Valve Is The Best Place To Work, Activision Publishing Among The Worst

Site Glassdoor.com, as its name implies, allows users to give insight to other prospective employees about a company's internal management and generally how it would be to work there.

Since many of the users are former employees, most of the comments tend to be on the negative side, which skews the ratings and reviews system, but since every company is given the same treatment, the playing field is even. As such, a compilation of video game company ratings on the site reveals that there's plenty to complain about.

A former employee at Activision Publishing, with a "Dissatisfied" rating of 2.2, says that though the possibility of learning was tremendous, the "hours and crunch will... be... brutal", sometimes "non-stop for 7 months, including more than a few monstrous 24+ hour marathon shifts". Also, "wages are not competitive to the rest of the industry".

One particularly pissed off employee of Codemasters, where 0% approve of CEO Rod Cousens, says that the company has "incredibly weak management" and advises senior management to "employ some execs who actually have a business degree".

EA Tiburon apparently "has a reputation for underpaying their employees, sometimes by 30-40% if they've been at the company for longer than 5 years". In fact, "managers see this as a badge of honor and work towards paying employees as little as possible to look good for senior management". Not only is it "impossible to tell how to get promoted", but there are times when "employees work upwards of 90 hours a week and they never get to see their families at any point".

Even Nintendo of America, with a positive 89% approval rating of COO Reggie Fils-Aime, has its troubles. The company is full of "old-timers" as a result of the company having "no layoffs", and is directly controlled by Nintendo in Japan who is willing to cooperate with Nintendo of America but don't trust them around.

Meanwhile, Rockstar Games has a "chaotic production pipeline", with "multiple bosses on one project", "old work being scrapped", and work needing to be done over because of poor communication in upper management.

The only developers that landed safely in the positive where Riot Games at an average rating of 4.4 and Valve with a pristine score of 5.0. Apparently, the most negative review on the company said that it had "good quality of life", "no formal management structure", and "responsibility is given on a competence level". Though things are "very competitive internally", "you feel like you are learning all the time".

So once again, Valve shows everyone how it's supposed to be done.

[Source]