Blizzard Entertainment Reviews

Pros

-Employees bleed passion. They embrace the 8 core values wholeheartedly and live and breath it.
-Opportunities for learning and growth. The company has grown quickly over the past few years and there are opportunities beyond just game development! eSports, Consumer Products, Story and Franchise Development and more.
-Limited hierarchy, everyone pitches in and has a voice, and focused on meritocracy
-You can be yourself. You don't have to be a gaming geek, there are foodies, pet lovers, table top gamers, tinkerers and so many other interests that you can share with others

Advice to Management

-Never forget the roots of the organization, the creativity and focus on quality, but realize that we need to catch up in certain areas as well

Pros

Incredible legacy of delivering epic entertainment
Can feel like an extended family

Advice to Management

Keep focusing on the people. Including those in remote regions.

Pros

Really passionate staff, who are all friendly and easy to talk with. Some of the products are the best in the business and they care about the fans.

Advice to Management

Look at your leaders performance and behave more like a professional company. Look beyond the game teams with regards to culture, it's a big organisation and not everyone is a developer. It takes massive support to launch and maintain the games but it seems only the game teams (maybe HQ staff) are looked after.

Pros

Managment is top notch. People are nice and work as a team. Very transparent and really do stick to the Core Values.

Pros

Commitment to diversity, tight knit community, good benefits.

Advice to Management

Stop promoting technical people with a lack of soft-skills to positions where they’ll manage dozens or hundreds of people. Read up on the Peter Principle. Listen to the cries of individual contributors when they say a lack of leadership is killing previously effective teams. Learn how to hire people from the outside who will adhere to the Core Values. Hiring hostile, inexperienced candidates for leadership/management positions and then making excuses for them when turnover on a team skyrockets isn’t doing anyone any favors.

#1 advice: have exit interviews for Internal Mobility moves. People aren’t leaving Battle.Net for game teams because they want to, they’re leaving it because it’s a hostile work environment.

Pros

- Amazing people and culture
- Ability and encouragement to be yourself (within reason)
- Incredible fan base
- Lots of fun perks and swag

Advice to Management

Let me start by saying that a lot of people work at Blizzard because they want to be there. They are super passionate about the company and what they're working on. The company says a lot of good things and makes great games. They provide pretty good benefits and additional perks to sweeten the deal. But they also significantly underpay and overwork the vast majority of their employees. Most people there will gladly accept this because, hey, they work at Blizzard! But I don't think those two things should be mutually exclusive. Blizzard needs to take better care of their people financially.

There are a lot of really amazing people at Blizzard and they do genuinely care for each other, but it's never great to continually say that you're struggling to make ends meet, that you feel as if you're underpaid, and have management say they know and are working on it with no change ever taking place. It's even worse when they do implement changes that don't actually do anything but cause the new hires to make more than the tenured people training them. When leadership sends messages like "get a second job" or "you're not rockstars, don't expect to be paid like rockstars" it really hurts morale. When people are encouraged to grow themselves and their careers but then blackballed and listed as a "flight risk" for their department and denied promotions, it can make people sour.

Additionally, being at Blizzard used to feel like being at a family company. As the business has grown it has become more corporate and driven by the bottom line. Their tag line has been "Creating the most epic entertainment experiences ever" but right now it feels like it is much closer to Activision's motto of "We make games that sell". The last few years have been exceptionally hard, especially on more tenured people.

I still think Blizzard is full of incredibly talented and devoted people. I think they make really good games. I believe that they care deeply about their community and fans. But until they stop exploiting that passion for profit, I wouldn't recommend Blizzard as a good place to work.

Pros

salary, benefits, location, company, food

Pros

There really aren't many pros anymore. Blizzard used to have a real family feel, people would hang out after work together, play boardgames, have a few drinks, work late nights and not even care. It felt like we all had each other's backs, and management was trusted. Now people come to work, do the required hours and leave. The passion has been fading slowly. Now it's just a job.

Right now, the only pro is saying "I work at Blizzard." Or maybe, "we have statues in the office. "

The pro is most definitely not the pay, because it's terrible compared to any comparable tech company. Basically, if you move to Amazon, Google, FB, Netflix etc, you have a good chance of more than doubling your money.

You may get the chance (if you're on the right team) to work with good and passionate people. However, recently, the best people have been leaving engineering positions like rats leaving a sinking ship.

Advice to Management

The tech orgs need to be restructured, Battle.net is a dysfunctional and a massively inefficient mess.

Pros

Company culture is awesome and just an awesome place to be at.

Pros

You get to work with some of the best people in the industry.