Bungie Associate Software Development Engineer In Test reviews

As evident from the polarizing reviews on Glassdoor, you can see that some employees have a great laid back experience where they actively progress their careers and experience personal fulfillment and rewarding production. Then you see those about people who work 60 hour weeks+weekends, in constant chaos with no upward movement and are managed poorly. Both of these worlds exist at Bungie. Since Destiny 1 launched this company has only ever grown in size to the beast it is today. There were never rounds of layoffs other than temps to cut the fat. As a result there are a lot of people simply taking up space. Employees who have been here for years were advanced a level without any major effort to hire a new wave of fresh blood to replace the vacancies. We end up with people in Lead positions in charge of a team of 0 or 1. Other critical teams are dismantled and the knowledge base is disbanded until a massive issue crops up and we have to scramble to find someone who remembers how any of that system works. During 1 on 1's we are encouraged to report our happiness level to management. My happiness level has been a constant level of 4 out of 10. Some days it's worse. We report this happiness level to our manager and our manager's manager. They know how happy or unhappy we are. No effort is made into increasing that happiness. They'll ask us what will it take to get you a few points higher and then nothing. Management acknowledges that some teams are orange or red in terms of team morale. These got out as team slides, areas that are at risk, they're listening to our feedback but on a micro level nothing changes. If you think the communication to the playerbase is rough sometimes we won't find out about game changing features until we read about it on reddit. A lot of, we said what? so many people at the company fill roles that fail the bus test (if they get hit by a bus, can someone do their job, to which the answer is no). no effort is made to train or disperse knowledge to others. There are at least two dozen people at the studio who are the only person that knows how something works and if they left the company development would grind to a halt. Players are already seeing that in the live game where these key people are stretched thin.