Tiburon - Not the best experience in my career.
Pros
You'll meet some great people. Employee Stock Plan is pretty good at times. I guess it looks good on your resume, although at times this hasn't looked good on my resume as well.
Cons
- Little to no career growth outside of management positions. - Very little emphasis on career path, or building your skills. - Very poor compensation in comparison to the industry. - Directors do not take their management responsibilities seriously, I haven't had a serious performance review in my 5 years. - Management only cares about taking care of management, they basically promote themselves super rapidly, and the majority of them are no where near ready for many of the responsibilities they are given. Management is always the first people to get "full time", while other disciplines tend to get contracted and receive no benefits. They'll generally only offer you full time if they're scared you will go elsewhere. Its a horrible business model that everyone hates, but its kind of the industry norm. Its sad that an "industry leader" isn't actively trying to solve this problem, shows that they really don't respect their employees. - Little to no accountability across the the studio. - Very poor project management, there's months where you don't do anything then you crunch super late due to poor planning and communication. - Vets at this studio have so much time off, the rest of the studio suffers yearly because they are constantly taking time-off/sabbatical. Which EA has eliminated for all employees past a certain date so you'll never get it! It's interesting that they haven't transitioned these people into leadership positions at this point, because it is a heavy burden when you have to cover development work for people(please move these people into project management roles). Again, this also ties in with the poor management/planning. - Directors are never around so features typically get pulled in many direction since the directors do a poor job of taking ownership. Lots of reworking of the same feature due to absence of leadership. - Directors are constantly taking on tasks that should belong to lower level employees, making them unavailable. I don't think the studio has a very good sense of what leadership responsibilities entail. I once didn't see my director for 5 months because he was off doing something an intern probably should have been doing. - Executive leadership is a boys club, and project management is slowly turning into a girls club. This is probably in part to EA's push to try and look good by hiring more women in leadership positions. While admirable I think they put too much emphasis on this, and the studio has shown its incapable of being unbiased in their hiring decisions for management, which has made a pretty toxic workplace that has split into many of the development teams. When you hire an intern who did very little in 3 months before you hire a contractor who's been there for two years, it just looks bad and the workplace notices it. (this happens yearly by the way) - Hyper political.
