Pros
- Really cool team, with a lot of talented individuals who work really really hard to deliver good quality projects and that support each other all the time, and everyone got along with each other being kind of a small family (unfortunately almost everyone left by now because of the management); - In-house physiotherapist like once every 2 months, and sometimes team lunch with pizzas and stuff;
Cons
By my experience there: - Constantly delayed wages (sometimes 1 month, sometimes 6 months) but with the management telling you every week that the wage will be coming in a few days to keep you there, stating that the payments are delayed due to the Publishers and not being their own fault ever! - Constantly feeling like you are being tricked by shady schemes from the management, which makes you feel very disrespected as an employer and as a developer; - Wages are very low in comparison to the industry everywhere else, and they don't let you work on personal gigs because you have basically an exclusivity contract (which doesn't make any sense with those wages). And funny enough, even when you have your wage delayed for a bunch of months they say you can't still do side gigs; - Crunch is not a periodic thing, it is a day to day basis because projects are planned for a shorter amount of time then they should! And those extra hours you put in the project because the management asks you do to so, are not paid at all! On the other hand if you happen to have to go to a doctor appointment or take care of personal business they will ask if you want to get a cut on your wage for those missing hours (even if you have more hours that month then what your contract says); - No delegation of responsibilities, even if there are team managers, all the decisions are made by the CEO so having and Art Director/Manager or something similar counts for almost nothing because they have no freedom to take any actions; This usually ends in very bad decisions in terms of Design/Art and in the end if something goes wrong the team is to blame by poor execution; - The time is controlled using a Bio-metric clock, so on one side your value as an employer comes from being there more time and not from working hard to get things done or creating high quality products! (on an happy note, you can just sit there and do the minimum required, if you ain't getting paid anyway); In general I would not recommend the company to anyone, it is a very toxic environment in terms of constantly keeping you on the edge for not being able to pay bills and such, while working crazy overtime to have the promises never being fulfilled in the end! Sure, if you are a Junior/Student and happen to stumble upon them and have the ability to get a little of experience and some project on your CV/Portfolio it might not be a bad idea to make you jump into something better in the future, but be really prepared for what is coming your way! The management seems to have a huge ego and that might be the source of the problem. He claims to have a ton of years in the industry, but even so, no quality achievements, but in his own head his ideas are the best in every field and you should be just a puppet doing what he wishes. Also, his history in management seems to be very very dark, the bad financial times that happened when I was there seems to be just a cycle that constantly comes back in their direction, due to a really bad management I guess, and actually just before Dakar they were recovering from something that was somewhat the same. To put and end to this, the reviews or the last page from the company in Glassdoor was deleted to try and clean their image (I guess they need new employees for the future), but to tell you the truth if you want to clean your image start by actions and not shady schemes once again.