King

It looks fancy from the outside.

King is a superficially successful and wealthy company, but its financial success has allowed it to cover up numerous issues that are hard to ignore.

1. Lack of Leadership in the Mid-Level Management: King has a significant problem with its middle management. There are many managers and directors with inflated titles, but they lack real leadership skills. These middle managers often don't even want to host the meetings they schedule themselves, shifting these responsibilities onto developers, which shouldn’t be their job in the first place. I’ve worked with engineering managers who have been at the company for over ten years, with no concern for their team members, no 1:1s, no salary reviews — they’re essentially just "coasting" at the company. There are many such people in the organization.

2. Lack of Competence in Product Development: King seems to have no idea how to build and manage products. The product managers and product directors hired by middle management are mostly ineffective. In most cases, they’re just organizers of meetings, spending their time creating vague visions and trying to report upwards, with little to no understanding of the products they manage.

3. Toxic Corporate Culture: The internal culture at King is strange. There are many obvious areas for improvement, but no one dares to speak up. It feels like everyone is just treading carefully, trying to hold on to their job in a company that’s essentially a money-printing machine.

4. Confusing Cost-Cutting Measures: There is a lot of confusion when it comes to cost-saving efforts. On the one hand, the company claims it's cutting jobs because of declining revenue. On the other hand, King has many unnecessary departments that do superficial work to create a "polished" external image, including renting expensive venues for pointless events. I don’t understand the significance of King discussing the "future of mobile gaming" when all they’ve really done is ride the wave of a trend with a simple match-3 game.

5. Unorganized Development Process: As a developer, I can't understand how a company that’s seen as successful by outsiders is so poor at implementing basic software development processes and management. As a developer, you end up doing everything: requirements analysis, product discovery, UX design, liaising, meetings, testing — you even have to run meetings that should be led by managers. So what exactly is the role of the managers and product managers?

6. Surface-Level Friendliness: The supposed "friendliness" within the company is mostly superficial. Many people are very good at performing political correctness and feigning friendliness. HR is incredibly nice when asking employees to recommend candidates, but once you do, they don’t even show basic respect — they send a generic rejection email. Some colleagues are great at saying nice things in public, but in private, they ignore you completely.

I don’t expect any changes at King, as the shareholders and executives are making too much money. However, as a developer, I would not recommend King to anyone. Your technical skills will stagnate, and you’ll find yourself stuck in endless internal politics and trivialities. Even smaller companies on the market operate in a much more organized and effective way than this.

Team cohesion isn’t built through fancy activities that look good on the surface. It comes from meaningful work, the satisfaction of achieving goals together, and creating an environment where everyone can thrive through modern, effective management. If you want King to continue its success, you need to cut the excess managers and remove the underperforming product managers.