Slashdot Mirror
Blizzard Starts Drive To Recruit More Women and Ethnic Minorities (bbc.co.uk)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The company behind games like World of Warcraft and Overwatch has started a drive to recruit more women and ethnic minorities. The information is in a leaked internal email from Blizzard's CEO, seen by the website Kotako. It claims 21 percent of Blizzard's employees are women, and although that's similar to the rest of the gaming industry, it says it wants to do better. The company claims the initiative will focus on finding more female employees and getting them to stay on longer. At the moment women are leaving at a higher rate than men but it says it'll fall short of setting "quotas."
why, because they are better programmers? If that's not the reason, your shareholders may want to have a word with you.
Interesting to see what happens to game quality when Blizzard's new employees are hired for genitalia instead of traditional merit-based criteria.
... to have some of the men declare that they feel like and wish to be treated as women. Then they could be counted as such, right?
I love working in diverse groups. Seriously, it makes life more fun and interesting.
Coding, however, is a meritocracy. It has quantified metrics and performance tracking by definition. You know who's committing what, you know how many bugs people are fixing, and you know how much code they write, what percentage needs review, and how impactful it is.
The elite organizations aren't going to tolerate people who can't code working with them.It will end up in revolt - ala Google - or in the talent leaving.
You can't change this. There are quantified metrics. You can't fake it, you can't wave wands all day. You have to get up and be able to write it on the board.
Women can code. Hell, anyone can code. We need to find ways to make it more appealing. But it doesn't change the fact that it is hard, you need to understand very complicated systems, you need to be able to produce working code that interfaces with those systems, and you need to be able to do it quickly.
Much luck, gentlemen. You'll need it.
So basically what this means is, "hire less white men"
Really Blizzard? Even if you get much more qualified men to do the job, you won't be hiring them to fill your diversity quota? Must be great for the women and "minorities"(can we stop calling any race other than Caucasian, a minority?) to know they were hired because of their gender/ethnicity over their skills.
At the moment women are leaving at a higher rate than men but it says it'll fall short of setting "quotas."
I think "Quotas" are what most people object to that object to hiring more women and minorities. No one wants to feel like they missed out on a job because they were the wrong sex or race. Not men, women, Europeans, or Africans.
Trying to be more appealing to women and minorities is a noble goal because in order to relate to all demographics of clients you need all demographics of staff. It's easy to miss out sometimes what another group might find appealing or offensive without valid representation.
Appeal to minorities and all genders but don't set quotas. As long as Blizzard is really doing this and not just saying they are to look good- they're doing the right thing by my way of thinking.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
God, please tell me this doesn't mean another ethnic minority inspired expansion of WoW like Pandaria.
All in the name of diversity. No commitment to game quality. Wow!
first boycott
Pay your taxes, first
She won't even play their games and hates them a shit load. They probably have other issues than hiring.
Gaming is much more mainstream than in the past and there are a lot more female gamers too.
They want their games to appeal to a bigger audience.
This sure sounds like female employees are going to be enticed with better compensation, perks, more flexible hours, etc. - how else could they possibly "convince them to stay longer"?
That would be so monumentally stupid that I can't believe Blizzard would actually do it, but here we are.
Also, giving preference to job applicants based on race/gender is flatly illegal in the US, so it seems to me like this memo could land Blizzard in a little bit of trouble. It certainly seems to imply that that's what they're going to do.
A: All of them that post here, obviously.
Try not to have any heart attacks or strokes, people.
Men are more likely to be willing to submit to gaming companies. Everyone knows they pay less and demand longer hours than the equivalent jobs in other industries. Women should consider themselves lucky they're only 21% of that workforce.
One more fucking company to cross of the list of products I'll buy.
Blizzard actually seems to do pretty well for having strong female characters in their games.
Kerrigan (Starcraft) was bad-ass, and Overwatch has some pretty awesome characters as well. Plus SC2 had a nice switch-up from Raynor saving Kerrigan and to vise-versa.
Having female characters that people can *play* seems a good step towards getting females interested in playing games, which is a step towards increase interest in making games.
The games business is notorious for terrible working conditions, terrible management, and a huge percentage of coworkers who are just plain jerks.
Bad management means you have low job security and a high chance your work will end up getting thrown away when the project is cancelled.
And whether your coworkers are jerks because they're misogynistic, or because they're trolls, or because they're SJWs, or because they're divas, or because they're just social misfits, it still sucks dealing with jerks all the time.
On the other hand, it's a growing business, so even a bad job might lead to a good opportunity eventually.
Better than what?
I honestly wonder what management is hoping to achieve here. Is there some deficiency in their products which they hope can be solved by women? Are their current empoyees (men and women ) fundamentally incapable of providing a solution to this deficiency? Why? Or perhaps they find their women to be of significantly higher competency such that they are overworked? Are they further implying that men and women are fundamentally different and that men do not have the mental capacity that they're looking for?
I'm feeling triggered and need to stay home today.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Its not about hiring a min number of [insert protected class here]. That will never work. Many will just will not stay.
The org has to change its own values and benefiits it gives to its employees as well as how business is conducted. Many of these changes are not possible for some positions/industries in tech.
The problem is that Tech is that many of the values that women seek are not found in tech as it is now.
Tech related work can mean giving up a lot of free time, working when the company needs you, and making other employees people productive and happy.
Say, the server goes offline at 1:24 AM, takes 48 continues hours to get it working again. That's not going to work with many women's career balance goals.
Assume a game is running behind. Department is threatened with the project being cut or outsourced for to be finished if they don't meet the next goal. Now the group has to work long hours to get it done. Again, another real reasonable expectation of tech work. No game project may mean no work.
Then and only then can you focus on your family. Women often say, "No Deal!" and move to somewhere else.
Not saying its right or wrong, it just is.
Its not about hiring people who match whatever protected class, its about finding what they want and offering it to attract them.
...women just don't like working at gaming companies.
"I'm a dirty white tomcat, enter my world..."
Instead of getting the BEST for anything, they will end up watering down their hiring process more likely, just to "look good" in the eyes of the public (and at their meetings). They can say see...see...see...we have minorities working here! Look at us! We are good because we have hired minorities! Just one example of what happens when you water down something, just to be politically correct. In the 70's...Miami-Metro Dade watered down the hiring process for police officers. They wanted to be politically correct, and hire more minorities, in response to the "cuban boat lift" garbage thanks to Jimmy Carter. Ole Castro dumped a bunch of losers, criminals on the Florida coast. Minorities said it wasn't fair to have an all white police force. So, they LOWERED THE STANDARDS, allowed more unqualified people to be an officer. In the 80's the Metro-Dade was one of the more corrupt police departments around. Drugs, murders, extortion, prostitution and on and on. Instead of what most likely will happen, they hire people who are not qualified, or, are not the best & brightest in their field, they should look for qualified people. You watch their business suffer, because of this. Happens every time you water things down.
Are they still in Playa Del Rey?
Let them try to funnel their way into that nightmare.
Very funny. Funny and true! Thanks for brightening my day.
Why are tech industries different than other industries? You don't see construction companies falling over themselves to try to hire more women. You don't see the healthcare and education sectors launching initiatives to recruit more men. Why is the tech industry unique in this endeavour?
Can anyone name a benefit to diversity that's anything close to compensation for all the bullshit we've had to endure achieving it?
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
Using past Slashdot submissions, let's track what happened to the GNOME desktop environment project after it started engaging in identity politics, instead of just focusing on software development.
On June 15, 2006, Slashdot featured the story "GNOME Reaches Out to Women". We can see this as the beginning of the troubles to come.
As we progress through the submission titles from 2007 through to just last week, we can see the decline:
The GNOME project went from creating GNOME 2, which was perhaps the most widely used and most liked open source desktop environment ever created, to the GNOME 3 disaster (which was quite delayed), and eventually to the project having trouble finding a maintainer for its text editor!
Some people will misinterpret what happened, and blame women for it. Of course, that's a load of bollocks. As we can see from the GNOME project grou
Look at the bright side they'll save 22% on every new hire. At least that's what the SJW want you to believe. Hopefully that's true, maybe they'll pass on the savings to their customers, or at least their shareholders.
captcha: earning
some autistic fuck with a MAGA hat might write a manifesto and then get RT to boost it everywhere for the next goddamned week straight
I remember going to a coding school in Canada back in the nineties. It cost about $10k. Lots of pretty talented folks, but this was before the Y2K thing so it was still hard to get a job as a fresh grad.
Except for one person. Native female. Two interesting facts: (1) some federal program paid the $10k for her, and (2) it didn't matter that she was a complete screw up zero. Was barely able to write hello world in C. Had to be helped with everything and I do mean everything.
Surprise, surprise, she got hired by Statistics Canada the day she graduated. No, they didn't even accept applications from anyone else. Everyone else had to scramble for months with high debt and little work. Yep, that's diversity in action, alright.
I guess I'm not a fan diversity. It seems to me more like discrimination.
Does this mean they're going to rehire Randi Lee Harper?
As soon as your corporate priority is not to hire the best employee, but instead make sure they fit specific demographics - you are over.
Whether women or ethnic minorities make just as good employees no longer matter when you add such an incentive to the market. What happens is there will increased demand for women and ethnic minorities at tech companies, and the market has to adjust to increase the supply, both by raising the salaries of those people and by lowering the quality of the people filling those positions, as that will increase the supply. You now have a group of poorly qualified employees that have a strong incentive to change jobs for even better pay. The result from this is predictable: the most aggressive companies will fill their ranks with these diversity hires and the ship will founder.
This is what will happen even without taking into account the current cultural climate surrounding issues of equality and diversity.
"it is illegal to discriminate against someone (applicant or employee) because of that person's race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information."
In the current climate, they should be scrutinised as if they were a Nazi-managed corporation, circa 1930, that declared it was launching an initiative to increase the representation of Aryans.
You don't see them refusing to work with people because of affirmative action policies. They just deal with their reality, no safe spaces required. They just might not speak out die to the totalitarian corporate policies that would get them fired if they spoke out against them - again, being smart and not "reeeeee-acting" so to speak.
All these idiots can do is go "The numbers. NOT SAME!"
Never mind that there are MANY reasons why that could be.
With one of the biggest being "Many (not all) women simply don't want to put up with the bullshit such jobs entail."
But no! They're going to do whatever they can to make those numbers the same. REGARDLESS of the laws they break. REGARDLESS of negative impact upon their company and the quality of their product.
"I have a hammer!"
"I have a screw that needs to be driven in."
*WHACK*
"Well, that broke the screw!"
"I have two pieces of glass that need to be delicately glued back together!"
*WHACK*
"Now I have two HUNDRED pieces of glass!"
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
They can keep their shitty 2+ hour commute to and from their $1.5M 70 year old 2 bedroom shack on a 50 year mortgage.
Is there some secret talent pool of colored programmers that has gone untapped? Are there really more basement monkeys than porch monkeys? Is there a secret cabal of talented women who would rather code than chat with their friends on Facebook? If so, then let Facebook hire them.
Women are just not into gaming. Women like chit-chatting with their friends, shopping online and looking at fashion articles.
Oh yes, yes, yes. I know about that lesbian clerk at your local GameStop. Cool. She can code your next purchase. Awesome.
How can you make a good game if there aren't gay and trans characters everywhere? And different races in a game, and hey fight each other and can't understand each other?!?!! WFT is up with that? Are you deliberately trying to promote racism?
next up diablo 3 will be about how the grand evil demon turns into a giant big breasted taco
the real reason is cause warner brothers got away with slave labour up in canada doing 3d special affects and animations and now so does everyone else
fuck the big game houses now for sure
Now that I decided to become a Asian woman I am now free to accept these new diversity jobs.
There is support for transsexual-transracial people and nobody should be allowed to judge me.
Stating that you are going to hire people based on their race or gender is literally the definition of discrimination, regardless if this time around it's women or minorities.
This shit is getting stupid, just hire people based upon there skillset.
That's what I did about three years back. I'm my own boss, my customers don't know or care if I'm even a human, and my earnings aren't supporting deadweight like HR departments full of SJWs. My work stands on its own, and enough people buy it to give me a comfortable living.
"CompanyX does not recognize ethnic groups or genders as relevant to any responsibilities and/or duties related to the offered position, as such, we have chosen to interview qualified candidates based on merit and skill-set alone. Please be prepared to highlight any past projects and/or responsibilities that you feel may be relevant to the position(s) you are applying for. Any candidate seeking special consideration based on Skin color, religion, gender, or any other protected class will be immediately disqualified for the position. CompanyX is proud of our culture of anti-discrimination and it will not be tolerated in ANY FORM. With that said, applicant should be aware we are an English speaking company, with a heavy emphasis on teamwork. All qualified candidates must posses a strong grasp of the English language, and be able to effectively communicate with your team members, managers, and peers. Best of luck, and thank you for your interest in joining the world class team at CompanyX"
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
21% of all employees, or 21% of technical staff?
Never mind that there are MANY reasons why that could be.
With one of the biggest being "Many (not all) women simply don't want to put up with the bullshit such jobs entail."
So run a study and prove it. Not all that hard, and not all that expensive to send out a bunch of questionnaires.
So odd that all the well-funded institutions that constantly write papers attacking diversity efforts can't manage to use a little funding to actually study it and back up their claims....
It's the typical thing white liberals do. They feel guilty for whatever reason and they make up excuses to feel better about it. One way is to declare they will hire more of us. Like we are so stupid we can't get an education or training and find them. I love gaming and I love programming. But I damn sure don't want to work for some white liberal falling all over themselves to get me to smile at them.
I am capable and smart and I will apply to a company if I want to work for them. Not so I can fill their quota and help them to breathe easier. We don't want or need that kind of help. Treat us as equals which means if we can do the job hire us, if we can't show us the door.
So because I'm white male I won't be considered for these positions? Isn't the point of these initiatives to discourage discrimination? Instead, you are committing it. The law says that discrimination against age, sex, gender, religion, etc is not okay. It doesn't have a footnote of "*unless white male".
I have no problem with ensuring everyone is considered equal and every other person gets the same chance I do and encourage doing so, but put me at a disadvantage like this is not okay.
Oh, you mean like the ones in the Google Diversity Memo?
The rise of the smart phone ruined Gnome more than identity politics. If Gnome had done nothing but chase identity politics, at least the interface wouldn't have changed drastically. Instead, some hipster douchebags got control of the interface and starting chasing after Apple and smart phone designs. The hipster douchebag is the disease. Identity politics and stupid new interfaces were the symptoms.
Oh, you mean the ones that are actually bullshit?
https://www.recode.net/2017/8/...
Looks like Japanese gaming industry solved the problem already:
https://myanimelist.net/anime/31953/New_Game
In this particular company, all designers, developers, and even managers are female. The only male is a cat.
Because that sort of thinking worked out so well for them.
And then begins the fall of Blizzard...
It was a good run.
That "refutation" is a bunch of strawmen.
For instance, "single sex classrooms" is not something within the Google memo, but it sure as fuck is part of that "debunking."
Also part of that debunking is citing "books" rather than peer reviewed research. That fact sure as fuck didnt get noticed by you.
What a fucking tool you are.
"His name was James Damore."
Except that's a lie, as Australians have found out, on the opposite, using blind recruitment reduces chances of women and minorities:
Blind recruitment trial to boost gender equality making things worse, study reveals
http://www.abc.net.au/news/201...
GNOME was ruined the day they chose a half finished graphics toolkit because they were precious snowflakes and got triggered by KDE using Qt. In other words, on day one.
mod parent up
They want to dilute their pool by forcing nature to bend to their will.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
With one of the biggest being "Many (not all) women simply don't want to put up with the bullshit such jobs entail."
Then maybe the working conditions need to IMPROVE for EVERYONE? Maybe aspie code-bros need to stop putting up with "crunch time" and crappy conditions for free cheetos and jolt.
REGARDLESS of negative impact upon their company and the quality of their product.
Have you played modern games designed/coded by the predominately male developers? Quality is NOT something they prioritize. So don't go around saying that encouraging women to "not quit" will have a negative impact.
Every last one of these SJW-influences mega corps needs to be sued until they get back in line. They are hiring someone based on their gender or color of their skin instead of who is most qualified. That is illegal. Who gives a shit how many white guys work at your company? I care about profitability. Rename applicants anonymously, hide their age and gender and background, and interview them electronically initially. There goes this big, alleged bias everyone keeps talking about.
Note: I am not the grandparent, but your statements seemed interesting enough to respond to.
I don't put up with crunch time, I personally do crunch time because I'm actually passionate about my work and care about my projects.
I have. You know, I never actually thought about this. However, now I am. I played games made by people pre-dominantly identifying as female. I didn't think "Revolution 60" or "Analogue: A Hate Story" were quality at all compared to male developers with even less resources like "Dust: An Elysian Tail" ? Annecdotally, my experience is a flat out opposite to what you're claiming...
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
...needed more janitors, maids and groundskeepers.
So and so company has decided that for ethical reasons, it should preferentially hire one race. This is ok by law because those races aren't white. It should also hire favoring a sex. This is okay because that sex isn't male.
The sweet truth here is that it doesn't matter what you call racism and sexism.
"No good deed goes unpunished"
That "refutation" is a bunch of strawmen.
Discussing the actual experiments cited by the Google employee is a strawman. Sure. You go right on believing that.
For instance, "single sex classrooms" is not something within the Google memo, but it sure as fuck is part of that "debunking."
So, are men not as biologically capable of actually reading? 'Cause the author literally tells you why it's relevant in the article.
Also part of that debunking is citing "books" rather than peer reviewed research
So does the Google manifesto. Gonna throw it out too?
Also, if you actually read a bit more carefully, you'd find those books are discussing peer reviewed research.
What a fucking tool you are.
What was that about strawmen?
Studies have BEEN done you dumbass!
That's why this is currently accepted social science.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Best way to stop racism, discrimination, etc is to *STOP* it. Not create new forms.
Imagine if there were no racist issues, what would guys like Al Sharpton and so on do for a living? It's in their best interest to keep it alive.
Same here, there's a fake womans issue to profit on.
Actually, the studies were done and the results are it is not accepted social science. In fact, the actual science points in the other direction.
In fact, one of the studies the Google manifesto relies on could not be replicated by the person who originally did it. Kinda a poster child for not a valid experiment, no?
https://www.recode.net/2017/8/...
You are confused if you believe that Gnome 3 was intended to be used on a tablet computer or a phone. Gnome 3 was designed to be a cohesive user experience based on the scientific principle of Fitts's law.
You are confused if you believe that Gnome 3 was intended to be used on a tablet computer or a phone. Gnome 3 was designed to be a cohesive user experience based on the scientific principle of Fitts's law.
And you're in denial if you think they weren't influenced by smart phone mania. Fitt's law doesn't say you should be removing buttons, or turning a desktop screen into a giant app screen that, coincidentally, was aping smart phone designs.
We are doomed because people are being too nice to people who believe diversity is the solve-all.
Diversity based on skills? Yes.
Diversity based on physical attributes? No.