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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.
... 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?
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
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"?
If being more flexible with hours and giving better compensation attracts more women then everyone benefits. Even men will surely be happier with more flexible hours and better benefits. If it attracts women but makes mens lives easier- that's a benefit for everyone.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Coding, however, is a meritocracy. It has quantified metrics and performance tracking by definition.
This would be a great argument if there hadn't been so much shitty product released in the last couple of decades, a lot of it from major vendors. Guess diversity hires won't be that big of a deal to the bottom line or the quality of software released after all.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
I honestly wonder what management is hoping to achieve here.
Setting up a legal defense for future lawsuits by women and minorities.
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.
Except that's fucking bullshit.
Until there are blind resume reviews and tests, the myth of the meritocracy is just so-much garbage spouted by people that are worried they'll lose their jobs to someone ACTUALLY qualified.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/wh...
This was exactly the same thing that happened at symphonies. When you ACTUALLY care about a) diversity and b) hiring the best people for the job, it turns out that the first thing you have to do is leave your biases at the door, and virtually nobody is good at doing that. So remove the doubt: blind auditions.
Most interview processes are garbage anyway. I've been a programmer for 15 years and I'm still asked to talk about certain kinds of language specific minutia that are super irrelevant in daily programming. (That is, I've answered questions and literally never, ever seen those features used in the games we ship. It's essentially a trivia contest.)
And here's the thing about programming when you're at a game company: AT LEAST half your job has nothing to do with programming—at least if you're any good. You HAVE to play the game you're making, make suggestions, think about the comfort of the player. I would take a junior programmer with a good feel for gameplay than a veteran rockstar programmer that has great technical chops but doesn't have any suggestions to improve the game. Even for engine and graphics programmers.
So yeah, coding can be hard, but I can teach you what you need to know. If you're working with me and I can trust you to make good gameplay decisions, that's a LOT more important to me, and I CAN'T teach you that.