Electronic Arts

8-10 days shutdown period in December.

• No work-life balance; you are expected to work from 9 AM to 11 PM. Even on weekends, your manager calls you and expects you to fix issues. They expect you to finish sprint tasks over the weekend. There are wrong estimations.
• Your health is going to get bad every day.
• Pay is less, not even comparable to service-based companies.
• Internal culture is just like a service-based organization; you are assigned to projects as per the manager's choice. They can swap you into any project at any time.
• You are expected to work on all platforms, code in all languages, and do everything.
• You are exploited, and your ideas are too, in the name of hackathons, awards, etc.
• Lot of political drama goes around between US and Hyderabad teams.
• Expected to join evening calls between 7 PM and 9 PM every day, which last for 1 hour to a couple of hours sometimes.
• No growth aspects; you are expected to work like an architect at a developer position, and architects work like people managers.
• Don't fall into the trap where managers persuade you with awards or stocks that can give you monetary benefits. Conditions apply.
• You will see contractors everywhere, and you will also be billed into projects like one of them, in spite of being a full-time employee.
• No real product development happens; it's all firefighting everywhere and unrealistic deadlines.
• The highest attrition rate I have ever seen in a product development organization till date. Many have left within the 6-month probation period. Some have absconded without notice.
• There are no good technical leaders in the middle management. Managers do micromanagement, causing a lot of emotional stress.

Please take care of your culture in the Hyderabad IT office, care for your developers.