Remember that time you thought you were living in an episode from The Office?
Pros
Some great production employees that were doing very well in spite of some poor leadership. The work life balance was good. Reasonable benefits Occasional trips and parties
Cons
Middle Management leads from behind. There is no vision and guidance (and therefore accountability) from these so-called leaders. This, of course, leads to an extremely high failure rate as employees are left guessing. It also means middle managers have very little risk for project decision-making (upper management bothers little about investigating high failure rates). Whenever productivity is questioned, faulty decisions about direction can be blamed on lower level employees and upper management believes it. Middle Management does not protect projects from micro-managing upper managers. There is a ton of waste because upper-level managers make huge changes at the end of projects with no pushback against questionable and whimsical decisions. I'm not talking about just aesthetic–but costly changes. I am talking about changes that create real legal risks that could have been easily avoided by a middle manager having the stones to say "Maybe we shouldn't do this because it is illegal." Then, when sanity finally sets in after weeks of re-work and it comes to accountability for the costs of these decisions, lower level employees are blamed. IT is in control of all hardware and software high-level decision making. Developers and art-production personnel have little control over the tech that they use and the resources they need. In every other development team for which I have worked, IT was a service dept. and not a deciding stakeholder on resources that production teams required for their work. This is extremely debilitating when IT is not typically trained in your area of expertise, and answers to a different managing executive than yourself. The QA Dept was always months behind development teams. This was a killer to being able to deliver product to the market quickly and efficiently. Very superficial commitment to the development of future-looking dev platforms, frameworks, and game design implementations. Any talk of these forward-looking initiatives was boardroom window-dressing and not a real effort to build serious future development frameworks. Why? Because developing now for something to be realized years in the future requires knowledge and foresight, which is in low supply at AGS. Watch what they do and take what they say with a grain of salt. Developers are paid very little compared with others in the industry. Turnover is extremely high and shows no sign of getting better. Why? The problems explained here are extremely harmful to morale. It's just not worth it to stick around. Just go look at the "About Us/Careers & Culture" page on the website and watch the gallery. Most of those images are of the CEO. I can't imagine why an executive would allow this. If it's a mistake, its a huge PR blunder. What does it communicate to the outside? "How afraid must everyone at AGS be to put up nearly all photos of the CEO? Does he really need the ego stroking" The bottom line is that AGS shows all the signs of a financially stressed and failing company with some poor middle managers and upper managers who are clueless or unwilling to fix productivity problems.