Pokémon Go creator Niantic accused of ‘systemic sexual bias’ in lawsuit | Hacker News Reader

Pokémon Go creator Niantic accused of ‘systemic sexual bias’ in lawsuit

theverge.com

15 pointsjakubmazanec20 comments

> she learned that Niantic was paying a male colleague more money even though she had a higher job title and more responsibilities than he did.

I've been in this situation too, as a guy. Actually, it's been like this for much of my career. I just suck at negotiating these things I guess – having grown up working class and fairly poor (by European standards) I generally feel lucky to get paid over median wage at all, and not all that confident negotiating for more. It's something I've worked on, and perhaps need to work on some more.

I guess what I dislike about stories like this is the implicit assumption that it has to be about sexism. Of course I can't really say anything meaningful about Niantic specifically; maybe it is a horribly sexist company, or ... maybe not and just your run of the mill "pay as little as we can get away with" type of company, which seems to be more common than not.

Maybe we should be talking about fair compensation for everyone, so that being very assertive and highly confident is no longer a requirement, no matter if you're a guy or gal.

And IMHO companies will benefit too; do you think my efforts increased or decreased after learning that the guy who literally cannot program a single line of code got paid 50% more than me? Or that I stuck around for a long time after the umpteenth attempt to get my salary up-to-standard after 3 years and having proved myself to be one of the more productive people in the company?

And I don't even care about the salary all that much; I'm easily satisfied on that front. I think lots of people don't really care about the number as such, but it's the "I'm doing loads more than this guy who is getting paid a ton more" that gets people riled up.

I know a guy from a small city in Morocco who is paid considerably more than his colleagues simply because he is efficient, delivers and he'll be hard to replace if he would move on. All those points are powerful when negotiating.

So I don't think it has to do anything with class but attitude and knowing your worth.

Different people are different, in spite of having similar backgrounds. I don't really know my own workings just as most people don't, all I know is that I'm horribly insecure about these sort of things and generally consider being paid above median (>~€40k) to be "lucky", whereas I see many others complain about their significantly higher salaries shrug.

> what I dislike about stories like this is the implicit assumption that it has to be about sexism

There is nothing implicit about this, she is expressing very clearly that this is about systemic discrimination across gender lines. Aren't you making the implicit assumption that the reason why women are paid less at Niantic, is because women are just "naturally" bad at negotiating? This is an argument used by misogynists to dismiss the pay gap, that it always must be something else because there is no such thing as sexism.

So no, sexism is actually real, it exists, it is a real thing that is a problem that we should solve.

> "A former Niantic employee filed a lawsuit [..] alleging that it devalued the work of female employees and women of color, denied equal pay to women employees and women of color."

> Aren't you making the implicit assumption that the reason why women are paid less at Niantic, is because women are just "naturally" bad at negotiating?

Well, I explicitly and clearly stated "I can't really say anything meaningful about Niantic specifically; maybe it is a horribly sexist company". All we have is a single case of a single person being underpaid. That doesn't really prove much of anything, much less "systemic sexism".

Either way, giving women all sorts of tools and methods to address wage inequality and giving men none and telling them "sucks to be you", based on the average that women get paid less (and averages say NOTHING about individual cases), doesn't strike me as a good path forward.

> The executives in the meeting also allegedly said her job evaluations were affected by her discussing workplace issues with her colleagues and said that she was paid below the range because she had raised concerns with her colleagues.

I guess they used a time machine to set her compensation based on complaints she only raised after the fact.

It’s a very confusingly written article, but I think that means that after several years there and some promotions and pay raises, the executive in question used that as a justification for why her pay at that time lagged other coworkers.

I still don’t understand how Niantic botched such a killer lead on Pokémon Go. When it first launched they were making millions _per day_ and somehow couldn’t scale to keep the servers alive.

Not only that, there are so many other franchises they could’ve applied the same game mechanics to and made additional hit games.

I'm amazed I never heard of the games outside of Pokemon and Ingress

Did you know they have NBA, Pikmin, and Peridot (whatever that is) games?

(Also they apparently developed a now shutdown Harry Potter game)

They also have Marvel and Monster Hunter games coming out this year.

I don't find their game loops fun, but damn do they have amazing IP partners

Terrible advertising too. I never heard of any of these besides Pokemon Go and Ingress.

Niantic was never about the fun and games, it was about the data. Look at their funders.

I don’t really feel like spending my Saturday doing some nebulous research project. Can you just tell me. Who are the funders and why is that relevant?

https://kotaku.com/the-creators-of-pokemon-go-mapped-the-wor...

From the article:

The CIA’s venture capital investment firm, In-Q-Tel, took a particular interest in Keyhole. According to a 2003 press release, within two weeks of In-Q-Tel’s investment, Keyhole’s tech was implemented to support Pentagon initiatives in Iraq.

In-Q-Tel’s leader at the time was Gilman Louie, a video game industry veteran who’d designed or produced a handful of flight simulators, including the Falcon series. Louie, who currently sits on the board of Niantic and whose venture capital firm is a major investor in the company, has had a decades-long relationship with Hanke, apparently fueled by their shared enthusiasm for mapping and augmented reality. Keyhole also proved seductive to Google, whose cofounder Sergey Brin led the initiative to acquire Keyhole for a reported $35 million in 2004.

According to basic Google searches, their revenue is literally higher now than 2016.

Now they have less than 1/3 of the active users compared to then, but their revenue is closer to 1bn then it was then.

It does seem like a failure because they were so popular and culturally relevant at their peak, whereas now I don't hear about them at all. But, I still think they are printing money and have one of the best "outstanding data collection to the public" apps ever

I saw some analysis by a Pokémon YouTuber that they thought Niantic were doing it intentionally because they're planning to launch their own competitor soon which they could make more money on because doesn't use the Pokémon IP

That wouldn't make a whole lot of sense, they already had Ingress. They were based in the same maps (at one point people were using knowledge of Ingress to find secrets in Pokemon Go).

It really was only because of the Pokemon IP it did/does so well.

They already did, it's called Peridot, launched in May and as you might guess it seems to be an expensive failure.

Monetization and a stubborn refusal for fun. Leadership their opted for "health" and engagement (even if negative) over exciting gameplay and quality of life improvements. Some of the best features of the game were bugs or unintended.

I still play occasionally, but I know quite a few people that still play every day, most of them are paying.

I think if you compare it to other fads they are doing quite well. I doubt fidget spinners and slap bracelets were making as much 7 years later.

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