Pros
- Friendly artists, designers, and producers. - Chance to make you own title once every 6 months during the company's "Hackathon" event. - Free lunches & dinners every Monday thru Friday (10 meals a week), including vegetarian options at each meal. - A few special interest groups for dog lovers, Starcraft players, beer connoisseurs, assuming your workload allows you time to enjoy these things.
Cons
- The games Storm8 makes are all clones of titles Zynga or Popcap make that are proven to be profitable. Up until now, Storm8 is not willing to take a risk on coming up with an innovative game. - Some of the Hackathon game ideas employees make are wonderful, but upper management refuses to use any of them because they only care about things that make money and never want to task risks. - As a software engineer, once you are assigned to a group at the 2-month point, you are stuck in that group and can never transfer. - Some of the decisions team leads and managers make are short-sighted, resulting in a lack of communication between different teams, and prohibitively more time to market than needed. - Every team is being pushed so hard that unless you are THEIR manager, your ideas get ignored, no matter how helpful they are. - The company has more than doubled from the point when I started until the point when I finished at the company, but the average workload per person has quadrupled. This is because management thinks that twice the number of people, including engineers, allows them to crank out eight times the number of new games or updates to existing games, but the math clearly doesn't add up. This results in a diminishing work & life balance per employee.