Big Fish Games reviews

- Leadership at the Oakland studio is essentially non-existent. Managers are forced to run things on their own terms and mostly disconnected from other managers. Minimal guidance is the norm, which is just complicated by the fact that there is nearly no communication between the different departments. - The studio does not have a solid production process. If you like your job to be challenging for all the right reasons, this is not the place for you. The challenges and frustration are all very easily avoided and are mostly due to a mixture of general incompetence, lack of communication between people who sit near/next to each other, or the extremely flimsy studio release process. - Office politics out the wazoo. If you like the mystery and backstabbing of Game of Thrones, you're gonna love working in the Oakland office. Gossip, rumors, swirls of he-said-she-said. Blame games, whining about other departments, and friends hiring friends. Each day is a struggle to make progress in both your work and with your career. I've never felt as bullied by a studio as I have working here. - Morale is at an all time low. It's masked mostly, but once you start talking to someone 1 on 1, they can't help but mention how down everyone seems.

* Company culture consists of 1) maximize revenue 2) don’t get sued. Everything we do is a means to one of these two values. * The studio leans heavily on a single product. We only get to work on one app, all day every day. Customers get squeezed constantly with sales and promotions in order to maintain record-breaking revenue. Other projects that don’t make the same ludicrous level of money get canned. * Development is orientated towards adding more and more and more new features to the flagship app to try and increase revenue. There’s little concern with maintaining existing features or dealing with known problems unless they seem to impact the bottom line. * Managers and HR are very cautious about dealing with employees who are angry or lazy; the preferred approach appears to be “do nothing and maybe they will calm down/get back to work/find another job”. * Project/Product management is very opaque, making it appear chaotic. Or maybe it is chaotic, it’s hard to say from outside of management. Some PMs demand constant reporting from teams without really explaining why it’s necessary. Some PMs let their feature team do whatever, or nothing, and then just let the whole project flop over the finish line weeks late. * Our development process is the wild wild west. Maybe some people can deal well with no code freezes, lots of frantic hotfixing, and development environments that don’t behave the same as the production environment, but I’m not a fan. Nothing particularly seems to happen to those who check in breaking changes all over other people’s work, so there’s no real incentive to play nice together. * There’s no mobility either within departments or between them. Solid employees who turn out good work get passed over because upper management haven’t heard of them or can’t imagine people in roles other than where they were hired.