Pros
- Awesome campus, great facilities; cafeteria, basketball, volleyball, gym, bike track, museum, library (borrow games and books)
- Bring your (well-trained) dog to work! (Rules apply)
- Great benefits: 2 dental plans, 3 medical plans, 1 vision plan, 401k, credit union, discounts at all kinds of places.
- Amazing opportunities for training. There's a whole team dedicated to that. In-house training on time management, DiSC, coaching, personal development... the list goes on and on.
- Education reimbursement program for undergrad and postgrad.
- Regular talks by internal and external gaming industry professionals and other speakers of interest.
- In development teams, people with job titles below Lead (or below Senior Producer) are paid hourly and therefore are paid for all overtime.
- Opportunity to earn profit sharing bonuses (though these are shrinking as the company gets larger)
- Management at least try to listen. They survey employees, hold focus groups, receive anonymous feedback via email and try to put action plans in place to fix problems.
Cons
- Irvine is an expensive place to live. Be prepared to pay, to share or to commute.
- Crunch. Sometimes we're required to work mandatory overtime to ship products on time. Very rarely we can be asked to work up to 6 days a week, 12 hours a day.
- Some of the people you work with have never worked anywhere else and lack professionalism. Not the majority though.
- There is a huge disparity between the way development are treated and the way QA and CS are treated.
