Salary
Biggest con about this company is the salaries they pay. In general they will greatly underpay it's employees because they are working for 'Sony'. And, as HR and many managers will phrase it, that privilege equates to lesser pay. It can take years of bonuses and wage increments for ones yearly pay to match what you'd get elsewhere in the same industry at far, far smaller organisations. This is particularly true for mid-level/senior engineers and employees in the lower levels of the archaic hierarchy who have little management influence in their day-to-day roles. Good pay if your a manager though.
Management/Culture
This is arguably what destroys employee dissatisfaction most within the organisation/department. Even more so within its own R&D department. This is entirely dependent on who your manager is, so this particular negative applies to my own department and some of the teams I worked with rather than the whole organisation.
Management is filled with stagnated and decade-old middle managers (and in my particular case) who did very little to no actual work outside of organizing meetings and providing already-clear direction. Little to absolutely no room for personal growth.
My own manager implemented absurdly authoritarian-like methods and checks to ensure engineers were hitting targets and not missing deadlines (e.g filling out detailed excel 'time-sheets' submitted weekly). Managers are never questioned as it is believed their experience equates to infallibility, and when problems do arise blame is quickly shifted beneath them when possible, or otherwise ignored and hushed when fingers cannot be easily pointed down the assembly line. This fostered an environment within engineering teams where we had to constantly proclaim and prove what we were doing. Animosity easily developed between co-workers new or old because of this and would quickly look for excuses or throw others under the bus to shift accountability. E.g:
Managment: You reported in the time sheet you coded X feature, which took you Y hours, and Z lines of code (yes they count lines of code). This is bad it should have only taken you minimum X-6 hours (arbitrary estimation with little consideration of actual engineering challenges). Why are you under-performing?
Person: I did what I could under the restrictions of teammate A not doing Task Con time, also blame this tool was broken and XYZ teams did not communicate and deliver, etc etc.
I hope things have changed since I left because in particular one team at SCEE R&D has extremely high employee turnover for many years. Yet everyone seemed to casually ignore that perhaps the all-wise manager running the team and their methods were the actual cause of engineers leaving every 1-2 years.
