Senior Software Engineer • Current Employee
Pros: Good perks, like (pre-COVID) all-expenses-paid week in Copenhagen, commuter and phone reimbursements, fitness reimbursements, free lunch and snacks.
Company overall is very communicative. Fully remote onboarding went off without a hitch. HR is very responsive and transparent about the COVID strategy. Public Slack channels are full of people sharing their personal projects, weekend plans, etc.
My team is already across time zones with 12-hour differences, and there have been no hitches. I think being a global team before the pandemic made the transition easy.
Workload is very manageable, but this feels team-dependent. I’m fairly new still, but my team spearheads a large initiative spanning all of the company and time zones, and yet I’ve never been pushed to working more than 40 hours a week. I have a great manager who will push back deadlines for us and manages upper management expectations. I’ve helped out on other projects where the teams seemed under a lot more stress due to disorganized management, but I have not been exposed to that.
Cons: Offers are slightly less competitive than the market. I think they rely on the cachet of working in the games industry to have people overlook a mediocre pay structure.
The perks like healthcare, gym reimbursement, etc., are actually very good, but they will hem and haw about signing bonuses, pay bumps, etc.
There is no annual cash bonus.
They do refresh RSUs for certain positions, but it’s hard to tell their value until the IPO happens.
The sentiment I’ve heard is that it’s hard to advance your compensation unless you get promoted.
Some teams are plagued with disorganization and poor leadership. My team is very good because my manager is on top of communication and setting expectations, but I know teams where no one knows what the product requirements are, or even when deadlines are, because their manager is not explicit in either, so they are scrambling to gather their information themselves.
IMO, it’s no worse than a lot of companies and startups I've been in, but I definitely sense how frustrated they are, and it can kill morale.
Good news is that the manager was disciplined, so it seems like the company takes it seriously.