Riot Games reviews

- "Old Guard" leaders protected by past successes and rarely held accountable without great effort, and risk - Feedback culture can be manipulated by those who want to retain power or squash criticism - Struggling to do too much, with an inability to focus means strategic decisions flip-flop and rarely last longer to 3-4 months - Senior Leaders have forgotten how to play a support leadership role - Product and Delivery disciplines have huge variances in competencies of individuals - Too Many "Chefs" in the kitchen in too many aspects of technical direction - Huge variances in pay between disciplines compound pay differences between those doing the work and those not contributing (you may find a QA/Release/Product/Delivery person working 5 times as hard as an engineering technical leader paid half what that leader is paid) - Huge variance in quality of managers/leaders means you roll the dice on whether you get a good or bad one, and bad ones can set your career back years - Vertical growth is all but dead, don't come here to move upwards. Someone has to quit, or be fired to create a vertical slot for growth and it's likely it'll be filled by a new hire, not an existing rioter - Horizontal (breadth) growth is difficult to achieve, there's a very large risk of getting stuck doing one thing for over 5 years and getting type cast into a role. As the company ages transfers between disciplines and product teams has ground to trickle - Attitude towards new product development has resulted in isolationist thinking, cultures are literally different, so are performance metrics and accountability, between large product groups at the company (esports, league, new games, central services) - Struggling to deal with the lack of diversity it's culture and focus on core gamers has created, mostly male management is blind and biased to the priority of the problem - Success requires being a member of the "bro culture/boys club" or working yourself to death to be visible, you need to play the "Cover Your A.. butt" game well here - Accountability culture can be used against you (your leaders will usually push fault down to the first person who claims fault, rather than take accountability themselves)

Ineffective leadership Titles don't matter, except when they do. What passes for autonomy here is a lot of theoretical talk about possible directions we can go among the masses at Riot, but the actual decisions are all still made in closed door meetings between product owners and top leaders. Once teams observe this effect, they tend to flail around trying to please the leadership. There's a real sense that no one at the top really understands which of our early decisions caused our success and which were the decisions we succeeded in spite of, so many of our leaders are afraid to make the kind of bold decisions we need to raise quality to where we want it. Painful conversations often just get kicked down the road, so we trudge on with the status quo. Many mid to upper level managers are inexperienced and/or insensitive, causing pockets of poor morale and patterns of avoidance. Our values often ring false One example: we use that word humbitious (ambitious but humble). Honestly, I think we are starting to fail at both. There's a lack of urgency in the decision making progress, because it feels like we automatically rake in a fortune no matter what we do, so why rock the boat? The humble part is fading too. There are a lot of alpha types that dominate conversations and leave little room for healthy debate. Nobody is really keeping these people in check, and they are found in many leadership positions. We're overly focused on hiring over internal promotion The discipline leaders are so focused on desperately hiring as fast as possible, that they aren't nurturing their existing teams properly. If you are currently being wooed by Riot recruiters, enjoy it. It's possibly the last time you will feel like Riot really cares about your growth. There is no clear path to promotion, and it's rare to hear about them. We recently started a regular performance review program, but the reviews don't appear to have any relationship to compensation or title. Stagnant compensation If you join up you'd better darn well negotiate like a boss, because you're getting stuck with that salary for the long haul. Riot is so obsessed with hiring, that it is ignoring the stagnant compensation of it's existing teams. This a growing powder keg that few are talking about except in frustrated whispers, because leadership has made it clear that we should just do our work out of a passion for our players. It seems the managers below them have interpreted that literally to mean no one should talk about money. Ever. Sure, passion is our primary motivation, but passion only stretches so far when you never get cost of living adjustments or bonuses to prop up dead wages and the office is located in Santa Monica, one of the most expensive areas to live in So. Cal. Mixed messages.