World of Warcraft: Current Year

Secrets said:

Thinking about the testimony of you folks who were with Alex at Blizzcon.. some food for thought:

You're a dude, he's a dude. He knows you're a customer where if you tread on his workspace, he could lose his job.
Much like Bill Cosby, he's not gonna roofie your ugly ass and fuck you. He's gonna be a 'bro' with you and talk about his wife and kids.

He's not going to do shady shit with you on TV. He's not gonna record a sitcom and grab women's asses on film, or fornicate with women in public.

If he's truly a predator, he's going to do that shit where you, a random outsider, cannot see it. And he's gonna do it when none of his coworkers that have a voice see it.

Laziness is another issue entirely. The games industry is full of these types of devs. They'll just rely on the community manager or human resources to resolve issues that are public facing. The community manager will make a big deflecting answer as to why they aren't 'getting x feature done in time', meanwhile he's grabbing his female coworker's ass and raiding on Final Fantasy XIV when he should be working on the new raid tier.

That's really just because big companies over-hire for what would maybe take 2-20 hires, and then hire 20-200 people. It's akin to throwing hardware at a software bug because your top talent is trying to get a nuke in Call of Duty: Warzone instead of fix a crippling memory leak.

He's the only engineer in the house that knows what the solution is, and he's having an orgy in his suite with 3 young subordinates.

So they'll hire 20 clowns for that circus at low wages, tell them to fix the bug, and they won't even know where to start - meanwhile, your top talent dude's over here getting his 17th Cloak of Flames from Nagafen in his GDKP guild while his 3rd wife comes to work and sucks him off in his suite.

These issues normally come from the top - 9-5'ers who don't want to be there, were hired in that 20-person spree, and are draining the cow of potential profits because of the other guy who works '7 days a week' but 4 of those days are spent farming Idol of the Underking in The Hole on Phinigel with his 18-box crew.

It sounds unbelievable from the outside, but if you've worked in any industry that interacts directly with programmers, you know exactly what I mean. It's like pulling teeth to get people to do shit because they feel they're better than their jobs. I can't say I was exempt from that. I fell into that trap and that's why I am mentioning it. You get complacent once you're in a 'safety blanket' and people have little accountability over you because you don't have someone that understands what you do, besides your 3-7 coworkers at your skill level, and they're 'in' on it.

It's not 'bro' culture. It's lazy culture.

Gender & sexual shit has nothing to do with the deep-seeded core issue here. The issue is with the lack of people who treat their job seriously and exist only for a paycheck that are meshing with the Unix wizard-looking motherfuckers who take month-long vacations at the beginning of a development cycle. If lazy employees are able to continue being lazy and get complacent with their lack of crackdown, and do things they 'shouldn't do at work' when there is work readily available to be done, you won't have to crunch, you won't have to defend your company against expensive suits, and maybe your product won't be shit as a result.

The moment someone is burned out at a company, I think it's HR's responsibility to identify that and approach them about paying them severance and, more importantly, *finding a new job elsewhere with the same pay they have there*.

I think a lot of creative minds get bored working on the same product for 15 years and just start doing shady shit they can get away with due to seniority. I remember reading reviews on Glassdoor from Daybreak where "Ku Klux Klan" was a wifi name there and the password was 'n-word' or something ridiculous, and I'm inclined to believe it.

Because I know what I felt in those positions, and leaving a company requires you to admit 'well, maybe I shouldn't abuse my position of power over these people, admit I don't want to do this for the rest of forever, and move on', and it takes an exceptional mind to actually act on that.

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