Everything else, so where do I start.
1. At no time are the actual skills and experience of an engineer actually taken into account. This means that if you specialize in A and have some knowledge of B, and have never looked at C, you will probably be given a large job on C with a schedule that was created by some who not only understands C but how C fits into the overall giant system them have created.
I was never told what the job was going to actually entail. I went in with a certain experienced skill-set and found that I use very little if any of it. The larger systems are built, so most of the work is adding things to the current pile (stack is too nice a word). This pile is organized to an extent, but almost completely undocumented so you must constantly research how things were done in the past as to not re-invent the wheel.
There are a lot "dead-ends" in to code.
2. It's "seat of your pants" development and learning at the same time and is not for the feint of heart.
3, "Getting up to Speed" on the current game systems will take months combined with trying to do projects at "Zynga Speed"
4. 12-14 hour days are the norm.
5. Unlimited Vacation is scarce and usually given easily to long term employees but begrudgingly to new developers. Managers, producers, and PMs seem to take a lot of vacations though.
6.. Burn-out until you drop development cycle that never ends. No planned down time, just a constant churn.
7, Development environment and tools that only work 50% of the time, so you have to add an extra 50% to all schedules to compensate. No one in project management cares to do so though.
8. Engineers are given very little control over what they will work on and even less input into anything that might be considered creative game design
I could go on, but why. If you are under 25, have no kids, love the smell of dog and want to get fat eating all kinds of free food, by all means , apply. It will be the extension of the dorm-living that you will need right after college. Professionals who want to complete an entire design/develop/iterate/deploy/and document cycle will find the going is tough.
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