Immersive Gamebox Reviews

- Projects and features are erratically planned and prioritised. Whilst plans are made well in advance based on Half-Years, the actual work done can change on a monthly or weekly basis. Depending on your job-role, this can completely upset other plans. - When it comes to culture, you're able to negotiate and deliberate on features/timelines for your tasks. But when it comes time to negotiating issues like Office/Remote hours, or whether you're allowed to not go to socials, management absolutely does not compromise. They'll say they listen to you, but over time will progressively not budge until you compromise with them. - The budget goes to the venues, not to the development team. You're expected to work odd hours outside of the 9-5 without guaranteed compensation, and requests for staff/testing/time have gone unheeded in the past. - Not as much time is put into maintenance as is put into new features. At some points it felt like we had work for 6 people needing to be done by 3 without much overarching planning around it; a key problem is having new projects to deploy whilst trying to fit in maintenance & new features into that on top of the older ones. - It's taken an oddly long amount of time to fill certain roles, and likewise some staff will vanish; over time the consistent message was "they aren't/weren't a good fit for the company/culture". This desired "fit" from my experience seemed to be that they weren't ready to do certain tasks on a whim for the company, where up to that point the person in question was a solid employee, all it takes is one critical decision and you're gone.

No job security - even when your employee feedback is strong. Many employees have had their jobs hired out from underneath them whilst being told that their job is safe and that they're doing well. Often employees have found out their job is at risk when they see their own jobs advertised, when no performance concerns have been raised. The culture is "this isn't the right environment for everyone" which is a fairly uncontroversial statement for a start up, but this statement is then used as a blanket excuse for why employees haven't worked out. There is never any self reflection when long standing or even new employees quit suddenly citing the culture as toxic, or when staff are suddenly let go with no due process (ie performance meetings or improvement plans). In under 4 months over 15 employees from the head office team quit or were let go - bearing in mind the size of the head office team at this time, this was about 33% of the team. There is a concerning lack of ethnic diversity in head office, and although the gender split is fairly equal there is a significantly higher turnover rate of female staff especially at a senior level. There is an assumed incompetence and worse, malicious intent, about almost every employee if a mistake is made. Whilst mistakes are outwardly encouraged, the reality is if an employee does make a mistake they are 'marked' as incompetent or as an active saboteur of the company whose sole intention is to bring the company down from within. The CEO is incredibly paranoid, which he wears as a badge of honor, and is unable to regulate his emotions which means it is often like working in an office with, and for a company run by, a volatile two year old. Unfortunately he is also very passionate about culture and ensuring everyone has a clear view of what culture looks like within that company. These two things combined means that the culture he creates is also paranoid and volatile with priorities and targets that change daily based on his latest business development whim and/or his personal feeling on any individual (and therefore their team/department) within the business.