Brian Birmingham, who was a lead software engineer at Blizzard Entertainment (hereafter, Blizzard), spoke on Twitter on January 24th about the company’s personnel evaluation system called “Stack Ranking”. Just before this, the overseas media Bloomberg reported that Blizzard fired Mr. Birmingham, who opposed the system, and revealed the circumstances from his own mouth.
Brian Birmingham is a veteran developer who has worked at Blizzard since 2006 as a lead software engineer. He is primarily responsible for programming World of Warcraft, and is also known as one of the people who led the development of World of Warcraft Classic, a recreation of an early version of the same work.
Bloomberg’sreportwas independently obtained from an email sent to Blizzard staff by Birmingham, who was also a manager, and was reported along with testimony from an anonymous employee at the company. In terms of content, Blizzard will introduce a personnel evaluation system stack ranking in 2021 that ranks employees in a normally distributed manner. Mr. Birmingham objected to the operation of the system and asked the human resources department to withdraw, and he was dismissed.
The company’s stack ranking system requires managerial staff to rank roughly 5% of their subordinates as low performers. Employees who are ranked low will have their bonuses reduced, and future salary increases and promotions may be adversely affected.
In an email sent to staff, Mr. Birmingham argued that the stack ranking system creates a sabotage competition among employees, which ultimately undermines mutual trust and destroys creativity. But the company’s top management justified the system by squeezing out the lowest-ranking employees so that everyone could grow, and asked that the existence of the system be kept secret from employees, he said.
This time, Mr. Birmingham acknowledged the fact that he was fired from Blizzard, and also commented that Bloomberg’s report content was accurate about the quoted part of his email. He did not intend to make the case public, but he provided some background as it has already been reported.
He looks back at the history of Blizzard’s parent company, Activision Blizzard. I will omit the details of the historical part, but the company, which owns Activision, Blizzard, and King, is said to have started to integrate the personnel evaluation systems of the three companies from the end of 2020 to 2021. All three companies originally had similar systems, but in this effort they went in the direction of forcing 5% of employees to be under-rated as “developing.”
For Blizzard, 2021 was a year of great turmoil due to internal sexual harassment issues and related lawsuits (Related article). This prompted the company to improve its working environment, and Birmingham hoped that the stack ranking system would also be scrapped, but that didn’t happen. Regarding the operation of the stack ranking system, it was said that instructions were given directly from the upper management of Activision Blizzard, a level above Blizzard president Mike Ybarra. Birmingham criticized Blizzard for its coercive position and the problem with the parent company.
A personnel evaluation system called Stack Ranking has been adopted by other companies as well. For example, Microsoft introduced it when Steve Ballmer was CEO. However, it was scrapped in 2013 after widespread confusion within the company for exactly the reasons Birmingham pointed out. Meanwhile, a Blizzard spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company’s systems are designed to bring out the best in employees. He also said that he provides feedback to improve performance for employees who are not meeting expectations.
In the wake of Brian Birmingham’s statement and reports about him, Activision Blizzard has received a lot of criticism. Mr. Birmingham commented to his followers that he would continue to play Blizzard’s work, but that each should decide whether to boycott with criticism. And he spoke of his desire to come back to Blizzard and fight the stack ranking system from the inside if allowed.
