Former Blizzard Manager Opens Up About Being Fired for Protesting Ranking System
World of Warcraft Classic co-lead software engineer Brian Birmingham has claimed he was terminated from Blizzard for protesting a forced employee ranking system.
As first reported by Bloomberg, Birmingham sent an email to his former colleagues saying he was terminated after revealing his intentions to resign instead of deeming certain staff members inadequate to fill a quota. Birmingham said in a Twitter thread (below) that he didn't share the email himself but "[believes] the quotes are accurate".
The "stack ranking" system asks managers to rank their employees under different labels, with the poorer "developing" status potentially affecting bonus money, raises, and promotions in the near future. Birmingham claimed that Blizzard managers, under parent company Activision Blizzard King (ABK), were forced to place 5% of their employees in this "developing" category.
I wasn't intending to make this public, but apparently its in the news already, so I'd at least like to set the record straight. I am no longer an employee of Blizzard Entertainment, though I would return if allowed to, so that I could fight the stack-ranking policy from inside.
Birmingham said he refused to drop some staff from a "successful" category to "developing" in order to hit this quota, and also refused to work until the policy had been revoked. According to his email, Birmingham was later terminated after speaking with HR.
"This sort of policy encourages competition between employees, sabotage of one another’s work, a desire for people to find low-performing teams that they can be the best-performing worker on, and ultimately erodes trust and destroys creativity," Birmingham wrote in the email."
He added: "If this policy can be reversed, perhaps my Blizzard
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