Re:Riot Games is violating California employment law
by tomnipotent on Saturday June 11, 2016 @04:50PM
(#11885258)
I respect Zed for his many contributions, but this is among the most ridiculous diatribe I've read all year. We'll ignore the whole at-will and protected class thing which is all that matters (legally).
> Their use of statistics to bucket employees into “reprimand” or “fire” buckets is incredibly dubious
Do you really think HR looked at some bin graphs and said "Ok lets fire these aholes!".
Software helped surface specific data from a larger data set based on specific rules. This was then reviewed by humans - remember them? - that decided some examples of behavior were so horrible that they felt compelled to confront specific individuals. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt [1].
> ... using data based on their behavior without their knowledge
Anyone have a Riot employment contract handy? Even if it doesn't explicitly mention data collection, I'm willing to wager the LoL terms of service has it covered. Every employment contract I've at looked at in over 15 years in tech has had some sort of clause around data collection/monitoring being an open option. Does it give me the Orwellian chills? Sure. But it's not illegal or unethical. Some industries like finance are legally required to in many situations. Boo hoo.
> I’ll bet you $100 the second this study was discussed all the managers went and deleted their history.
Riot centrally logs chat deemed (subjectively) toxic. Middle managers at a company this size do not just walk up to someone with production access and ask them to delete data in a complex system, especially not en masse.
From the original re:Work article:
> Riot identified the 30 most toxic employees (all of whom were more junior Rioters, new to the working world)
> While these logs did factor into the exits of a couple employees who had already had serious problems
Let's set some context. Smart folks at Riot had a hypothesis that ended up identifying 30 out of some ~2,500 [2] employees (~1.2%) by legally analyzing chat logs. Riot discovered, unsurprisingly, that all of the employees identified happened to be new to the workforce and the company and used this opportunity to meet with them individually to work out a plan to improve their behavior.
Unfortunately a "couple" with past incidents were let go. The question is whether or not these specific employees would have been terminated if not for this hypothesis. Bigger question is what Riot will do so that the problem doesn't escalate to this level again (new hire orientation sounds like a good start).
Great job Riot for using human process and technology to try and make a workplace better. Poor job re:Work for over-romancing the software involvement in the process and turning an awesome example of work place improvement into a bad PR puff piece on "people operations", and worse job Zed for turning this into an emotional appeal of fear of an authority state. "But what if they use your chat logs before you worked there?! Or recorded headset audio?" It holds as much intellectual merit as the mob responses we see when Facebook or Instagram make changes to how stories are sorted. Sorry pal, I've lived in California too long waiting for "the big one" to buy into world-ending FUD.
> Their use of statistics to bucket employees into “reprimand” or “fire” buckets is incredibly dubious
Do you really think HR looked at some bin graphs and said "Ok lets fire these aholes!".
Software helped surface specific data from a larger data set based on specific rules. This was then reviewed by humans - remember them? - that decided some examples of behavior were so horrible that they felt compelled to confront specific individuals. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt [1].
> ... using data based on their behavior without their knowledge
Anyone have a Riot employment contract handy? Even if it doesn't explicitly mention data collection, I'm willing to wager the LoL terms of service has it covered. Every employment contract I've at looked at in over 15 years in tech has had some sort of clause around data collection/monitoring being an open option. Does it give me the Orwellian chills? Sure. But it's not illegal or unethical. Some industries like finance are legally required to in many situations. Boo hoo.
> I’ll bet you $100 the second this study was discussed all the managers went and deleted their history.
Riot centrally logs chat deemed (subjectively) toxic. Middle managers at a company this size do not just walk up to someone with production access and ask them to delete data in a complex system, especially not en masse.
From the original re:Work article:
> Riot identified the 30 most toxic employees (all of whom were more junior Rioters, new to the working world) > While these logs did factor into the exits of a couple employees who had already had serious problems
Let's set some context. Smart folks at Riot had a hypothesis that ended up identifying 30 out of some ~2,500 [2] employees (~1.2%) by legally analyzing chat logs. Riot discovered, unsurprisingly, that all of the employees identified happened to be new to the workforce and the company and used this opportunity to meet with them individually to work out a plan to improve their behavior.
Unfortunately a "couple" with past incidents were let go. The question is whether or not these specific employees would have been terminated if not for this hypothesis. Bigger question is what Riot will do so that the problem doesn't escalate to this level again (new hire orientation sounds like a good start).
Great job Riot for using human process and technology to try and make a workplace better. Poor job re:Work for over-romancing the software involvement in the process and turning an awesome example of work place improvement into a bad PR puff piece on "people operations", and worse job Zed for turning this into an emotional appeal of fear of an authority state. "But what if they use your chat logs before you worked there?! Or recorded headset audio?" It holds as much intellectual merit as the mob responses we see when Facebook or Instagram make changes to how stories are sorted. Sorry pal, I've lived in California too long waiting for "the big one" to buy into world-ending FUD.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity [2] https://www.linkedin.com/company/riot-games