* Taxes are incredibly high in Montreal. Between Canadian and Quebec taxes, you lose roughly 40%-50% of your salary to taxes. This is not an exaggeration. U.S. developers should ask for at least 40% more than they get in the U.S. so as not to take a step backward in salary!
* French is absolutely the predominant language at Ubisoft Montreal (it's even worse at Ubi Quebec). In my 9 months with the company, I estimate that at least 75% of all conversations, maybe more, were in French. Some official meetings were conducted in French. At one formal teleconference with the Editorial Board over in Paris, they asked if the meeting could be conducted in French, even though they knew 6 of the 8 devs on our side of the monitor were primarily English-speaking.
* Editorial Board in Paris has a stranglehold on every decision. They don't micromanage on a daily basis, but any decision made by team management can be overturned at any time by Editorial, regardless of cost to project or team. The project I began on had been in development for 2.5 years when Editorial suddenly told us we had to switch from first person to third person, we had to go from a linear game to an open world one, and oh by the way, we hate your protagonist, change him. Each of these was a massive shift that was suddenly dumped on the team. And then 1.5 months later they canceled the project, after these changes were well underway, with lots of crunch involved. Stupid management, amazing any decent products have ever come out of Ubisoft.
* They have a lot of hoops to jump through in their production process, lots of "gates"/greenlight hurdles the team has to pause regular production to prepare for. Despite this semblance of accountability, all three projects I had contact with were way over their schedule and wallowing slowly toward completion. I believe only one of the three actually came out.
* Without a doubt the most political game development company I've ever worked for (out of seven). Politics affect every decision and hindered every project. Ubisoft Montreal is the epitome of "it's not what you know, it's who you know." That maxim is what Ubi Montreal is all about.
* Montreal is a very expensive city to live in, compared to large U.S. cities. Crappy little apartments are expensive and everything above that is too.
* Commuting is very bad. The trains are good, the buses are really bad (at hitting their schedules). Don't bring a car if you move there. It would take me 45 minutes to go 4 miles, at 7PM. There can be massive traffic jams at any time of the day, on any major highway in the city, no rhyme or reason to it.
* Drivers are awful; Montreal is the only place I have ever heard of that had to rescind right-on-red rules for cars because drivers were such a danger to pedestrians in crosswalks. Apparently pedestrian deaths have gone down but drivers aren't any better. Most drivers in Montreal seem to be in a hurry to reach the site of their next accident. ;)
