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Comment by eksemplar | Hacker News Reader

This is not the way things are though. I’m a manager, and I wouldn’t tolerate any of the painted stories for a second. In fact, none of the people in my network, which includes numerous large Scandinavian tech companies would tolerate anything of the sort.

You do see that stuff, of course, but you see it mainly in children aged 10-15, and otherwise only in private, because anyone who keeps it up after that will be unemployable.

If this is commonplace in America workplace, then you truely are an odd country.

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There's obviously a scale of how things are at various workplaces, and how acceptable various things are in different cultures.

I've worked at a gaming company in Europe before where among other things female team members told me they've been asked by someone "how it feels to have the biggest boobs in the team" when another female in the team left.

The company later introduced an inclusivity effort and a code of conduct, and felt obliged to offer an AMA (because "new and scary thing" or whatever). They got questions like "should we now lower our hiring standards because we want to hire more women?" and "will there be any punishments if you break the CoC?" to which the answer was "of course not, don't worry". It felt like they just did these things to show an effort, not to actually follow through on them. Leadership was of course all white middle-age straight male.

There are a number of studies that show that implementing new guidelines / yearly rote training is about the least effective thing you can do to change corporate culture.

The most effective tends to be non-adversarial, regular peer meetings where actual discussions can be had.

And yet every enterprise I've ever worked at has the same canned training systems. Or implements them in response to an incident.

Do companies care about being effective or care about covering their liability?

The company doesn't have to care for certain specific/influential people at the company to care and make healthy culture.

Company culture is it's employees, All the way from CEO to janitor.

If this is commonplace in America workplace, then you truely are an odd country.

This statement seems odd in this context. While Riot may be headquartered in the US, all of the events in the article took place in Ireland.

It would indeed be very nice to assume this is somehow unique to the US. Europe has many countries that are notorious for their machismo, or their adherence to religious beliefs that are condescending towards women. I would say Scandinavian attitude is more likely to be unique in the world than vice versa.

You’re right, I should’ve said Ireland, or maybe “in game development” as these kind of stories often seem to originate from there.

Well she says in her account the large majority of people at Riot Games are lovely. The problem tends to be that there are powerful people who the company has strong reasons not to fire that perpetuate the worst behavior. Then the culture of ignoring the worst offenders allows other people to get away with little things. And the culture of ignoring things period, eats away at employees's sense of well being and sense that their workplace is fair and looks at them with respect.

I'm sure there are plenty of managers at Riot Games who wouldn't tolerate the stories for a second, but there are a few at or near the top that will and that can ruin an entire workplace.

It's similar to what happened at Uber, and the solution will be the same -- Replace people from the top-down, starting with the CEO.

Unfortunately, it's often suppressed by those who are offended because they feel speaking up jeopardizes their job or acceptance with coworkers. Look how much is quietly endured in this very anecdote.

Cases like this exist, where managers are subsumed into the culture (or passively even actively foster it), but more common is behavior that's increasingly tolerated because nobody wants to speak up because of the cultural implications.

I realize it's gauche to complain about downvotes but ... what?

There's a subset of users out in full force bravely downvoting anyone who sticks up for her or who dares to suggest that sexism might be an institutional, culturally widespread problem. Same reason this article went from the front page to the sixth in three hours.

Don't worry about it.

That's some crazy conspiracy-theory level shit happening... it was #1 a couple hours ago with 80ish votes... now ~215 and you're right, it's dropped off to the 6th or 7th page! Is it getting flagged a lot? Why would that happen in a few hours?

The gamergate crowd, I'd assume. Normal for this sort of story, unfortunately.

If we quickly get these articles off the front page, we don't have to think about it anymore. Then we can go back to living in the perfect world where sexism is invented by the left to bring down people in the poor, innocent bro culture.

Users often flag stories for crappy threads completely independently of the content, quality, relevance, or importance of the article.

Its shocking and horrifying to me that such a "young" company and in such liberal areas can be like this, and that it can in any way be tolerated. This culture absolutely comes from the top, in the form of who they've chosen to hire and choosing not to ever course correct (I imagine these sorts of things get brought up on a monthly basis).

Brandon Beck and Mark Merrill as the business guys are ultimately responsible for the culture allowed to flourish under them - they made the hires that made this possible, and not stopping it is on them. I look forward to an expedient response, because the fact that its gotten so far to come to a post like this means they've been negligent for a long time.

I think there are self-reinforcing pockets out there. I'm a manager also, and I know if I heard any of this I'd stamp it down immediately. Heck, if I didn't, I wouldn't be doing my job, and I'd (hopefully) eventually be called on it myself.

American here: that sort of thing would be totally unacceptable here too, evidently except for bizarre cultures like that in the story, the bizarre aspect being the reason for the story, I'm guessing.

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