Blizzard

Cutting Edge software development (roughly a new thing here at Blizzard).

Amazing staff and peers. You will feel like a family with your team, and Blizzard has tons of team-building events on most teams. Some teams are excluded from this by personal preference.

Great and competitive pay for the SoCal area. It's not what you could make at a non-gaming company in SEA or SF, but it's definitely good for Irvine (engineering perspective only).

Profit sharing is awesome. Everyone at Blizzard gets profit sharing if you are a full-time employee of Blizzard. The closer you are to games and the more seniority you have, the higher your share will be, but everyone gets something!

On-campus classes to learn and expand your skills. This has been growing now for some time, with more and more classes becoming available.

Tons of swag, access to Activision games as well, and being a part of the numerous Activision/Blizzard events hosted by the companies.

Large corporation politics: You will need to play nice and play fair, but also play the political game. Mostly meaning that knowing and befriending the right person can generally secure you a promotion. Hard work doesn't go unnoticed, but can be overshadowed due to nepotism or relationships.

The numerous amount of teams and lack of alignment between game teams, services teams, and web and mobile teams can make it hard to know what is what. This also makes it difficult to incite change or purpose change due to the sheer number of dependencies needed.

Your personal growth within the company can be a bit of a confusion. Most of your managers don't really understand growth within the company or your path for promotion. Most people will tell you to speak to your manager, but the managers themselves fail to understand the organizational structure, halting you dead in your tracks. If you want to climb the ladder here, be prepared to do your homework and proactively look for opportunities; they won't come to you.

Upper management needs to teach lower management how to incentivize employees to get promotions or raises. Lower management doesn't understand this process, as it can be very complex.

Ben Kilgore, keep working on aligning all of the teams in terms of technology and development practices. We have a long way to go, but you're killing it on getting us there.

Mike, start incentivizing people to come up with quality game ideas. Currently, there is no way for people to present ideas at Blizzard, which forces them to do this on their own time. This ends up costing or losing Blizzard talent, ideas, and potential revenue.