Blizzard

The everyday employees at Blizzard Entertainment are fantastic people to work with.

They work hard and play hard. The one thing that kept me here was the people. A lot of fun times were had here.

Management needs some work. They don't really know, or care to know, what projects are happening at the lower levels of the company. This causes frustration at the lower level, as those workers are worked extremely hard for long periods of time and are sometimes not doing it on the clock.

There is just too much to do with no time to do it all. I knew quite a few people, myself included, who worked 60+ hours a week (only reporting 42-45 hours) with no help or care in sight from upper management. The workers did it because they love their job and wanted to help their teams. Management only wanted to get more and more done with less people and no extra headcount.

Their pay was lower than other companies are paying. They bank on the fact that people want to work at Blizzard.

For any sort of advancement in the company, you have to compete and be compared to your peers. Sometimes you have to look for people from different disciplines entirely if there are no others in your realm of practice. This causes some people who performed well to be lowered in their evaluation because HR only allows so many of each of the higher ratings. This was brutal on some teams where everyone was overachieving.

Your evaluation also affects your profit sharing and your annual increase, so even if you perform at a high level, if your whole team does as well, you would likely be lowered to "meets expectations" or lower in some areas. All due to their ranking system being built to compete against your teammates for any sort of meaningful increase or promotion.

Please take time to see and invest in what your workers are doing. Take time to inform yourself on what projects are being completed by your reports and their reports.

If you're asked for feedback, please give it honestly.

More transparency in moving up in the company. Many people want to move up but are being held at a lower level for no reason, or for management's lack of time and knowledge of what their workers are doing.

Fight for change in promotions and the entire evaluation process. In its current form, this is terrible for morale, as well as makes it hard for teams in which everyone works well and at a high level to get any sort of meaningful raises and/or promotions.