Tuesday, February 22, 2022

Make Your Mark in the Gaming Field

6 comments:

  1. I'm intrigued by the request for a personal photograph from applicants for the Design/Production Staff Member position. I can't think of a really good reason why they would need that, but I can think of a few bad ones...

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    1. It's actually illegal for US employers to request a personal photo from you, primarily because of potential discrimination issues. But that's in 2022, and this ad was from when, 1979? The laws were different back then and there was certainly no internet, so no effortless searches for social media history, LinkedIn profiles, conviction records, etc. It's possible that asking for a photo so they could establish you were actually the person they'd been corresponding with when it came to a personal interview was acceptable behavior. Need someone about ten years older than I am to testify on that subject - my first resumes went out in 1988, and sure didn't include photos because no one asked.

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  2. "along with a personal photograph", mmm, what? Do you look like a game designer? I have to think about this...

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  3. Game designers could've been the new rockstars!

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  4. Born in 1969, but from listening to older relatives my understanding is that photographs were not an unusual expectation into the 60's and lingered into the 70's. I think by 1980 a picture would have been an uncommon expectation. Since Gygax was born in 1938, he may have still been hiring like it was 1960.

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    1. That was my thought as well. Digging into it further, there are a whole set of anti-discrimination laws that make it generally illegal to ask for a photo, with a few exceptions for jobs like acting or modeling. They started coming into place with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1967 Age Discrimination Act, and the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 pretty much drove the last nails into the coffin. The Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 expanded the protections even further. These days making an illegal photo request will get the EEOC on your case if the applicant files a complaint - and they process tens of thousands of them per year, collecting upwards of half a billion in fines for discrimination.

      So, don't do that. Even Gygax was past the period when it was legal practice, although in his case I agree it was likely inertia at work rather than malice. Hopefully, anyway. Seems to me the TSR staff was awfully pale back in the day, though.

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