Let me be clear here first, most of the problems come from outside the Zynga Toronto studio. The people at the Toronto studio are phenomenal and I couldn't recommend working with them more. However, it is debatable how good the overall experience can be when there are a whole slew of concerns outside of the Toronto studio's control.
Slow to react to employee concerns until it becomes a large, and negative problem for the company. During covid, they gave a one time $1000 CAD stipend for home office expenses months after lockdown, was very stingy about letting people going to the office to collect things like keyboards, cables and adapters to work from home.
Lot's of recent games are acquired from studio acquisitions: if you end up on one of the original Zynga in-house games, expect to be maintaining that game for a very long time. In those cases there is little to no opportunities for career growth. I have seen my direct reports work ever so hard, but get little to no recognition since they are working on a legacy codebase on games with declining metrics. For the same reason, there is virtually no opportunity to update their skillsets with modern technologies the rest of the industry uses.
Long-term compensation is stingy, instead of raises, Zynga often loves to give out one time stock bonuses instead, but only when you haven't gotten any in recent years. The raises themselves are also pretty low, it makes more sense to switch to another company after years of being praised, and then get a tiny raise compared to peers outside of Zynga. As a manager at Zynga, the salary increase pool for my direct reports were pitiful. As much as I would have loved to see my team get the fair compensation for their performance, there was little I could do about it to compensate them meaningfully. I wouldn't be surprised to see employees who have been performing well, and working longer at the company to end up being out compensated by new hires. Likely related to some degree, a good number of Zynga employees have been leaving the company from the end of 2020 to 2021 as well.
The upper, senior direction from the main San Francisco headquarters, during 2020) don't exactly fit the mold of leadership material. They always talk about being more transparent during all-hands, but I haven't really observed that transparency at all. For instance, a few teams in one division were planning to transition their game to the cheaper satellite studio and move on to a new division, as a chance to work on newer games using modern tech and update their skillsets at the same time. Unfortunately, it was very late in the process when their replacements were effectively trained up to take over the transitioned game, when the senior management from HQ gave the news that they were no longer needed in either division, despite having known this for months. They basically asked them to look for new roles inside Zynga or be let go after a period of time because there was no work for them in either division, then asked them to keep working on roadmap items for their old team. There were a few senior team members that have been at Zynga for a decade, that got caught up in this, and they pretty much jumped ship after that. Since then, a lot of people have started moving on from Zynga to other companies, the talent isn't at Zynga anymore.
The senior engineering management from HQ often wanted small game teams focused on maintaining legacy games (think 2-3 engineers) to forfeit their roadmap to work on some high-effort, low-return initiatives, but criticism and concerns fell on deaf ears. In our retrospectives, the team agreed it wasn't a good use of time, and caused more harm to the product than good. This was a pattern, so it was evident that we could expect no improvement in this area.
If you plan to be an engineer at Zynga, they will throw you under the bus to save a product manager. Product managers tend to get preferential treatment and oftentimes there are too many product managers on a product, and a lot of time gets spent on iterating over the most mundane tweaks to boost metrics. At the end of the day, it's often a short-term gain on metrics like average revenue per daily active user to reach quarterly goal, but they sometimes forget the bigger picture. As an engineer, it's likely you will not be challenged or excited to work on such tasks after the honeymoon period of being on a new team.
If you have feature ideas for your game, expect to be politely ignored and told that you are not a game designer or product manager.
