Working at activision blizzard? ATVI
How’s the experience of working at ATVI? Culture? Wlb? Changes after acquisition? #tech
As a customer who watched them destroy Diablo 4 and a software engineer who understands the shitty leadership practices and culture that lead to those types of shortcuts… probably not great I have no actual insight to provide though. Maybe it’s actually great
Morale took a big hit post acquisition with layoffs of many roles that were very much still needed. As JiggleFold (lol) posted, most of that work didn’t go away and now everyone is having to carry the extra weight. We lost some top performing people who moved to teams that happened to get cut, so it wasn’t based on stack ranking in most cases, it was brutal. Aside from the layoffs that happened and fear of additional layoffs, the culture has been good and seems like it’s going in a positive direction. There is definitely some culture shock but it looks like there might be some more transparent and open leadership.
The integration post-acquisition is still ongoing so things are a little weird. More people on my team got laid off last Monday so things aren’t quite stable yet. As you might expect, the work those people were doing is not going away, so most of my team is just getting extra work, more hours, for no extra pay. All that being said, the culture (at least for Blizzard) is good, and I really enjoy working on the things I work on, with the people I work with, but not everyone shares that sentiment.
Any of this related to AI in any way?
I have heard (but can’t confirm myself) from some folks that our Customer Support team being downsized is due to AI but that’s it. Certainly nothing on my team. We aren’t even allowed to use most AI tools.