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Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

> In a letter to employees made public in October, Ms. Townsend said Activision had “exited” 20 employees and another 20 had faced disciplinary action. “We know there’s a desire to know about the outcome when misconduct is reported,” Ms. Townsend wrote. “Sometimes, there are privacy reasons we can’t share. But where we can, we will be sharing more information with you. We will also be providing you regular, aggregate data about investigative outcomes.”

They fired 20 people, not the CEO, and haven’t disclosed who it what reason these people were fired for.

Smells to me like major scrapegoating.

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> They fired 20 people, not the CEO

Oh no, he's trying to save face and trying to make it look like he fixed the issues - even though he was a participant and he allowed this culture to develop.

I might be out of the loop, but what is indicating that, this is what actually happened?

Setting culture is a large part of leadership. Most likely one of two things happened: a) the leadership was complicit in the culture, b) the leadership was too weak to prevent a toxic culture from festering.

In either case, the leadership is not fit for, ahem, leadership.

Don't forget the more likely situation of absent leadership and the resulting "Lord of the Flies" situation that results.

FWIW, I had many friends spend time at Activision. Lord of the Flies is an apt description of their internal politics.

Or leadership is new, is correcting the problems, which takes time.

Otherwise every time you replace leadership you must immediately replace the new leadership, since they too have not instantly fixed the culture.

Guessing you are talking about the general case...? Bobby Kotick is hardly "new" to the Activision leadership position. He has been there for quite a while.

Apparently the leadership's conduct is just fine for MSFT, though.

Mr. Kotick, who has served as CEO for more than three decades, didn’t inform the board of sexual misconduct allegations that he was aware of, including rape, against managers across the company.

The Nov. 16 article, citing interviews and internal documents, also detailed misconduct allegations against Mr. Kotick, including when an assistant complained in 2006 that he had threatened in a voice mail to have her killed.

Or Microsoft is looking to get rid of him and others first chance, but it's difficult and awkward to get rid of the CEO of a company you haven't actually bought yet and you need to talk to when trying to buy it. Seems equally possible.

> Apparently the leadership's conduct is just fine for MSFT, though.

A very odd statement to make when at this point all we know is that MSFT is acquiring Acti-Blizzard and very little information about what will happen to the latter's existing leadership post-acquisition.

I was "out of the loop", too - until I read the article. It's all there, just a few paragraphs down.

Even if you believe the "maximize shareholder value" line - it is the very definition of the CEO's job to prevent stuff like this from happening.

> scrapegoating

Is this a typo of "scapegoating", or a conscious neologism to indicate "scraping (the bottom of the barrel) to look for a scapegoat"...?

Like it! Scrapegoating it is from now on in these circumstances.

> Smells to me like major scrapegoating.

cough cough massive severance package cough cough

There may be legal privacy issues involved with disclosing private employment information.

I suspect that they get around that by giving a total number, no personal details. If, for instance, they gave the rank of those employees, director or above former employees could argue that they were identifiable and couldn’t hide behind the usual churn.

"They expect twenty of us in the wreckage, brother."

"Smells to me like major scrapegoating."

My bet is on security engineers and QA. If I could bet on this - I would have my money on those people being fired. Always annoying at meetings, constantly being downers /s

Why would you assume scapegoating and not firing offendors who aren't "too big to fail"?

Not disclosing a reason is the opposite of scapegoating. It's downplaying to avoid a fresh news cycle with lurid details.

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