November 04, 2019
Mason Sciotti ’15 merges English, computer science majors at Discord in San Francisco
By Vicki-Ann Downing
Mason Sciotti ’15 works as a product manager for Discord, the voice, video, and text app that allows video gamers to communicate while playing. He was an English major and computer science minor at Providence College, graduating as co-valedictorian with a perfect 4.0 average.
“I’m not analyzing much literature these days, but I am communicating with people, taking in a lot of information and figuring out what’s important, doing research, thinking critically, and forming opinions based on that,” Sciotti said.
Sciotti was hired as a technical writer at Discord in May 2017 after responding to an advertisement on the company’s website, leaving his job at a software company outside Boston and moving across the country to San Francisco. As product manager, he leads a team of two engineers and a designer to anticipate what the company needs to develop next and how to make it happen.
An original user of Discord when the app launched in 2015, Sciotti believes in its value as a communication tool. Discord allows him to play games with his friends no matter where they are in the world and to stay in touch.
“A lot of technology and social media is highlight reels of people’s lives — ‘I had this great meal’ or ‘I went on this wonderful vacation.’ You’re comparing yourself to others, and it can be very isolating,” Sciotti said. “Discord is a place where you can talk to your friends at the beginning and end of each day to celebrate successes, talk about failures, discuss a play that won you a big game or the bad breakup that just happened. It’s about being with people you care about in a place that’s very much yours.”
Every evening after work, dinner, and chores, Sciotti logs in to Discord to connect with friends who live on the East Coast and in Missouri, Alaska, Japan, and Germany. He met them through gaming, mostly World of Warcraft, which he has played since he was 11. He has even traveled as far as Europe to meet them in person.
“These are people I talk to almost as much as anybody else in my day-to-day life,” Sciotti said. “Sometimes the game is secondary. It’s like the conversations you have while you are kicking a soccer ball or watching Netflix. You meet under the pretense of playing a game together. Going online to talk is a commitment you make to them, to be there at a certain time each day.”
Sciotti, who grew up in Rumford, R.I., and North Attleboro, Mass., figured he would become an English professor or high school teacher. But his interest in video games was incorporated into his college experience right from the start. He was one of a few “extra nerds” who brought a gaming computer to campus. In addition to being a writer and editor-in-chief of The Cowl, he wrote for HighGround.TV, a blog about competitive gaming.
In the summer of 2014, Sciotti went to Seattle to cover the International Dota 2 Championships at Key Arena, where 10,000 spectators watched teams compete for $1.6 million in prize money. He even worked his interest in video games into his senior English thesis, “Narrative Theory and Thematic Drivers in Video Games.”
When he interviewed for jobs with employers after graduation, those offering positions that suited his English major questioned his programming degree, and those advertising programming jobs wondered why he majored in English. Sciotti looked for a way to incorporate both and found it with Discord. He was one of its first employees.
“I started out as somebody who understood technology and could talk to people, both engineers and non-engineers, and find a way to get things done,” Sciotti said. “Now my role is to figure out what’s most important for us to work on next, to make it better for the people we care about, and while it’s being designed or built, to help our people get through the process. We have one big thing going all the time and a lot of little things.”
Joining the company is one of the best decisions he’s made, Sciotti said.
“The startup environment can be tough. When you’re trying to build and manage a product that has more than 250 million users, and you’re doing it with a team of less than 200 people, there’s a lot of work to do all the time,” Sciotti said. “I haven’t been bored in two years.”
