All-Hands Meeting at Blizzard Entertainment Undermines Concerns and Frustrates Employees
Blizzard Entertainment President Mike Ybarra spoke to employees in an all-hands meeting over zoom yesterday, addressing a number of controversial subjects including stack rankings, reduced profit sharing, and the upcoming return to office mandate which would end three years of work-from-home policies. A report by Game Developer relayed quotes attributed to Ybarra, as well as additional context added by a Blizzard spokesperson after the fact.
Stack Ranking EmployeesThe practice of using stack rankings to evaluate employee performance came to public light after Classic WoW Technical Lead Brian Birmingham left the company in protest due to refusing to give out an undeservedly low employee evaluation in order to fill competitive stack ranking quotas required by executive leadership. Citing it as an unfair practice which pit employees against one another, Birmingham followed up by saying the policies originated from the problematic influence of Activision Blizzard, rather than Blizzard Entertainment leadership specifically. Despite those comment seemingly absolving Blizzard and its leadership, however, President Mike Ybarra took a different line — purportedly downplayed the concerns raised by Birmingham:
Game Developer Frustration apparently began to boil as the Q&A went on, particularly during a conflicting back-and-forth discussion of how the company «ranks» worker performance. Ybarra reportedly downplayed comments made by lead software engineer Brian Birmingham, who criticized the company's use of a «stack-ranking» policy that he claimed would force him to punitively rank an employee whose performance he found to be satisfactory. Blizzard's spokesperson told Game Developer that Ybarra did not directly reference Read more on wowhead.com
