11y
Hi,
Thanks for the review. We appreciate you using Glassdoor to share your perspective on life at Riot. Even when the feedback is critical and tough to hear, it's still useful.
Wanted to respond to your cons note about work-life balance.
This is something that's come up a bunch here on Glassdoor, and for good reason.
From 2010 to 2012, Riot experienced a growth trajectory that was fast enough to strip the paint off of a rocket ship. This was seriously unprecedented growth that stretched and challenged everybody in the company in insane ways. Many Rioters discovered their limits as long hours, challenging work, and an overwhelming sense of "how am I ever going to get all of this stuff done" all came together at the same time.
As painful as it was to go through that period, it wasn't unique. This is a somewhat typical experience for any startup going through its hockey-stick period of growth.
Nowadays, we're seeing improvements in work-life relationship scores on our our annual survey. We seem to be turning the corner on this issue, and that's also expected as we put in place more scalable systems and processes for handling all of the stuff there is to do.
What's more, we've added a lot of people to the company to help with the workload. In the first half of 2014 alone, we added 225 really talented people to the company. Many hands make light(er) work.
Furthermore, many folks at the company have had children in the year since this was posted (including Marc and Brandon), and as Rioters have children, we'll see more folks paying more attention to achieving a sustainable work-life blend.
We need to state this really clearly: nobody at Riot wants anybody here to hurt their health, familial relationships, or overall quality of life. If someone needs to take care of family, they need to go do that. Your colleagues here will look after players and the servers and all the other stuff that needs taking care of, but only you can look after your family.
We do as a company have a strong view on the idea of what a good Work/Life blend looks like. We think it's healthy to take a more integrated approach to this.
Rioters do work hard and will likely continue to work very hard. That's because we hire really passionate people who are fired up and who get really turned on by work. They love the challenge of work at Riot and wouldn't have it any other way.
We also work hard because Riot’s an unabashed meritocracy -- where professional competence, quality of craft, and ultimate delivery of extraordinary results matter a great deal.
But we don't work stupid hard. Most anybody can put in a heroic effort and crush it by working 100-hour workweeks for a month or more, but few can sustain that sort of pace. If we make ourselves sick or make our significant others feel neglected and angry, that’s not sustainable.
So it’s up to each of us to find and advocate for a sustainable work-life blend that doesn't screw with our ability to be happy and productive over the course of years. Healthy professional careers are built year upon year upon year. Some people may choose to sprint for a day or two at a time, some for a week or month at time. Some prefer to find a steady-state pace that’s less variable and more copacetic with other life obligations (extracurriculars, childcare, etc). We encourage everyone to find their own blend, and to take advantage of Riot’s open PTO policy by building in enough time to restore themselves and their relationships.
Also, you might have noticed we call it "work-life relationship" or "work-life blend." As one executive (at another company) explained, “If work and life are separate things -- if work is what keeps you from living -- then there's a serious problem.”
The common "work-life balance" language seems to indicate that work and life are at opposite ends of a teeter-totter, that raising one up causes the other to suffer, that work and life are fundamentally in opposition to each other, that a career is an alien thing that happens outside of our lives and that two things are substitutes, not complements to each other.
But work and life are actually intertwined, especially the sort of knowledge work that we do. Work and life draw down on the same 24 hours each of us has every day. We believe that work can be a place that fulfills us, a place that helps us become a better version of ourselves, a place where deep and rewarding relationships are formed, and a place that makes life richer overall. We want our sons and daughters to grow up with parents that have a healthy relationship with work, not a perception that work is something one grudgingly, and only for money.
