I was trying to wait for lab zero to get more internal resolution on this before I went public, but now that has started talking about it, I'll share with you the statement I made in the company slack when I cut ties with lab zero almost two months ago.
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There's a lot of specific stuff in there because this was dealing with the then-new allegations of sexual harassment Mike Z made in DMs - that's better covered here: dotesports.com/fgc/news/skull
But I want to talk about something more than that, the idea of the "toxic genius"
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Mike was someone you had to tiptoe around, and everybody on the team knew it. He held any feature hostage by virtue of whether he felt like working on it. He'd spend days working on something unrelated because he wanted to do it, while necessary features languished.
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It was HIS engine, and he was the lead engineer, so no matter what anyone else wanted to do, even a lead, it would only get done if you convinced/argued/pleaded with him for enough days in a row for him to begrudgingly, sadly, do the work while complaining in your DMs.
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This kind of behavior is coddled and accepted in so many companies. "That's just how he is, you've just got to learn to work around him." But I can't accept that. We had someone like that in my company in the past. He's gone now, and we rewrote everything he did in two months.
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With lab zero, you had one of the most diverse teams in games, bar none, all being held hostage by one toxic white man who would make sexual comments about his teammates, insult their children, scream at people, and not do the necessary work if you didn't "treat him nicely."
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That's why I cut ties with lab zero in june/july. I stand in support of and whomever else you may see in the coming days. Lab Zero is undergoing a coup by Mike to fully take over the company and push out the diverse crew that everyone else so carefully assembled.
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I hope lab zero survives! But with mike at the helm I don't see how that is possible.
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BTW I want to make sure people understand - Mike didn't just do two bad things. The stuff that came out publicly was the latest in a pattern of behavior that was tiptoed around within lab zero for years, and finally came to a head when people outside the studio learned about it.
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The pot has been boiling over for some time now, happy to see people are going public. Cheers on your decision.
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The more news and visibility we give this the more we can show people that Mike is not a stable individual and hopefully things can go back to normal.
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