Pros: Decent pay, stable company. In this economy, these are strong foundations. Riot is a real business with millions of real, passionate, even fanatic users. They have grand visions for the future, where the Riot universe will stand 50 years from now alongside what Marvel is doing. This vision is impressive, if risky, but they have deep pockets and real profits to generally back it up. You can make an impact. Your work there can affect millions in dramatic ways, even within a week of being there. How many companies can offer that? They ship often and mix month-long initiatives with "just found out about this a day ago" issues, so odds are you can find something interesting to work on. You can probably go anywhere, as the company is pretty flat. Pretty much any perk you want is subsidized for you and your SO (gym, food, massages, trips, movies), along with all the caffeine and sugar in any form you could ever want to drink. It's a bit like a private college campus in feel. You'll generally be surrounded by passionate, competent people. Prepare to be inspired, and others to go out of their way to help you on your way if you ask nicely. A strong social culture. I'd say familial, except you'll rarely get to know anybody that well.

Cons: Interviewing and onboarding was for me a borderline hazing ritual, and the day-to-day, if you're doing anything worthwhile, means frequently getting kicked in the tenders. May want to bring a helmet and a sports cup. High friction environment: expect to spend 30% of the time in meetings (including wrangling meetings so they don't overlap). If you're on the front line, 30%-60% of the time fighting complicated forest fires that weren't visible the day before, and much to management's horror, defy any ability to plan or change their ways, despite attempting so. The culture of Riot is young, arrogant, and narcissistic. It feels like a pro sports team that just won the Super Bowl three years in a row, does things in a particular way, and now is attached to that way of doing things, even if, like the ham butt problem, they don't really make sense on a grand scale. Pretty much every part of Riot is under the crisis of turning a rusty bus into a shiny 747 in a year or two, with paying people never getting off, and the vehicle never stopping, moving 24/7 worldwide. And to make things complicated, that 747 is already deprecated in anticipation of a spaceship capable of interstellar drive, but is a decade away practically. That identity crisis leads to many at Riot being their own worst enemy when actually getting stuff done. The work turning a rusty bus into a 747 can be ugly, challenging, and unforgiving. Having millions of live users means every weak link is stressed and often breaks, and even innocuous things can have drastic consequences in live production, impacting millions of users so severely they picket the offices. Issues can be six layers deep of locked black boxes that take months to understand enough data to find out what is causing them, if you can even get data on them (it's a rusty bus, remember?). There are often a half-dozen languages and a dozen esoteric systems to make any part work. This continued effort wavers between a turn-on and a grinding treadmill. Expect at the end of the week to be pretty tapped, and your SO probably not very understanding why you're a vegetable on the weekends and don't want to do anything. The process of managing the work (almost one-dimensional Jira and walls of post-it notes) is often a poor fit for what the super-complicated and rapidly changing projects need. Riot is exceptionally flat, and often it feels like there are 12 people collectively driving the bus at any given time, each with their own agenda, and in some cases, shouldn't be driving anyway. Day to day, expect to spend a lot of time juggling competing, conflicting priorities. Between 'blue sky, cost is no object' and 'this was supposed to be done last month, what's the minimum we can do?'. Everyday is like ER triage: do we cut off the left arm or the right one? Is the heart attack or the 3-car pileup more important? Meanwhile, other high-priority tasks starve and rot on the sideline. There is sort of an ADHD with projects half-started or half-fixed and never cleanly finished, and long backlogs where poor project managers, every few months, continue to ask for help with no response. Riot likes to throw people at and sometimes under problems. Be expected to be treated as a cog that can be placed anywhere at any time. Month by month, you will meet new people, and then a month later, you or they will move, and you'll rarely see them again. If you're good at what you do and fit well in the machine, expect to either be there doing the same thing forever to the point you dislike it, or be quickly overloaded and split focus so things are hard to manage, and pretty much everybody there is heavily loaded, so don't expect most things to go smoothly or sensically. As Riot is a social-political machine, it's not enough for you to do a good job; to be successful, you have to sell it to others. If you get a project that doesn't fit into clean department lines, prepare to get squished. This extends especially to projects that are outsourced, set up to fail, started often without much planning (at least architectural), or continued oversight, and end up in crisis as they are tried to be integrated in a rush, and end up having huge issues, requiring everyone to dogpile on. While the intent for many of these features is to be player-facing, I often saw designer/developer thinking very egocentrically, running amok, leading to leaping ahead without looking, then in the end often throwing away months of work and red-lining people for months in the process.

Pros: Teams are truly cross-functional. Because you know everyone on your team is a rock star, it's easy to value and engage everyone's opinion. Everyone here is a gamer. There is no hate for other gaming companies or products. We like good games, and we want to make them and play them. If you are tenacious, honest, and talented, there is a ton of room for career growth, even in the company's post-startup phase. It is not easy or automatic, but the opportunities are there. There's a very entrepreneurial vibe here. See something that needs improvement? Start having conversations and make it happen. There is an open PTO policy, and I am constantly encouraged to take more advantage of it. There is a lot of intellectual desire to be good about work/life balance, but people do get caught up in the presumed importance of what they are doing and forget not to crunch. Sometimes crunch is even necessary, but I've never been on a team where this was true for extended periods of time. In short, Riot wants to have good work-life balance, and the tools are given to everyone to achieve that, but most of us fail to achieve it.

Cons: Because it is highly entrepreneurial, Riot can be an uncomfortable place for people who are not assertive and proactive. Alpha-type dominant personalities have a strong advantage here, and though efforts are made to include less forceful sorts in decision-making processes, they are still often left behind. No one is going to pick you up and put you in the awesome promotion you want. If you want to grow, talk to everyone about it, get allies, get mentors, and shadow people. Be the primary owner of your own growth. It's not likely that anyone else will do this for you. We're still dealing with growing pains and haven't figured out the most effective ways to function at the scale we are at. There is some disorganization, missteps, and overcorrections, but there is also an intense desire to improve and fix those underlying issues.

Pros: - Riot provided housing that was right next to the office (a five-minute walk). - Weekly lunches with important people from all across the company; got to meet people like LCS casters, executive sound producers, directors of engineering, project managers, etc. - Worked on important project(s); treated like full-time (gave presentations in front of the whole company, had 100% say in any type of planning meetings, got whatever benefits full-time Rioters got). - Met amazing people; everyone is willing to help if you just ask. - Work-life balance is encouraged; they didn't want me to be stressed out, so they made sure I played games and took breaks. - Lots and lots of swag.

Cons: The internship program is not structured very well in terms of managing interns. According to most of the interns, Riot was very slow at getting back to them about how the interview process was going, and even later giving out the job offers. Some interns even talked about how their manager didn't know what to do with them. Most of the events were pretty good, but other companies do it better. There needs to be a dedicated team that focuses on hiring interns, ensuring everyone has something to do, and setting up intern events.