Pros
- People - Love or hate the games, the people behind this company are it's best asset. Smart, driven, fast and always open to help, you'll be pulled forward by them and if you're smart enough to find a good mentor, they'll help you push yourself to new heights. Go for the people!
- Be your own CEO - Ability to own and impact large areas of whatever you're working on with distributed decision making.
- Zynga Speed == Pragmatic - To move fast you have to make trade-offs and this place will teach you how to do it better than anyone out there.
- Zynga First - Egos get pushed aside when someone challenges you with "is that Zynga first?"
- Meritocracy - Doesn't matter if you're in QA, Documentation or Design, your voice gets heard and the best ideas rise to the top if people have the confidence to speak up.
- Level Up - If you aspire to move up and can both build and execute upon a plan to grow your career then Zynga will reward you with upwards mobility. Just don't think working REALLY hard is enough, it's not, you need to show results.
- Innovate - the games might not always show it (see cons) but internally the company is never afraid to change itself, processes, teams or tech in order to move forward. Sometimes that's a messy thing but at least it breaks the old molds and creates new ones.
Cons
- Insane hard pace at times, you'll burn out if you can't figure out how to stay healthy (which is your responsibility).
- Regurgitation - games can be very derivative and there are economies of scale in doing so, move around to make sure you don't get bored, 1 year per team.
- Ruled by Numbers - sometimes you need to use gut and intuition but those aren't always trusted if there's no comparable numbers to look at it.
