Pros
Riot is an incredible place to work - you are surrounded by smart, passionate people who deeply care about the experience of players and who share an ambitious vision of making gaming better for gamers. Engineering really is trying to push game technology to the next level, and that is an incredibly rewarding challenge. Micromanaging is not really a thing at Riot - teams have the liberty to decide on how to meet their goals and are generally free to choose their own path. If you can handle the ambiguity that comes from having a goal without an externally-imposed instruction set, this is incredibly empowering. If you can't, you will fail. Benefits are pretty darn good - both in the form of standard benefits (health insurance, 401k matching, etc) and in the form of less standard perks (the new office occasionally feels like nerd Disneyland). The space we work in now is incredible, and the people who work to make sure we have a great place to work probably deserve even more praise than I can give them. The problems we work on are incredibly fun - the scale we need to support and the expected level of quality we need to hit mean that you have to stay on your toes and keep growing. If you are the kind of person who loves to rise to a challenge, and finds difficult problems their own reward, you will love this. If you aren't, Riot isn't for you.
Cons
Ear Flicks: * Riot is very loud, which can be disruptive to work. * Meeting culture can be kinda lax, which is annoying if you are not lax yourself. * Living in Los Angeles More Substantive Cons: * Riot is most certainly not for everyone - you have to be incredibly comfortable with ambiguity, capable of self-management, and able to handle your own growth. You will have management, but they will be hands-off. If you can handle that, you will succeed, but if you can't, you will fail. * There isn't enough middle-management to go around. Managers are overtaxed and have too many reports, which means that individuals own even more of their own careers than was perhaps intended. * Inter-group (particularly between teams and initiatives) trust seems low at times, which is weird, given that trust is one of the cornerstones of Riot's values. * Things get done slowly - not from lack of hard work or proper prioritization, but because the core technology we work with was not built to sustain the level or kind of use it actually has. Scaling out to support the massive number of players we need to support at the level we want to support them at makes even simple problems into hard problems. Efforts to pay down tech-debt and improve our base scalability continue to improve our iteration speed, but lots of work remains. This can be really disheartening, because players often feel that we aren't working hard enough, aren't working well enough, or just don't care about them, which is as far from the truth as you can get. For me, personally, nothing hurts more than feeling like the people we do this for aren't getting what they want. * Pay isn't great - it isn't horrible, but if Riot really wants to recruit Google level talent, we need to shell out Google level money - and we don't. Most of that is probably the inherent lower pay that people in the games industry receive, but that shouldn't be a constraint we accept. * You own your own work-life balance. That sounds like a pro, but for lots of Rioters, that just enables them to have terrible work-life balance and not correct it. Teams and management need to do a better job of setting the expectation of reasonable balance. * Living in Los Angeles... No, but seriously - LA is expensive as heck to live in and has infrastructure that seems like it hasn't improved since the 1950's. Riot is the only reason I am willing to live here.