Once upon a time I was working on a procedurally generated interactive narrative system that would create conversations and intrigue in the open game world based on innate talents and subculture affiliation of NPCs and the player.

My boss’ boss’ boss said he loved it, as did many others. But, he wanted us to push it so that instead of it being a safe space for collaborative crafting the goal of the game would be to psychologically manipulate NPCs to get what you want. Gross!!

I asked him to coffee and mentioned that I was working on a presentation to help him get into the headspace of what young women in our target audience want but I realized that was a waste of his time and mine and it would be better if he could trust my team’s implicit expertise.

We talked for a while and everything seemed fine. Then shortly afterward my boss came to my desk near the end of day and said that he (not my boss, the other dude) wanted a production update the next morning—an end-of-milestone update they we were supposed to do in two weeks.

This was nonsensical — weirdly gaslight-y — and I refused to stay late to make a nonsensical presentation of the work we weren’t done yet. My boss helped. In the morning, our boss didn’t want to see the presentation. He just wanted to show us he could make us jump.

He wrote to circles on the whiteboard. In one he wrote “AI” and in the other he wrote “Vogue”. And he said, this is what is wrong with your game. These two things don’t go together. Women want Vogue magazine, not deep, rich character systems.

In the same meeting he said several other weirdly ignorant, questionable and illegal things about gender and women and me and my team. He calmly and clearly one after the other targeted my work, my credibility, and my position and then walked out of the room.

I spoke with an executive directly afterward and discovered that this man had taken credit for my project before he was involved in it. I started to ponder leaving because this was all so wildly childish and didn’t bode well. I didn’t want to abandon my team to this situation.

A few days later at the company party three of my bosses, including this man, harassed me in a way that scared me so much that I silently left the company. Many people know but no one has ever apologized or been held accountable.

I have friends interviewing there now who have reached out to me recently to ask what I think. What the recruiters are telling them is either wishful thinking or dishonest. I tell them what I honestly think, which is that it would be a good opportunity and to watch your back.

It somehow becomes my burden to make them feel morally okay about working at that company when they know what they know about what I and many others dealt with.

I was the first he pushed out in that department. I heard that he eventually pushed out pretty much everyone in similar roles and sunk his own department. Imagine being that insecure and squandering that much opportunity. It makes me sad every time someone asks me about it.