Blizzard Entertainment reviews

Lack of care for employees, ignores most feed back. They act like the really care about you till you really need a break/helping hand. They won't hesitate to fire you when you show first signs of fatigue or weakness.

This is purely from a QA perspective, but from what I gather, there similarly unfortunate organizational practices in other departments. Too much of an old boys club thing going on in management. I believe this stems from several core reasons. For one, there are very few valid metrics in evaluating performance, so both personnel and project management become a trust/friendship/lets-just-have-a-good-time orgy that favors conformity and obedience over truly amazing work. QA in the game industry is very behind other software testing, so the standards are already quite low. Second, I think stems from the types of personalities within the organization. Gamers hiring other gamers turns into a very incestuous fear-driven, sometimes even anti-social, approach to solving problems. To be agile, one must first dig into themselves, challenging who you are and what you. Insecurity acts as a barrier. I am on a very awesome team that is trying to incorporate software testing practices into our daily routines, but management does more to impede our progress than to empower. Why should we accept sub-par wages when we're the ones trying to up the level of professionalism?