Niantic

Niantic has some of the friendliest, most fun coworkers I've ever had.

Really extraordinarily good work/life balance (on some teams). A lot of people complain, but I think they haven't worked at many other places. I've worked weekends a lot in my career and done a lot of crunch; it's infrequent at Niantic.

We're doing some really cool work in AR, gaming, and platform, and our game pipeline is exciting.

Our CEO genuinely cares about employees, and we've added some new senior leaders who will help shake things up. The head of the LA studio is terrific and has deep experience in the industry as a studio head and small company CEO.

Talking a lot more about diversity, and it seems leaders take it seriously.

Our Black Lives Matter donations are amazing.

New donation matching program is really nice.

There's a lot of dead weight at Niantic. Early employees who continue on in unclear roles and aren't seemingly held accountable for anything.

Senior leaders who've clearly risen beyond where they can do good work but we're very slow to move anyone out or demote them.

We haven't really shipped much since PGo and feel like that's our only really successful product. We have some good work in the pipeline, but can we make a real impact or are we a one-hit wonder?

Game development feels like second-class citizens sometimes, behind the Google and Facebook engineers. We make all the money for the company, but everything is about AR and platform. And I don't know how real or successful the platform will be. We've been talking about it for a long time, but does it really exist?

It feels like we didn't really capitalize on our early lead and have fallen behind companies like Snapchat and Facebook in augmented reality. If we focused more on games and less on AR, we'd probably move faster and make more money.

Lots of management changes recently. Some of the org changes may be good, but it's still disruptive. And I think we need more change.

The HR team isn't terribly supportive; you really need to manage your own issues.

I don't understand the difference between game teams in the studio versus those that are more integrated into Niantic, but the ones closer to Niantic seem to be the favored children.

We haven't been told what our post-pandemic office will look like. While tech companies are moving to be more remote-friendly or at least work-from-home friendly, we're still being told to wait and see.

Not sure what our equity is worth, and I don't think we can sell it unless we go public.

We have a bonus, but they don't really tell you how it's determined. Mine was pretty good last year, though.

We had some high-profile departures recently; not sure if that's a bad sign or not.

Like most game companies, we could do better with diversity.

Accountability for everyone, including OG employees and executives.

Get better HR.

Focus on game development.

Hire more women.

Let us sell equity.

Let us work remotely even after COVID.

Promote people faster.