Pros
I work for Pogo, a division within Electronic Arts, and it is the most professional game company I have ever worked in. Particularly of note is the fact that they take careful measures to introduce processes to gauge and track project progress. They are extremely quick to adjust to schedule needs by providing additional resources, pushing back the schedule, or dropping features, and never consider overworking the employee as an option, even if it is in our nature to work harder as the typical crunch approaches. The work life balance is phenomenal, and I have never had better managers running our groups.
Cons
Pogo is production driven and focused on profit, which is clearly good. However, they are unfortunately extreme in that end and will play the conservative card far too much for my taste, resorting to requiring careful justification for any project that does not obvious return revenue. Certainly there is a point where you have to put some faith in your staff that a project is a good investment, even if that investment cannot be quantified in number of titles sold. This rigidity results in an inability to determine just how much less money-oriented projects can help other projects across the board. Unable to exactly quantify how much we lose on each of 15 projects because we don't implement one to shave time off them ends up in tossing the one project in the bin and having everything done less efficiency with no investment of time on proper tools, for instance.
