Amazing Company, with amazing growth, and the opportunity to be apart of a gaming company that cares about its players
Pros
Cutting Edge software development (roughly a new thing here at Blizzard) Amazing staff, and peers. You will feel like a family with your team and Blizzard has tons of team building events on most teams. Some teams are excluded from this by personal preference. Great & competitive pay for the SoCal area, not what you could make at a non gaming company in SEA or SF but definitely good for Irvine (Engineering perspective only) Profit sharing, this is awesome, everyone at Blizzard gets profit sharing if you are a full-time employee of Blizzard. The closer you are to games and the more seniority you have the higher your share will be, but everyone gets something! On-campus classes to learn and expand your skills, this has been growing now for some time with more and more classes becoming available. Tons of swag, access to Activision games as well, and being apart of the numerous Activision / Blizzard events hosted by the companies.
Cons
Large corporation politics, you will need to play nice and play fair, but also play the political game. Mostly meaning that knowing and befriending the right person can generally secure you a promotion. Hard work doesn't go unnoticed, but can be over shadowed due to nepotism or relationships. The numerous amount of teams and lack of alignment between game teams, services teams, and web and mobile teams, can make it hard to know what is what. This also makes it difficult to incite change or purpose change due to the sheer number of dependencies needed. Your personal growth within the company can be a bit of confusion. Most of your managers don't really understand growth within the company, or your path for promotion. Most people will tell you to speak to your manager but the managers themselves fail to understand the organizational structure. Halting you dead in your tracks! If you want to climb the ladder here, be prepared to do your home work and proactively look for opportunities they won't come to you.
