Pros
The only Pros I can think of are given by Corporate for all the studios to enjoy: Health benefits are good. Unlimited vacation (but that gets denied a lot depending on your manager). Free food. Dog friendly. The only Pro about the LA Studio is that the non-management coworkers are really nice and cool.
Cons
The company overall is risk adverse. Everything needs to be tested and proven to make money before waves are made. I understand that is the industry norm now, but don't come here expecting that you will be able to pour your passion into the projects here. Each studio is different and all managed differently. I heard great things about the other studios, but LA studio’s management is hot garbage. The company is risk-adverse, but Management wants to make waves to look good. They'll just make all the decisions on their own; it is not a collaborative atmosphere. Because they are making all the decisions on their own, they usually make very late decisions. You will get top-down orders from management and will be expected to deliver quality results in a short amount of time. Most of these decisions are to just copy whatever our competitors are doing for guaranteed results. You end up feeling really burnt out making all this work, which is just copying others, only to see things get get shelved because they didn't test well enough. The studio does not believe in promoting from within. They give you title bumps and small raises to keep you working at the studio, but it takes about 3-4 years for that to happen. If you get promoted, you don't get an increase in responsibilities, have any weight to make decisions, or learn anything new. Sometimes, they don't even bother and they will just hire their friend to work on top of you. Nothing actually changes. Everything is still top-down from Management, regardless of your title. Because of this, people feel highly disrespected and titles no longer mean anything at this studio. Corporate recently (in 2020) started annual reviews and raises. However, there is a percentage cap on how much your raise can be. Studio Management underpays in general, so no matter how much your percentage raise will be, you will always be underpaid compared to industry standards. Sometimes, Management makes bad decisions which costs the team a lot of time, effort, and money...but they are never held accountable. There is a disconnect from the studio with the rest of the company and Management is supposed to be the bridge. However, it sometimes seems that Management uses that as an opportunity to not be truthful about how things are run at the studio. Because of that, there has been some layoffs in the past 2 years at the studio. Unfortunately, the ongoing sentiment of the studio is that the people who were let go were targeted. This causes a lot of people to be afraid of coming out to HR or Upper Management about the issues they face at the studio. People feel that it is easier to just leave the company, rather than speaking out and potentially causing trouble for others on the team. High turnover at this studio. There is also an ongoing sentiment that Management is not qualified for their positions. Almost all of them were hired because they are friends with higher ups in Corporate. They do not seem to understand how to communicate or work with others. That's fine if they want to be a designer/engineer/artist/PM and just focus on the projects, but if they are part of Management they should be able to manage people. There is a big lack of communication, coupled with them basically not caring, that causes Management to be "unaware" of the unhappiness of employees at this studio. They don't seem to believe in keeping good talent. It seems that people who say "yes" with their decisions are more important.