Pros
- Development team are mostly some of the most talented people you'll ever get to work with within this industry
- Line managers are also by and large great and they'll work closely with you to get the best out of you, though experience may vary person to person
- Your day to day work is probably pretty fun if you're on the development team, when you're left to do the work
- Plenty of free food/drinks, the office experience team generally knock it out of the park
- Nice office space to work in
- Working on 2 highly ambitious projects that the pieces seem to finally, slowly, starting to come together on
- Pay is reasonable, but not competitive with similar sized studios in the UK
- Personally found managers are reasonably accommodating for remote work provided you still get tasks done, but this varies team to team it seems
Cons
- Departments are far too siloed from each other, with communication being poor - production has somewhat steadied the ship in the past 12 months, but there's still been multiple instances of "final" pieces of work being submitted only for another department to do a pass months later, requiring further reworks
- Not a great work life balance, and long working hours - lunch is unpaid so you have to make that time back, but you're also mandated to take at least 30 minutes, so a "40 hour" work week is actually a 42.5-45 hour work week depending how you take your breaks
- Overtime isn't enforced usually, but there's definitely an atmosphere and culture of pressure on you to do overtime, and there have been periods of mandated overtime where you have to work weekends - whilst these have usually been short periods they've also lead to heavy burnout
- People who leave are almost never replaced
- So many meetings that just derail your day and largely have no impact on you, usually to give progress updates to the person sat at the desk opposite you
- Upper management similarly needs to know when to call something complete - there's clearly a lot of egos driving decisions, leading to a seemingly endless cycle of reworks and tweaks with minimal progress to show whilst there are huge, fundamental issues that need fixing left by the wayside
- Particularly noticeable in the last year or two, but the executive and upper management of the team have really started to become bullies, talking to developers in incredibly demeaning ways- legitimate issues or limitations outside of your control are often dismissed as excuses and you're told to "make it happen"
- Chris Roberts - seemingly the blueprint of the above issue - greets good work with mild enthusiasm at best and treats mistakes, no matter how minor, like they're the worst thing to happen in human history, and where he used to be a relatively approachable character in the office he now largely treats his employees with thinly veiled contempt outside of those who have kissed the ring.
- Pay structure was brought in recently - whilst there has been the usual corporate line as to why, it's very transparent the reason why is because people caught wind of how much more certain team members were being paid, and now you're incredibly limited on how much you can increase your pay unless you can get promoted, which you very much have to force through no matter your merit
- Office itself isn't in the easiest to reach part of the city, with no real transport links from Victoria or Piccadilly, outside of a bus from Piccadilly that's once every half hour, but even then it's more or less faster to walk, and all the car parks nearby are very expensive if you can't get parking in the office car park
- Once a week remote work as standard just isn't good enough anymore especially when it used to be twice a week, which was seemingly only taken away for the sake of visibly having people in the office, rather than needing them there