You will be treated like farm animals, meaning:
1) you will be well-fed (free food, not necessarily a con)
2) well clothed--lots of swags... if you like wearing company logos
3) you will be optimized like animals--long hours, late nights, til midnight (and no one will appreciate you doing that because that's the norm).
- If you are an established developer, you will not learn anything new here. Just code something that bring in the best revenue.
- No one will care about how you feel or help your career advancement, because there are always the next batch of farm animals (college grads) who don't mind doing this (see my pros)
- Career advancement are given to those who have celebrated roles. Tough luck if you are the best back-end engineer or QA. But join if you can be the GM of a game studio or artist, or anyone who excel in the game of politics!
- Culture is not collaborated. If you make a mistake someone will make sure everyone is aware of this. If you make a bad game up to alpha, an entire studio can be canned.
- A lot of "cancer" or parasites in the work force (thus the bad culture I mentioned above). Middle management consists of people who were promoted because they were here since the early days, but have no understanding of how to build a companyfor the long term. But they don't care because they probably will leave in a year after their stocks vest, but....
- ...they get level ups so they will probably stay longer to squeeze more $ out of the company.
Management say work life balance but act like sweat shop. You will hear "Everyone should take some time off...but we need to do this yesterday". "We want to level up our developers, but you cannot work on projects that interest you or match your skill set because you need to work on this that bring one more penny". Management feel they are doing well in leveling up people, when in fact only a few percentage of the team got bonus or level up. Even with level ups I got 3000 stocks distributed over 4 years...sounds a lot but if you consider typical company gives out 10-15% bonus (of course depending on your level), it's a meh considering the current stock price! Keep in mind probably 70% of the team, many of them hard workers, got zero bonus/stocks last quarter, so I was the "lucky" one.
In summary, if you enjoy working long hours with little recognition so your incompetent managers who don't care can get all your credit and become richer, this is a fun place to work for.
