Shinny games from the dark places of Game Development - Programmer Neon Giant Employee Review

- Cowboy/Improvised planning style, which results in bad production, long work hours for super long periods and surprise features that are urgent out of the blue. Even though the producer is a very good one, the constant micro-management and decision override from the bosses makes things difficult to handle team wise. - There isn't any system (or company will) to control how long an employee works or to prevent people from working too much. Be aware of the implications of it. I recommend having a signed personal tracking app. - Crunch is just another valid resource and part of the planning. Working culture (or bosses' thinking really) revolves around the concepts of "the more hours you work, the better the product" and "nobody gets far doing 40h weeks". Many of us have hundreds of extra hours accumulated. I crunched (50h to 75h weeks) from October-ish 2019 until May-ish 2021 and I'm not the one with the most extra time accumulated, that should give some perspective. This includes weekends, bank holidays, late nights... you name it. But said extra hours ARE NOT PAID. If you like to be paid for overtime, make sure you make a written and signed deal beforehand or you will end up crunching months for nothing. Working this many hours (both in total and per week) or missing holidays (to some extent) is not legal in Sweden. Be aware. - Sometimes they will imply "how rich you are gonna get" with shares/bonuses. Said bonuses are not on paper (or anywhere) defined, neither in terms of revenue percentage, when do you get them or if they are tied to time worked at the company. Shares are a different topic. They are signed and bound to conditions (if you get them). But it's not a public company, so don't expect much from them any time soon (again, if you do get them). - At the moment of leaving, the bosses' opinion on Work From Home was that "it is the devil". Ask, but don't expect the company to say yes. It depends a lot on who you are. During Covid times, the few people that worked from home were called into the office now and then for face to face meetings. The office never closed because of Covid at any point. This includes people commuting from other parts of the city or other cities (like Stockholm). - Negative talking or criticism in a negative way about company decisions, quality of life in the job or current state of the game might get you a private meeting with bosses, not to fix things, but to tell you to not do it again. If it happens within a company chat (Slack), your comment can be removed without previous warning. Happened more than once and to different people. - "We will see", "We're thinking about it" and "We're doing everything we can" are common things to hear from bosses when asking for improvements for work-life balance, salaries or compensation for too much work. But expect no change unless it is something that benefits the game sales. - Can't give examples due to legal reasons but, if a deal for the company/game is on the table and can bring something good (money, publicity etc), it will be taken. No matter if that means someone will work 14h days for long periods of time. Product goes before employee wellbeing. Always. - Bosses do not "believe" in documentation. This applies to both game/features design and deals with employees (except for the initial contract). As pointed before, do not believe promises or "we will see" arguments. Have everything on paper if it implies doing anything outside your 40h week. - Bosses have no idea about most of the working laws. Either that or they choose to ignore things for the company benefit. Do not trust anything they say in regards to how long they can make you work, how they can influence your free time or holidays and some other work-related issues. Unless it's written and signed, double check what the law says. - If you work late, dinner is not fully paid. You order in food and the company pays part of it. So you will lose money working extra for both reasons: the dinner part you pay and for not getting paid for the extra time. You will not get holidays to compensate either. You might want to negotiate this too and have it on paper and signed. - If you are used to having designers/direction prototyping, designing, producing a document and passing it down, not your company. This company is more in line with someone in direction (bosses) dropping an idea during meetings, coffee break, lunch etc and waiting for a programmer/artist to implement it by heart and good guesses. Then, due to the chaotic pipeline and cowboy-planning style, said feature might be looked up immediately or months later. On every "review" you will get new info you didn't have before, because nothing was on paper or properly planned, so you didn't know (or didn't guess). This is incredibly frustrating for some of the employees. Sometimes this combines with people changing the feature and coming back to you to fix it if it breaks. Ownership is not a clear concept. - At the time of leaving (or signing with them for that matter), the salary was not great. It's easy to find similar positions in other companies with better perks, collective agreements and better salaries. Noticeably better. - Barely any employee reviews happened during my time there(had 1 in three years and my exit interview) and no salary reviews for almost 2 years (from 2019 until 2021). Excuses were deadlines and Covid. When salary "talks" happened they were pure number dumping. No explanation on why you are getting these numbers or how to improve them (or your work). I asked around for other people's rises and the feeling was that people were getting different percentages based on their relationship with the bosses. The programmer team didn't have any lead or manager that knew how good/bad quality of each programmer was, which leads me to think again salaries were based on gut feeling and not real parameters. This is a VERY obscure company when it comes to salaries and budgets (even though you will hear bosses claim the opposite constantly). There isn't a salary grid based on experience/role, so you will need to ask people how much they earn to know if you are being treated fairly or not. - About how you feel working there: for the bosses, you don't matter as a person. You are what you produce and that's it. You are lucky to work "with veterans". There's some classicism based on years of experience that imprints the "veteran good, new guy bad" feeling, both inwards (how staff is treated) and outwards (company image projected in interviews for media). - You probably will read other reviews talking about sexism and bro culture. While this is not a general thing and comes from specific people, it's constant and little to no action has ever happened to stop it. Conclusion: If you are looking for a company where you are being taken care of, in a relaxed environment, where the wellbeing and health of the employees matter more than financial profit, I can't recommend it based on my experience. There are better places out there. Avoid for now until clear signs of improvement are out there.