What it's like working at Riot Games

I actually agree with you. Well, this may certainly be correct in his case, I don’t know:

…but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. In which case, he just lacks awareness (or doesn’t care) about the effect that this has on all the other employees. Personally, I think it creates an environment that is unhealthy in the long-run or at least unscaleable, but maybe if there is enough fresh blood it doesn’t matter.

Exactly right. The tech industry skews young and counts on turnover. Since employees are essentially expendable assets with a limited life, there’s no real point to treating them well. Sweatshop working conditions will extract more money.

The only difference between small tech companies and third world garment factories are that the tech industry types have to be a bit more subtle and indirect in their exploitation of employees. They can’t just crack a whip and tell people to work 80 hours a week, they have to convince them that it’s a great idea and part of “Company Culture” and so forth and so on.

P.S. I apologize if I come off as dick-ish in this thread, but I’m in the tech industry and we’ve been crunching lately (50+ hour weeks) so I’m feeling a lot of very personal angst on this topic.

Also compensation at tech companies tends to be very good, especially compared with, say, sweatshops.

I thought the military was a great idea when I was 18.

When I was in my 20s I thought nothing of going on to full-scale, catbutt mode in front of a monitor, a keyboard, an IDE and a Mission.

When I was in my 30s I began to rethink some of that.

Now that I am [deleted for your protection], I shake my head at stuff like Mr. Pan’s statement, but also yearn back for the days where I loved to do a grinding task so much that I would do it for free 24x7 if I could.

Everything is relative. Riot’s compensation is quite inferior to most companies with a similar level of profit.

Yeah, this is one of those things I hate. Those guys who are totally willing to sacrifice their life and give themselves wholly to the company. They set a standard that others need to follow if they want to get promotions or bonuses or whatever.

And the sad part is that the guy who works every weekend and 12 hours a day doesn’t necessarily get more work done, oftentimes they are just shitty at time management and produce shitty work. But because they are there all the time, it seems like they are contributing more. It’s much like the “Guy comes in at noon, but works til 8pm seems like he’s ‘working late’ and putting in lots of effort compared to the guy who left at 5pm” problem that seems to happen a lot at companies. (Hell, I’ve been praised for staying late, when in reality I just came in late and was trying to work a full eight hours.)

As a side note, isn’t Riot in Santa Monica, aren’t they supposed to pay overtime to artists & engineers? (the guy in the article is some form of management though he sounds like an assistant PM really, since he’s been at the company for a very short time)

Even when I was 25, I would never work such insane hours. That’s why I purposefully choose NOT to work in the gaming industry but as a regular software developer, although I’m as hardcore into gaming as it gets. I already had read enough about all these young ‘heroes’ who burn themselves out.

Time is the most precious resource to me.

I took a stand at one of my software development jobs because like Zeitgeist above, time is very important. I was never one to be crazy about working extra time, but I did so occasionally when I didn’t feel I was getting enough work done. The sales and marketing folks got into the habit of over promising and finally I decided to not be responsible for their screw ups. It was declared that there would be mandatory overtime over the weekend to deliver on those promises and I said no. They were shocked that someone didn’t want to give up their personal time for the company.

Happy to see people didn’t buy into the BS of the post, I’ve seen this culture before, it’s terrible, and I was very strict on it before, no pay no work, I didn’t care what their expectations were. Also crunching is a terrible way to work, it creates more trouble and really if you get into these situations it’s because the company haven’t hired enough people and has effectively gambled with their employees, it’s all verrrry pro of them.

Sometimes, even getting paid for the work still has its problems.

I’m not in the software industry (I’m an attorney), I bill by the hour, so I get paid for the extra hours I put in. That does not mean that I want to routinely work 60 hour weeks, but it is effectively what the industry demands (and more) when there is a “deal” that needs to be done.

I put in 104 hours over a seven day straight period a month or so ago. That just sucked. I would have gladly skipped the pay to have just worked a 40 hour week.

Unfortunately, in a lot of professional jobs, that option really does not seem to be out there.

I wouldn’t think Riot Games would need to crunch on anything anyway. They only make content for League of Legends at this point anyway right? I would think they would have a pipeline for new content in place so that people wouldn’t need to crunch.

Or maybe Riot Games makes other games too? In which case what I just said doesn’t apply I guess.

I think they got other stuff going, but on the other side they can now just run with a skinny crew and get rich and buy ferraris, exept those who work for them though

I would expect there’s a fair amount of “all hands on deck” moments making sure everything is running smoothly running up to and during the tournaments. There’s a lot of money flying around, and that is enough to make anybody nervous, even if you’re pretty confident in your product.

Of course they need to crunch. They have signed up for deadlines, they have revenue riding on delivering on time, and if they are anything like all their industry brethren they don’t have the staff to deliver to those deadlines by just having everyone work 40 hour weeks.

Crunch is almost always the result or poor management. It might be clueless management, or exploitative management, or some other factors but fundamentally it comes from management. Management could say “Drat, we are going to have to push back a few weeks on delivery, this isn’t working” or they could say “We are behind schedule, so we’ll need everyone in this weekend.” In the software industry they often choose the latter.

If it’s happening once or twice a year it’s fairly forgivable. More often than that and it’s just a sign that the management is either cynically or ignorantly in denial about workload vs available personnel.

  • Creative people is easy to exploit because at some level really love his work. Manipulative people can smell blood, and use this.

  • The worst thing about working 40 hours a week is the miserable feel if you exit your work at 6:00 pm and everyone else stay there doing something.

  • If you own a part of the company, it sorts of make sense to work a extra. If you only own your salary, why the fuck are you investing your health in it?

  • This has many levels, and somebody may just want to grind his life to dead for some reason, and you and me have no reason to stop somebody from doing it, maybe.

Well, I think the larger point is: Riot has created one of the most popular games ever made, with revenue to match (over $600 million in 2013). They don’t need to set schedules so tight they are setting up bunkbeds in their cubicles.

Riot has dropped the 2 weeks new champ rule, really all they do is make skins. If they have to crunch that is pathetic, in the worst possible way.

It is my understanding they have other teams making other stuff, but they haven’t released anything. Other times its a team devoted to a different play mode, like Domination.

But yeah…at this point, I have no idea why Riot would be crunching. Yes you have to get a new character out every month, but this is such a known thing that they should have multiple mini-teams working on a new character in advance for like the next 3+ characters.

I know a friend from Austin who was in his late 30s, worked in a somewhat laid-back culture at a particular company, and went to work at Riot for a director level position in Santa Monica. He was the type to not want to do 40+ hours a week unless he really had to at times when it was natural to do so (launches, outages, things like this). Suffice it to say he left after about 6 months (I forget the exact timeline but it’s around that time frame I think).

From everything I’ve known about Riot, they have a particular way of doing things and have their own thought process of how it should be done, which is probably not particularly normal, and it would definitely rub some the wrong way and they’d completely, totally hate it. Okay so I’ve seen this a bit more often now that I’ve moved out here and a lot of startups and game companies usually develop some more unique cultures from Dallas or Austin.

Oh that leads me to another point, which was that apparently their interview process is a bit more intense, long and involved than it used to be, probably to make sure they get the right “company culture” type people in the process and weed out everyone else early on.

— Alan

But why would they stop? That’s how they make their profit.