Riot Games

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.

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.