Pros
Zynga is a public company wrapped around a group of startups, with each team having significant freedoms to choose their own technology, strategy, and designs without being forced to tow the company line on core decisions. The teams heavily embrace an open community within this ecosystem, and there is significant cooperation between these teams to share technology, processes, and code to allow sister teams to prosper as opposed to companies where teams are in constant competition over resources. Nor do teams have their technical / creative decisions restricted by a rigid company persona, or are forced to leverage specific technologies due to primarily political decisions. Sitting in between these teams is the Cloud Engineering team, which works with every team to support and disseminate new processes, technologies and patterns across this loosely coupled community. We enjoy the opportunity of tracking the different technologies, challenges, and successes from our peers, increasing our own knowledge base as Zynga continues to grow. In return, we focus on pairing solutions with partners throughout the company, and leading teams on the path of prosperity. Zynga in general has a very strong work life balance, with generous PTO (not gated by seniority), maternity/paternity leave, and benefits to care for your family and pets. Our team has taken this as a core tenet to balance the challenges of supporting such a wide variety of clients and their needs, by emphasizing the importance of regular PTO, predictable work hours, and the role of remote-work.
Cons
Zynga is a multinational, and many teams are relatively distributed across different offices and time zones, so communication is often electronic rather than personal. While this introduces us to friends and co-workers around the world, opportunities to work together in person are rare. Commuting time to our major offices like San Francisco can be challenging, so we heavily emphasize and subsidize public transportation or shuttles where available. Senior management has changed frequently in the past 10 years, shuffling organizations and strategy, but the current CEO has put Zynga into a continuous growth trend for the last couple years, and seems poised to have brought strategic stability.
