment were being massaged to fit the hypothesis.
Look, IDK, my nick can already be linked to my real persona, so understand I don't want to get into details here. In fact I'm not sure if I should be posting this, as it could affect future job prospects.
> That's mostly an effect of what women study, and motherhood.
I secretly wanted to see the actual arguments based on numbers since I'm very aware that the global survey like this can fail to account for domestic contexts, but yeah, typical canned arguments.
I personally don't care who you are (except for your country in question), but if you feel unsafe about the discussion after all you'd rather not talk about it at all. In the other words, expect the criticism if you keep posting those typical canned arguments.
> That's mostly an effect of what women study, and motherhood.
Have you seen data from companies showing total comp of each individual? Every study I’ve seen shows discrimination after accounting for differences in education. I’ve known many women in different workplaces that were not being paid equally.
The self proclaimed guys that are at the same time 10X devs and 10x negociaters think that all the simpletons will be envious and hate on them. It could be that some of the double 10x guys are not paid 10x times as "simpletons" (most of the time this ones are stuck to cleanup the 10x devs garbage output)
I would answer this, but it would give my potential next employer the opportunity to lowball me.
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.
I really would not want this. I already compare myself to my peers and feel the pressure enough. I don't want to have the salary figures as an extra metric to obsess about. I think it would lead to a lot of resentment and be generally unproductive
People, to the great benefit of companies, tend to actually negotiate up front and then not want to think about money as long as they consider it “enough” for their lifestyle, at least not wanting to revisit it on a weekly or monthly basis.
It allows people to fool themselves that they do what they do for something other than money, and or they’re afraid of any conflict in the workplace (and thereby instability).
Certainly depends on if where you fall in the system; are you taking advantage of getting paid more than those around you with no transparency or could you benefit from transparency because you're lacking information?
While I agree with this perspective, I also feel like there's a lot of cultural baggage around this that makes a transition it a hard sell for the time being.
A defense that the company can offer is 'we intervened to prevent this in the following ways, senior management took this seriously and had a zero tolerance policy, as you can see from the long list of people fired for doing bad things.' That is probably the most common defense for a suit like this. This is the main reason that companies provide annual harassment training, anonymous complaint lines, etc.- it helps to build the case that senior management takes the problem seriously in case a lawsuit like this is filed.
The problem that A-B is going to have is that 'I complained to the CEO personally about Afrasiabi in 2013, and they didn't fire him until 2020' is tough to square with that argument. In order to make that stick you have to actually have consequences for employees who do this sort of thing. And 'we waited until after the investigation into our company had been going on for a year, almost a decade after his first documented complaint' doesn't really fit the facts the company wants. So, can they find enough people who did suffer consequences in 2013, say, to convince a jury? That's probably what the legal argument will come down to (their current tack is probably not the one they will take with a jury, presuming this gets that far).
What if they say "Only a small portion of the females were harassed in our company! They are not broadly and uniformly harassed! How dare you say we have a constant sexual harassment problem!"
I don't think this logic makes sense. For things that shouldn't happen in the first place, just a few cases speak a lot.
Then single out the individuals performing the harassment and bring specific charges.
Like the GP says, this suit is not really talking about a singular crime, it's trying to paint a 10k+ organization spread across the globe as some parody of a frat house gone wrong.
Your point is sarcastic but is exactly the point. If only a small portions of the females were harassed, then specify the nature of the harassment and bring criminal charges against the harassers, don't try and paint a massive multinational with a very very broad brush and use that as some kind of proof.
Your logic is flawed in that you didn't clarify the definition of "small". How small are we talking about? This is a simple statistical question.
Calculate the number of sexual harassment reports of all US companies normalized by employee counts, and check if the number of sexual harassments at Blizzard is statically significantly higher. If so, then it is plain reasonable to suspect Blizzard has certain issues that cause this.
Whether the females are broadly and uniformly harassed is not a good indicator. As long as the rate is significantly higher than other company, it could indicate some problem and is worth investigation, even if the total number of harassment cases are small compared to the total female employees.
> For things that shouldn't happen in the first place, just a few cases speak a lot.
what does this mean? assuming the allegations are true, then yes, these things shouldn't have happened, you won't find anyone who disagrees with that. but what does "just a few cases speak a lot" mean? are we supposed to infer that because these cases are being prosecuted, that there's much more misogynistic evil happening beneath the surface at Activision Blizzard, enough to spread to their entire corporate culture at some deep, primal level? that's quite the supposition! "some bad people, especially those with power over others, did some bad things" is much easier to believe.
Can you list the number of incidents of workplace harassment and groping that you would find appropriate before concluding that maybe there's a bigger problem?
Activision Blizzard is a very large company (10,000+ employees in 196(!!) countries), and this suit claims that a proportionally small number of allegations over the course of many years is indicative of widespread corporate culture. meanwhile, like I said, it pulls in a suicide and dudes drinking and being hungover on the job, as well as pay issues and sexual harassment. notice that I did not claim any allegations were untruthful or lacked merit, merely that the overall picture being painted seems disingenuous. if the suicide connection was less tenuous (or omitted entirely), the drinking/hungover stuff wasn't mentioned, and the suit wasn't trying to paint the whole company's culture in a negative light, I would have no comment except, "cool, assuming these allegations are true, I wish the people filing the suit the best of luck in getting justice." it's the extrapolation of discrete events into a scathing indictment of the corporate culture and the tangential, tenuous things mentioned (as a means of bolstering the idea the the corporate culture is misogynistic) that gives me pause. I don't see a problem with this line of thinking. maybe the corporate culture really is as anti-woman as depicted here—that's for the courts to determine. meanwhile, I find it hard to believe 100% at face value, like many people here and elsewhere on social media are doing.
I don't understand what my sex has to do with this evaluation—you said you hated to "play that card," but you didn't play any card at all, you just pointed out my presumed sex based on my handle, and didn't connect it to anything.
Let me ask you this. What would you rate as sufficient evidence of systemic, deep-seated misogyny in a company? Or is your argument a company with 10000 employees can not display of systemic mysogyny, because there are just too many people? Is the argument then that a company of that size can not have any systemic behaviour or failures?
If that is not your argument, then I don't sure what you are trying to say. You specifically mentioned that the number of cases brought forward made you sceptical. So would have less cases of harassment been better evidence of systemic mysogyny? If not how many cases are needed to be sufficient?
> " it's the extrapolation of discrete events into a scathing indictment
How much evidence must we have, to make such an indictment?
Your position is basically unfalsifiable. It feels as if no matter how many people come forward, no matter how many women identify these issues, that you will just hand wave it all away.
When person after person after person comes forward, eventually that makes a pattern.
> that's for the courts to determine
No. It is also for all of us to determine. Everyone can look at the evidence, and decide for themselves if that is the kind of company that they want to answer recruiter calls from, or work for.
If you have some actual evidence to the contrary, that proves anything of value, then feel free to show it.
But don't just be a devils advocate, and ignore literally everything, that anyone ever brings up.
Eventually, if you see enough evidence, that proves a pattern.
> why are people taking such strong issue with this position
Because you don't actually make any arguments at all, and provide no evidence to your position.
All you are doing is playing devil's advocate, and saying "I don't believe the narrative!", without actually providing any evidence of your own as to why it is wrong.
If you worked at blizzard at the past, or know people who have, and you know from talking to them, that they have different experiences, then that would be a different story.
But you don't have that. You aren't actually backing up any position at all, and you are just casting doubt, like a bad faith actor, without actually defending or justifying anything that you are saying, beyond "I don't believe the narrative!".
> what motives am I supposed to actually have
The motive would be the same motive that the "well acttualllyyy", devil's advocates have. You get to try to look smart, by going against the grain, and find irrelevant flaws in people's arguments, without actually backing anything up yourself, or subjecting your own argument to the same type of hyper, useless, deconstruction.
You literally answer your own bafflement in what you typed. You said it’s a flimsy case for any systemic issues, indicating you believe this to be a collection of one-offs rather than systemic ones if you then believe the individual cases.
I’m saying your top level statement quoted below is harmful regardless of your motives because it works to minimize and excuse the impact and veracity of the accusations (which you yourself are not disputing individually). What your motives are for doing so is besides the point.
Your personal bar of it being “as broadly, uniformly terrible for all women in the company specifically” is irrelevant to just about anyone’s people’s definition of systemic harm, to the point that it’s very hard to take your argument as being in good faith.
> it's kind of off-putting how many different grievances are bundled together here—many different accusations about a wide variety of topics intended to paint a very broadly negative view of the company culture, everywhere from management to lower-level (male) employees. while I don't doubt that many of the grievances are true and merited, I have a hard time believing things could be as broadly, uniformly terrible for all women in the company specifically as the overall picture depicted here
It started out mainly to hire more GMs for World Of Warcraft (had a few people in my larger social circle that worked there). But it looks to have expanded to include some non-game engineering roles.
> I really struggle to understand this equal pay business; I'm not (and don't ever expect to be) paid the same as other equally qualified engineers on my team.
Yes, and random pay discrimination (or discrimination on job-irrelevant traits like “salary negotiation ability”) are, on their own, legal.
However, if that is systematic by sex/gender its illegal discrimination, including if it is an indirect result of facially-sex/gender-neutral discrimination that has an unequal impact by sex and insufficient tie to legitimate business necessity (that’s “disparate impact” discrimination.)
On a nation scale, pay tend to be adjusted based on hours worked while not counting permitted leave, vacation, and sick days. This does have an unequal impact by gender.
> The internship program has a focus of providing development opportunities to students from groups historically underrepresented in tech, through technical training and professional development.
At least they're openly admitting to it. Blizzard is also bragging about how 43% of their new interns are women, which way more than the number of women cs grads. This isn't whataboutism because you can't complain about pay disparity if the groups don't start on a level playing field.
No, but that's not the point I was making. Depending on where you advertise, you can get 43% non-men applications as long as unnecessary restrictions like cs grad don't prevent it.
I believe this is the case for much of the software industry. There's even places where women/minorities make more due to diversity efforts. And then there's the few bad apples like AB where there probably was blatant pay discrimination.
The fact of the matter is: you have to have some negotiation skills if you want to get paid the best you possibly can, regardless of your gender.
> The fact of the matter is: you have to have some negotiation skills if you want to get paid the best you possibly can, regardless of your gender.
I think that is still a pretty big issue on it's own. This feels pretty shitty when we bring neurodiversity into view. Coworkers with Autism will have a very hard time negotiating for that pay raise to the same efficiency of others.
Simply put, I'd like to make the most my negotiation position makes possible. Different people with the same qualifications and title would not have the same circumstances. If negotiation played no role, the practical outcome is that wages would stagnate as employers would engage in some version of a cartel, which would be worse for the people at the bottom of the bell curve as well.
> If negotiation played no role, the practical outcome is that wages would stagnate as employers would engage in some version of a cartel, which would be worse for the people at the bottom of the bell curve as well.
You mean, the thing that repeatedly happens under the existing system, despite negotiation?
Negotiation is entirely irrelevant. Why should a 2-5x variance in individual compensation factor into whether or not companies form a cartel to suppress all salaries?
Because there needs to be a trickle to start the flood. All companies are incentivised to co-ordinate prices to some degree, it's the desire to fill a particular role quickly or poach a particular superstar that causes companies to break from whatever happens to be the"industry standard", and those variances become factors in future negotiations. If there was never any variance in individual pay there'd be no pressure to adjust salaries at all, barring collective action. Which has its own negative externalities.
Because a very high percentage of programmer types (of whatever sort of title) genuinely believe that they are well above average, and thus that performance-based pay would advantage them over others.
This is, of course, statistically impossible to be true for everyone who believes it.
Even if it were true, there's no contradiction. More granular roles could be created or more scrutiny could be had in promotions.
Unless you're overwhelming overpaid irrespective of your actual ability, no employee would suffer any downsides from pay transparency. If you (not you specifically, but any reader) disagree feel free to present a scenario.
One time I took a suitcase to my office and told my manager I was away for some interviews. Subsequently told him I didn't feel like I was earning my market rate - this was after my performance reviewed raise+bonus. Gained another 15% that way.
Because I want to be paid the same as equally performant people. I want the company to hire equally qualified people and pay according to equal performance.
Considering we all know hiring is an imperfect measure of skill, I would expect that pay diverges over tenure conditioned on identical qualification at hire.
What I do not want is for equally performant people to be paid differently on non-job-characteristics: so if, for instance, two people are roughly in the same bucket of performance, paying the woman less/more is unacceptable. Obviously individuals will see individual variation, but if across a number of employees, n, you see x% lower/higher pay for women than for men something is strange for sufficiently large x and n.
That is, either your hiring practices for women and men are not congruent, or they are and for some reason you're seeing poorer/better performances from women/men, then you have to identify the cause. The null hypothesis is that gender does not affect ability.
> Because I want to be paid the same as equally performant people. I want the company to hire equally qualified people and pay according to equal performance.
Without pay transparency you wouldn't know regardless so I'm not sure what your point is.
I'll try again. We seem to have suffered some context-loss. I'll keep the question and answer close to each other to avoid that.
Your question was:
> why wouldn't you want to be paid the same as equally qualified members with the same title on the same team?
My answer is "because performance is more important than qualifications and once you're in I could give a flying fuck about your qualifications". That's the point.
Pay transparency is a different discussion. I am fully capable of transmitting and receiving pay information without forced pay transparency.
You're missing the point. For two people who just started, without transparency they could've been paid differently irrespective of their qualifications or nonexistence performance at their role.
Furthermore even if there are discrepancies in pay and performance without transparency you wouldn't know anyway. My question was in the context of the other post - in the context of your post it's the same question except with respect to performance.
So, are you against pay transparency, or not? You say you're capable of receiving and transmitting, but ultimately you aren't receiving the truth, only what is told to you - which may or may not be the same.
Against. Not because of the ideal but because sufficient numbers of capable engineers I'd like to work with are simultaneously poor evaluators of whether others are capable. i.e. lack of pay transparency permits us both to turn the situation into a low stakes situation if we do not highly estimate each others' ability to evaluate others.
> You say you're capable of receiving and transmitting, but ultimately you aren't receiving the truth, only what is told to you - which may or may not be the same.
I am capable of having trusted relationships where I do not need third-party enforcement of truth. Just like I'd believe a friend who says she's going to the store without having to check her location on Google Maps, I am capable of believing my trusted co-workers when they express things like this as truth. I do not lie to them and I am capable of forming relationships where I believe they do not lie to me.
What do your negotiating skills contribute to an engineering team that they should be affecting your compensation to the same extent as your skill level?
> What do your negotiating skills contribute to an engineering team that they should be affecting your compensation to the same extent as your skill level?
Negotiating comes in a few flavors. One is in the form of a competing offer, which you could just as easily ask the same question: "What does a competing offer contribute to an engineering team that it should affect compensation to the same extent as skill". Of course, the answer is that competing offers don't contribute to engineering teams at all! But, if a company ignores all competing offers, it will not hire anyone who manages to get one. I'd guess competing offers correlate highly with being a successful engineer, so that sounds like a terrible strategy to me. They also serve as another form of vetting (like VCs piling on after but only after the first bite).
I think this question fundamentally misunderstands labor markets. They are, in fact, markets! Employees are not paid by the amount of value they generate (potentially over a million per person at FAANG), but according to supply and demand for the position.
Nothing. But the reality is that it's in the company's interest to secure labor as cheaply as possible. If Charlie had competing offers and negotiates better pay than Daniel who did not, this isn't discrimination. At least not discrimination on the basis of protected class, it's discrimination on the basis of competing job offers. Swap out Daniel for Danielle and it's no different.
Good negotiation skills = good communication skills. Communication is a skill that 80% of the engineers I meet don’t have. Don’t be upset that someone negotiated a higher salary than you when they were hired, you could have tried just the same.
I don't buy this. I've known a lot of people, especially from a south-east asian background, that are extremely reserved when it comes to self-advocacy wage-wise and still remain extremely strong and clear communicators in the areas that matter. Additionally various factors of neurodiversity bring this into an even worse light, being mildly Autistic can make this difficult to accomplish even if you're able to communicate well with the team on a day-by-day basis.
You’re right, being a bad negotiator does not always correlate to being a bad communicator. But being a good negotiator almost always correlates to being a good communicator.
I don't agree with this. I had a great salary negotiation, over the phone. It was all prepared, i had answers ready for me for the negotiation, prepared by my stepsister (who recently had a mission at a recruitment firm), she listened to the interviewer/manager, pointed me to the correct idea for negotiating, and i landed +60% of my old salary (loosing two vacation weeks, i only have 8 left, but still). Nothing to do with being a good communicator.
I did say “almost always”. Also you showed (somewhat morally ambiguous haha) problem solving and resourcing—two highly sought after skills.
Let’s also not discount the fact that negotiation is a skill itself, and you were learning from your stepsister who sounds like a skilled negotiator. If you had to negotiate another raise in-person I would bet you could think back to the cards and knock it out.
It’s not about equal pay, it’s about not paying differently simply due to gender. You can do so for other reasons even ones correlated with gender. It’s very hard afaik to prove such a case so a company needs to be really blatant about it.
California law is more strict. There is a whitelist of allowable reasons, consisting of: seniority, "a merit system", quantity and quality of producrion, and the catch all
> (D) A bona fide factor other than sex, such as education, training, or experience. This factor shall apply only if the employer demonstrates that the factor is not based on or derived from a sex-based differential in compensation, is job related with respect to the position in question, and is consistent with a business necessity. For purposes of this subparagraph, “business necessity” means an overriding legitimate business purpose such that the factor relied upon effectively fulfills the business purpose it is supposed to serve. This defense shall not apply if the employee demonstrates that an alternative business practice exists that would serve the same business purpose without producing the wage differential.
In particular, prior salary is explicitly not a valid defense.
By this standard, if there is a pay gap in California, the burden is on the employer to demonstrate they are not discriminating
Because at the end of the day "equal skills" doesn't exist. You can't just measure a developer's overall skill with a single power level number like in some anime. Different people are good/bad at different things and two engineers at the same level/experience can contribute to the team in completely different ways.
That's why compensation exists in bands, which is aimed to reflect that skill levels exist in bands (not all L4s are equal, etc).
The parent specifically said "I'm not (and don't ever expect to be) paid the same as other equally qualified engineers on my team."
I understand your point, even if I think it's a little narrow, but the original comment seemed to apply that there was no point in even trying to achieve equal pay. That just totally baffles me.
Equal pay forces metric-based assessments which imo is detrimental. I think(?) that's what op what refering to. It's incredibly hard to evaluate how to pay 2 different people, allowing negotiation allows the free market to determine the price, which is the best way we have found as a society to allocate assets.
If you agree agree with the GP that people should be paid based on their negotiating skills, then you also support paying people regardless of their performance. Those are two mutually exclusive criteria.
We're not discussing a binary, though. Negotiating skills can't completely untether compensation from qualification/performance, but they absolutely loosen the two. If I am a junior employee who is skilled at negotiating comparing my salary with a senior employee who is not, the delta will be far smaller than if our qualifications were the same but our negotiating skills were reversed.
My understanding is that GG began due to undisclosed conflicts of interest among some journalists and game developers. This was later used to justify a crusade to abuse people on social media.
Although I think you're correct that the ethics in journalism issue was used as a smokescreen by bad faith actors.
Some gamers started harassing a developer because they didn't like her game. It intensified after her ex boyfriend accused her of cheating on him with a journalist and several other people. Some gamers imagined she had sex with that journalist and others for positive reviews. The ex boyfriend said even he didn't mean to accuse her of that.[1]
And those gamers connected the conflict of interest allegations to social issues right away. Gamergate's name was inspired by a video that said journalism's decline began with writing about things like sexual harassment and representation.[2]
I agree. The game developers who celebrated on twitter when John Peter Bain died to cancer was one of the worst behavior I have seen in the gaming industry.
The death threats to john and his family before that was also in rather bad taste.
According to Wikipedia (so YMMV) GamerGate started when a woman wrote a text-based game about depression and got rape and death threats over it, recorded said death threats and publicized them, got even more death threats, and an ex-boyfriend jumped in to contribute by straight up lying and claiming journalistic corruption... [0]
That's patently false. Discourse still continues to this day on certain subreddits.
We talk about ethics in gaming journalism, and oppose censorship and the woke mob.
It's sad that some people decided to be harassers in the name of GG, but that is practically ancient history. If you think that's still true, you're part of the problem, because you believe everything the media and Twitter tells you.
This made me curious since I haven't heard much GG discourse recently so I went to /r/KotakuInAction since they bill themselves as "the main hub for GamerGate on Reddit". The third highest upvoted post over the last month is a mod that increases the butt size of a female character in a video game. Definitely seems to be a community focused on ethics with zero hint of sexism and misogyny.
EDIT: So apparently I was wrong that it was specifically about the size of the butt. The headline is "There's now a mod to fix Miranda's butt in the Mass Effect remaster, for anyone that cares" and the screenshot is a big butt. I took "fixed Miranda's butt" to mean they fixed the appearance of it. The issue was instead that gratuities shots of said butt were removed not that the butt itself was changed. I don't think that changes the fundamental issue, but I apologize for my lack of ethics in games journalism.
Can you elaborate on how people choose to enjoy content in the privacy of their home amounts to sexism and misogyny? Complaining about men enjoying content that caters to the male gaze seems as pointless as complaining about how romance novels cater to women's tastes. If people want to alter the remastered edition to more closely resemble the original 2010 release of Mass Effect 2, that doesn't strike me as sexist or misogynist at all.
This comment not only fails to demonstrate any sexism or misogyny, but makes me think that the sub has a valid point about inconsistent and unjust denigration of gaming.
>Can you elaborate on how people choose to enjoy content in the privacy of their home amounts to sexism and misogyny? Complaining about men enjoying content that caters to the male gaze seems as pointless as complaining about how romance novels cater to women's tastes.
People can do whatever they want in their own home. I'm not complaining about that. I am complaining about how their complaints are voiced in public, usually in an aggressive and derogatory manner. Have fun, enjoy the butt, but I am going to laugh at you if you whine in public that "the evil woke mob forced companies to remove the butt" and I will get angry if you start harassing people over it.
>If people want to alter the remastered edition to more closely resemble the original 2010 release of Mass Effect 2, that doesn't strike me as sexist or misogynist at all.
The more context you remove the less sexist and misogynistic it becomes. No one can argue with making a remake more closely resembles the original. It starts to get iffy when you add the context that the change is to add more gratuitous ass shots. It becomes clearly sexist and misogynistic when the addition of those shots is celebrated in a community that already has a reputation for sexism and misogyny.
As per one of the most top-voted posts in that thread [1], the same author released two mods: one that restores the shots of Miranda's behind to the 2010 release, and one removed them from the original release. I'm not sure how adding more context makes it any more misogynistic. This community is enabling people to enjoy the game however they want, both with more sexualization and even less sexualization. If your issue is specifically with "how their complaints are voiced in public, usually in an aggressive and derogatory manner" you would be much better served highlighting this particular kind of behavior rather than the community as a whole.
I think your last sentence is really demonstrative of what I'm saying: people harbor a highly prejudiced view of gaming as, "a community that already has a reputation for sexism and misogyny" and are making judgements based on this prejudice. I have no doubt that you earnestly believe this butt-mod is sexist, but the fact that you harbor this belief is precisely what leads me to feel that this group's complaints are valid.
The person who wrote the mod does not appear to be the one who linked it on KotakuInAction. Therefore that community can't take credit for the other mods and claim they balance each other out.
>I think your last sentence is really demonstrative of what I'm saying: people harbor a highly prejudiced view of gaming as, "a community that already has a reputation for sexism and misogyny" and are making very skewed judgements.
To be clear, I am not saying this about the general gaming community. I am saying this about the gamergate community. Surely not everyone in that community is sexists or misogynist, but I don't think you can legitimately argue that there is not some sizable portion of that community that is highly sexists and misogynist.
That context and context in general is important because it helps to establish the motivation behind their actions. It is just like how saying the exact same thing to your wife and a random women on the street could be loving in the former context and sexist in the latter.
> The person who wrote the mod does not appear to be the one who linked it on KotakuInAction. Therefore that community can't take credit for the other mods and claim they balance each other out.
Then by the same logic, the sexualized mod doesn't count either. They were authored by the same person. Otherwise, this is yet another double standard: the sexualized mod counts despite not being linked by the author, yet the de-sexualized mod doesn't count because it want linked by the author.
I don't think it's productive to drag this out any longer, but as an outsider to this situation you come off as highly prejudiced and it makes me sympathize more with the people you're calling sexist and misogynist over a mod.
>Then by the same logic, the sexualized mod doesn't count either. They were authored by the same person. Otherwise, this is yet another double standard: the sexualized mod counts despite not being linked by the author, yet the de-sexualized mod doesn't count because it want linked by the author.
The author doesn't matter. I am not criticizing the author as I don't know the author's intent.
I am criticizing the specific reaction of the KotakuInAction community to the work of the author the same way I might criticize how some people celebrate American History X for reasons that are not aligned with the filmmaker's intent.
I don't see why you think this rebuts the previous comment. "We're mad that the company reduced the female's butt size" doesn't really refute "the community cares about female butt size [presumably to ogle large butts]"... in fact, it kind of reinforces that viewpoint.
For what it's worth, I looked through that subreddit's discussion of the article of this HN thread, and the dominant strain of opinions tended to be either "woke company is a bunch of hypocrites, ha ha ha" or "why are you believing what women say." I didn't see the other thread in question, but there definitely seems to be a very strong anti-woke-ism and misogynistic strain in general to the subreddit.
Yikes. One of the first articles I see on that subreddit is a long, curated list of "race and gender swaps" in movies, such as the "blackwashing" of casting Morgan Freeman as "Red" in The Shawshank Redemption, with several hundred examples, each lovingly attributed in a changelog. Ethics in gaming indeed!
Gamergate started because a dude spread lies about his ex-gf. Not a single one of his accusations regarding her behavior or the behavior of employees of gaming websites was true.
It was always, always about harassing women. It still is. The main places where Gamergate is still discussed are chock full of misogynist bullshit.
The gaming publishing industry does have conflict of interest issues, but Gamergate approached and approaches the problem from an entirely wrong-headed point of view. Criticism of the industry should be entirely detached from the clusterfuck that is Gamergate.
So you essentially confirm that GG was born from harassing women, and that lots of people continued harassing women even while people said it was always about ethics in journalism.
No at some point the leftover people at some point had an about face, and said from now on we don't do harassment anymore and it's only about ethics in journalism.
Let's consider this is true, but why on earth would this new "only about ethics in journalism" movement continue to wear the same GG label, and somehow be surprised (and annoyed) that people still associate the movement with harassment and mysogyny?
Its literally a conservative culture war for people under 60 lol. Any gamergate space is an alt-right space and any alt-right space is a gamergate space.
>Years after the online harassment campaign known as Gamergate targeted women in the video game world
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.
If you're reading this, there's a pretty solid chance that you're a male working in the software industry.
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.
This take is a little too extreme, it is one you see a lot on the internet, but if you talk to actual women in the industry there are much more varied experiences. Some don’t perceive any problems at all, others do but consider it minor, others are depressed and angry as hell.
> it is one you see a lot on the internet, but if you talk to actual women in the industry
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.
misogyny in tech is an innate, intractable problem that is literally impossible to solve? why would any woman work with any nonzero number of men in tech, then? I changed my career trajectory when I realized the video game industry wasn't a fit for me in terms of politics, work-family balance, and (to a lesser extent) religion... if this problem is truly unsolvable and endemic to software development, shouldn't women, looking out for their best interests, pursue other fields of work?
(note that I don't actually believe this supposition, I'm just following it to the logical conclusion.)
OP made unabashedly broad claims about an entire generalized industry, saying something happens everywhere, yes even at your company where you think everything is fine and there's no problems, yes, it happens there too. this implies that literally every measure possible taken at every possible corporation in the entire broad field of "software" continues to be ineffective at solving these problems, and that we must be aware of this. OP went out of their way to both leave no room for nuance in this assertion and to provide zero solutions or ideas for solutions for solving this problem, and implied that it was endemic to women working together with men (in software, I guess). what other possible alternative interpretation is there?
> this implies that literally every measure possible taken at every possible corporation in the entire broad field of "software" continues to be ineffective at solving these problems
OP did not imply that; read their comment again, you will note that they actually stated the opposite of your accusation quite clearly. That there is more work to do (their point) directly contradicts your assumptions.
> implied that it was endemic to women working together with men....what other possible alternative interpretation is there?
The only interpretation of OP that I can see is that there exists a problem and that being aware of the problem existing is a key factor in solving it.
I have no idea where you got these ideas from in OP's comment, I read quite the opposite from it actually.
the basic idea that anything could be literally, explicitly 100% "pervasive" at literally every place in the entire world regardless of culture is so far beyond ridiculous it's nowhere even near entertaining, and the sheer delusion in making such a statement, including explicitly doubling down on any chance of doubt or wiggle room, is so far beyond the pale that it's just plain silly, and can only be made by someone who has minimal life experience and is extrapolating said limited life experience to the whole world
> Misogyny and harassment are happening around you, and you need to be looking for it.
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 think this is a pretty unhelpful response which tends to diminish the gravity of serious allegations. I don't claim to work in a perfectly enlightened place where nobody ever faces harassment, but I'm confident "the nice manager" at my company has never harassed a coworker to the point of suicide and I've seen people get fired for isolated incidents of behavior which the lawsuit describes as pervasive and routine. If you're working for a company where this conduct could happen, you should try to find a better one; if you're building a company, you have a strong but achievable obligation to ensure it couldn't happen.
You might want to reread the article. It isn't about harassment or misogyny from individuals. It's about a corporate culture and leadership that allegedly encouraged the same.
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 actually think this is much more prevalent in the US and probably even concentrated at their west coast around silicon valley. Not exclusively though, but even in this case at Activision. How many employees are involved and how many do they have?
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.
CEO positions tend to be filled by the most highly competitive personality types. People willing to sacrifice most of their life to attain a single goal.
Perhaps women tend to choose to lead more balanced lives because they find it more rewarding and meaningful.
Humans are incredibly varied and I don't doubt there are highly dedicated, passionate women sacrificing most of their life to attain singular goals. That's why there are enough women to have an entire women's league of most professional sports. If it were true that women tend to choose to lead more balanced lives to the point where entire leadership positions are almost completely bereft of women, there would be no female professional athletes, and certainly not enough to have leagues and teams of them. There would be no female dancers, and especially no female ballerinas.
I am big proponent of STFU and do your job.
No "we are family here". No dating people from work.
Because some people really really need that next pay-check.
There are people paying off their chemotherapy that have to go to work reading about this and worrying about their livelihood. Nobody deserves that. Nobody has a right to get you to worry about how are you gonna survive next mortgage payment. And over what? people acting like they are in highschool. Stuff like this boils my blood before we even get to politics. Life is hard enough. I will not burden you with my family issues and I will work as hard as I can but in return you let me do the work and worry only about what I am working on. Everything else goes under grow the f up and get a life outside company.
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.