There are many teams at Wargaming, so it's highly likely not all cons apply to all teams. This was my experience with the Platform team (called Seattle team, but is located in Bellevue office).
- No one is held accountable. Accountability is washed away in the face of emergency.
- Language/culture barrier... Google Translate only gets so far and not all documentation is professionally translated yet. Indirect vs. direct communication styles are not acknowledged and it leads to unbalanced expectations and a lot of anger against other teams
- Development across two vastly different cultures, multiple programming languages and approaches to tech stacks, 10 hour difference in time zones, and 5+ softwares to communicate through, with little to no defined procedure = nothing works well and everything is unstable
- Systematic attention to symptoms and never the root causes (from both technological and social point of view)
- Middle management tries to re-invent the wheel of communication far, far too often instead of taking feedback from employees at face value... they make new guidelines and policies and proclaim them but never enforce them... strange expectation for everyone to "self organize" which leads to mass chaos and no sense of direction
- Technical issues are only prioritized when there's a customer facing problem / break in production; preventative measures / investigations are not prioritized which leaves engineering team burnt out and on edge
- Seattle team has barely any persuasion in the rest of the company. It is a struggle to get appropriate access to machines for troubleshooting or testing.
- Because of resource issues a lot of fixing has to be done directly in production: reproducing issues / test cases is extremely time consuming and management prefers results over quality
- I do more 'digital paperwork' than I do actual technical work. I would say only 10-25% of my technical prowess is utilized at this company.
- Use of agile/scrum is too serious to the point of detriment. Leads to micro management. items sent to backlog are typically forgotten about. If you don't finish something in a sprint it's often assumed to "no longer be a problem", then there is again mass confusion when issues resurface
- Managers often have no social skills or no managerial experience -- "team lead", "senior", and "manager" are conflated. Some people don't even want to do administrative type tasks but are forced to. leads to EXTREME resentment and imbalance of power/persuasion.
- Sexism. Woman engineers are frequently talked over, need to defend themselves in unnecessary detail, are excluded from conversations, iced out from decision making, conference calls, business trips and etc. Obviously this is another cultural difference but that does not invalidate the impact on employees. Such a waste of talent. Other reviewers are spot on about this. Yes, these are all very subjective experiences but experiences nonetheless and I doubt it will ever change.
- Little to no morale.
- Rule by fear/shoot the messenger mentality. For example, we were discouraged from talking about bugs or making jokes in Slack because certain "higher ups" might see it. engineers not having safe place to vent frustrations kills motivation and passive aggressiveness is off the charts just like in Dilbert comics. Cute at first but gets old quickly.
- Bad work/life balance is rewarded (e.g. 10+ hour work days, working on weekends) and implied that it is necessary at times but never explicitly requested.
- Rampant nepotism, and favoritism... there's a lot of people who I wonder "what do they do exactly?"
- Gossip, whispering, unclear promotion paths (if any)
- Received a bonus, but ONLY after I complained about management problems, and there was no word of anyone else getting bonuses... leading me to believe they are trying to pacify me with money.
I would suggest to only work here if you are completely out of options.
