By far, best company ever in my career
Pros
- Extremely talented team: you will learn a lot and be inspired by your colleagues. Riot Games has some of the most talented people in the industry and you will feel it within your first days. Riot has a sport team culture / mentality. They will put their best player on their team. it doesn't mean there is no mistake. It happens from time to time. It means they don't value a family culture of unconditional love. As a result, you can find really ground breaking people and leaders throughout the organization, the ones who are able to raise the bar within the industry - Riot games fires: Usually, Riot Games doesn't waste a lot of time with underperforming individuals. This is great. It avoids poisoning the rest of the team - Player focused: if you are a gamer, you are going to love the company. The company's compass is the player. We are almost all gamers. The few who aren't appreciate their loss and feel bad (they are not arrogant thinking they are above it). Everybody feels player's frustrations and wishes intimately. It is not a stupid naive conception that some more business oriented folks would challenge. There is a fundamental believe that being player focus will improve the relationship and service offered to the players, which eventually improve company's financial. In my previous companies, you often need to make tough decision, and unfortunately, it very often ends being choosing between cost / profit for the company versus benefits for the players. These dilemma never happens at Riot. Player value is the company's compass since we believe this is the foundation of company's current and future's success - Growth and Career path: the company has been successful and growing a lot, opening a lot of opportunities for exceptional performers. If you are are high performer, you will have the opportunity to take more responsibility. You will witness a lot of high performers having more responsibilities and doing more awesome throughout the company - Ambitious / Not risk averse: the company isn't shy to take big initiative and risks. Even if it means making significant investment in strategies nobody really pursued. Some examples are initiatives like the tribunal and honor system, international expansion, e-sport initiatives, etc… when you combine crazy smart idea, talented people and a culture that is ambitious and ready to innovate, you get these industry leading results! - Vision oriented: being goal oriented is better than task oriented. I believe Riot does even better since it is more vision oriented than goal oriented. Leaders and managers help contextualize the vision, but let the team set up their own goals and way to achieve those. You will rarely find stupid top down goals like: you have to achieve this number or you have to stay under this budget. - Accountability: company gives you a lot of accountability. Very minimal approval / check / up-and-down communication for checking or covering your ass. You will take a mission (often set by yourself) and be accountable for delivery. There is no excuse and very little situation of "oh i could not do this because department / team / individual X did or didn't do this". That's personally my favorite thing about Riot - People oriented: - Compensation is very attractive and is composed of different tools - Nice office / Location: the office and facilities are really cool. Location is one of the best of Los Angeles - Solid benefits: the benefits, although not perfect, are really getting good and keep improving
Cons
- Growth challenge: I am sure this would be the number one challenge you'll hear from almost any Rioter. The company is running through some growing pain. For example certain systems and process are still unclear to a lot of us and confusing for new comer. You won't know who does what quickly, and the lack of organization chart (Riot is pretty flat and internationally non hierarchical) won't help. Communication, although very transparent internally, is still a bit messy sometimes between teams / department and offices. By the time we clarify things, new Rioters / Teams have joined making the new system obsolete. - Benefits: The benefits are still a little bit behind, also to my opinion due to growth challenge. They are getting there though, for example, pension plan is now offered, healthcare has always been there, etc… I am confident in the HR / People team though and can assume Riot will be above average by the end of 2012, and probably at top standard sometimes in 2013 - Requires ability to work in vague environment: this is probably one of the toughest thing, especially for junior people. You will need to be strategic and understand the big picture to define your own goal and path to success as the management style is very vision oriented and not really task oriented. - Not family oriented: this is not a con for me but I think this is important to share. Riot is not "family" oriented. By that I mean they don't treat people like part of their family. They treat you as part of their (sport) team. So contrary to your family to which you have unconditional love, Riot will have high expectations from you and won't hesitate to tell you if you don't meet them and then let you go if you can't adapt quickly. So if you are looking for job security, guaranteed paycheck, etc… Riot is not for you - Hard work: There is never a "post shipment" period at Riot where you can feel "now we have shipped the game, let's relax". League of Legends has been growing in content, features, territories and player base for three years and the amount of awesomeness keeps increasing all the time. If you are hoping for a 9 to 5 job, this is not your place. This is not consulting or investment banking either. For reference, i am in management position and I think i work maybe around 60h a week (monday to friday). On the week-end, i rarely spend more than a couple of hours, mostly doing email. I have around a couple of rush per quarter (in which i'll work over the week-end and may be at 70-80h during the full week). So although it is hard work, this is not insane. Some excellent people and high performers work less, other work more. - Onboarding / training: if you join, expect being lost at the beginning. This is not your typical game company, since we run LoL as a service. Plus, we have some uniqueness you won't find in other online games: our fair business model, our 25+ shards / platform (with most of them having hundreds of thousand of CCU), our e-sport passion, our 25+ development team working on agile, etc… This makes on boarding really hard. Additionally, Riot is still not great at training. You will learn a lot from experience and with fantastic people, but if you count on Riot to teach you a specific knowledge, language, etc… Riot is not there yet
