Riot Games reviews

I'll start off by echoing everything mentioned in Feb 22nd's review "A great place to learn the ropes, but run for the hills if you’re in a leadership role"". This includes Senior Leadership with an emphasis on cronyism, rocking the boat is viewed as being misaligned, senior leadership being misaligned with everyone else, poor compensation, and optimized for extroverts are all real and ongoing problems and sadly have gotten worse over the past year or two. I could go on about each of them, but several reviews already do so. Expanding on the above, a few point's not called out. Entitlement: Entitlement has gone up significantly at Riot and is often found in those with the least reason to feel entitled. The number of people who waste time and have roles where they are accountable to no one has increased significantly since the start of 2015. Work quality and output that was mediocre in 2013 is now the norm. Play games 2-3 hours a day? Not a problem on some teams. Compensation: Perhaps one reason a large amount of the company feels so entitled is the pay at Riot is about 20-35% less than competitors in west LA, if you are below senior leadership level. Your ability to negotiate pay raises is extraordinarily difficult. It is seen as un-riotous to ask for more money and senior leadership often stonewalls monetary requests. What makes this so much worse than it appears at first glance is the number of senior people who are compensated very well for the work they did years ago and now coast by making so very much more than the rest of us while doing less work. Perks: Many perks which people took for granted years ago are dwindling or gone. These lost perks include: WeRiot yearly vacation, unlocked game account, equity in the company, ability to negotiate compensation packages, trips to conferences or events like PAX, and the ability to switch teams to focus on what you are passionate about are all gone or almost gone.

* 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.