Blizzard

There really aren't many pros anymore. Blizzard used to have a real family feel; people would hang out after work together, play board games, have a few drinks, and work late nights without even caring. 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, Facebook, or 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.

So many cons.

There is a "good old boy" form of leadership who have risen up to senior levels across the company because they're friends with other old school Blizzard guys. These people think that because they were involved with WoW or Starcraft back in the day, it means they're geniuses and everything they say or do now must be the right thing. However, they don't realize that the games industry and tech in general has changed, and they have not adapted to the changing times.

These guys might be good in individual contributor roles, but they are terrible at senior management. This is the "Peter Principle" in action as you watch in astonishment. Levels of incompetency that are so ridiculous it looks like something you might see in "Silicon Valley" or some other comedy show.

These guys enjoy their senior positions while making terrible strategic decisions, not realizing that huge amounts of talent is leaving the company and huge amounts of money have been wasted due to poor decision making and investments.

The pay is terrible. If you compare salaries for any form of enterprise engineering, whether it's for data engineering, backend, front-end, infrastructure, network, SRE, etc, you will earn 50% less or worse when compared to other tech companies. There is poor transparency over salaries and salary bands. Any discussion of individual salaries is deterred, probably because there are people earning 100k here who could be earning 200k+ at Google. The engineers earning 180k at Blizzard could be earning 300-400k total comp in San Francisco. This isn't hyperbole. This is the "Blizzard tax." It used to be that people were willing to pay this Blizzard tax to work at a fun and family-friendly company, the company of your dreams. Well, Blizzard isn't like that anymore, and so if you're no longer going to work at a place of your dreams, why keep earning significantly less?

Depending on your team, you could work in a toxic environment. Some teams are better than others in this regard. Other teams have a terrible reputation across the company... cough Battle.net cough cough

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