´´https://venturebeat.com/2021/11/01/world-of-warcraft-director-ion-hazzikostas-talks-the-games-future-and-current-soul-searching/´´
I love when he talks about providing a place in azeroth so people can escape the trials and tribulations from the real world and in the next paragraph he goes on about making sure they need to hire more diverse people and not just white males, so the game can be shaped in the right way.
Nothing makes me escape reality more than entering Azeroth, where a big focus on content is making sure that its diverse from top to bottom and where everything is perfectly clean and sterlizied
51 Likes
That kinda check box talk is so dumb.
What happened at Blizzard didn’t happen because lack of “diversity” it happened because lack of oversight, responsibility and common sense. You could have the most diverse crew and still have issues, look at Netflix.
Saying you got an issue at the company so therefore you need to hire x, y and or z is like saying you should hire more Christians because if you hire a bunch of them then suddenly the workforce will be good.
46 Likes
Is this going to affect cubicle crawl Thursday?
18 Likes
Making sure that qualified people get hired but also making sure that we do not hire too many of the qualified people when they are white or male is the new anti racism and progressive step in the future
21 Likes
“Recognizing that the game industry has had certain skews – male-dominated is one obvious one, especially in design – we need to work harder to build and find the qualified candidates who are out there. We can’t just open up a position, take the first couple dozen resumes, look through them, and pick someone out of that pile, because we may just get a couple dozen white male resumes. And it’s not that we wouldn’t hire someone who’s qualified for the job. We will. But we’ll be limiting the range of perspectives that come to our team. Again, this is not about any preferential decisions in the hiring process itself. It’s about working harder to understand how our job descriptions, the way we’re sourcing candidates, the way referrals work, and all the rest are filtering out qualified candidates of other backgrounds before they even make it to us. And then once we’re interviewing people, we’re going to pick the best person for the job at the time, but doing that extra work up front, we have found and continue and find, leads to a more diverse team that is more reflective of the country that we’re in and the player base that plays our game globally.”
Not sure how I feel about this. Saying you want the most qualified candidate but that you have to check their ethnicity before accepting someone is not the same thing.
They’re also saying they want to represent not the games playerbase in the workplace but their ideal playerbase. What does that even mean? And why?
14 Likes
It’s always great to see privileged old white men slamming the door shut on their own kind
Gone are the days of hiring people that were most qualified for the job.
Now it’s about ticking all the boxes for gender and “race” (no such thing but people still act like there is).
32 Likes
In reality that never was a thing. Qualified people have been overlooked for decades. In Blizzard’s case they underpaid and refused to promote a whole group of qualified people. They also assaulted and harassed them.
A lack of diversity isn’t the root of their problem. It’s poor management and just not caring about anything other than their quotas and the bottom line. You can see that attitude in the games they produce.
They don’t care about their employees anymore than they care about their customers.
13 Likes
It’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between a white guy and just a guy… 
The white males must be stopped
The complaints about the “Evil White Males” is laughable, of course you’re going to get a lot of resumes from a majority in the country that gravitates to tech jobs.
It’s been known for decades that white man/asian men make up the majority in the tech industry/gaming community. There’s no conspiracy it’s just some demographics prefer other careers.
This thinking of “We must discriminate in order to have diversity” is crazy talk. You cannot fight racism with more racism.
40 Likes
Blizzard already showed they discriminate. I doubt the majority of those cube crawling, butt grabbing drunks were the best and the brightest.
4 Likes
Well at least we got some kind of pseudo admission that he’s kinda terrible at what he does.
5 Likes
The saying of “Give someone an inch and they’ll take a mile” is correct. By letting a few of the crawlers get away with what they did they created a culture of acceptance for the behavior. Had they squashed it on the first incident there would have been no issues.
I worked for a company where we had a similar problem except it was some from the LGBT area, they were harassing other employees and nothing was getting done because people from HR and Administration were buddies with the people doing it. They’d be cat calling new hires, making nsfw convos and if someone complained would get hit with a discrimination threat write up. It was absolutely nuts.
3 Likes
That’s exactly the point. Blizzard doesn’t care about “diversity” or fairness or even maintaining a safe work environment. THEY DON’T CARE. Getting sued doesn’t suddenly make them care - all it resulted in is a ridiculous PR scramble. All the platitudes and the gestures and speeches don’t change a thing. They’re a greedy company that only cares about their bottom line. No one believes they’re actually concerned if their employees are discriminated against or harassed or assaulted as long as they don’t get caught.
Seriously, all one has to do is look at the way Blizzard treats their customers and their game to understand exactly what their attitude is. Holiday events bugged from start to finish without a word, remnants of the retail client allowed to persist all through Classic and now TBC without a word, servers languishing while they rake in $$ for transfers without a word, and on and on.
And then they come up with this “council” of hand picked players to listen to. It means nothing, just like Bobby’s little speeches and paintings of fruit. It’s a PR stunt and frankly, insulting.
8 Likes
Says something about the type of person who assumes that anyone other than non-white males is not going to be qualified rather than assuming that they will be increasing recruiting efforts to attract qualified non-white males since they are known for having a discriminatory work place.
Wonder why they just automatically assume minorities and women wont be qualified.
3 Likes
No idea. Maybe they have the same mindset as the people who think not hiring white males will somehow improve the work place or assuming hiring white males are an issue. It seems a lot of people have issues with assumptions and “looking good to the public” over simply hiring good people.
3 Likes
Having no white males would be the antithesis of diverse. No one proposed such a thing.
It’s absolutely no secret that this industry has a long history of discrimination and harassment. Qualified women and minority applicants are routinely passed over, often losing out to less qualified males.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-silicon-valley-so-awful-to-women/517788/
There is a long and documented history of unequal pay (even when assuming a bigger workload) harassment, being passed up for promotion (even with stellar performance reviews) in favor of lesser qualified males, and outright hostility.
This is all documented fact. The tech industry is notorious in that regard.
https://www.cio.com/article/3516012/women-in-tech-statistics-the-hard-truths-of-an-uphill-battle.html
Now I don’t believe for a second that Blizzard is at all interested in treating their employees fairly or respectfully. But when a company that has a long history of discrimination in hiring and promoting comes out and makes a statement that they’re going to look at changing all that, it’s ridiculous to hear a bunch of white males shrieking, “THEY TOOK ER JOWBS!”
Like NOT discriminating against a group of people is suddenly discriminating against another group. It’s silly.
3 Likes
It’s just a way for them to do more PR. Though this type of PR almost always backfires or just out right fails. Seems like they should consider adjusting the PR staff as well to help them figure out what to actually do.
