Activision Blizzard reviews

I have never been a part of an organization so utterly lacking in culture. The San Francisco office is a morgue. Leadership does not interact with anybody, preferring to lock themselves in rooms all day, "solving" problems the company does not care about. The politics and self-importance are horrific and disgusting. It is remarkable that anybody is still there, and I heard regularly from my peer group that those who do stay do so purely for financial reasons (the pay is competitive outside of equity). The leadership team has no chemistry, the president is out over his skis in terms of experience, the marketing team is full of people who have no prior marketing experience, the product team has never actually shipped a product, and the sales team is embarrassed by the products that they bring to market. Most importantly, the division is not a priority to the company, but a sideshow that they wish to see revenue from, but otherwise wish would disappear. It is remarkable that the division has yet to be shut down.

1) Blame culture trickling down from the top to the bottom: You're always in fear of reporting issues as you'll be the one who gets reprimanded and questioned "How!?" and "Why did you spot this only NOW!!?". This results in people trying to cover up for each other and hide issues from management. There's a strong focus on blaming the people not the process; If the process is extremely prone to human-error then humans must simply not make errors. Meanwhile, the process will never get re-examined, because senior management will say "This is how we've done it for years" 2) Low autonomy combined with low trust results in a micro-management heavy culture: Politics between different departments with QA inferiority complex, once you join as a lowly QA peasant, you'll always be looked down upon by management as a QA peasant no matter how far you make it. 3) Extremely low-tech: For a leading video game publisher, Activision (Dublin) is at least 5-8 years behind in technology. Be prepared to relive the spirit of the 90s with emails and excel sheets used for nearly everything. No investment in tools whatsoever. 4) Complete lack of transparency from the senior management: Decisions involving you will be made at a top level and will not be communicated or explained to a peasant such as yourself until the last minute, this will not change even if you become a team leader. 5) Compensation is consistently below the market average for nearly all roles: Be prepared for unprecedented levels of stinginess no matter how well the company is performing financially.