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.
... 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
She won't even play their games and hates them a shit load. They probably have other issues than hiring.
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!
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.
I honestly wonder what management is hoping to achieve here.
Setting up a legal defense for future lawsuits by women and minorities.
More female players in WoW would mean more revenue, but that's assuming that women are better at marketing to women and girls. I doubt that is Blizzard's plan and it has more to do with getting a feather in their cap for workplace diversity, and deflecting potential lawsuits for lacking diversity. Like most things, you don't want to be the worst offender in the industry when you're a high profile target with a lot of money to lose. If I were Blizzard, I'd take the minimal effort to make my company look better for diversity than Amazon, Valve, Google, Facebook and let people go sue those companies and not mine.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
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.
You know that modern games require a much larger set of skills than just coding, right?
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
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.
Because construction is seen as hard work. Where women dominate, there's no political SJW angle to it, so that's brushed under the carpet and "men just don't want to" (part of that is men are scared to these days; much higher chance of some pupil trumping a molestation charge to ruin your career and having it taken seriously). The tech industry is seen as a 'clean office job, and probably not that demanding, so easy money'. So it's seen as a political thing to get people into cushy jobs. Many that go into it and actually get to realise that it's not a cushy job then leave. The women (and, well, generally everyone) that is actually passionate about it accept that it's pretty gruelling and get on with the job. There are outliers of jerks, same as there are in every job, but that's not the main factor. My other half's an engineer (mechanical engineering), but went into finance, simply because she preferred it as an interest. She does marvellously; the precision and conscientiousness of an Engineer working on figures. Currently, she's doing very nicely with it, just has no real intention of working in Engineering (though her DIY projects are absolutely awesomely engineered).
Plus SC2 had a nice switch-up from Raynor saving Kerrigan and to vise-versa.
Yea, no. The story amounted to "the power of love saved Raynor from his alcoholism for someone he knew briefly and she returned the favor and suddenly fell in love too". All the hatred, betrayal and past motivations of the characters were whisked away when they changed it to a love story. I don't mind a love story in my sci fi... but between the shit in sc1 compared to sc2... Ugh. There is a reason why Raynor was rotting in the bottom of a bottle and it wasn't love for Kerrigan. Or to put another way. He went from a backwoods marshal, to an important rebel leader, to an outcast that lost everything in part because of Kerrigan.
"I'm going to be the man that kills you one day Kerrigan." - Raynor. ....4 years later.. :3 ilu be my waifu! 3 3
The sc2 story was 'meh' at best with the rehashed "old ones are coming back prophecy. the end is nigh" that is overly used by blizzard.
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...