Microsoft laid off 1,900 employees yesterday, many of them at Blizzard, the developer behind WoW, Overwatch and Hearthstone. A former electrical engineer who describes his career on reddit tells us what it feels like to be laid off.
These are the hard facts:
The technician’s dream was to work on a Blizzard game:
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Left a well-paying job to start working as a temp at Blizzard
An employee describes this fateA technician who worked at Blizzard for 13 years tells us on Reddit what a layoff looks like in practice.
The man says he has loved Blizzard since 1995, discovered Warcraft 2 back then and had the dream of one day working for Blizzard on a gaming team.
In 2011, he earned more than $100,000 as an electrical engineer, but left the job to join Blizzard for $11.50 an hour as a low-level technical quality assurance employee.
He quickly realized that this wasn’t a dream job. The tone when dealing with him as a temporary worker was rough:
Nevertheless, he loved the company and fought his way through.
Great teams, great colleagues and cool work
How did his career continue? The technician says that over the years he made a name for himself at Blizzard and prevailed. Superiors took notice of him, recognized his quality, and promoted him, while he himself spent his weekends pursuing further training.
The pay and the jobs got better, although the pay was never really great, but the teams he was allowed to work in became more and more competent and cooler. So he became QA Lead.
However, he then fell too far up the career ladder and ended up on the Blizzard Cloud team, where he felt completely overwhelmed. Now he wanted to switch to the “Blizzard Classic Games” team, but that wasn’t possible because there were too many gaps in the cloud team. Employees had resigned from Blizzard due to poor pay.
So he had to stay in the cloud team and deal with all the geniuses who hang around there and ultimately found new inspiration and motivation for his work in the competence of the employees there: He now wanted to catch up with the top people there.
In any case, the man has a great deal of respect for the technical competence of the employees at Blizzard: There were many brilliant minds working there, and he was always amazed at how their brains worked.
Strokes of fate throw him off course, then the call comes
When did the break come?? The technician says he received good reviews until 2023, but then strokes of fate struck the family. He had switched to working from home due to Covid and other life circumstances and was now spending more and more time caring for sick family members: his brother had a stroke, his father was dying, his mother suffered from dementia.
The technician spent more and more time finding a nursing home for relatives, talking to doctors, and finding a nursing home. 2023 turned out to be a hellish year for him.
As a result, his absenteeism increased and now he was caught in the layoffs. He says:
“I think I’ve been away from work too much. I was called into a call this morning and was told I was being let go. I just cried in the room with my dogs. It’s so pathetic, I know, but I really wanted to work at Blizzard all my life. I never made it into a gaming team, I don’t know what to do with my life now, I find it hard to imagine working anywhere else. I feel like I’ve been wronged, I’ve had the hardest year of my life and I was just starting to recover from it and now I’m being fired.”
This is the reaction: Many are moved by the story of the man who loves Blizzard so much.
Another Blizzard employee says: He was also fired after 12 years. He doubts that the dismissal had anything to do with the technician’s performance or his absences. He had some friends who worked on the survival game Odyssey and they were absolutely amazing. Real pillars of the company. And they were fired too:
Blizzard’s secret survival game has been canceled – employees should work on other projects
The cover image is a symbolic image from Pixabay.