- Leadership gaps: Our hiring philosophy tends to favor hiring those with growth for potential over raw talent. This has worked for us, but we now are dealing with major leadership gaps in critical parts of the org. There are bottom heavy teams, where junior managers are managing over 20 reports (seriously). Even though Riot’s identified this weakness and have prioritized hiring leaders in these key roles, there’s lots of chaos between managers, and teams are severely undermanaged as a result until we’re able to find and put those senior leaders in place.
- Bro culture is real: This comes up a lot in other reviews because it’s true. I perceive that we have a higher male to female ratio compared to previous game/tech companies I’ve worked at in the past, but it doesn’t seem to discourage bro culture at Riot. Default gender pronouns tend to be “he”, jokes among team members can be inappropriate, women more often expected to take on administrative responsibilities (even amongst male peers). More recently these behaviors have surfaced as areas we have to improve, and there are groups inside Riot to be change agents - it’s far from being a toxic environment, but is a major weak area that needs to improve sooner than later.
- Professionalism: Maybe this is a sign that I’m a curmudgeon, but Rioters are rowdy...and sometimes not in a fun way. More junior Rioters run the gamut of unprofessional behaviors: consistently late to meetings (or not responding to invites), inconsistent follow up/through, being super loud in open workspace (especially while playing games), leaving common areas like conference rooms super messy...and it doesn’t end there. I don’t think Rioters do this to be intentionally discourteous, but it’s super frustrating nonetheless.
- Noise and distraction: It’s just loud. Our open floorplan + bad noise management in the building makes concentration at your desk nearly impossible. I rely on working from home more often in order to get work done - I would normally opt to find a phone booth room to sequester myself in, but with the shortage of conference room space at our current HQ, it’s just easier to stay at home. I hope that this is resolved in our new space /crossesfingers
- Communication: We just super suck at this, across the board. Teams get spun up and down constantly and many individuals possess tribal knowledge and don’t pass them on to others. There are lots of situations where you find out two teams are working on the same problem, but in different ways, all because they don’t know to talk to one another. We really need to identify how to connect teams locally and globally to one another.
- Feedback: Riot’s a feedback oriented culture, except Rioters are terrible at giving feedback. It’s common these days for Rioters to assume feedback means it’s critical in nature. There are many junior Rioters that were surprised to discover that there is such a thing as positive feedback. This exists because you have a ton of uncoached people giving feedback in a number of ways, many of which can be either untactful or just plain unhelpful. Riot claims to be good at this, but we’re not. Instead of just saying, “give feedback to this person”, we need to coach Rioters on the ways to best give and receive it.
- Culture misfits: I’ve detected a number of Rioters in influential positions who feel like culture misfits - those who are seeking to engage in ugly politics and glad-handing. I worry that because of their senior roles they will poison their groups, but go undetected because of their effectiveness at managing up. Long term this is especially worrisome because the larger Riot is, the more likely the subculture goes undetected.
