Pros
- Excellent Team: Most people I work with are the best at their jobs I have worked with. Everyone from engineering leads to talent partners to recruiters to product owners to project managers - No jerks policy works: most engineers are smart AND easy to work with - Highly Collaborative: open culture of constructive feedback is truly in effect, and you are expected to contribute - People Read the Docs: If you write documentation for your work, people generally read it and give feedback on it - Truly a gamer culture: people are passionate about good games from top to bottom - Lap of Luxury: Working at Riot is an experience in luxury - great food, great coffee, amazing facilities. Its almost too much
Cons
- Large scale is stressing Traditional Riot Values: Riot is now a large-ish company, and its bottom-up, gamer-first culture is under stress. These growing pains are going to hit the long-timers pretty hard in the coming years - Innovators Dilemma: After years of focusing on an incredibly successful product, finding "what's next" is difficult and slow. Many Rioters want to do something new, but the culture and the structure of the company don't make it clear how to make that happen - No Clear Leadership: Highly collaborative culture is great, but its far too time consuming to create horizontal alignment for every decision, including massive strategic pivots. This is changing, and the internal management structure is starting to become more top-down/hierarchical. Most of Riot considers a Bad Thing, but in my judgement, its a necessary step to take the company to the next step. - Non-financial decision making: Riot pretty much NEVER considers money when making decisions. This leads to a lot of difficult to understand priorities. Again, the new leadership is starting too look at normal considerations like ROI and margin when making decisions. I think its a good idea, but talking dollars and cents is jarring to lots of long-time Rioters. - Not Invented Here (NIH): A lack of monetary accountability and some degree of engineering over-confidence allows engineers to re-invent the wheel a lot more often than than necessary