Universally Speaking Reviews

Abhorent work culture. Favoritism is rampant within the managerial heirarchy, if you are not willing to talk about your friends and colleagues behind their back whilst puffing down vapes every break then get ready to be spoken of poorly. Certain members of higher up management are downright incomptent and have cost people their jobs. The pay is abhorent and so are the hours. Management will throw every excuse they have at their disposal as to why pay cannot go up, but will proudly boast about their huge earnings and cash flow. Minimum wage is also age based, so young seniors are actually paid less than older testers (despite how hard they work). Do not expect your hard work to go noticed. But definetley expect critiques. If you're absolutely desperate to break into the gaming industry, then by all means, go and suck it up for a bit until you have proper experience to work for a company that will respect you. Otherwise you'll be paid significantly more working in tesco than you would at Universally Speaking.

- Not representative of actual QA and LQA in the industry. - Messy, rushed training at all roles (on occasion, new staff were put on a live project with no prior training). - Toxic work environment. - High turnover of employees on junior and senior QA roles. - High and persisting discontent among staff. - Staff underpaid at all levels, compared to other studios in the same field. - Employees do not feel valued, but treated as disposable tools. - Employees overwhelmingly feel like their concerns are never listened to or acted upon appropriately by upper management. - Senior and lead staff are either overworked and expected to handle unrealistic workloads with limited resources, or given no work at all for days and expected to sit in-office for 8 hours hoping to find something to do. - Management frequently lies to staff about the status of incoming projects, recruitment of new staff, and client feedback. - Fosters a culture of dishonestly for profit, often encouraged leads and managers to lie to clients about issues that fall under Universally Speaking's responsibility to keep face. - Company broke Covid-19 regulations multiple times during the pandemic, showed no concerns for their staff's mental and physical health, and instead saw an opportunity to increase their profits by marketing their testers working in-office as a selling point to clients (while putting in little effort to make the office actually safe to work in, only making some improvements after being called out by more outspoken staff members). - Office is in a remote location and difficult to access without a car, opening times are not adjusted to accomodate the only bus line that stops nearby. - No WFH opportunities in QA at all.