Bungie reviews

Although management aloud HR to make small incentives such as health plans and coffee bars for employees. Often when things needing shifting or something was not working between employees that HR could see was having a negative impact and downfall on the productivity of employees senior management would not allow for this change to happen and would over rule. Yes, naturally no one likes change but when it was drastically needed, making no change at all lead to further problems down the line of production. Once full production of the "Destiny" franchise started in 2010, many employees has already or begun to exit the studio to continue work on the "Halo" franchise. We decreased from about 250 employees to roughly 175. As production carried on, in HR we spend roughly a year bringing in new talent to work on "Destiny" and slowly integrate these new employees as part of already existing groups in production. Once 2011 had rolled around the studio was at roughly 400 employees. Management had set a goal to have an employee base of around 350-450. Although we in HR quickly learnt the studio expanded and grew in size to quickly. This resulted in a loss of the high standards we had built and the "Bungie culture" started to go. This lead to a somewhat rupture within the employee base that HR slowly needed to go though and fix, due to this production was drastically hindered. During this time senior management were persistent on no change whatsoever. Senior Management. Although I had been friends with many of them for years during my time at Bungie, it was clear the lack of managerial skills. Some of senior management was excellent but while many lacked behind resulting in many times a clash of senior management while employees would watch on. In late 2015 this came to clash of heads as of then current studio president Harold Ryan was pushing and overruling other senior management to have the "Destiny" sequel released in 2016 although many in the studio knew it was not possible to do. Due to this Harold Ryan was stood down and Pete Parsons was going to be taking his place. A major wrap to Pete Parsons was his ability to bring back the "Bungie Culture" and this drastically showed within the studio.

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.