Pros
As the title said it was a learning experience. The scale of the games gives you immense opportunity to learn if you are on the back end services team. We used relatively new tech stack such as redis, node.js, coffeescript while it was still a up and coming thing. Free food and snacks are good and did offset some of the salary cut the pre-ipo hired took. No limits on hardware and quality equipment to work with.
Cons
I personally felt the cons outweighed the pros and thats why I decided to leave. * While the learnings were fun, it was a short lived experience. The learnings stopped once I realized that the company tends to repeat itself again and again and is not keen on taking a step back to realize what might or might not be working. * Company is risk averse w.r.t technology. Proven numbers around performance with modern stack was dismissed in favor of PHP only because the company had lots of PHP developers/ops and thought they OPS might not be able to support it. * Working in a remote studio was absolutely painful as we got work that SFO didnt want or didnt care(this was fatal as it meant your quarterly bonus was non existant) * Merit increases were highly political. It went to SFO people always and unless your manager had good impressions about you, you end up getting nothing. * Product managers and directors can be extremely political. Our remote office clearly felt the directory preferred young engineers as they put more time at work that than the ones that had families. * Not all perks werent matched as SFO even for a US satellite office. No parking match. * Zynga does not value engineers at all. I would be surprised if any thing like a Spanner, Hive, HipHop, Kafka or any such innovative tech stack come out of Zynga as its just not valued or rewarded. If you did a quick fix that ticked unique users up in a month then you will be recognized as a star or an atlas or whatever crap they paraded in company meeting. On the other hand you spent weeks to improve a bad PHP code base and reduced server count, you get nothing. * unprofessional executives - The way the chief people officer behaved was shocking. Their on stage interactions with other executives on quarterly company meetings was awkward and embarrassing. * Mark Pincus - Extremely reactive founder. It doesnt take much to spook him and he will quickly change directions. For instance when the Sims took off he killed projects to put those folks on "the Ville" game only to realize in a month Sims dying off. Ville met the same end.