12 ms·

If you haven't read the state of California's claims here you should. It's the result of a two year investigation and the claims are.. shocking. I want to make

by cletus 5y ago

If you haven't read the state of California's claims here you should. It's the result of a two year investigation and the claims are.. shocking. I want to make a point about "culture fit". "Culture fit" in a company typically comes down to "we like you" and the reason why people like other people is that they are like them. Similar age, background, whatever. It's why Stanford grads probably like other Stanford grads. This "we like you" can and does lead to discrimination. But here's the even darker side of this. Toxic cultures of sexual harassment as alleged in the complaint against Activision-Blizzard always come down to a few key individuals who then "spread" by hiring or promoting other people who are like then. I doubt this is ever explicit. It's more that you can sense a fellow predator (make no mistake: they are preying on vulnerable staff). So without intervention this toxicity will tend to spread. Those who oppose it will leave. Those who tow the lines get promoted. And it's leadership's responsibility to root this out and eliminate it. Heads should roll here. Maybe even J Allen Brack's and/or Bobby Kotick's. If you want to take credit for the successes you also have to take responsibility for the giant failures here. Oh and whoever wrote and sent out that statement about how the state was pursuing this was why so many businesses are leaving California needs to be fired. It was so utterly tone deaf and irrelevant.

cableshaft 5y ago
Bobby Kotick is worth $600 million according to a brief Google search. That's enough fuck you money I'm surprised he hasn't just retired yet. Of course, when you can convince the board to pay you $155 million more, that's a good incentive to keep working I guess. Especially since work at that level is probably just a handful of meetings in a boardroom and a few more on the golf course per year (I don't mean CEOs in general, but CEOs of large corporations like his, where the decisions boil down to pretty much "How many absurd microtransactions can we get away with in Call of Duty this year?"). Anyway I highly doubt his head can really roll from this. https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-06-22-activision-blizzard-boss-bobby-koticks-usd155m-pay-package-approved-by-shareholders https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-06-22-activision-bli...
- Ntrails 5y ago
  Anyone with a net worth over about 100m (and many a fir chunk lower) isn't working for money anymore. He hasn't retired to enjoy his wealth is imo because the jobs selection bias excludes the sorts of people who would do that
  - cableshaft 5y ago
    Yeah I think once I got to like, 10 million I'd just pull a Joe Rogan and do whatever I felt like at that point and not work a proper job anymore. And I'm a long way away from getting that, unless one of my investments pulls a GME or something.
  - ecshafer 5y ago
    That's a good point. Most people that would retire at $100M would probably retire at $10M, and thus wouldn't make it to that $100M level.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    I don't really think this is true. They can end up spending a lot of that 100m on a car collection.
    - cableshaft 5y ago
      I'm not too greedy. Give me enough money I won't feel too guilty spending a half million on a Lagoon 40 catamaran and a quarter million on a Lamborghini Huracan and enough for a single-family beach house on Lake Michigan or Lake Superior, (and enough investments I can 4% withdraw about 70k a year) and I'll be satisfied.
      - heavyset_go 5y ago
        I agree, I just disagree that they aren't working for the money.
    - antpol 5y ago
      when you get to a point of getting a car collection, you don't spend you start to invest in car collection, hence why you shift buying preferences to exotics with good track record of appreciating in value and simply lease everything else
dec0dedab0de 5y ago
I want to make a point about "culture fit". "Culture fit" in a company typically comes down to "we like you" and the reason why people like other people is that they are like them. Similar age, background, whatever. There are plenty of people who like each other that have nothing in common. The idea that the reason people like people is because they are like them just feels ridiculous to me, but maybe I am an outlier. Personally, the more someone is like me, the less I like them. But the bigger, weirder argument you seem to be making is that you shouldn't hire people that you like. I would say life is too short to be spending it around people you don't like, if you can help it. I say that it is very possible to hire only people you like, and still end up with a diverse workplace free from abuse. You just need to start with good leaders.
- kgantchev 5y ago
  The culture fit thing is the sort of keyboard warrior psychologist analysis that we all love... completely made up and is, in fact, how you get a toxic culture in a company.
- mhuffman 5y ago
  >There are plenty of people who like each other that have nothing in common. The idea that the reason people like people is because they are like them just feels ridiculous to me, but maybe I am an outlier. Personally, the more someone is like me, the less I like them. Yes, you are an outlier. There is a very large amount of studies that show that people like people that are like them. [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0265407508096700?casa_token=TmckhC7lG2AAAAAA%3ARSf0Jx6txZ45y5WM1lHGJZT_Olumyy7T92k29Vj-G0FaT9OmHlhfbdM-Yd9TDooylh4akbrL46t8mQ& https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/026540750809670...
  - dec0dedab0de 5y ago
    Yes, you are an outlier. Fair enough There is a very large amount of studies that show that people like people that are like them. The link you provide shows a coefficient of .47 for actual similarity, and .39 for perceived similarity. I'm not good at statistics, but that seems like a far cry from "the reason why people like other people is that they are like them." which is the line I was replying to. If I'm understanding it correctly it would be more accurate to say "people are somewhat more likely to like someone who is like them." If that's what was originally written, then I probably wouldn't have replied.
kqr 5y ago
I agree with most of your comment but I want to add one level of nuance. There's a bad way to do "culture fit" which you describe. There's also a good way: list the things you want in your culture (openness to criticism, appetite for learning, honesty, unafraid of challenges, or what have you) and then you construct questions specifically to find those things out, grade the result and weigh together into a culture fit score. The good way to determine culture fit is to ask the candidate about the specific things you want in your culture, not go by general feeling because then you're indeed measuring something your biased System 1 likes, which is probably just the chimpanzee in your brain trying to determine how likely your blood relations with this person is.
overgard 5y ago
> I want to make a point about "culture fit". "Culture fit" in a company typically comes down to "we like you" and the reason why people like other people is that they are like them. Similar age, background, whatever. It's why Stanford grads probably like other Stanford grads. I mean I do kind of agree, but I'm not sure if "hire people you dislike" works either? It probably needs to be more of a situation of like "if you're a stanford grad the world isn't just other stanford grads" or something.
- hkt 5y ago
  Maybe the main thing is that hiring needs to be done in a way that is more about assessing fitness for the task than culture fit. Professionals should be able to cope with culture clashes. Fundamentally, if someone isn't professional enough to get along with people who aren't from the same monoculture, they're not fit to work in a modern office.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Hire people you can work with. People who disagree with you and challenge your way of thinking are good to have around as a check on your biases. You don't have to like them.
  - bennysomething 5y ago
    I like lots of people I disagree with, why is not liking someone the key some problem? In fact I'm not sure anyone has defined the problem of with hiring people you like other than some unsubstantiated claim that we only like people of the same colour and background which in my experience is nonsense.
    - mensetmanusman 5y ago
      This. I love my disagreeable friends because having robust dialogue is fun for most of my ilk (although it is interesting that women have told us they (mistakenly) think that we are bitterly arguing, which makes them feel uncomfortable).
mcguire 5y ago
The filing: https://aboutblaw.com/YJw https://aboutblaw.com/YJw
nineplay 5y ago
> I want to make a point about "culture fit" "culture fit" is one of the biggest causes of workplace discrimination and I still see it pushed in 'hiring training' as perfectly valid criteria. Things I've seen teams consider "culture" - will the candidate go to our weekly study session at the micro-brewery? - will the candidate stay after work to play multi-player games with us? - is the candidate entertained by all the Star Wars lingo we use? If you don't find these discriminatory, think about how well a recent poster from Gaza would have done with them. Not well, I suspect https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25849054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25849054
- UnpossibleJim 5y ago
  As a side note (and a fully conjectural query), do you think that the desire of control of a branded monoculture in the work place is one of the reasons for the push to bring employees back to the workplace? You can separate the culture of Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter as easily as any brand, like Nike and Reebok. Those cultural brands are surely dissolving without the guiding hand of in office guidelines.
  - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    Speaking from experience, the “culture” at Microsoft and Google (at least) definitely varies more between teams and divisions than between those two companies on-the-whole.
    - UnpossibleJim 5y ago
      Fair enough. Nadella's hard push for the return is curious to me (I'm in the Seattle area, and close-ish to the campus with quite a few friends who work in a single team, so I'm a bit myopic, I suppose). They all seem to do well remotely, and I do also. I probably do work less hours, on the whole, but I produce more... so I dunno how that factors in. I can't speak to their quality of work, though.
      - mensetmanusman 5y ago
eloff 5y ago
> Oh and whoever wrote and sent out that statement about how the state was pursuing this was why so many businesses are leaving California needs to be fired. It was so utterly tone deaf and irrelevant. It is tone deaf and irrelevant, but they should not lose their job over that. Let the person who has never held a poor opinion throw the first stone.
- greycol 5y ago
  If I was a PR person and I had the choice of not doing my job and agreeing with toxic boss that "California is forcing businesses out by not ignoring my type of toxic behaviour, put that in!" or being bullied and possibly fired for raising the point that they are maybe not 100% right... Not that this is what happened, still bad bosses reap bad behaviour.
ChuckMcM 5y ago
I agree with 98% of this :-). And it absolutely flows from the top. What is more, good leadership knows this and understands that no matter how something happened, they are responsible for it. The entire games industry however has a reputation for being "bad" at empowering good leadership. But let's talk about 'culture' for a moment. In my experience, the tech workers in the US make their "work" their "life" way too frequently to be healthy. What I mean by that is that they do not choose to separate their "work" life from their "non-work" life in any meaningful way. As a result the parts that would nominally be "non-work" like friendships where you travel together, or date, or share political affiliations, or other causes, are not kept separate from your "work" life. It isn't easy. People interact on social media and at work and so if you're angrily criticizing the plight of the Palestinians on social media, your pro-Israel co-worker may bring that conflict into work with them, which make it harder to get things done. And even when you support the notion that employees are their own people and what they do in their own time is their own business, and not to bring it to work, it shows up anyway. For a long time people have advocated to "not bring your work home." That helps you maintain family relationships because at home that is your priority. We now also have to "not bring home to work." I am aware of the situation of an excellent engineer who lost their job because at "home" they were a supporter of the policies of an administration that many of their co-workers despised. I can assure you from my experience with this person that their technical capabilities were in no way diminished by their political preferences, and yet their company saw the "disruption" as a bigger threat than the loss of talent. So ActiBliz really needs to be corrected here, and firmly, because they allowed a non-professional culture to emerge and flourish within their company at the expense of many of their employees. But it isn't just "bro" culture, it is any non-business culture. It is one of the under appreciated complexities of what a good manager can overcome.
- throwequality 5y ago
  Political beliefs / affiliation (especially when mainstream) is a protected class though. Was this individual also "bringing it to work"?
  - ChuckMcM 5y ago
belorn 5y ago
I find it greatly insightful that when the Swedish government studied gender segregation in the education system, the most common reason men left the profession was "culture fit". It highlight how culture fit is not specific to one industry or one gender, but rather as an universal aspect and likely major root cause in gender segregating behavior. The issue goes much further than simply "we like you". How safe one feel in ones choices and decision is heavily influenced by choices of peers. If other Stanford grads work at the same place I do, then how bad can the decision to stay be? Similar, if every Stanford grads left, then is the decision to stay still safe or am I missing something. The relation between culture fit and the probability that someone will commit a crime (like sexual harassment) seems less direct but I suspect there are an connection there. At a society level we know that mixing demographics will reduce trust, and with reduced trust we see an increase in crime.
raxxorrax 5y ago
I think you are making a lot of assumptions here. Were it even the one responsible for hiring that misbehaved? It is correct to be angry about this, but your answer seems to be vindictive. Next step is to wait for the verdict. > So without intervention this toxicity will tend to spread. Most businesses operate without sexual misdemeanor happening. On the contrary, I doubt the measures now announced by Kotick will ever be non-toxic. Because here you institute a group that will turn on random employees as they see fit. It is the wrong medicine in my opinion. Useful would be to accuse the people responsible and use the law against them in a court of justice without arbitration. Kotick voted for group punishment and I don't really understand how anyone would want to work at Activision to be honest because that isn't the way to get a non-toxic workplace. I doubt we will see much cooperation here.

by cletus 5y ago

cableshaft 5y ago

Bobby Kotick is worth $600 million according to a brief Google search. That's enough fuck you money I'm surprised he hasn't just retired yet. Of course, when you can convince the board to pay you $155 million more, that's a good incentive to keep working I guess. Especially since work at that level is probably just a handful of meetings in a boardroom and a few more on the golf course per year (I don't mean CEOs in general, but CEOs of large corporations like his, where the decisions boil down to pretty much "How many absurd microtransactions can we get away with in Call of Duty this year?"). Anyway I highly doubt his head can really roll from this. https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-06-22-activision-blizzard-boss-bobby-koticks-usd155m-pay-package-approved-by-shareholders https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-06-22-activision-bli...

Ntrails 5y ago
Anyone with a net worth over about 100m (and many a fir chunk lower) isn't working for money anymore. He hasn't retired to enjoy his wealth is imo because the jobs selection bias excludes the sorts of people who would do that
- cableshaft 5y ago
  Yeah I think once I got to like, 10 million I'd just pull a Joe Rogan and do whatever I felt like at that point and not work a proper job anymore. And I'm a long way away from getting that, unless one of my investments pulls a GME or something.
- ecshafer 5y ago
  That's a good point. Most people that would retire at $100M would probably retire at $10M, and thus wouldn't make it to that $100M level.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  I don't really think this is true. They can end up spending a lot of that 100m on a car collection.
  - cableshaft 5y ago
    I'm not too greedy. Give me enough money I won't feel too guilty spending a half million on a Lagoon 40 catamaran and a quarter million on a Lamborghini Huracan and enough for a single-family beach house on Lake Michigan or Lake Superior, (and enough investments I can 4% withdraw about 70k a year) and I'll be satisfied.
    - heavyset_go 5y ago
      I agree, I just disagree that they aren't working for the money.
  - antpol 5y ago
    when you get to a point of getting a car collection, you don't spend you start to invest in car collection, hence why you shift buying preferences to exotics with good track record of appreciating in value and simply lease everything else

dec0dedab0de 5y ago

I want to make a point about "culture fit". "Culture fit" in a company typically comes down to "we like you" and the reason why people like other people is that they are like them. Similar age, background, whatever. There are plenty of people who like each other that have nothing in common. The idea that the reason people like people is because they are like them just feels ridiculous to me, but maybe I am an outlier. Personally, the more someone is like me, the less I like them. But the bigger, weirder argument you seem to be making is that you shouldn't hire people that you like. I would say life is too short to be spending it around people you don't like, if you can help it. I say that it is very possible to hire only people you like, and still end up with a diverse workplace free from abuse. You just need to start with good leaders.

kgantchev 5y ago
The culture fit thing is the sort of keyboard warrior psychologist analysis that we all love... completely made up and is, in fact, how you get a toxic culture in a company.
mhuffman 5y ago
>There are plenty of people who like each other that have nothing in common. The idea that the reason people like people is because they are like them just feels ridiculous to me, but maybe I am an outlier. Personally, the more someone is like me, the less I like them. Yes, you are an outlier. There is a very large amount of studies that show that people like people that are like them. [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0265407508096700?casa_token=TmckhC7lG2AAAAAA%3ARSf0Jx6txZ45y5WM1lHGJZT_Olumyy7T92k29Vj-G0FaT9OmHlhfbdM-Yd9TDooylh4akbrL46t8mQ& https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/026540750809670...
- dec0dedab0de 5y ago
  Yes, you are an outlier. Fair enough There is a very large amount of studies that show that people like people that are like them. The link you provide shows a coefficient of .47 for actual similarity, and .39 for perceived similarity. I'm not good at statistics, but that seems like a far cry from "the reason why people like other people is that they are like them." which is the line I was replying to. If I'm understanding it correctly it would be more accurate to say "people are somewhat more likely to like someone who is like them." If that's what was originally written, then I probably wouldn't have replied.

kqr 5y ago

I agree with most of your comment but I want to add one level of nuance. There's a bad way to do "culture fit" which you describe. There's also a good way: list the things you want in your culture (openness to criticism, appetite for learning, honesty, unafraid of challenges, or what have you) and then you construct questions specifically to find those things out, grade the result and weigh together into a culture fit score. The good way to determine culture fit is to ask the candidate about the specific things you want in your culture, not go by general feeling because then you're indeed measuring something your biased System 1 likes, which is probably just the chimpanzee in your brain trying to determine how likely your blood relations with this person is.

overgard 5y ago

> I want to make a point about "culture fit". "Culture fit" in a company typically comes down to "we like you" and the reason why people like other people is that they are like them. Similar age, background, whatever. It's why Stanford grads probably like other Stanford grads. I mean I do kind of agree, but I'm not sure if "hire people you dislike" works either? It probably needs to be more of a situation of like "if you're a stanford grad the world isn't just other stanford grads" or something.

hkt 5y ago
Maybe the main thing is that hiring needs to be done in a way that is more about assessing fitness for the task than culture fit. Professionals should be able to cope with culture clashes. Fundamentally, if someone isn't professional enough to get along with people who aren't from the same monoculture, they're not fit to work in a modern office.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Hire people you can work with. People who disagree with you and challenge your way of thinking are good to have around as a check on your biases. You don't have to like them.
- bennysomething 5y ago
  I like lots of people I disagree with, why is not liking someone the key some problem? In fact I'm not sure anyone has defined the problem of with hiring people you like other than some unsubstantiated claim that we only like people of the same colour and background which in my experience is nonsense.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    This. I love my disagreeable friends because having robust dialogue is fun for most of my ilk (although it is interesting that women have told us they (mistakenly) think that we are bitterly arguing, which makes them feel uncomfortable).

mcguire 5y ago

The filing: https://aboutblaw.com/YJw https://aboutblaw.com/YJw

nineplay 5y ago

> I want to make a point about "culture fit" "culture fit" is one of the biggest causes of workplace discrimination and I still see it pushed in 'hiring training' as perfectly valid criteria. Things I've seen teams consider "culture" - will the candidate go to our weekly study session at the micro-brewery? - will the candidate stay after work to play multi-player games with us? - is the candidate entertained by all the Star Wars lingo we use? If you don't find these discriminatory, think about how well a recent poster from Gaza would have done with them. Not well, I suspect https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25849054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25849054

UnpossibleJim 5y ago
As a side note (and a fully conjectural query), do you think that the desire of control of a branded monoculture in the work place is one of the reasons for the push to bring employees back to the workplace? You can separate the culture of Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter as easily as any brand, like Nike and Reebok. Those cultural brands are surely dissolving without the guiding hand of in office guidelines.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  Speaking from experience, the “culture” at Microsoft and Google (at least) definitely varies more between teams and divisions than between those two companies on-the-whole.
  - UnpossibleJim 5y ago
    Fair enough. Nadella's hard push for the return is curious to me (I'm in the Seattle area, and close-ish to the campus with quite a few friends who work in a single team, so I'm a bit myopic, I suppose). They all seem to do well remotely, and I do also. I probably do work less hours, on the whole, but I produce more... so I dunno how that factors in. I can't speak to their quality of work, though.
    - mensetmanusman 5y ago

eloff 5y ago

> Oh and whoever wrote and sent out that statement about how the state was pursuing this was why so many businesses are leaving California needs to be fired. It was so utterly tone deaf and irrelevant. It is tone deaf and irrelevant, but they should not lose their job over that. Let the person who has never held a poor opinion throw the first stone.

greycol 5y ago
If I was a PR person and I had the choice of not doing my job and agreeing with toxic boss that "California is forcing businesses out by not ignoring my type of toxic behaviour, put that in!" or being bullied and possibly fired for raising the point that they are maybe not 100% right... Not that this is what happened, still bad bosses reap bad behaviour.

ChuckMcM 5y ago

I agree with 98% of this :-). And it absolutely flows from the top. What is more, good leadership knows this and understands that no matter how something happened, they are responsible for it. The entire games industry however has a reputation for being "bad" at empowering good leadership. But let's talk about 'culture' for a moment. In my experience, the tech workers in the US make their "work" their "life" way too frequently to be healthy. What I mean by that is that they do not choose to separate their "work" life from their "non-work" life in any meaningful way. As a result the parts that would nominally be "non-work" like friendships where you travel together, or date, or share political affiliations, or other causes, are not kept separate from your "work" life. It isn't easy. People interact on social media and at work and so if you're angrily criticizing the plight of the Palestinians on social media, your pro-Israel co-worker may bring that conflict into work with them, which make it harder to get things done. And even when you support the notion that employees are their own people and what they do in their own time is their own business, and not to bring it to work, it shows up anyway. For a long time people have advocated to "not bring your work home." That helps you maintain family relationships because at home that is your priority. We now also have to "not bring home to work." I am aware of the situation of an excellent engineer who lost their job because at "home" they were a supporter of the policies of an administration that many of their co-workers despised. I can assure you from my experience with this person that their technical capabilities were in no way diminished by their political preferences, and yet their company saw the "disruption" as a bigger threat than the loss of talent. So ActiBliz really needs to be corrected here, and firmly, because they allowed a non-professional culture to emerge and flourish within their company at the expense of many of their employees. But it isn't just "bro" culture, it is any non-business culture. It is one of the under appreciated complexities of what a good manager can overcome.

throwequality 5y ago
Political beliefs / affiliation (especially when mainstream) is a protected class though. Was this individual also "bringing it to work"?
- ChuckMcM 5y ago

belorn 5y ago

I find it greatly insightful that when the Swedish government studied gender segregation in the education system, the most common reason men left the profession was "culture fit". It highlight how culture fit is not specific to one industry or one gender, but rather as an universal aspect and likely major root cause in gender segregating behavior. The issue goes much further than simply "we like you". How safe one feel in ones choices and decision is heavily influenced by choices of peers. If other Stanford grads work at the same place I do, then how bad can the decision to stay be? Similar, if every Stanford grads left, then is the decision to stay still safe or am I missing something. The relation between culture fit and the probability that someone will commit a crime (like sexual harassment) seems less direct but I suspect there are an connection there. At a society level we know that mixing demographics will reduce trust, and with reduced trust we see an increase in crime.

raxxorrax 5y ago

I think you are making a lot of assumptions here. Were it even the one responsible for hiring that misbehaved? It is correct to be angry about this, but your answer seems to be vindictive. Next step is to wait for the verdict. > So without intervention this toxicity will tend to spread. Most businesses operate without sexual misdemeanor happening. On the contrary, I doubt the measures now announced by Kotick will ever be non-toxic. Because here you institute a group that will turn on random employees as they see fit. It is the wrong medicine in my opinion. Useful would be to accuse the people responsible and use the law against them in a court of justice without arbitration. Kotick voted for group punishment and I don't really understand how anyone would want to work at Activision to be honest because that isn't the way to get a non-toxic workplace. I doubt we will see much cooperation here.