While the reason he stood up was justified, the minute he pushed back against HR in such a blatant way was really the reason for him being fired. You don't say "me or ____" without accepting the fact that it could be very well you who gets the axe. HR literally had no choice -- they couldn't change policy.However, I am sure that Brian did everything that he could up until the point where he put down his ultimatum. Hopefully, this gets enough publicity to cause Blizzard enough embarrassment to change the policy, but Brian is not going to get his job back. :(
green tea company.
Even microsoft and amazon, apple etc all have went away from stack ranking for the exact reasons he said. Its a %^&*!ic system overall and doubly so for a creative company like blizzard is supposed to be.
Not that he'll ever read this but that's integrity, decency and courage of the higher order.Huge respect for this guy, I wish more people (I wish I) had his strength of character.
This is a win for him, great values as a human being. It absolutely does lower team morale and these dumb executives need to learn how a business is run cause lately they have a lot of losses.
It is nice he stood up for his beliefs, but unfortunately, this will only flag him as someone who doesn't tow the company line. A lot of businesses use this model or a version of it even when they say they don't. My company of over 18k employees uses needs improvement, solid performer, role model, for the eval system and if you give someone a role model with the ensuing pay/bonus bump, even if it is .5%, they will force someone to be a needs improvement and take it from them. It all comes out of one bucket and someone has to lose their share to pay the top performers.
This is a symptom of the real problem, which is corporations. Good luck not giving your money to one.
As a software engineering manager myself, this is flawed from top to bottom. As stated, this promotes toxicity within the team. It seems as though the execs at Blizzard cannot fathom a world where the full team meets expectations. The role of a quality team lead is to help your team reach their goals, not to hinder them or undermine their efforts because of a quota. This feels like the first "L" from Blizzard in a little while.
Let's hope he will return.
I love comments, like yes, it is not a perfect system but it is better than some systems. And if you are going to stop playing wow over it, make sure to also: watch what food you eat, no longer buy any larger manufactured purchase, use no electronics.... ect ect. It is a very common practice to not over overpremote peoples ego, it's to bad that despite there being obvious areas in classic dev doing much better, he refused to give the honest feedback some people needed and it showed by repeating mistakes.
Blizzard is really not the real old Blizzard in 1995.Only care about money and reputation from $$$$$
Good on him for supporting his employees, but I personally won't miss him as a lead for classic, didn't like his ideals on what classic should be.