Pros
At the studio level things were mostly good. Aside from a lot of strange hiring/firing decisions, which mostly trickled down from what I'll touch on in the 'Cons' section, I loved my day-to-day at the office. The people were great, the location (Bellevue, WA) was pretty nice, and when we were allowed the grace to do what we wanted things tended to go very smoothly.
Cons
Cooperate tended to lie to their employees more than not. And I do mean more than they would tell the truth, it seemed. They would say things like, "We will not be downsizing. In fact, we will end up increasing headcount." then a month later lay off dozens of people. This is one example of many, but an example I use because it was one of the more common lies Niccolo in particular fed us. The folks running the show (the c-suite), I'm convinced, have no idea what it means to make a game. I feel like this is all too common in cooperate-run studios, but with Glu it seemed particularly egregious (I say that having worked in AAA). Niccolo, and a few others just below him, toured the studio to "see what we were working on" a few times throughout my time there. Each time it was a lesson in ignorance. They seemed to have absolutely no idea what they were looking at and could hardly even speak the game development language. This incompetence was not limited to just development, it seemed many of the poor hiring philosophies implemented in upper management of studios has/had them hiring based on how well they like person as a person not as a developer. This led to a plethora of crippling issues throughout development, including ignorance of proper development practices, pipelines, management, you name it. Go figure, hiring someone based not in skill and experience ended up being a poor call. I fully expect no one at Glu to have learned from this mistake. Glu actually made the decision to shut our studio down at the end of May. A decision I still have a hard time justifying to myself, considering our studio was lean and (more importantly) profitable. The c-suite then decided to offload all of our projects to the Moscow studio, a studio who's track record has been nothing but failure since my time at Glu started. As a result they have been non-profitable since before I started had there as well. To top everything off, a few days ago I received a letter from the company explaining a breach in security/information. One of the folks in HR received an email from someone impersonating Niccolo requesting they upload all W-2 information from employees who worked there in 2015 to a website. They complied. This was a textbook spear phishing scam. The company had just willingly uploaded all of our personal information to a phishing scammer. They then chose to wait 2 weeks to notify their employees. More likely, they had no idea anything was wrong for the majority of these two weeks. We are still receiving information as to how bad this breach really is. Some are reporting instances of information leaks to their family members as well. At this point in time it is assumed that anyone/anything referenced on our 2015 tax information is at risk. Niccolo does not care about your product unless you are making a celebrity game. He does not want innovation, he does not want integrity, he does not want you to succeed. He wants the game to have a title with a big name in it so he can show how good that looks to investors and people looking to purchase the company. If you want to make a good game and have some level of security in your job (and information) I would recommend working anywhere else but here.