- Burnout Culture
At PlayStation, you'll have unnecessary meetings until 8 or 9 pm three or more times a week, without anyone asking if you have small children, or what exactly your children are doing while you are stuck in unplanned video conferences. None of these meetings are useful or necessary. Most of them never even needed to be an email. They are tedious status updates that go on for 2 hours and suck the spirit out of everyone. 10 or 14-hour work days are common, and no one knows why or what for. Nothing is automated, everything is in Google sheets or 60 Slack channels. Everything is always on fire and not being available is unacceptable. Vacations don't belong to you either, and your manager will pull you into meetings during vacation time too. PlayStation seems to have imported the concept of "karoshi" (death from overwork") from Tokyo into Silicon Valley.
- Terrible for Women
As a woman at PlayStation, please prepare yourself to have supbar maternity benefits, the least desirable projects and performance reviews filled with gender-biased language. All of the most important product development always goes to the bro-culture dudes and there is a general lack of opportunity for women. Men always talk over women in meetings and no one ever stops them. Men also attack women when they are not available for meetings due to childcare conflicts or during no-meeting hours. PlayStation isn't at all interested in supporting mothers. That said, to create an appearance of caring for womens' issues, PlayStation has a number token womens' initiatives, except they are run by men and do exactly nothing to empower PlayStation women. During the COVID pandemic, PlayStation women were hit especially hard. Managers asked mothers to take paid vacation days to support their kids' virtual school. The CEO was extremely tone-deaf and kept sending messages about his sports interests and his barbeque parties as PlayStation women came together to cry because the loss of childcare was ruining their lives and their company didn't care. A lot of the company gender discrimination seems to be based on covert patterns of gaslighting. Not promoted or empowered? It's because you are incompetent, not because you are a woman (never mind statistical data). The company has consistently refused to release gender-based pay data. If you are a woman, just say no to this company.
- Horrifyingly Bad People Managers. If you haven't had your share of bullying, yelling, humiliation and continuous put-downs, PlayStation is the company for you. Old-time individual contributors get promoted to people managers and then there is no one to keep their abusive behavior in check. If you are unhappy, please prepare yourself to accept a severance package because HR will never believe you or take you seriously.
- Biggest and worst of all, PlayStation leadership is incompetent and runs the company on their gut alone, while serious players come into the gaming space with analytics and data-driven insights. PlayStation is stuck in trusting its long-time "bros" and their gut feelings. PlayStation will go the way of Blackberry unless it wakes up.
