Blizzard Infuriate Devs, End Remote Work, Cut Profit Sharing Bonus, Insult QA | Hacker News Reader

Blizzard Infuriate Devs, End Remote Work, Cut Profit Sharing Bonus, Insult QA

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94 pointseffingwewt37 comments

Dropping remote work, disrespecting employees, and giving less than expected bonuses? This is how you reduce your payroll without paying severance.

This is doubly disappointing because they have recently shipped some good products and have promising products shipping in the near future.

Yes. You also reduce your chance of shipping successful products

This is Blizzard, they haven't released a decent game since 2010. Just half-baked expansions, failed attempts into other genres, and Netease partnership garbage.

Since 2010?

Dragonflight, Legacy of the Void, Overwatch, Wow Classic are all well loved games. Maybe you personally didn't like them, but objectively pass the bar of "decent"

Only overwatch's managed to become something, and it's getting its lunch eaten by Valorant. the rest are all rehashed content of old, deprecating existing IPs

Overwatch was 2016 and it was fantastic.

Whereas you can see the sheer quality drop with overwatch 2. Looks like a pre alpha release.

Overwatch 2?

Oh, you mean Overwatch 1, with the patches and balances changes we neglected to do for the intervening 4 years!

> This is how you reduce your payroll without paying severance.

Unlike with severance, your best employees leave first

They don't care. Everyone is replaceable.

Companies don’t have the concept of good and bad employees, except when it comes to layoffs. Certainly no rewards for doing well verses just shuffling along.

In this scenario the highest achieving employees will be the ones that will quit first, as they will be in the most demand and therefore have the most options.

Yeah, I keep having this discussion with random leaders and the general impression is 'if you don't like it, leave' vibe. The companies and their leadership clearly feel emboldened by the recession prospects ( I already heard 'great layoff' term ). I am annoyed by this, but a lot will depend on whether people call their bluff. So far.. all the RTO plans failed, but a lot is going to happen between now and June.

I've worked with some fantastic folks who came from Blizzard. Their descriptions of its company culture become increasingly depressing the more recent their departure.

could we get the link switched to an actual written source instead of some youtube person speaking for 20 mins?

There are a bunch of links in the video description that seem to back most of this up

20 untagged links starting with 2 other youtube videos and the antiwork subreddit, and ending with a dozen links to twitter. Much better to actually put a decent written source if you want people to actually pay attention to it, especially with such an inflammatory title.

This seems to be the most complete source out of the bunch for anyone looking for it: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/culture/q-a-with-blizzard-lead...

20min? Is that you, YongYea?

Edit: it was.

Unfortunately, it seems this is the trend now for all software jobs

Welcome to the shit show.

2017-2022 did seem too good to be true. Back to the grindstone! I hope all the people attracted to the industry enjoy coding so much they can put up with poor wages.

I don't know why this is always said here, sure there are layoffs in some huge tech companies. But thats it. At least in Germany, my LinkedIn still gets mutliple messages per Day and my Salary is looking good.

Also from Germany, and can confirm this. Recruiters are filling my inbox and are even trying to call me at work.

A friend of mine is currently working for a company that got acquired by an US investor recently and while the company didn't announce layoffs in Germany, employees won't get a salary increase this year. My friend is now in the process of leaving, obviously.

Where I live (also in the EU), I noticed a slowdown in recruiting starting on mid-December. While I usually receive at least 2 messages from recruiters per week, I received only 2 messages in almost 2 months.

However, last week things seem to be heating up again.

Slack and Salesforce just did the same thing.

Beware of working in a passionate industry. You will get treated like shit and there's nothing you can do about it. Someone else would gladly take that work for half or even free.

Other it businesses can't do this shit without suffering heavily, but game studios can because passionate works will be willing to join.

There are exceptions, but those are exceptions for a reason.

Will stick to working an easy job and putting my passion into an AI that creates games for me so companies like Blizzard’s cease to exist.

I didn’t ask to be born and didn’t sign a contract to believe a bunch of GenX and older CEOs are “powerful people” due to political status quo.

CEOs and the like can get fucked. We are not their serfs.

This is classic supply and demand doing its thing. People in passionate industries (artists, musicians, game devs) have a hard time because there's a large over supply of people who want to do it relative to less glamorous/fun jobs which creates a supply surplus, pushing down the cost of labor.

This is exactly why my advice to CS students always is – find a job writing business software. You can pursue your passions on the side, contribute to open source, volunteer or do whatever else you want, but hold on to that stable, "boring" 9-5 job like your life depends on it. Ten or twenty years later you are going to look back and thank yourself for going down this path while your peers who chased more flashy jobs are abused, burned out and have lost all passion for the art.

Why business software? As a veteran of the "software industry" this would literally be my last choice. There's nothing I hate with more vengeance than business software ;) I mean might as well go work for the government if all you want is a steady job.

I would say go work somewhere where software engineering is what produces value for the company.

Really I'd offer the exact opposite advice. Never go for a stable/boring job. You're just or more likely to get laid off from those in an economic downturn. They pay less. Less growth prospects. It'll suck the life out of you and you won't have energy for anything else.

There are a lot of good jobs out there that are interesting, pay very well, reasonable life-work balance, opportunity for growth/learning. If you're good and passionate go after those. You'll be fine in the periodic recessions and everyone will want you on their team most of the rest of the time, when the economy is booming.

EDIT: I do agree that game-dev is one of those areas where lots of people are willing to do the work because it seems glamorous. The industry has a reputation of treating software devs poorly. There's some exceptions but it's definitely in the "be careful" category. But there's lots of other options out there.

It's a good way to end up financially secure, but that may not lead to a satisfying career. If you want to be a game developer, are you really going to be happy writing business crud apps with the majority of your working energy? Not necessarily disagreeing, but with kids despite having plenty of passion for those side endeavors, time and energy are quite lacking.

I think you should try and make your passions into your career personally, as long as you are realistic about the opportunities and lifestyle.

> If you want to be a game developer, are you really going to be happy writing business crud apps with the majority of your working energy

You may not be happy doing that, but you will also not be sad, especially if your financial situation makes life tolerable.

On the other hand, you will certainly be unhappy if you were always poorly paid for your skills and were abused and exploited by your employers due to making an effort to be working in something you are passionate about.

In the world we live in, pursuing a passion job is reserved for people that come from families that already sorted their financial situation for them.

It's a bold strategy, Cotton, let's see if it pays off for them.

>Insult QA

Blizzard, if you weren't dead to me already, you now are.

Pretty much every game company has always insulted QA, it's a major problem in the industry.

Among my favorite games is Factorio, which seems to have a lot of tests:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXnyTZBmfXM

You and I zeroed in on the same section. I zipped through the video and found the pertinent part[0]. It's not so much an insult as it is unequal treatment for QA (which...is an insult). QA makes the world spin though. Never a good idea to take them for granted.

[0]https://youtu.be/NVDpaqFLD24?t=158

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