Electronic Arts

• Remote work is allowed.
• Great team of people.
• Get to work on interesting problems.
• Access to a uniquely complicated/large codebase.
• No overtime/crunch culture (might be different on other teams, though?).
• Great managers.
• Autonomy in how tasks are completed; management is generally ok with (even failed) attempts at interesting solutions, when applicable.

• Pay is bad, even for the games industry.
• You need to be somewhat self-motivated to learn relevant things and figure out the stuff you're working with.
• There are massive gaps in codebase documentation (often need to use the debugger just to follow what's going on).
• After a year-long contract, you can only work as a contractor again after a 3-month "break".
• Going full-time means taking a massive pay cut. (The full-time salary for the same role is ~90-100k CAD / year. I doubt the benefits make up for the difference, especially in Canada.)
• To go full-time, you have to sign an onerous IP contract (basically cannot publicly work on or release anything creative).
• If you quit, you have to get special permission to release any creative side project that they know about.

Come up with a better excuse for why people can't work on side projects. They're the only reason I was able to even gain the skills necessary to work here.

The comments from the CEO are patronizing at best.

The first example of an allowable side project is starting a vineyard.

The excuse given is typically along the lines of "I don't understand why you would want to compete with your employer :')".

It's disingenuous to act like hobby projects would "compete" with a multi-billion dollar company (or for the CEO to act like he "doesn't understand").

Even management and recruiters are frustrated by this, as they lose access to a lot of top talent (most people with job mobility who are genuinely excited to work on games will not take the trade).