Not a game developer, but a business that happens to make games on the side.
Pros
- Free cereal, fruit on Monday and Wednesday and drinks after work (used to be pretty much unlimited, but quantity and hours have been cut progressively). - Flexible working hours, 10 to 5 base and the freedom to add hours to reach 40 hours per week (unless when you're in QA). The company does not keep close track of this and largely trusts you to work the hours you are paid for. - Company parties are amazing and you get 20 euro per person per quarter for team events. - Very loose dress code, room for individuality. - Quality hires, at least in my team (see below for internal promotions). - Very flexible and fair when it comes to personal wishes. Special vacation requests for example, getting time off in advance, were possible for me.
Cons
The biggest caveat you have to keep in mind when considering this company, is that it is run (very successfully from a financial point of view) by a dentist and a lawyer. They could have been selling insulation material and the company would not be all that different. Marketing, sales and PR are by far the most important teams, and a lot of issues stem from that. - No flat hierarchies. Despite what is still being said during interviews, there is a serious level of overhead you will battle. You talk to your project manager, who talks to the first, who talks to the lead, who talks to the team lead, who talks to the department lead, who talks to ... If you're lucky people are actually talking, but it might all go through Jira tickets. Trying to skip one of those levels could get you in trouble. - For a company that is 100% privately owned, it is run as though there are outside investors. With games that have zero hype built around them, it makes little sense that you let marketing dictate a release date and that teams end up working on Saturday. On that note, poor planning seems to be a common occurrence in general. Ideas become critical overnight only to be cancelled again when fully implemented two weeks later. Breaking releases of tools the company relies on get announced months in advance, but it gets ignored until the games stop working. - Good old boys club when it comes to management. Though they advertise with the company being multicultural, once you reach a certain level you need to be white, male and German speaking. Yes there are exceptions, but they are just that. - Internal promotions are questionable at times. I've seen more than one person get bumped up to a position they would never have been hired for if they weren't dating someone higher up, or were grandfathered into the company. - Poor communication skills from the top down. Major decisions that affect entire teams are taken without any input from the relevant parties and nothing is shared until the last second. Any available information comes from office gossip. Failed projects are swept under the rug without a proper retrospective, so the same mistakes are made over and over again. - Every decision is based on tracking data. This makes sense in many ways, but also kills the creative process of game design and development. No one seems to listen to actual customer needs and wants. The value of a feature is purely defined by weekly spreadsheets that list the amount of paying users.
