You know how Jeff and company are always joking about trying to Slack famous people like David Letterman and such? I guess thats how ill feel about seeing @jgerstmann and @bshoemaker show up in MY company slack. I've been a GB fan/premium sub for a long long time, and its extremely strange waking up to all of this.
The cult comment above makes me laugh. I've been an engineer at Red Ventures for 4 years now. Aside from them giving us a lot of company tshirts (seriously, its how we celebrate. something gets launched? we make tshirts. someone takes a particularly good shit? we make tshirts.) i dont really feel the desire to drink too much koolaid.
I can't speak to how these changes will affect GB at all. A. I'm just an engineering manager in a division of the company far from where Gamespot (and possibly GB?) will end up. I dont know shit. B. Even if i DID have some knowledge about the purchase, i wouldn't speak on it anyway cuz i like my job. All i can say is:
1. The company is wildly different from how the local folks think of it. 5 years ago, it was basically a marketing firm for internet companies. We ran websites, knew how to SEO like the best of them, and basically said 'we'll sell your product better than YOU can sell your product'. And we did. We have a pretty sick campus by Charlotte, North Carolina standards. Since then we've taken that 'sell your shit better than you can' mentality and realized maybe if we sell our own shit we can be better off. So we started buying our own shit. So far, this is the biggest thing we've ever done. Most of the other acquisitions (bankrate, healthline, yada yada) are doing better now than they were before. The whole call center way of business is largely being downplayed infavor of all this new stuff.
2. Whats it like to work here? Pretty damn good. I've gotten offers for more money elsewhere in the area (lots of SF tech is making satellite offices in Charlotte rn like CreditKarma and others) but I stay cuz i like it a lot. The CEO came right out and said 'no one is getting fired due to covid.' We're not getting raises, but we haven't had any layoffs. Shortly into my career here, i started tutoring/volunteering at our Road2Hire program (https://roadtohire.org/) which takes people who haven't had opportunity (growing up poor usually) and teaches them to program and then gets them jobs in the area. This past year I helped a young man go from supporting his brothers and sisters with multiple gas station jobs to a jr. developer at Bank of America. Half of my engineering staff came up through this program. And WE pay THEM a monthly stipend to do this. Our CEO (Ric Elias) legit gives a shit. Hes stupid rich, but spends fucktons of his own cash trying to make Charlotte suck less. We have a huge scholarship program for DACA students https://www.goldendoorscholars.org/ and before lockdown we were growing https://lifesports.org/.
3. When the BLM stuff hit, the company response was pretty quick and damn good. CEO himself came out and said 'we hold you to a high standard, but we've been shit to you for ignoring this'. Since then they've made major major changes to our HR policy, put a ton of money in the right hands, gave us the opportunity to help the community in the right ways (i put on a Q&A panel with the Southern Poverty Law center and it was AWESOME) and now the company itself is pushing all of us to VOTE. Seriously, its awesome. I'm black, and never in a million years did i think the company i work for would come to me and go 'JESUS CHRIST WE FUCKED UP LET US HELP' and then actually do something tangible.
I guess most of that post makes me look like im sip-sip-sippin on the koolaid. I'm not an idiot. Corporations aren't our friends. The second im not contributing i know my ass is out. THAT SAID, if i have to crank the capitalism grindstone, i dont mind doing it here.
source: https://github.com/wesleyradcliffe Me.
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