Electronic Arts

• Good pay and benefits, comparable to Microsoft, Amazon, etc.
• Top leadership treats employees as humans (e.g., their response to the pandemic has been great throughout so far).
• Variety of opportunities: lots of studios and many central tech teams.
• Pretty good work/life balance (can't speak for studios though).

I only have experience in one of their central technology organizations, so this may be different in other organizations, and is likely not representative of the many studios, as they can be rather autonomous.

My organization is extremely top-down when it comes to planning and execution. Even as a senior, I have little autonomy within my team. Things are decided behind closed doors by managers, and I'm just handed down projects thought up by someone else, often with no chance to give input on feasibility and deadlines.

They pay lip service to "you can shape your career according to your interests," but it only applies when your interests are aligned with management's interests in a very specific way. I've stated preferences in terms of what's ahead of us in our team, and almost invariably, I am always assigned work I said I was not interested in.

It's very hard to take initiative to improve things unless you do it on your own time. Even then, you might get asked why you were doing that and not working on the projects assigned to you. If you try to do things via the official route, leadership will pretend to share your concerns and put your ideas in a backlog that's never addressed.

Try to break the top-down structure of technology organizations.

Let employees feel genuinely interested in their projects and listen to their ideas. Let them pursue those ideas freely.

Trust that motivated people will produce good results.