Thread by @Atrix256

Folks! I'm leaving Blizzard. My last day is the 17th. As it gets closer I'll talk about where I'm going to. I think it's fair that they be treated as separate events.

Some things about my 7 years at Blizzard...
I worked 1 day of crunch in those 7 years.
Joined SC2 just in time to get a check in to heart of the swarm before launch. Shipped Legacy of the Void. Shipped Heroes of the Storm. Worked on Diablo 4 (added blue noise!).

The last 2 years or so, i've worked on a shared game engine group with a ton of really smart folks, and spent 1.5 of those years as the solo rendering engineer? My boss was working on the abstraction API, i made the PBR model and tech sitting on top of the API.

Being the solo rendering person making a graphics engine for a multi billion dollar company was kind of a trip, but no more than it was running starcraft in visual studio, or making gameplay changes in a game played by millions of people, and in crazy serious tournaments hehe.

The solution to all of this mentally was to just not think of it like that. You do the best you can do, be meticulous (as you should always be!) and it's sort of a "don't look down" situation.
A strange side effect of having such a huge player base was that low repro rate bugs

happened really commonly. That meant you had to sort out "is this a bug, a cheater, or bad ram?"
Third party tools became a lot less reliable too, for the same reasons. We needed source code for as much 3rd party code as we could get to fix these rare edge cases ourselves often.

Starcraft 2 was a deterministic sim that also supported user generated content, which means as you made changes, or fixed bugs, you had to preserve old behavior. Often a refactor could only happen if you preserved the bugs, so better to stack it higher :P

A thing that really threw me a curve ball was i was SURE the tech at Blizzard had to be better than anything i had ever seen before and had so much respect for the programmers, i was a little scared to be honest, despite coming from WB/monolith/11 years exp.

I don't remember how long it took, but i did eventually realize that no... the tech is strong where it needs to be (*cough* server things for one!), but literally was held together with chewing gum in many places less critical. I was surprised.

I learned that the secret to making great games is not the tech. The artists, designers, content creators are seriously what make Blizzard great IMO and frankly, they are the people who make ALL games great. Give these people respect, enable them to succeed, do whatever you can.

Blizzard is the only place I've ever worked where people from the bottom to the top genuinely cared first and foremost about making great games. I never saw or felt pressure to bend to the wills of the market or similar. The company truly lives by it's core values.

core values: blizzard.com/en-us/company/…
Someone else that surprised me a bit about working at Blizzard was that each game team is in many ways ran as it's own company within the larger company. The cultures are different between teams, and individual experiences are different too.

I (with nearly zero business experience) really think this is a good model for a large company. You don't end up in a situation where if one team fails the company goes under. Multi-cellular organism. What do i know though? haha

Like forest gump says "That's all I have to say about that"
Maybe more later.
In any case, whatever is in the news, the stock market, etc. Blizzard is a great place to work, I seriously recommend it.
They are hiring for all positions basically:
careers.blizzard.com/en-us/openings

Oh PS, that "things held together with chewing gum" thing. It would not work without the herculean efforts of QA. I didn't forget all my QA friends, you guys are the real unusung heroes <3