Pros
- Fantastic, highly competitive perks - Competitive pay (in Engineering) - The best teams practice great balance of autonomy, empowerment and direction - Huge fans of gaming, the most supportive, fun and exciting group of passionate industry professionals you'll ever work with - Huge breadth of experience, mentors are easy to find if you seek them out - The culture "bleeds" the manifesto, when it's working it is truly amazing, the strength of that manifesto allows even struggling teams to do reasonably well - If you follow the manifesto and have a good supportive manager, you can do very well here. - The people here are generally amazing, you really can "Default to Trust" for most people doing the work in the rank and file, everyone is well intentioned and trying to win. - Riot celebrates those who take accountability seriously - So much more than "just a game company", you'll likely learn more here in a few years than a decade at any other company
Cons
- "Old Guard" leaders protected by past successes and rarely held accountable without great effort, and risk - Feedback culture can be manipulated by those who want to retain power or squash criticism - Struggling to do too much, with an inability to focus means strategic decisions flip-flop and rarely last longer to 3-4 months - Senior Leaders have forgotten how to play a support leadership role - Product and Delivery disciplines have huge variances in competencies of individuals - Too Many "Chefs" in the kitchen in too many aspects of technical direction - Huge variances in pay between disciplines compound pay differences between those doing the work and those not contributing (you may find a QA/Release/Product/Delivery person working 5 times as hard as an engineering technical leader paid half what that leader is paid) - Huge variance in quality of managers/leaders means you roll the dice on whether you get a good or bad one, and bad ones can set your career back years - Vertical growth is all but dead, don't come here to move upwards. Someone has to quit, or be fired to create a vertical slot for growth and it's likely it'll be filled by a new hire, not an existing rioter - Horizontal (breadth) growth is difficult to achieve, there's a very large risk of getting stuck doing one thing for over 5 years and getting type cast into a role. As the company ages transfers between disciplines and product teams has ground to trickle - Attitude towards new product development has resulted in isolationist thinking, cultures are literally different, so are performance metrics and accountability, between large product groups at the company (esports, league, new games, central services) - Struggling to deal with the lack of diversity it's culture and focus on core gamers has created, mostly male management is blind and biased to the priority of the problem - Success requires being a member of the "bro culture/boys club" or working yourself to death to be visible, you need to play the "Cover Your A.. butt" game well here - Accountability culture can be used against you (your leaders will usually push fault down to the first person who claims fault, rather than take accountability themselves)