Ventajas
In the interest of fairness, I want to make it clear that there are plenty of great people at Riot, including some great leaders. It’s also made a great game and has made major progress in eSports which, as a gamer, is awesome. They also do a lot of superficial stuff pretty well - nice campus, perks, etc.
Desventajas
The world changes and what made Riot great years ago isn’t the case today. If one were to isolate a turning point in Riot’s culture, my money’s on the Tencent buy-out in late 2015. Company culture, which used to be flawed (as any place is) but usually good at heart has become much more “Lord of the Flies” as senior leaders are preoccupied with empire building or just completely checked out. Often you can find multiple layers of management (including the top) who have no idea what is going on and who stonewall progress because good ideas aren’t theirs. Organizational planning is more or less nonexistent which at thousands of employees means lots of redundant work and people with no real responsibility free-riding. Relatively straightforward questions of business direction are still unanswered to the point of crippling progress due to an inability to get out of a no-decision spiral. Acquisitions are poorly integrated and seem like boondoggles for our senior leaders and finance team rather than genuine ways of extending our products or reach. Leadership is unconcerned with the above and pretty content to fiddle while Rome burns, or more specifically they seem to prefer hanging out with other LA celebrities and spend their money and company resources vs. generating new business. Progress on new titles is glacial, I’ve lost track of how many times we’ve been beaten to market. The most successful use of our IP in the last seven years (honor of Kings) wasn't made by us and there has been no perspective from leadership on either why that shouldn’t have been Riot or how we’re going to meaningfully change in the future to be more successful at shipping new experiences to players. The most concerning part is the low sense of urgency even after many years of setbacks. I’ve had high-performing colleagues who have switched off of new games teams of their own volition because they were bored due to lack of work. Core gamer dogma means this place is non-inclusive as all getout. There are plenty of people who are gamers and care about games who aren't willing to invest in competitive PvP. Some of them may even have different backgrounds and ideas. Crazy, I know.