Translation: we rig and we really don’t want leaks

Simple questions have simple answers. When someone asks the most simple company development question “shall we add more employees”, there is no place for other answers than “Yes!” and “The added work wouldn’t be worth it.” There is a reason that most companies remains small. Then comes the lead developer of League of Legends and spits out bullshit, paragraph after paragraph, like he’d be writing War and Peace.

His first paragraph is just offtopic. It’s obvious that the hiring process will take time and new hire will take time to learn his job. This is not a counterargument to hiring any more than “but we’d need to give him salary” or “he needed a desk that costs money”. Oh wait, he says just that in the second paragraph. He kinds of hints the real answer too, we’ll get back to that.

The third paragraph is centered around how devs prefer to work in small, familiar teams, which is totally irrelevant. Of course employees prefer a friendly team instead of a huge structured office! Show me a single guy in the World who doesn’t!? But employees all around the World are still working in large factories and huge offices filled with small cubicles, filling out reports to a structured management because that’s what they are paid for and that’s what the organization needs.

The next paragraph is true, but again irrelevant. If you’d have extra employees, you would probably wouldn’t send them to fix some obscure thing. You’d send them to reinforce the team working on the current priority. So do it! Finish those tasks faster! If there is organizational overhead (you can’t send 1000 painters to paint the same room faster), then you should form a new team working on another aspect of the game or the website or whatnot. If you consider that “some neglected feature of potentially marginal value”, then just declare that feature dead and don’t fool around. If you won’t send your B-team there, you will surely not send your A-team!

Now the true answer is lying somewhere in the second and the last paragraph:

Riot strives to measure what we work on in terms of gamer impact. But what that means can be really open to interpretation — it’s not something that is easily summed up in an employee handbook. Instead, it has to be learned by working alongside folks who already get it. The faster you grow, the more that ratio of folks who already get it gets diluted.

…

You wouldn’t want to hire someone just for a three-month project and then fire them again. Some companies are fine with that approach (a lot of Hollywood still works that way), but Riot really wants to be a place staffed by lifers who want a long-term career here, not hired guns who jam out a project and then move on to the next gig.

We are talking about a job. Employees are hired guns. Drawing a tree or managing the website or doing data mining isn’t a moral choice that one would do as a volunteer, nor they are specialized tasks like working on a spaceship. One can literally draw a tree for Riot today, just to draw trees or rocks for an animated movie tomorrow. A data analyzer seeking connections between Singed use and Singed skin purchases can quit today to work on a political campaign where they need someone finding connections between Facebook shares of the main agenda item and sending money to the campaign. I gladly accept that you can’t hire a lead developer for 3 months or write his job in a handbook but you should be able to do these for “infantrymen” and “non-commissioned officers”.

What is this secret knowledge that can’t be written on the handbook or trusted on a 3-months hired gun? The rigging! League of Legends market itself as a non-pay-to-win e-sport, while in reality your win is mostly depending on recent purchases. Sure, I accept that a really good player can rise above this and top games are not rigged (especially as they don’t use the matchmaker but have pre-selected teams), but for the 90% playing in Bronze, Silver and Gold leagues, most matches are won or lost on loading screen, because buyers need to be rewarded. This is what Riot doesn’t want to share with too many people. This is what they don’t want in writing. This is what can only be shared to those who prove to be “fit culturally”, meaning “doesn’t have moral problems lying to millions for some bucks”.