Amazing Company, with amazing growth, and the opportunity to be apart of a gaming company that cares about its players - Senior Software Engineer I Blizzard Entertainment Employee Review

5.0
Aug 30, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

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.

Explore other reviews about Blizzard Entertainment

5.0
Jun 2, 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Really great people, best and kindest in the business

Cons

Compensation is on lower side

2.0
Mar 23, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Depending on the team, you get to work with some great people. - Company events are fun and make you temporarily forget that you're still in a corporate environment. - You're near the games being released.

Cons

On the surface, the company talks a big game about being structured and performance-driven. In reality, it feels pretty chaotic once you’re actually in it. Expectations aren’t clearly defined, and what “success” looks like seems to shift depending on the week or who you’re talking to. You end up spending more time managing optics and trying to stay aligned with moving targets than actually doing solid engineering work. What makes it worse is how management handles team dynamics. Toxic behavior doesn’t really get addressed — if anything, it sometimes feels like it’s enabled. Feedback can feel very one-sided, and when you raise concerns, they’re not always taken seriously or represented fairly. There are definitely moments where the narrative about your performance doesn’t match the reality of what you’re actually doing day to day, which slowly kills trust. At a minimum, leadership needs to get better at clear communication, setting stable and objective expectations, and actually supporting both engineers and managers. Without that, even strong teams start to feel dysfunctional. Compensation doesn’t make up for it either. It often feels like decisions are driven by cost-cutting rather than recognizing real impact, which makes the whole environment feel more transactional than motivating. Overall, I wouldn’t recommend this place in its current state, especially if you’re an experienced professional looking for a stable, well-run role.

See reviews by: Helpful|Rating|Date|All