Blizzard

Working at Blizzard is undoubtedly fun. Out of the thousands of employees, there will be awesome people that you can clique with and create your own niche. For me, it has been connecting with the few people that "get it," are highly visionary, and don't put up with the corporate nonsense. These are life-long connections that shouldn't be taken for granted.

The on-campus gym is another fabulous place for this.

This is purely from a QA perspective, but from what I gather, there are similarly unfortunate organizational practices in other departments.

Too much of an old boys club thing going on in management. I believe this stems from several core reasons. For one, there are very few valid metrics in evaluating performance, so both personnel and project management become a trust/friendship/lets-just-have-a-good-time orgy that favors conformity and obedience over truly amazing work. QA in the game industry is very behind other software testing, so the standards are already quite low.

Second, I think this stems from the types of personalities within the organization. Gamers hiring other gamers turns into a very incestuous, fear-driven, sometimes even anti-social, approach to solving problems. To be agile, one must first dig into themselves, challenging who you are and what you are. Insecurity acts as a barrier.

I am on a very awesome team that is trying to incorporate software testing practices into our daily routines, but management does more to impede our progress than to empower. Why should we accept sub-par wages when we're the ones trying to up the level of professionalism?

Pay attention to what teams are cutting edge and will be defining the standard of the department. Blizzard QA is better than many other game companies, but that doesn't mean it should stop improving.