Blizzard Entertainment reviews

The management playing favorites and making your life hell if they don't like you. Customer support being treated like crap by higher levels in the company.

Competition to leave CS is fierce, which means that it can take many, many years to get promoted or to switch departments, especially in the Austin office because of limited departments/options. While Blizzard hires internally a lot, leaving Austin means having to move to California, where cost of living is enormously high and wages are not offset sufficiently to make it feasible (imo). Blizzard says they pay based on cost of labor (not cost of living), but they seem to really lowball highly skilled people. They seem to live on the nerd factor, where people are lined up to get a job and are willing to get paid less just to work for Blizzard. This ultimately hurts wages because they can get people for cheaper, have them do more for less, and they are unwilling to leave because it's Blizzard. Latin America departments are paid a differential due to language skills, but differentials don't often carry to other roles. This means that getting "promoted" can lead to a significant loss in salary. Once management has an opinion of you, it is very, very hard to get them to change that and progress in the company can be halted because of one or two very influential managers. Some managers also play favorites and trash talk previous employees. Even though Blizzard as a 0 retaliation policy, fear of retaliation/lack of change is still very strong if this is brought up. Managers aren't always consistent in regards to what is important - some are very data driven and micromanage, others prefer a more broad view type of coaching. Shift work that isn't affected by your ranking, which means you can be an awesome employee, but get stuck with a terrible shift for a year until the next shift change. Reversely, also mean that some terrible employees get great shifts, or some people manage to get repeatedly good hours or weekends, while better workers don't.