Pros
- Exciting products like Pokemon GO, AR, and some new games coming out. - Profitable, unlike many startups. - Very cool office in the Ferry Building. - Fun perks like traveling and lots of company swag. - Some coworkers are great. - Good values and mission.
Cons
To clarify, I am not a disgruntled employee. I have enjoyed some of my time at Niantic but the company has been facing high attrition for various reasons: Nepotism. There are several people that hold high positions at the company yet everyone knows these individuals are very unqualified for their jobs and that they don't contribute any meaningful work. For whatever reason, leadership protects them. Recently, we lost half of an entire org when they got a new leader but the rest of the leadership team just turns a blind eye. Weak leadership with topdown decision-making. C-suite leadership dictates most decisions. Recently, a high impact, topdown decision was made and the majority of the game team disagreed but leadership decided to follow through regardless. This happens all the time across different game and platform teams. Plenty of other examples of favoritism throughout the company. Certain people constantly getting promoted and getting what they want simply because their manager loves them and also has influence. Some people are staff level engineers when they clearly should not be. Poor career growth opportunities. For those that are not as lucky, it is very hard to advance your career here. Niantic likes to hire leadership externally rather than build the careers of their current employees. However, you may do well here if you are good at work politics. Work imbalance. There are some people who do nothing all day, everyday while some people are always working late nights, and many weekends. Hard workers don't get much recognition here, causing them to feel under-appreciated, burn out, and then eventually leave. Disingenuous. Niantic pretends to be a company that cares about diversity, empowering their employees, and wanting to do good in the world. In reality, Niantic doesn't take real action and even if they do, there are underlying motives. Niantic has not shipped any successful products within the past several years. We do not know how to launch games and were just lucky with Pokemon Go. But that will soon fizzle out when we run out of new content to release.