Publicity stunt, simple as. He already has made billions and if the stunt push stock prices up he’ll make millions anyway.
Even at $62k a year he’ll have a better quality of life than most blizzard devs that struggle to make ends meet.
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So all the CEOs in circulation are actually immortal and just keep accumulating experience and there is absolutely no possible entry point for new people? Don’t be ridiculous. Sure, among those people with 20+ years of experience now, there are more men than women, but as long as there is a progression pathway from entry-level jobs to experience-requiring jobs, the male-to-female ratio in those jobs will asymptotically move towards the ratio among applicants. In order for your reasoning to be solid, ten years down the line they’d have to require 30 years of experience, then 40 years after the next ten and so on, which is clearly not the case.
Compensatory discrimination is still discrimination. Now you have two unfair practices where previously there was only one. And of course no concrete metric is provided to determine when exactly the original disadvantage is considered to have been compensated enough so the additional discrimination can be taken away.
Since the requirement is not on what percentage of applications is to be seriously looked at, but on the gender ratio among newly-hired employees that has to be the outcome of that process, yes, male applicants now have a disadvantage. HR can spend a million years looking at every application in detail before making that decision and that doesn’t change a bit about the required outcome.
What is the ratio among applicants, and what does the distribution of qualifications look like? The mere gender ratio of current employees in isolation is a useless metric for conclusively diagnosing discrimination. You need that additional information to be able to estimate the gender difference in chances to be hired at any given level of qualification (assuming for the sake of simplicity, of course, it was possible to unidimensionally quantify qualification, which in reality it isn’t at all).
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I think the lowest pay according to some sites I saw (I’ve been job hunting for game dev) is around 40k, but that must be rough for California.
Ok I think some of these things, I haven’t been clear on so I’ll say it differently.
I’ve hired Harvard Business School lifelong A-students that have performed poorly in their job.
And an I.Q. Test is the precise example of bias I’m referring to. We live in a global economy yet what is deemed to be “common knowledge” is very much local. What is prioritized in education is also different in different countries.
I experienced education in 3 different countries growing up and that gave me an advantage in some areas and a disadvantage in others.
However, none of this has been a predictor of how well a person will perform in a job. That’s why Google (a historically difficult company to get into) have stopped allowing universities to be put on the CV in some countries.
Top universities will ensure you leave with knowledge of things important to the ruling class but not necessarily make you a better employee.
Well I shortened it as I thought most would fill in the gaps but here is the rest of it…
This is the case for CEO positions but it’s also the case for the positions below. The successors to the CEO are also men. The few women the may be there are interviewing with men for a position in a company where the policies, culture and definition of success is created by men.
There may eventually come a point where there will be an equal number of men and women entering the tech industry. But by that time, if something does not change, we will have those people coming into a man’s world.
My point then is that we need to change how we view what is needed for a new employee with this in mind - this might not be looking for years of experience but looking for impact.
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Dynasty wealthy types usually are, and each generation just gets worse.
Then again, I imagined what I would do with a billion dollars and immediately realize how undereducated I would be to wield that money and produce competent, tangible good in the world.
Pretty sure my greed for money would stop at a few million, and with enough income from dividends to live comfortably. You really have to be cautious on the very rare chance you come across lots of wealth because your character will immediately be assaulted, and the winner controls the loser.
Yep, and they have a cost of living to deal with. Struggling to live in shared houses/flats. Kotick has none of these issues even if he took $0 a year.
Either way, him making a statement of a pay cut for himself like it means something, shows how out of touch he really is.
As an extra note bobby owns 4,305,890 Activision Blizzard shares which will generate him $1-$2 mil a year passively lmao
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Define “fine”. I believe people deserve to be payed for their work, and even if you have a ton of money in the bank, I do not think its fine to go unpayed for work you’ve done. I actually think its morally horrible.
I thought the point was “I’m taking a pay cut so that extra money can go into making blizzard a good company”?
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I think he means more, “If Bobby Kotick decided that he never wants to work a day in life from here on out, he’d pretty much be set for life,” although, that’s assuming he isn’t extravagant with his money, like buying a fleet of yachts all furnished.
Let’s be honest, Mr. Kotick probably isn’t exactly struggling with finances or making ends meet, and while everyone is entitled to accumulate wealth, some need to be wary of greed and obsession settling in. Plus, what exactly, does Kotick do?
Let’s see if that actually goes through (shows in the products to come). Strangely enough, most large funds tend to not end up where they were supposed to go, for some reason or another?
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strictly from that point, maybe. However the entire process of getting up to that point is stacked against their competition. Merely getting through education and study of tech basics is rough for non-males. If the entire road for someone to get to a point where they’re employable or have the same qualifications on paper is much harder for a non-male, who has the advantage overall of training for and acquiring a tech job in the gaming industry?
And I’m very sure that someone who is less qualified won’t be accepted for a job that requires stringent certifications or experience, this isn’t hiring rando women over specialist men. They consider all aspects and pick qualified applicants … hopefully. But The devil is in those details for sure, it does matter HOW they go about it, but done correctly it’s a good way to have actual equality in the industry.
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He has the money to just do that.
Stopping you here because there’s an interesting question no one considers:
If you think the odds being stacked against women is bad, then wouldn’t stacking them against men in any capacity be just as bad? I notice people tend to side step this hypothetical since, you know, people think the finish line is “women gets more jobs and that’s good” when in reality I’d say that’s the half way point in the race.
I know. That’s not what I asked. You said
But if (IF!!!) it goes into making blizzard a better company, then his pay cut DID mean something.
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Yea a publicity stunt and to look good for an upcoming investor call.
Being incredibly rich that with normal spending you just can live out your life without any worries. You would already been paid for your work, for the rest of your life. Kotick lowered his wage to the legal minimum (meaning, even if he wanted it to be lower, Activision/Blizzard couldn’t legally do that), so, good job Kotick (?).
We will see.
No, for two main reasons.
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It’s leveling the playing field/evening the odds, since they are already stacked against women and non binary people in the industry.
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One of the biggest reasons that this whole issue and company culture came to be was a lack of diversity. Increasing diversity can prevent company culture from becoming the way it did in blizzard’s case.
That’s not how compensation works. You earn money for the work that you do, people don’t get to say “oh, you have money in the bank so you don’t need more money for working all week.”, that’d be horrible regardless of how rich you are.
Compensation is about EARNING money. You can be the richest person in the world, but if you decide “I’m going to go out and plough a field” or some other kind of labor, then you absolutely DO deserve money. To not compensate that person would essentially be like you using them as a slave. I mean, unless it was explicitly charity work.
Understand, I’m assuming you’re a child and being charitable with how I respond to you. I’ve heard terrible arguments like this before, and its mostly because the person’s brain goes “Rich guy doesn’t need money, therefor, rich guy shouldn’t get more money NO MATTER WHAT” and then their brain turns off.
You may THINK that’s fair, but I can only describe a situation where you work for no pay as unfair. Again, unless its charity work.
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According to the article, this is the lowest possible amount?? What on earth sets that minimum I wonder.
The idea being that the overall difficulty to get to the point being … equal…ish. Whether it truly is or not is highly debatable. It would be way better if we could just make people stop discriminating against women and others and then we could just hire whomever was the most qualified. But we can’t because people don’t work like that. People in the industry and in the education and training processes leading UP to just getting into the industry have years and years of learned and subconscious bias you can’t just fry out of them or regulate.
It IS the halfway point, but it’s what we have until we get more people accepting that it doesn’t matter what form the talent comes in, and that’s not going to happen while the bias still runs the industry.
No it’s not. Who told you that? Blizzard’s issue was enabling harassment by not doing anything about harassers. Do you honestly think, if Blizzards company was more diverse, there would just be no harassment?
If you have so much money that you can life your whole life on it, it certainly can be a point. Y’know, the whole 1% thing that have billionaires having so much money, and not doing anything with it. Being compensated is one thing, being set for life is another. And I did never say he shouldn’t be compensated, I said that he is set for life still if he wasn’t.
A culture of harassment wouldn’t have been allowed or started in the first place if the company was more diverse.