Niantic

The SF, Bellevue, and Tokyo offices are quite nice if in-person collaboration is ideal for you. The individual office cultures tend to be fairly good. They (mostly) put their money where their mouth is as far as D&I is concerned. Despite their best efforts, Pokémon Go is still a fun game with a great community. The majority of the people who work at the company are passionate and want to do the right thing, and a lot of them are great fun to work with.

It is very easy to fall between the cracks and just sort of shuffle around and exist if you're not an outspoken and passionate person, which can be a double-edged sword. (Obviously not a con for everyone, but it should be mentioned.) This also leads to what feels like a lot of filler and middle-management positions, with a few talented engineers, designers, artists, etc., carrying the load for many.

Forced RTO policies post-pandemic, pointing at it as one of the reasons why products were underperforming, while not acknowledging the actual reasons they were (poor design decisions, executive whims overwriting feedback from players/internal feedback).

Reliance on a bloated technology stack that has accrued a completely untenable amount of tech debt. Everyone who made it no longer works at the company, and it is such a broad platform that there likely isn't a single person who understands how it all works start to finish.

A high degree of internal executive politics: you are either forced to be at the whims of, or you are going to get in some drag-out fights to enact the changes you believe to be positive. This leads to a pervasive attitude of frustration among a lot of the staff. Communication outside of official company channels between coworkers reflects this negativity and frustration.

A lot of coworkers got mysterious pay bumps as soon as the California law passed requiring them to display salary ranges. Upon investigation, a lot of these pay bumps were to the bottom of the newly listed pay bracket, furthering mistrust that many junior staff were being underpaid.

Video game development is a passion industry, but that doesn't mean that workers should be unfairly compensated for their labor. Hopefully, the forced visibility change will lead to a more positive outcome on this front.

Decide whether you want to be a technology company or a video game developer. This one foot in, one foot out approach just muddies the waters.

There is a clear favoritism towards the technology faction within the company, and the desire to push features from the technology side often clashes with the realities of game development on the other side.

If you're going to be a game developer, actually listen to more junior designers and player feedback. Railroading unpopular changes through in the name of adherence to company vision versus listening to the people paying the bills is not a smart business decision.

You need to realize that you are making an MMO: once you give players quality of life, you can't turn around and take it away, ever.

Forcing every product to adhere to the 'Niantic Values' is not going to land in the current market.

Management needs to take a long, hard look at the values and decide whether the livelihoods of their staff and the value of their company are worth the stubborn adherence to the vision.

You need to let internal product teams make their own technology decisions from scratch that are right for their product. Forcing everyone into the Niantic Platform inherits such a dramatic amount of technical debt for every single project.

I realize there is a dogfooding aspect to it, since you are also trying to sell Lightship as a product, but the fact that external developers aren't able to bring their own code and have to be reliant on Java is not a good look either.

Major time and investment is necessary to rethink and retrofit the platform.