Worst place to work at - Anonymous employee Pearl Abyss Employee Review

-Bad work environment overall but can be even toxic depending on your department. -Incredibly long hours with NO OT PAY. Depending on which department you are in, you can easily stay until 12-1am in the morning very frequently and consecutively. Only sometimes will they offer you to come in late the next day to make up for it but that is up to the discretion of your manager and is NOT guaranteed, as they have noted it is just a kind gesture and not something to be expected from the company. -Treats workers as if this was a start up company (when they are a fairly large established company) with a "you must wear multiple hats with no complaints" and low pay. They will say it's because of their "benefits" are what makes up for it, however, many companies provide just as excellent benefits with better pay else where. It's one thing to HELP out with things outside of your scope of work but its another to tack on several jobs under you for little pay and no title change and little to no pay raises. If you don't subscribe to their working style they will treat you as someone dispensable, especially if you aren't in the clique. You can actually see the favoritism and difference between how they treat their colleagues. -Incompetent management. Almost all level of management does NOT know what they are doing. This plays into a toxic work environment. Fast pace because they themselves do not know how to plan effectively nor work efficiently and causing all projects to be rushed. Will plan projects last minute and when it is not up to par, will essentially blame others but themselves. Due to this, there is a lot of unrealistic timeline expectations from them. Almost everything must be reviewed and checked by KR home office and essentially be done yesterday when they give you the project just today. Any issues you bring up to them will result in them basically gaslighting you. No structure to any team and it is up to the people under the management to try and figure out how to do anything to create results. They also don't even know what to plan because they themselves don't really interact with the community nor really play the game (which is shocking to hear but they sorta pretend to be gamers), so they do not have knowledge of what kind of events, stream, content, etc to plan for the community to enjoy. Lots of micromanaging when they themselves don't know how things operate, thus many issues can blow out of proportion for no reason because they don't ask for help, don't research, nor let the people who know how to work do their job effectively. -Ineffective working style. Refusal to adapt and lack of understanding of Western/ American working culture. The majority of management are Koreans from Korea and they basically run the LA office as an extension of the Korean office. Not only that but when suggesting any changes to improve situations they will reply with "but in Korea we did it like this and it was totally fine" and nothing will be done, especially when Korea has different working laws and work culture compared to America. They have a mindset of if it worked in Korea that it must work in America. Not really opened to trying new ideas or attempting anything. -Poor communication from management to team but also from management to Home Office. Management speaks Korean like 80% of the time. Their big meetings are all held in Korean so if you don't know Korean your best out of luck. They employ a trickle down effect in terms of communication crucial information and details about projects, events, etc to the team causing projects to be not fully understood and done poorly (thus leading to the cycle of blaming you) and be delayed because you had to wait for all the information to be presented to you. By the time information comes to you, it is just crumbs of what is needed to be known to do your job well. What you tell them to ask of Home Office if needed for a specific project may never be conveyed and when it is, it may not even be what you are asking for as they tend to tiptoe around them and are afraid of upsetting them in anyway (even if it is something small). -Any serious issues will basically not be dealt with until people start quitting in order for them to do anything about it. Ex. There was a incredibly toxic manager and it took 10 months and 2 people quitting with several people from other departments also submitting countless complaints for almost a year prior in order for them to actively do anything about the issue. HR has their hands tied because they will get over ruled by the person in charge, so you can't expect HR to help you too much even if they want to. -Drains the creativity and passion out of you. Any suggestions for anything basically gets shot down if it is not seen in a Korean lens. Does not understand Western audience given that the LA office is suppose to cater to the western market. Wonder why some events or streams are so boring? Or that there doesn't seem to be many of them? You can thank the management and the Korean home office for basically shooting down all ideas that are not Korean or made with them in mind. Almost all creative ideas have to cater to the Korean audience as the management who is almost 95% Korean, does not understand the meme or gaming culture of the West, and will not approve it. Can be seen by how many people who were so excited at the beginning providing so many ideas stop suggesting anything after a few months. -No opportunity to move up. If you are looking to work your way up from the bottom do no consider this company. Most, if not all, big meetings are done solely in Korean, so if you don't speak Korean you will most likely not be able to participate. Which will lead you to not being able to try and tackle bigger projects to move up. The roles in which doesn't require your heavy involvement are the few roles that can have non-Korean speaking management but that is incredibly few. -Diverse but in a different way that isn't really diverse or good. Management is essentially male dominated not because they are well suited for their roles but because traditionally both in gaming culture and Asian culture, males tend to make majority of the roles (and not in a good way). President acknowledges that there is heavily male dominate and wants to change but then talk about how none of her female colleagues are up to par and doesn't do anything to change nor empower female colleagues. Yes, this is a Korean company, however, regardless of it may be a majority of one culture you must also be open to working with people of different backgrounds more so for the branch based in the US, which is a melting pot of people. Sadly that is the case as mentioned above, they all work and live in a Korean bubble and you either have to abide by it or you will have a bad time. -BDO only. (Can be both a pro and con). Great if you like the game and play nothing but BDO specifically the PC version. Console team gets nothing, devs don't do anything to address issues, and mobile team is isolated as their own thing. BDO PC is the only one that gets the most support. They don't really allow you to play any other games (as many of the management doesn't play anything else either) to help facilitate new ideas that can be suggest to implement to game or create events for the community. It is actually discouraged to play any other games when during work hours, even if you are not busy. You are expected to only play BD and BD only, so if you are free that day, you can't be caught watching YouTube or be on social media, you have to play BD all day. This can be great if you enjoy it, however, if you are not into the grinding mindset, doing this several hours a day every single day can be exhausting. Anything you watch as well must be directed towards BD whether its streamers or community videos. They have given people slack about watching things not related to BD in anyway (part of the micromanagement as mention above). -Office overall sloppy. People lacking general etiquette of picking up after themselves and cleaning up their own messes. Furniture keeps moving around a lot because lack of foresight, and it can be noisy because things keep having to be moved around.