Blizzard: a leader resigns to criticize the “toxic” staff evaluation system

It’s been a while since we talked about Blizzard without mentioning anything other than the takeover by Microsoft or internal concerns. However, this is not about to stop following the latest revelations made by Bloomberg and Brian Birmingham, a Blizzard executive who decided to leave the company following Blizzard’s established personnel development processes.

A toxic and biased evaluation system in order to meet quotas

Brian Birmingham had been a senior software engineer at Blizzard for 17 years until he decided to jump ship recently. The reason ? A very dubious staff evaluation method called “stack ranking” and of which Brian Birmingham was one of the managers.

Like all Blizzard managers, Birmingham had to grade its employees on a curve. Nevertheless, managers were forced to give low marks to at least 5% of employees so that they did not receive profit-sharing bonuses and were less likely to be promoted.

Bloomberg reporters investigating also on the situation revealed in particular that Brian Birmingham had been obliged to lower the note of an employee of the status “successful” to that of “development”, the lower scale, just to respect these quotas. Birmingham notably detailed the situation in an email sent to Blizzard staff.

“When the team leaders asked why we had to do this, the directors of World of Warcraft explained that, although they disagreed, the reasons given by senior management were that it was important to rush underperforming employees to ensure everyone continues to grow.

This kind of politics encourages competition among employees, the sabotage of others’ work, people’s desire to find underperforming teams in which they can perform best, and ultimately erodes trust and destroys creativity.

If this policy can be reversed, maybe “my Blizzard” can still be saved, and if so, I’d like to continue working on it. If this policy cannot be reversed, then the Blizzard Entertainment I want to work for no longer exists, and I will have to find another place to work.”

Following the publication of the quotes from the Birmingham emails in Jason Schreier’s article, the ex-Blizzard employee still wanted to come back to several elements with his own terms and a little perspective in a long Twitter thread published by him today. According to him, this quota policy is terrible and really reflects the atmosphere that can reign within the studio, but also the way ABK’s administration looks at its employees.

“At Blizzard, we pushed the envelope hard in 2021, and I truly believed we had reversed the development quota policy. When the sexual harassment lawsuit came to light later that year, we saw a certain change as a result of that as well, and we felt we could have an impact on ABK’s policies.

Realizing that there is still a minimum quota for “Developers”, despite our objections and harsh letters, leads me to believe that I was deluding myself. I hope Blizzard’s positive culture can overcome ABK’s poison, but it isn’t quite there yet.

Having explained all of this, I have no hard feelings towards my former colleagues at Blizzard Entertainment. The Blizzard that I knew and always wanted to work for is being torn apart by ABK executives, and that makes me sad. I really respect the developers I’ve worked with at Blizzard.

But ABK is a problematic parent company. They put pressure on us to deliver both expansions ahead of schedule. It is deeply unfair to follow this by depriving the employees who worked there of their fair share of profit. The ABK team should be ashamed of themselves.”

This is a new controversy that will not do Activision Blizzard any good, but the revelation of which can only be positive for the well-being of employees and the improvement of working conditions in the toxic culture that is that of the ABK group. .