How much Activision does it take to change a Blizzard?

Good lord, you have an open bar at lunch? That might be a step too far!

Yeah, most people can handle it. But there is almost always someone young and new to the industry who overdoes it and misses meetings the next day. Those people should be reprimanded and if it’s someone senior they should get fired.

I worked at a company where everyone from the CEO down took pride in how much they drank at events, how many hotels they got kicked out of, and how many meetings they missed because of it all. It was infuriating, and it made it almost impossible to have the pre-event talk with the team about not doing something stupid.

All your earlier defenses, but this is what goes too far? Amusing.

What are these jobs where people get fired left and right? That’s insane, it takes 18 months to train up someone new. You discipline people, put them on improvement plans, you don’t immediately fire for anything that isn’t major, or introducing liability.

He seems to be doing a good job of ruining his life all on his own. He left comments open on the tweet above and responded several times trying to defend/explain points brought up. Sometimes it’s better to just keep your mouth shut, which I suspect his current employer will point out.

Completely agree with you there! Make the statement then STFU.

I will never tell the stories publicly, but there were plenty of liability-raising incidents at this company.

The problem was the CEO was the pack leader for all the shenanigans so nobody ever even got told it was bad. The worst thing that happened was I stopped inviting them to events, and even then I came under immense pressure because many of them were very senior and prominent leads.

HA, no, no one drinks until after work. I usually only grab something when someone in our team is sticking around after work or we have a game night scheduled.

I used to work for a French company and it was quite normal for everyone to have a glass of wine or a beer with lunch. Mind you, this was not drinking to excess, we all went back to work after lunch. So I just kinda adjusted my work norm to sometimes just have a midday drink. Some places are like that.

I’ll be interested to see if Activision actually does anything meaningful, because I guarantee that a public company that size first hired a crisis management firm. Then that firm recommended the law firm to do the investigation. That doesn’t always mean a whitewash or finding a couple of scapegoats to take the fall, but the crisis management playbook for publicly-traded companies tends to lean that way. They are far more worried about a shareholder suit and SEC problems if this non-disclosed information hurts the share price.

Source: 15 years as an outside counsel HR investigator and hearing officer with a rep for being a hard-ass & refusing to whitewash anything. Find someone else if you wanted that. If management is a little scared of you and the employee unions hate you, you’re doing a good job.

So.

For four years I was a roadie for Bands You Have Heard Of. Needless to say, I’ve seen shit. I never took part in said shit. Most of it was I was raised well, some of it was needless to say sobering when the woman you might spend some time with spent some time with Guns and Roses the night before. For me, I liked the work and working shows was one of the most rewarding jobs I’ve had.

In this case, it’s an interesting distinction that I probably can’t wrap my head around. For me, I keep coming around to “this is ostensibly a professional-level job and if HR at any straight job I’ve had heard about this, heads would roll.” If it’s a consensual fan thing, not so much of a problem.

Except when you’re the one guy who doesn’t drink, has his career affected because you don’t hang out after hours, or drink soda pop at gatherings. Not that has happened to me, mind you.

Fun group activities build teams, sure.

I have worked a multiple large companies, both of which a decade ago, this would have been the mantra, and over time they have all shifted away from drinking at sanctioned work events/functions. Removing open bars from holiday parties etc.

It is too much of a liability, because stuff, like at Blizzard, keeps happening.

The games industry is just behind the times on this stuff.

Heh. One of my former coworkers never went drinking with us because he was an observant Muslim. In his case, anyway, it doesn’t seem to have hampered his career; he’s still at that company (I was laid off years ago) and is (I suspect) making a lot more than I do. But yeah, booze like many things can be a basis for exclusionary behavior.

Being old, the first law firm I worked for had a liquor cabinet, and every Friday at 4pm was cocktail hour. Seemed like a really dumb idea to hand out free drinks right before the drive home, but that was the firm tradition. The liquor cabinet went away after a couple of former associates filed lawsuits because a some of the partners would get far too loose with their language. I’m still proud that I was one of only two attorneys at the firm who were not named in any of those suits, because I treat people with respect and act like a professional. It ain’t difficult.

There’s also an ADA issue hiding here (technically it is now the ADAAA, the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act, but that’s too hard to say & write all the time). If you are a recovering alcoholic or addict, that’s a protected disability (if you fall off the wagon, you’re not recovering anymore, and you lose the ADA protection). It would be extremely difficult to prove that skipping alcohol at company or employee events caused some sort of discrimination in promotion or receipt of other job benefits, but the risk is there for employers. Basically the same discrimination issue exists if an employee doesn’t drink for religious reasons.

My employer does not reimburse for alcohol, which cuts down on a lot of problems. I was at an airport bar a few years ago having dinner & a drink, and asked the bartender if I could get the drink on a separate check. He said, “No problem, we get that request a lot, especially from pilots.” Good to know, good to know, how much is an interstate Uber?

Well, it’s the games industry, so unions aren’t exactly an issue. :P

The latter, I’d say.

What adult people do consensually, should be no one’s business but their own. But there’s a difference between a rock star who represents himself, and someone who is representing a company. If the rock star does something he shouldn’t be doing, he’s only hurting himself. The guy representing a company, on the other hand… well, most normal corporations are none too eager to have their names dragged into that kind of mess. Thus why most companies are pretty proactive about avoiding that kind of situation.

Activision/Blizzard apparently did not get that memo.

One of the companies I worked for did that, though they made an exception for business-related meals with clients/press/etc.

Another company gave everyone a flat amount per diem for travel, which led to some really weird behaviors, like more junior staff skipping meals all together so they could pocket some extra cash.

Also, given the number of stories that have come out throughout and beyond the large thrust of the #MeToo movement about a number of rock stars/bands in the pop-punk/emo scene centered around events like Warped Tour that specifically targeted, say, underage fans (I mean obviously you’ve got shit like Lori Mattox as a 14-year-old with Bowie and Jimmy Paige back in the 70s too). Bright Eyes, Brand New, Lostprophets (jesus Ian Watkins was a fucking monster) maybe even Fall Out Boy.

Pop culture rockstars have always been an object of devotion for young fans, and more than a few have specifically used that to their predatory advantage.

AKA, maybe it might be time to reassess the level of okay we are as a society with rockstars wearing down groupie inhibitions with booze and drugs backstage. . .

I’ve been wondering when or if this kind of reckoning was going to happen with touring musicians in the #metoo era, but it seems a lot harder to address because:

  • Generally musicians don’t work for large companies with HR teams. They are either individuals or a band that is probably a corporate in and of itself, and they don’t give a shit about HR.
  • It’s not currently illegal to have consensual sex with a fan who is of age. And unfortunately it seems pretty rare or nonexistant that underage fans sue.
  • The music labels, which do have HR teams, generally don’t care what their artists do until they get into trouble. As long as the money’s flowing, they are unlikely to mandate rules about this sort of thing, above and beyond a very generic morality clause that I assume most labels include in their contracts.

Maybe things will change as time goes on though.