The chief engineer of World of Warcraft, Brian Birmingham, was fired by Blizzard Entertainment a few days ago after refusing to comply with the employee ranking system. Indeed, he obviously did not wish to submit negative evaluations on some of his colleagues, judging this undeserved.
Since 2021, Blizzard has implemented an employee evaluation system within the company. This consists of classifying them on a curve according to the evaluations issued by the managers. Workers who are evaluated negatively may therefore not get certain bonuses, not have a salary increase or even not be promoted to more important positions.
Not being in agreement with this policy, Brian Birmingham therefore refused to submit to it, explaining that ” this type of policy encourages competition among employees, the sabotage of each other’s work, people’s desire to find underperforming teams in which they can be the top performing employee, and ultimately erodes trust and destroys creativity. Following this declaration, he would have expressed the wish not to work until this system is reviewed. It is in particular this decision which would have earned him to be dismissed by Blizzard some time later.
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.
— Brian Birmingham? (@BrianBirming) January 24, 2023
The chief engineer made a point of clarifying on Twitter the reasons for his departure from the company, specifying despite everything that he would like to be able to work there again if he was authorized to do so, in order to “ fight the classification policy from within. However, this policy would come directly from ABK (Activision Blizzard King), from a person above Mike Ybarra, the President of Blizzard Entertainment. So it seems pretty hard to imagine anything having any impact on the ranking system, but hopefully Brian can get back to his job soon and continue his fight.
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