A Letter From CEO Bobby Kotick Regarding Progress and Commitments Made at Acti-Blizz

[Ajko]

No, you do not understand. You remain utterly ignorant. Sorry to be blunt. This is not about equal rights or evenness. It's about the fact that gender roles are an artificial construct that have a massive effect on how our lives turn out.



What you fail to get is that these so called "choices" are not nearly as free as you'd like to believe. Girls do "girly things" and boys to "boy things" because that is what is indoctrinated into them by the system they are born into. It's a lot more pervasive than you realise.



Congratulations on entirely missing the point....

ye, roles are part of the nature, you know.

The male seahorse has a pouch on its stomach in which to carry babies, it is his role.
male animal species attract female species, it is their role.
some male birds species build their nests, in others females build the nest. it is their role.
mother bear watches over her cubs, father does not care. again, it is their roles.

what is so bad an unnatural about roles? why push so hard against it? where is the real problem?

and by the way, if a woman or a man decides to leave the role, they can, no one will force them to not do so, it is their free choice. but to claim that the roles are wrong is against the nature

[Hellobolis]

a) I don’t speak Dutch.
b) Holland is not going the US.

Carry on.

sure the US scores worse on gender equality than NL, but do you really think it's that much worse that it's not comparable at all?

couldn't find the exact numbers in California for IT, but a quick search for engineers shows 20% women with bachelor degree and 14% with masters. that's in the same ballpark.

[Kiwijello]

No one cares about this, CEO man. We don't care how valiant you are by taking a pay cut. You never deserved that pay to begin with. CEO pay is overinflated for a person who milks a company until it's dead and then moves on. A CEO is a parasite.

What we care about is CONTENT, and you are incapable of creating it, sustaining it, and distributing it in such a way that your customers are happy. This ^. Yeah, it's to appease stock holders. Why even post it here? It's almost insulting to have a millionaire tell you he is going to suffer a paycut because he let the company turn into "Frat House O'Cosby Lovin".

What a fucking joke.

[DingDongKing]

sure the US scores worse on gender equality than NL, but do you really think it's that much worse that it's not comparable at all?

couldn't find the exact numbers in California for IT, but a quick search for engineers shows 20% women with bachelor degree and 14% with masters. that's in the same ballpark.

There’s lots of other roles at Blizzard available. And lots of different qualifications required.

[Hellobolis]

There’s lots of other roles at Blizzard available. And lots of different qualifications required.

eh. if that's what you want.

you consider a hospital with 70 female nurses and 30 male doctors a good thing? you don't want at least some female doctors too?

[Ajko]

eh. if that's what you want.

you consider a hospital with 70 female nurses and 30 male doctors a good thing? you don't want at least some female doctors too?

dunno, but in my country it is quite the opposite. hospitals full of female doctors...

[DingDongKing]

eh. if that's what you want.

you consider a hospital with 70 female nurses and 30 male doctors a good thing? you don't want at least some female doctors too?

Doesn’t matter what I want. And dealing in hypotheticals is pointless. Also, California isn’t the only state from where employees are sourced. They come from an international pool. So there will be enough diverse candidates out there. Who WANT the job. And are also qualified.

[Lord Pebbleton]

Stupid bullshit as usual. Diversity should NEVER be something to base the hiring process on, becuase in that case, you hire purely basing on skill without any external bias.

I really really do not like the direction Blizzard is going. Previously I would be annoyed at some of their decisions, this is the first time I am legit frustrated with how they are handling basically everything.

[Hellobolis]

Doesn’t matter what I want. And dealing in hypotheticals is pointless. Also, California isn’t the only state from where employees are sourced. They come from an international pool. So there will be enough diverse candidates out there. Who WANT the job. And are also qualified.

it's not a hypothetical. blizzard can easily meet their 33% women quota without hiring a single women for the actual dev teams, they have plenty of other roles as you said.

[DingDongKing]

it's not a hypothetical. blizzard can easily meet their 33% women quota without hiring a single women for the actual dev teams, they have plenty of other roles as you said.

That’s obviously not what I said. What I said is that whilst the qualifications percentage matches certain figures, there are a litany of roles OTHER than the devs. Add to that, Blizz doesn’t just recruit from its local catchment area. So the variables mean the bog standard 80/20 ratios don’t mean Jack, ESPECIALLY if a company wants to establish a new status quo anyway.

[Xorzor]

So the TLDR of this letter is "I'm saying what I have to so you losers will get f-ing get off my case". That about right?

#cancelKotick

[Hellobolis]

That’s obviously not what I said. What I said is that whilst the qualifications percentage matches certain figures, there are a litany of roles OTHER than the devs. Add to that, Blizz doesn’t just recruit from its local catchment area. So the variables mean the bog standard 80/20 ratios don’t mean Jack, ESPECIALLY if a company wants to establish a new status quo anyway.

it's your turn to back up your claims this time then. cause as far as i know California is ahead of the curve in the US on this sorta thing, and people have given you the leading EU figures too.

China has relatively many women in STEM/IT/etc fields i think though, you think they recruit from there?

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So the TLDR of this letter is "I'm saying what I have to so you losers will get f-ing get off my case". That about right?

#cancelKotick

kinda curious what kind of bonus he is getting next year for giving it up this year

[DingDongKing]

it's your turn to back up your claims this time then. cause as far as i know California is ahead of the curve in the US on this sorta thing, and people have given you the leading EU figures too.

China has relatively many women in STEM/IT/etc fields i think though, you think they recruit from there?

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kinda curious what kind of bonus he is getting next year for giving it up this year

I’ll have a look and find out, but Asia is a highly likely source. Going on experience from the company I work in, we have a LOT of finance grads from Asia. And a lot of them are women. Point is, given the global reach of companies like Blizz, they’re not stuck in the trap of ‘well this is all we have available to recruit from!’

[Kralljin]

They come from an international pool. So there will be enough diverse candidates out there. Who WANT the job. And are also qualified.

Hiring from the outside of a country is hardly the norm, because it comes with a lot of baggage from a legal perspective and social for the employee themself.

A lot of people aren't willing to move to another state, let alone country for another job and that's even disregarding the fact that some people might quit after a few months / years because they can't deal with the changed social enviroment.

Heard stories from people that moved to the US for a new job and then moved back after a few years because they had a hard time adapting to the US attitude.
No hate towards the US, but it's not exactly a wild theory that a european moving to the US struggles with some the social norms there, the opposite is also entirely possible.
And that in itself also ignores that moving away from friends and family can be a huge burden on some people.

This isn't a nonexistant pool of people, but it's also not some untapped well of talent that no one thought of, it's just not a very deep pool.

And the legal aspect of hiring people that don't hold US citizenship is also something that needs to be accounted for.

[mbit]

Not sure what you mean about personal level and the such I can assure you that I find the blizzard practices ridiculous and those advising them to act these way, fucking idiots with no sense of whats important in society.

Since we are incapable of living together in communities everything personal must be sanitized and remove. Keep it simple: Do you have the education, work experience and understanding of what we do here? You are hired. End of story. Every other consideration is suspicious and has ulterior motives.

Personal level was meant as what someone can do by themself to deal with it. If you sit in cali the only thing you can do as a individual realistically is play pretend along the rest to get the diversity benefits and this means for white guys to claim trans. You certainly wont budge the policies so its either leave the state or play along. Ironically they are placed even higher on the diversity totem pole and get seemingly ahead of women.

[Straga21]

this site is a joke,people get banned instantly right and left for ''trolling'' when having obvious serious discourse,but obvious trolls or white supremacists get a pass,iv seen plenty of those coments not even from burner accounts every day,its kinda clear about the ideology of the people runing it,ill likely be banned just for pointing it out

Ah here we go, people who don't agree with forced diversity and white people getting discriminated are all "white supremacists". You are so textbook it's just funny.

[MoanaLisa]

Its very simple: Anonymize applications and simply get whoever is the best for the job. No need for any other considerations.

When working in a IT team environment interviewers and their applicants need to get a sense of what sort of person this is. If possible how they will fit in. You can discuss projects and positions on project teams and learn a lot about how they will work out. You have, especially lately, many older men who have tons of experience but haven't worked much with new tools, languages and who over the course of an interview can be seen that they're very set in their ways and will have problems in an AGILE or SCRUM environment. By the same token I've sat in on interviews with the latest class of graduates with their degrees. Some have promise; some believe that they're smarter than the people interviewing them and would be nothing but problems with unlearning a lot of what they know. We do like portfolios of former work a lot but often run into situations where that work is proprietary to the company it was created for. And needless to say someone that has worked in the IT department of an fab (like Intel) may be the very last person you want to implement enterprise planning software suites like SAP/R3.

IT shops, especially larger shops have their ways and qualifications aside applicants need to be accepting that they may not know as much as they think they do. We finally took the route of paid eight-week internships and worked them hard and very often the best fit for a position was not the most qualified. Flexibility, the knowledge that you don't know everything, the ability to bump up into a legacy system that looks stuck together with glue and scotch tape and ask the question about why it is that way. That's all critical stuff when handing out jobs.

Lots of people here bellowing about some sort of supposedly scientific way to look at a CV and an application and decide strictly on the basis of that. That's nuts, frankly. People lie about their qualifications for one thing. And as skilled as they may be they may not have the very specific skill that you're looking for. The decision in most IT shops is complicated unless you're hiring all of your old guild mates and their friends. That's easy but may not work out well in the end.

[deenman]

Ah here we go, people who don't agree with forced diversity and white people getting discriminated are all "white supremacists". You are so textbook it's just funny.

you missed the guy who was spaming profanity about women/jews/black people etc,my coment is kinda lost now considering theirs were removed

[Raunchy]

The second part of your post is what needs to be highlighted, the hiring practices absolutely should be competence and excellency first, diversity second. If you have a lineup of 5 people that are equally qualified for a position and one happens to be from a minority group, then absolutely it would be an excellent move to bring them in an diversify the workplace. If however they are from a minority group and they are worse at the job than a non-minority individual, they should be let down just like any other person.

Excellency first, in all aspects.

seems like the obvious answer.

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I have a dumb question, whyz cant blizz hire best person for job?

[mojusk]

are you impying women or non binary people dont have skills for the job? wow dude...wow

no? hes implying that they should be hired for their talent, not their gender.