Pros
There are people at the company who are genuinely nice who will become true friends, not just work colleagues.
Cons
Where to even begin... The sales team will sell a game and agree a launch slot with a customer before the rest of the company even know about the existence of the game, sometimes with only a few months to react. This leads to a situation where you have to crunch to release a game or risk upsetting the customer as you're automatically behind before the project has even started. Working late into the evening and weekends/public holidays was not uncommon. Staff members are asked to plan projects themselves by the team leads. When the staff deliver the timelines back to the leads they're told those times don't fit within the roadmap and they need to re-plan it to make it fit - The roadmap is never shown to staff members and the time the project needs to fit into also isn't communicated at first so projects often have to be re-planned once the actual available time to a project is communicated (If you ask to see the roadmap or enquire about what time a project has available to it you're told not to worry about that and to just come up with a plan and then the lead will let you know if that does or doesn't fit into the roadmap). Often this available time is completely unreasonable and you're asked to reduce estimated times by several weeks or more. Any attempts to try and explain why this is unreasonable get ignored/dismissed. Some staff have even been disciplined for speaking up about project timelines by their team leader, being told to just follow the leads orders and to not question anything. Team leads/management will also then use this 'staff planned' approach to absolve themselves of any responsibility and blame when the project does run behind, claiming that because it was planned by the staff member and not them, it is the staff members fault as they must have incorrectly planned the project. Certain team leads/managers will routinely lie to upper management/each other about the state of a project to make it seem like it's on track when in fact it isn't and they know it's not. In reality management rarely ever know exactly where a project is and what’s actually going on with it. When management discover a project isn't on track the team leader continues to lie and will blame the staff member working on the project for not communicating to them properly, often leading to that staff member being spoken too by management. In instances where the team leader is discovered to have been lying to management no action is taken and it just gets shrugged off. The lead will then go straight back to lying about projects/staff etc and management will act as if nothing ever happened (If they’re discovered again management will just treat it as if it’s the first time it has happened. This cycle repeats itself again and again). Some staff have even been spoken to by management multiple times because of things their team leader has made up about them, and now work in constant of fear of when they’ll next be taken to one side to be spoken to based on nothing but a team leaders baseless lies. At the same time they feel they can’t raise any issues/concerns for fear of repercussions from their team leader if they discover they’ve made a complaint about them. Overall the culture at the company is extremely toxic/a blame culture. When things go wrong (Which they frequently do), the management team and team leaders all start pointing the finger at everyone else/each other to try and shift any blame away from themselves, rather than trying to fix the root cause and work together to ensure it doesn't happen again. Management also don't deal with problems and complaints raised by staff members. Staff members which routinely raise complaints/try to point out problems are just seen as a problem child and are not taken seriously as management views them as drama queens. You’ll often raise the same issue multiple times but each time the management team will act as if it’s brand new information they’ve never heard before. They’ll promise resolutions but then not actually do anything. Staff reviews are also a complete joke, there was a brief period where reviews were carried out however the feedback from management was faked so that management could withhold promotions or pay rises by claiming you were at the correct level already. A new review structure was later introduced, designed to deliberately move reviews away from conversations about pay and promotions (management were very open and honest about this purpose). However a number of staff had to have HR sit in on their reviews due to how unfair the feedback was (Some staff had 1:1 reviews with their team lead and a few days later had to have the review repeated but with HR present after they raised how awful their team leader had treated them the first time around. Once again, no action was taken against that team leader and this would be allowed to happen again and again).