- *Very* Cliquey.
- QA is a literal garbage fire and treats anyone without a manager/director title like they are plebs.
Some examples of how QA are treated badly:
1) I was brought in as highly experienced hire to build a new department. The only other hire in QA was a QA Manager. The QA onboarding staff made a specific point that it is not acceptable to come into work smelly/dirty, and if you did, there are showers on campus, so there's no reason not to.
Not only is this insulting to present in any onboarding, but it also reinforces the stereotype that QA employees are just garbage pulled in off the street. Not a great first impression.
2) Be prepared for the Directors/managers to disagree, and the employees reporting to them to get caught in the middle.
3) QA has *no* real say in how the games are developed. You are expected to write up bugs, then defer to the dev and production teams. They'll make all the decisions from there. "Quality Assurance" in name only.
4) During my time there, Blizzard finally realized that embedding QA with the dev teams was a great idea! But only after they were forced to do so because the QA building almost collapsed and they had to relocate the staff.
5) Some managers and directors have no respect for LGBTQ employees. Some management in my department, after 2 years, still spoke about a transgender employee using the wrong pronouns. When confronted about it, they blamed it on you, instead of taking responsibility.
6) Blizzard makes all employees work over the Blizzcon weekend, supporting the show. This isn't so bad, except that literally everyone else in the company is given the opportunity to choose where they want to support the event except QA! I was told every time we were to sign up that the spots for QA had already been decided, so there was no need to sign up. We were told we had to man the demo floor because "we know the games best", even though half the time they would put you on a demo floor area for a game you'd never even seen/played before.
7) The company is *very* apprehensive to work together across teams. It's a fight sometimes to even get QA personnel across teams to share information so they can learn from one another's mistakes and improve as a whole.
