Pros
- Decent pay for a gaming studio (for senior engineers). - There are some passionate folks that are nice to work with, especially some of the designers. - If you stay here long enough to get tenured, then you can do whatever you want. - The hiring process was easy, for me it was just a take home test and a couple of interviews. No one reads the answers to the take home test other than the programming questions. I wrote "Oh by the way, please mention this sentence to me during interviews if you read it" on my test and no one mentioned it.
Cons
- I'm a mostly remote employee, and I did not receive any IT equipment when I started. I'm using 100% of my own gear, I even had to buy a 2TB SSD and webcam purely for work. At the last gaming studio I worked at they bought me a top of the line gaming PC to use without blinking. - Gearbox completely lacks engineering discipline. Code reviews are optional! Which, in practice, means no one does code reviews. The guiding principle is that if you do it first and it mostly works, then that was the right way to have done it. What this means is that the code is all poorly written cowboy code with no thought given to sound engineering principles or maintainability. - I got bait and switched about the work I was going to be doing. I'm a fairly specialized Linux server engineer, and I expressed this clearly during interviews. The work I was told that I'd be doing aligned with my background very well. After being hired, I was shoved onto the UE assembly line to do any UE engineering work that needed doing. This includes windows UE editor tooling, which is extremely out of my wheelhouse. - Onboarding was basically non-existent outside of a 1 hour presentation from HR. After I'd been here for 1 week I was already being hounded for not getting tasks I'd been assigned done quickly enough. This persisted until I finally had enough time to finish on-boarding myself. I'm a "senior", and in the mind of my supervisor that means I should have had no ramp up time, even though I had clearly communicated my lack of experience with UE. - Communication between the studios is all done through Teams and no one actually chats. I've been here about a year and any co-worker that I haven't worked with directly is a stranger to me. - The tenured employees all get to do whatever they want, they can work on any product they choose and do any work they want to on that product. Everyone newer is on the assembly line. This feels terrible as an experienced engineer, when you know exactly how you could be most efficiently contributing, but instead you're stuck doing the next task in the queue that may or may not be anything you're familiar with.