Visual Concepts (Novato, CA) reviews

If you're not the type of person to take initiative, you're not going to excel. The most frustrating thing is the nature of the industry's sports video game cycle, shipping games every year. Overall, I think the team is very talented, but our development cycle is somewhat immature, mainly due to the tight time constraints. You will not find much automated or glass/white-box testing, comments, documentation, or code-reviews, for the better or worse. The office is in Novato, CA, which isn't near much. I would rather work in SF or south bay. The north-bound commute is easy, but if I bought a house and lost my job, I'd be in a bad position.

The management is extremely disorganized. I should have known when I showed up for my first day of work and didn't actually know my duties or job title. It turns out I was being hired as a Build Engineer, though such a thing was never brought up during the application or interview process. There was no training or guidance, which is something sorely needed by someone at their first job. 'Go read the source code' was their idea of training. What source code? Why? I was rarely given concrete tasks to help me learn the ropes or make a difference at the company. 'Think of something interesting that we could use and do it.' That is way too open-ended for someone who hasn't even learned what is needed at the company. It's also lazy. I never felt like I had goals or motivation to excel at this company. From the day I started I was just a cog in the machine.