Blizzard and the “Blizzard Way”
E3 at Facebook here. Just completed an onsite at Blizzard Entertainment. A few of my interviewers mentioned the “Blizzard Way” regarding the culture and how fast things move at Blizzard. One person said it would take 4-6 months to grasp the Blizzard Way and that they generally work at a slower more methodical way to ensure their projects are absolutely epic. Three questions: 1) Would love to hear from some blizzard engineers about the Blizzard Way and if they agree things move slower? I’m looking for a better work life balance so will this be nice or will it be super slow? 2) I’ve heard Blizzard offers don’t include equity (RSU’s) unless you’re at the director level or above? Would like some insight into the bonus structure as it appears comp = only base salary and bonus? 3) what’s the company morale like? Generally good or does it depend on the team and manager like most places? Thanks!
Probably depends on the product, but expect to work in the middle of the night for their epic downtime maintenance windows.
Run far away. Game studios are not meritocracies, and have super emotional film, media, and art people without too much business acumen in middle management.
This was my experience at Blizzard
Interesting no Blizzard comments yet. Maybe this is a good example of the Blizzard Way? LOL?
1) our street address is 1 blizzard way. Don't get lost. Definitely slower paced here, almost comical at times. 2) there are salary bands for each level, they are extremely wide, and the top end isn't bad, especially for the industry. California law means the recruiter has to tell you the band for the position you are applying for. Bonuses (called profit shares) are determined by level, ranging from around 10-25% of base for most levels. These are multiplied based on your review score, impact and company/department profitability. While stocks grants are possible, don't count on them, especially as a line engineer. 3) moral varies between departments. Generally high on game teams. With some exceptions, crunch isn't bad anymore. But we run a live service which might require out if hours troubleshooting. Good luck, but to echo others you likely are coming here for the culture and passion... Not the money.
Not at Blizzard anymore, left in April after 6 years. So first of all, don’t join for the money. I was Technical Lead Principal 1 and was earning about 200k total comp. There were so many top engineers who could have been earning 300-450k at Google or Netflix earning 150-175k at Blizzard, in fact a few of my friends there more doubled their salaries moving to Netflix. Also, the leadership culture is terrible, especially if you’re in any team that isn’t making a game. Battle.net is notorious for toxicity and terrible leadership. The tech generally used across Blizzard is also super old fashioned and teams are slow to move to new fangled things like “the cloud”. Blizzard Engineering has a huge “not built here” culture which leads to trying to build everything in house like trying to build our own metrics platform versus use Prometheus and Grafana or DataDog. So a team of 30 engineers works for a few years on Blizzards own logging and metrics platform but then due to terrible leadership and toxicity half the team quite and leaves and the platform is left dead in the water. This is typical at Blizzard. Blizzard also spent years building their own in house Jira competitor (Inspector) until finally realizing how moronic the whole project was. The senior leadership is full of old dudes who got there because they used to be someone back in Warcraft 2 days and still think that unless you code in C++ you’re somehow not a real engineer. Senior leadership is terrible at recognizing internal talent for promotions and instead hire terrible external candidates. There is a huge old boy mentality. Money is super tight as of this year and there is zero transparency into promotions and merit increases. Only directors and higher get stock but no worry, the stock has been doing shit anyway. HR claims salaries are competitive compared to similar companies but it’s a complete fantasy. Everyone at Blizzard talks about the “blizzard tax” you pay for working there. It used to be worth it because the culture was fun but in recent years they have massively clamped down on parties and drinks at work. The culture is nothing like it was in 2012 or so. It’s basically just another tech job except with worse pay and pictures of orcs on the walls. My recommendation, stay away unless you’re on Overwatch team which is the only team with a decent culture. Do not, I repeat, do not, join global insights, battlenet, or corporate applications.
This explains so much about my experience there; been away a long time. There was a core group pre-WoW, but World of Warcraft diluted this clique into two camps: pre-WoW and the WoW-group. Once the StarCraft 2 / Diablo 3 years started where Blizzard began working on multiple projects at a time (losing DOTA to Riot was a huge missed opportunity, StarCraft: Ghost was a misfire), those cliques diluted further. There was a sense of pride that Blizzard built things in-house and weren't dependent on vendors; I see your argument that this is silly and not how most companies work. I know all about Inspector. I actually got upset at a party during my Blizzard years when someone said they had taken on some outsourced engineering work from Blizzard -- I didn't believe the dude when he told me. The Blizzard Way usually involves being so invested in what is being created that you don't leak, you champion ideas of quality software products and customer experience, polish and iteration to perfection, but also to a degree that I would say is detached from reality. Diablo 3's development, speaking only as a witness, seemed like a team that didn't know what kind of game they wanted to make and were throwing things at the wall to see what stick for years. Having been away from the company for so long and seeing how the rest of the tech industry (and the real world) works, it does seem almost cult-like being there. They hire true believers, which is to say people who don't have any frame of reference and buy-in fully to what Blizzard is selling, but that may have changed in recent years.
Just out of curiosity, why would you leave fb to go to blizzard? Are you actually going to be developing games? From what I heard several years ago, most game dev shops (incl blizzard) are pretty poor when it comes to comp, wlb with frequent death marches.
The folks at Blizzard were saying they are going through some big growth cycles over the next 3-5 years. Looking to add 800 to 900 more engineers alone across Blizzard/Activision/King. They made it sound very stable as people have been there 20+ years. FB is a great company, don’t get me wrong. Good pay, great benefits, but I thought I’d like it more. I don’t use FB myself, I use IG to post pics of my food and my dog every so often but for the most part look at it while on the can. FB has high stress levels and the bar is set high for performance and contributions. I see people working themselves to the bone here. Not saying that’s bad, just not what I want at this stage. Tell me more about these death marches?
It’s mostly hearsay so take it with a grain of salt. I don’t have much more to add other than that game dev is generally very toxic, so will wait for people from blizzard to chime in. Why not move to Google / Msft or the ilk if you want wlb? If you’re passionate about games blizzard makes, that’s a different thing but even then it’s probably not the right financial decision.