Toxic working environment - an outdated "control and command" style of team management. - Anonymous employee Virtual Arts Employee Review

Work with a highly motivated team, devoted to pushing the boundary of the visual technology sector. Encourages employees to develop themselves, devoting time for self improvement. Want to learn a new software which could improve your workflow? Take this week for research and prototyping! Employees with motivation and passion can quickly progress through the company, becoming involved in high level planning meetings and increased responsibility. A multitude of benefits including free food, parking, multiple paid business trips per year, social events, etc.

Virtual Arts are not against crunch. being a start-up with a small team when a client asks to bring a deadline forward or springs a new project into the pipeline, sometimes you will have to put in extra hours to meet those deadlines. The company expects a high quality of work. Upon getting the job a 3 month probation will commence. In my case I was approved after the 3 months however there have been candidates that their probation was extended or ended early due to them not meeting the standards required. You are required to learn and change your routine when a new workflow is tested. My workflow previously was 3DS Max, Unreal engine, marmoset. However when I joined I was required to learn Blender, Unity and a number of different Source Control software. Virtual Arts is not a games company. If you graduated a games art or development course and are looking to make video games this is not the company for you.

A yearly Bonus, but this is to offset low wages. My team at the time was great and we had a real sense of comradery, this does not include leadership.

A culture of crunch and bad time management, We often had to deal with ridiculous deadlines and expectations, work that should have been a month or more would often be forced into a week or two leading to enforced crunch. If you did not partake in crunch you were seen as “ungrateful” or “not being a team player” and would often lead to getting belittled, shouted at, and bullied by management. This happened in every project. Planning was practically non existent or happened two days before the end of a week long deadline. This also lead into some long drawn out meetings that would eat into work hours, you were expected to make up the meeting time after work hours. When Issues about this work environment and management were raised by the team we were told to “get on with it” and pretend nothing was wrong even when management had mentioned they were open to criticism. Colleagues were often kept on probation multiple times with no clear reason why, this was up to a year on probation in some cases. A colleague was informed that they would lose their job if they didn’t “step up” within a month, nothing came of this, it was used as a fear tactic to get more work out of them. Promotions were used to get more work out of people and it was often said “you’ll get this if the next project does well” only for nothing to come from it. Management were often hard to get hold of but expected employees to be contactable anytime. Minor mistakes treated with immediate suspicion, often felt like you didn’t know how to do your own job. HR and work (lunch breaks, doctors appointments) policies were constantly changing and not being communicated until someone breaks the new policy. There was no actual HR department and these duties were left with the CEO, who no one felt comfortable discussing HR matters with. A point was eventually reached where the entire art team were unhappy, we laid out our concerns and were made redundant within a month after. Overall, do not work here; it's toxic and not worth the stress.