Electronic Arts

An opportunity to work on major console titles and build your resume if you're interested in a career in AAA games. If you're not interested in this industry, there are plenty of other places where you'll find better compensation and work-life balance.

Depending on the team, you can get a lot of responsibility architecting major systems for major games even if you're new to games or are an inexperienced dev.

People are passionate about games and want to make them fun and polished.

There are a lot of people with depth in their respective areas (eg graphics programming) to learn from.

One of the few console developers that hires engineers straight out of school.

• Promotions are much less frequent than at any one of the fast-growing mobile or social gaming companies.

• It can be hard to focus on professional growth when you're under frequent pressure to hit unrealistic deadlines.

• It can be nerve-wracking when the company is underperforming. The company eliminated entire teams on many occasions in order to cut costs, sometimes waiting until just after they finished their last game.

• Low morale due to bad financials/layoffs.

• Marketing decided which projects get green-lit and sometimes made questionable decisions. They set unrealistic time tables, pushed for uninteresting games, or blocked titles that had a lot of creative momentum, based on their market analysis which was never transparent to the game teams. It also was never clear how or whether marketing was accountable for mediocre decisions.

Provide more transparency into green-light decisions. When teams invest a lot into new games, they deserve more insight into the decisions being made behind the scenes.

Offer more career growth opportunities so employees don't have to leave once they're tired of their current roles.

Better product strategy from top execs so that financials don't continue to disappoint.