Blizzard

One of the most stable game companies.

There is room to move up, to a point. There are some truly talented people here who are awesome to work with.

Pay is great if you're on a game team and you've been at the company for a long time. It's based in Irvine. Good for the employees that have the pay and like Orange County.

The president is doing a lot of things right. Here are some examples:

• He still plays and geeks out over video games.
• He trusts game designers to do their jobs.
• He actually cares about customer service.
• He has actively taken steps to improve employee morale by conducting yearly internal surveys and business plan meetings.

The worst thing about the company is the cruft that has built up in the employee pool, aka the old boys' club.

There are some employees who were promoted to key leadership positions that may have been great workers 15 or 20 years ago, but are poor leaders.

A lot of them don't seem to realize that they were promoted due to tenure and are therefore very egotistical and stubborn.

There is a culture of not admitting you're wrong.

Making excuses is not uncommon.

The company loses a decent number of employees to this problem.

Thankfully, the president himself doesn't seem to do this as much as the rest of the cruft does.

Work/Life balance is practically non-existent.

Expect to do as much overtime as they want you to do.

Can't move up if one of the old boys is sitting in your spot.

Pay is disproportionately low for non-game team employees (web, QA, Battle.net, etc).

It's based in Irvine.

Bad for people that don't want to live in Orange County or aren't making the pay.

Keep gathering employee feedback and holding company-wide meetings to discuss the feedback. It helps a lot.

Invest in your employees as a whole instead of handing out promotions to each other at the executive and director level.

Be more aggressive about reprimanding people that aren't doing a good job. Get rid of some of the existing cruft and avoid building up more cruft.