Blizzard

Blizzard does an amazing job of curating its company culture and trying to keep everyone happy and healthy. Benefits are amazing, both the usual 401k/Medical/etc and the perks. Several times, management rented entire theaters to give employees free advance screenings of new movies.

I worked in QA, and Blizzard treats its QA better than any other studio in the industry. If you love video games, I doubt you'd find a more like-minded company culture anywhere else.

Extremely long hours when under deadline, which is about one-third of the year. Located in Irvine (may not be a con for everyone).

The tight-knit company culture also breeds a large amount of clique-ness that is hard to break through at times. During my employ with the company, the routes to promotion out of QA were shut down or frozen, although I've heard good things about the times before and after.

In the QA department, information is passed through word of mouth primarily, instead of being written down. In my opinion, this is massively inefficient, although it does help breed a sense of camaraderie.

This is to the QA management, since my experience with the rest of the company's management was limited and satisfactory. I like the move to provide supervisors to each QA analyst, but I felt that they spent more time being friendly sounding boards than providing advice and guidance of substance.

Work harder at identifying people who would be good in leadership positions, instead of pushing the people who simply express continual interest in the positions. While the promotion system you have currently works well enough, I saw several people placed in leadership who simply got there by being friends with current leadership/interviewers, not based on merit.