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.

- Insane amount of archaic tooling and systems, oftentimes coupled with opaque proprietary tech stacks. For example, the internal website frontend for invoking a new build on our in-house build farm still uses Silverlight. You have to use IE compatibility mode in Edge to even load the page properly. And that doesn't even begin to comment on how inflexible and purpose-built the build farm itself actually is, providing almost no support for the rapid growth and expansion the studio has been experiencing. - Company culture is trending in the "woke" direction. For some this could be a pro, and in a lot of ways it is a pro, but if you ever disagree with a decision or an action that was taken in the name of "diversity and inclusion" then you better not share your opinion with anyone. You will be skewered by other employees and your name will be dragged through the mud behind your back. - Constantly understaffed while always biting off more than we can reasonably chew. Two week sprints literally feel like sprints from start to finish with no opportunity to rest, to evaluate where we are, or to take a look at the bigger picture. - Always focused on and optimizing for what needs to be immediately done, longer-term efforts are always deprioritized and even discouraged. - If you want to work in-person at the office, you need to live in or near Bellevue, WA which is comically expensive. - Recently bought out by Sony. Leadership super pinky swears that Bungie will retain almost all of its independence, and so far that feels like it's been true, but who's to say that will continue to be true if Bungie stumbles in the future? Sony bought Bungie to grow their own business, not as a good-will gesture. It doesn't matter what kind of protections were specified in the buyout details, get enough talented lawyers and you can make anything happen.