3y
It’s disheartening to read reviews like this as the business owner. No one sets out to create a business that causes unhappiness to others. To the reviewer: I’m sorry to hear that you had such a bad experience at our company. Everyone deserves to find a workplace that fits with who they are and so I hope you’ve found your ideal workplace by now. I agree with certain points you've made and have made changes to our studio based on your comments (please see below).
We don’t get poor reviews often and so I’d like to take some time to address this review:
- A bit of context: This person was terminated due to several reasons (some of them listed below). They weren't happy about their termination (as you can imagine). We have regular check-in meetings together and not once did they voice any discontent or shared any areas of improvement. Had they done so, we would have addressed their issues immediately. Please take this context into account when reading their review.
- A timer tool was mentioned as a form of micromanagement. During our interviews with the reviewer, we had explicitly mentioned the need for time tracking for this project. The requirement to track time was also listed in the job description. Tracking was required by the stakeholders of the project so I really wish the reviewer had let us know during the interview that they felt uncomfortable with this! To be clear, time tracking is NOT REQUIRED anymore since we’ve completed that project. I understand where this person is coming from though, and so we will no longer take on projects that require time tracking.
- Responding to colleagues’ Slack messages in a timely manner is a requirement for us. This was also stated in the job description and our interviews, as well as during the onboarding process. We’ve never heard of any complaints about this before since it’s a benefit to everyone. Imagine messaging your colleague to talk about something that’s blocking you and having to wait for an hour to get a reply. You wouldn’t want that for yourself and neither do your teammates. That said, I have brought this to our team, and we’ve agreed that if you’re not AFK a soft policy of 15 minutes could be more ideal.
- We had three co-op students during this time, which is the most we’ve ever had at a single time. These students were absolute rockstars and did a fantastic job in developing early prototypes. I’m really proud of them and see no reason why we shouldn’t have hired them during the prototyping phase of our project. As to not investing resources in intermediate and senior employees, this is not true at all! We have paid the full tuition for multiple people in the past to help them upskill and advance their careers. One such employee started out as a co-op, then became a full-time for several years before moving on to their childhood dream company to work for (Naughty Dog). We supported them along the way with paid courses, educational subscriptions like ‘GDC Vault’, paid mentorships, and relevant work experiences. We even went to GDC together.
- I wish it wasn’t the case that we weren’t able to trust the reviewer. It’s not a great feeling on both sides. We’ve never had a situation like this before and it has made me lose more sleep than I can count. I’ll give two major incidents where our trust in the reviewer was admittedly affected: 1) During their employment at our company, we found out the reviewer was running TWO startups AND was employed at another company (in addition to being employed at ours). Granted, the reviewer was working with us on a part-time basis (three full days a week) but I hope anyone reading this can see how worrying this was. 2) The reviewer was instructed to pay special care to cyber security due to one of our stakeholders’ concerns. Not more than 2 weeks later, the reviewer proposed and insisted on a publicly accessible content management system (CMS) where full edit access is given to our most important databases via a single password. This CMS would be publicly accessible to the internet (!) and a username wouldn’t even be assigned. When questioned why this would be more secure than using Azure’s existing, tried-and-true authentication system, they said a single password is enough protection and left it at that. This one still baffles me to this day.
- Sometimes people have different opinions on which creative path works best. That’s totally fine. It’s important to understand that creative work is not a scientific process. At times, relying on one’s experience and intuition is required.
- I’ve brought this up with the team. They said that although they could see I wasn’t as energetic as before the birth of my daughter, they disagreed with the reviewer outright, saying they didn’t feel any pressure at all. They went as far as saying the reviewer wasn’t being “fair in [their] review” (their exact words). I do admit I could have handled my stress and lack of sleep better and a paternity leave would have helped immensely, but we had an important project in the works and I wanted to continue supporting our team. That said, I feel terrible to have made this reviewer feel the way they did. It doesn’t feel great to feel any amount of emotional weight at your workplace no matter the circumstances. Having thought about this for quite some time, I think the reason why the reviewer felt the way they did was because they had stopped attending our team socials. Our team socials are where we share a little bit about our lives with each other, building relationships and our understanding of one another.
- We purposely have a flat organizational structure at this company. Some people like it and some people don’t. Pros to this are: Less managers, less meetings, more focus on dev tasks. Cons: Developers pick and choose what tasks they want to work on and need to update the statuses of those tasks on Jira. We're open to hiring a PM in the future but our team size right now doesn't necessitate one. We've talked about this early on in our hiring process though so the reviewer already knew what our organizational structure looked like. I feel like their feedback is meant to maim rather than to represent the truth.
- Normally, we only just have a daily 10-min standup meeting and a weekly half-day all-hands meeting. The all-hands meeting was a suggestion that stuck around since the early years of the studio’s history. I’m inclined to agree with the reviewer that it is a bit long though. This is something I’ll bring up to our team to see what they think. Thank you for the suggestion.
I want to again express my apologies for the reviewer’s experience at our company. We've implemented some of their suggestions and will be speaking with our team to make further improvements. It’s clear that this person wasn’t a good fit (on both sides) and I wish them best of luck in finding a workplace that suits them better.
Stay safe and take care everyone.
PS: This reviewer is now creating multiple profiles to post more negative reviews.
