Riot Games reviews

I'm echoing everything else that has been said in other negative reviews. It's a sad and sobering fact that none of them are overly dramatic. This place is extremely toxic. - "Bro culture" and harassment run rampant and pervades leadership. You know those Uber stories going around recently? Riot is a half-step down from those experiences. Your clout and stability are directly proportional to the state of your abs (I'm only somewhat kidding about this). Leadership is filled with privileged men who do not recognize their own privilege and destructively wield their lack of awareness. - In order to be successful at Riot you have to do one of two things: 1) deal with an absurd amount of nonsense (this is the majority of Rioters) or 2) play the political game of backstabbing, befriending the right people, and focusing on presentation rather than results or expertise. Nepotism is your friend. It is incredible how many incompetent, unproven people have risen their ways through the ranks just from smooth talking and agreeing with the people around them. - Senior leadership is the layer of cancer that infects the rest of the company. More and more "mercenaries" are being hired who are looking to not do much and take a lot of credit. There's an obliviousness/naivety to these kinds of mercenaries from leadership (yet obvious to everyone else), and they're always surprised when one leaves the company for more money somewhere else. Some have stayed long-term since they've discovered there isn't a lot of hard work to be done. All they have to do is ask some "powerful questions" to cast the illusion that they're adding value. - As progressive as Riot is in its employee policies, HR remains the same as every other company out there. They will not help you. They will only help the company. Do not bother bringing to their attention the problems you've experienced; they'll just run you around conducting interviews and not actually address the issue, especially if you have a grievance towards one specific person and that person has a powerful manager. - Practicing what you preach is not followed at Riot. Leadership loves to say that it's on you to call out bad people, experiences, people who are "misaligned", etc, but god forbid you challenge a leader when they're being hypocritical or doing a bad job. Your career at Riot will end if you rock the boat, even when it's clearly coming from a good place (like being player-focused). If you're perceived as "complaining" about an issue, you're done (doubly so if you're a woman). Leadership is void of empathy and loves to spin everything so that you're part of the problem when you bring something up. Phrases like, "Why don't you do something about it?" "Is this the appropriate way to bring it up?" are thrown at Rioters when they appropriately call out red flags, ignoring the facts that they have already taken the right steps or them calling it out IS doing something because they don't realistically have the power to affect it. This also relates to the privilege part I wrote out above: leadership sings about merit and disregards any real struggles people have when the odds are stacked against them. They fail to recognize that people don't "rise to the challenge" in their eyes because they have made it a hostile, unsafe environment to do so, or that issues like sexism make it impossible for people to tackle problems. - "Misaligned" is a word thrown around by leadership to easily fire people, which really just translates to: "They hurt my fragile ego and I have more power than them so I'll abuse it right now." - Diversity is not taken seriously. There is a diversity initiative, but the truth is leadership is not empathetic of diversity and doesn't fully internalize the positives of hiring minorities. They fall into the misguided attitudes of, "More minorities should just apply" without, again, recognizing that maybe minorities don't want to for good reason. - If you're a woman who is looking to succeed, you're expected to act like a type-A man yet you cannot be TOO loud. The line is extremely fuzzy, so it's easier to err on the side of a female "yes man." It was commonplace to find that feedback included gender-based slurs for women, but not for men. - An open feedback culture is encouraged but you cannot give negative feedback to certain people or you will be shown the door. They will ignore the fact that the negative feedback you give is actually constructive and intending to improve the company, but you will be painted as a negative person yourself. It's a very simple, easy defense tactic from higher-ups, and it's employed frequently. Fragile egos, again. Witch hunts are common. Prepare to be called "difficult to work with" if you give constructive feedback to the wrong people. - It takes forever to get anything done. Trust is not widely available and there are too many stakeholders at any given point, so don't expect to come out of this job with a resume with tangible deliverables. - You'll be brainwashed to ignore all of these issues. If you can give into that, I envy you to a small degree.

Same with the pros above, I don't consider these purely negative, but they do present some challenges. Most of these center on how Rioters communicate effectively as the scale of the company increases. - Hiring feels SLOW. The need to maintain Riot culture in addition to finding highly qualified candidates can make it feel like you're constantly searching for a unicorn. It's super important to find cultural fits. But if your team needs to hire 5 people to succeed, get ready to feel like you're short on resources for the next year. - Immature communication channels. Riot is gradually figuring out how to manage team interactions as the company grows across multiple offices, but this can often be painful. There is still some startup mentality where people think they can just call folks into a room/meeting and everyone will be on the same page. This can sometimes lead to a sense that you need to be "in the room" in order to have your opinion matter. - Too many recurring meetings. As Riot grows and it becomes harder to have casual face-to-face conversations with all stakeholders, lots of folks try to schedule meetings as a replacement. These drain the productive juices out of many participants. Be prepared to push back on any meeting invite that doesn't have a set, clear agenda. They will try to take over your calendar. - Weak meeting facilitation. Riot prides itself on being a flat organization. Bosses don't dominate the discussion and all Rioters are encouraged to participate. Riot tries to create a meritocratic environment for surfacing ideas in meetings, where anyone is encouraged to speak up at any time. But without strong facilitation, this often leads to people who are willing to interrupt or those whose style is to "think out loud" to be the majority of the voice that gets heard. This has led to an impression among many that when it comes to getting your vision across at Riot, only alpha personalities are valued. This is an unfortunate (and inaccurate) perception, but it's not helped by lack of strong facilitation during meetings. Riot needs to learn stronger facilitation techniques in order to maintain meritocratic interactions without accidentally promoting a culture that values "waiting to talk" over listening. Be prepared to exercise patience here. - Side-effects of a strong culture of ownership. Usually this is a great thing, as it encourages teams to take responsibility for what they create end-to-end without pointing fingers when they assumed another team would handle something for them. But a side effect one will notice over time is that some teams come to believe they own an entire type of problem space for the company and can become territorial when other teams start to tread in their domain. This is something management seems sort of aware of and is gradually dealing with over time, but it can be a pain point. People who excel at inter-team collaboration and relationship building will be most effective under these circumstances. - Individual Rioters are responsible for maintaining their own work/life balance. This is a positive in principle, but I think the company could do more to arm new Rioters with some practical tools & techniques. Nobody makes you stay late or work weekends, but it's very easy to fall into doing that at Riot if you don't make a conscious effort to stay on top of it.