Riot Games reviews

* Technically not innovative: running very old legacy architecture at some of the core elements despite the marketing hype for their culture about being at the forefront of technology. Too many examples to list... causes incredible frustration for engineers. Your career will suffer if you plan on implementing modern tech or want to advance your resume in technical prowess. Be prepared to work on decade old apps/configs and bad code that's dumped in your lap from the supposed "architect" employees that have been around since ~2008-2010. * Change management is the least efficient and least useful process I've seen in any tech company. Barely any adherence to ITIL process and most tech employees I asked about it had never heard of it. Shameful. * Bogged down in inefficiency at all levels of network and technical operations. * Management doesn't micromanage but they don't manage closely either - it's incredibly hands off and of the mindset that employees will either succeed or miserably fail without any guidance. * Pointless cultural frameworks exist in an attempt to brand Riot as "this that and the other". This was only instituted once a particular director was hired and that was the breaking point where the company changed from a fun place to work (about ~500 people) to a culturally immature struggle to be popular instead of technically successful. * Growth is out of control; ie management was efficient under 400 people, now the company is over 1,200 people and they haven't improved. * Re-org happens far too often and confuses employees, destabilizes teams, decentralizes reporting structure, projects lose focus, inter-team communication is massively broken as a result. * Employees kept in the dark about core changes to infrastructure and direction and efficiency metrics of operations and network. There used to be an all hands type meeting for many years but it was disbanded once the company grew too fast and spread too thin. * Technical direction is impaired by the above point, engineers are not empowered to know the overall architecture (game loop knowledge training is far too vague and doesn't cover the actual reality of the architecture like it used to because of how much things have changed since that required knowledge was implemented.) * Cultural hiring process fails to hire experts, instead hiring based on popularity. * WAY TOO MANY EMPLOYEES PLAYING LoL DURING WORKING HOURS. So much productivity lost here causing systemic laziness. * Majority of technical side of the company suffers from unhealthy lifestyles. Cultural fit tends to promote a lifestyle that results in a lot of obese and overweight employees. I lost count of how many employees went from healthy BMI to overweight/obese BMI during the 5 years I worked there. It's sad to watch people change this way and have the company not promote healthy lifestyles. * Terrible LGBT support overall despite the recent hype given to the charity donation for the Trevor Project. That was charity for marketing, nothing more. Highly homophobic and misogynistic work environment (I'm not LGBT or female but wow... the guys there are pretty crude and awful sometimes. It's like being surrounded by Gamer Gate sometimes.) * Work life balance is abysmal. Worst of any company I've worked for in my 16+ years.

Absolutely zero integrity when it comes to consistent management of people. The promise of cultural change has been mostly lip service to check a few boxes. Many senior leaders call the Kotaku article "blown out of proportion" or "just a case of a few bad managers." I assure you this is not the case but no one wants to admit the problem is in their house. Discussions of how people are feeling have been all but squelched by a "no rumor milling, no discussions of the lawsuit" gag order instituted by the CEO. Hilariously the studio decided a 2 month holiday vacation was the appropriate response to a COO who has made many feel excluded, uncomfortable and harassed. The takeaway? As long as you perform well in your role it doesn't matter how you treated Rioters 4 years ago. Not acceptable. Our new heros are people who write up a set of fluffy meaningless values. Seriously Riot? We deserve better than cheesy lines like "dream big" and "thrive together." The trainings that have been rolled out in order to get at our cultural issues have been massive wastes of time which have led to zero change in the day to day experience of working at the studio. It is sad to see such a great studio turn to this.