“He was fired after 13 years at Blizzard.”

Microsoft laid off 1,900 employees yesterday, many of them at Blizzard, the developer behind WoW, Overwatch, and Hearthstone. A former electrical engineer describing his career on Reddit tells us what it feels like to get laid off.

These are the hard facts:

The technician's dream was to work on a Blizzard game:

I left a well-paying job to start working as a temp at Blizzard

One employee describes this fateA technician who has worked at Blizzard for 13 years explains what a layoff looks like in practice Reddit.

The man says he has loved Blizzard since 1995, discovered Warcraft 2 at that time and dreamed of one day working for Blizzard on a gaming team.

In 2011, he earned over $100,000 as an electrical engineer, but left the job to join Blizzard for $11.50 an hour as a low-level technical QA employee.

He soon realized that this was not a dream job. The tone of his treatment as a temporary worker was harsh:

• His boss told him “I hate you” when he made a joke about Apple
• The manager also made fun of a colleague who had diabetes
• Another manager was also a real ass, he cheated on his wife, started an affair with a Blizzard employee, got her pregnant and then dumped her when she was 8 months old

However, he loved the company and fought his way through.

Great teams, great colleagues and great work

How did his career continue? The technician says that over the years he has made a name for himself at Blizzard and won. His superiors noticed him, recognized his quality, and promoted him, while he himself spent his weekends pursuing further training.

The wages and jobs improved, although the pay was never great, but the teams he was allowed to work on became more efficient and cooler. So he became the QA lead.

However, he fell too far up the career ladder and ended up on the Blizzard Cloud team, where he felt completely burned out. Now he wanted to switch to the Blizzard Classic Games team, but that was not possible because there were a lot of holes in the cloud team. Employees quit Blizzard due to poor pay.

So he had to stay on the cloud team and deal with all the geniuses hanging out there, and eventually he found new inspiration and motivation for his work in employee efficiency there: now he wanted to catch up with the best people there.

However, the man had 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.

Blows of fate throw him off track, and then comes the call

When did the break come?? The technician says he received good reviews until 2023, but then fate struck the family. He had shifted 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 had a stroke, his father was dying, and his mother had dementia.

The technician spent more and more time searching for a nursing home for relatives, talking with doctors, and finding a nursing home. 2023 turned out to be a hellish year for him.

As a result, his absenteeism has increased and he is now stuck with layoffs. He says:

“I think I walked away from work too much. I was called in for a call this morning and was told I was going to be let go. I just cried in the room with my dogs. I know it's pathetic, but I really wanted to work at Blizzard my whole life. I was never able to join “Gaming team. I don't know what to do with my life right now, and I'm having a hard time imagining working anywhere else. I feel like I've been wronged. I've had the hardest year of my life and I'm just starting to recover from it and now I'm getting fired.”

This is the reaction: Many were moved by the story of the man who loves Blizzard so much.

He was also fired after 12 years, says another Blizzard employee. He doubts whether the dismissal has anything to do with the technician's performance or absence. He had some friends who worked on the survival game Odyssey and they were pretty cool. The true pillars of the company. They were also expelled:

Blizzard's secret survival game has been canceled – employees must work on other projects

The cover image is an avatar from Pixabay.