Stable company, incompetent manager, dated equipment
Pros
It is a big, stable company that is growing steadily. It hires good people. A company was started by immigrants and most employees are immigrants. It is nice to have people from different cultures. The atmosphere is relaxed, not much pressure. There are 2 gyms on site. Many different clubs such as swimming, ping-pong, tai chi, latin dance, drone, motorcycle etc. The job may be interesting from the perspective of getting experience. Or to get your foot into the tech industry. The department needs more people but struggled to hire historically. So maybe a good opportunity to bargain if you are coming in.
Cons
It is so unfortunate that the manager for the video team has no management skills or planning skills. Oftentimes, the work is dumped at the last minute. And it does not have to be. If it were plan beforehand. He has no knowledge of video creation process either. For example, he does not understand that creating a video or animation starts with a story/script. This results in a lot of re-doing of work. Micromanagement, shooting down any initiative and creative ideas are all the results of his incompetence. Computers we have for video production are not powerful enough to run AfterEffects and other programs. This is a computer company! There is no access to any asset account. The team is stuck in the old cubicle corner. There is no travel or interaction (outside of getting the info from the SMEs) involved for this job role. No traveling, no conferences, nothing. It feels like my skillset gets stale as the time goes on. Certainly, it may not be the most exciting company to work. Most activities are organized by the employees. It is a better fit for family people and older folks. For young and ambitious, it is a drag. The challenges are as follows: you have to talk to experts (pms, qa) to gather info. These people not always are clear explainers. Nor do they always have time. The directions from different parties are often contradicting. So you have to find a solution that suits everyone. You have to work with an always increasing line of complex networking products. There is no training and you are expected to figure out the functionality yourself. The products you work on always change. So it is a lot of intensive learning involved. For the content/video people there are no advancing opportunities. For some strange reason remote work is discouraged. No training budget or team activities. This is specific to video team in Burnaby. And my be different for other departments
