Pros
- Fantastic work/life balance, you are (for the most part) treated as a real human being with real struggles and emotions. - Pretty good compensation, though probably less than comparable non-gaming tech companies - Casual and open environment, at least among non-management - You get to work on, or adjacent to, video games - You get to work at a company that has a track record of significantly shaking up the industry (Marathon introduced FPS freelook, Halo made FPS work comfortably on consoles, Halo 2 introduced matchmaking, Destiny put matchmaking under the hood and actually succeeded (eventually) as a cooperative looter shooter where others have struggled and/or failed)
Cons
- 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.