Vantaggi
My advice to potential new hires; If you are ambitious, experienced and well educated, you might experience stagnation on many aspects of your career and personal development. There are very little career growth opportunities and because of the low quality of the products it might not add much to your portfolio and you might risk exhausting yourself and your skills on uneducated people in an old fashioned company. If this is you, go spend your energy elsewhere, where it is rewarded, respected, understood and acknowledged and realise that working here comes with the risk of spending valuable time without much professional reward in return. If you are gonna give this a try and you know your worth, I advise you to negotiate well. Once you agree to a salary and a position, it will likely never change eventhough HR will promise you mountains, realise that growth is likely never happening once you are hired. HR and your manager have 0 power to make anything happen. The power to get anything done is with the two people that are furthest away from their employees and the product, the CFO and the CEO. Loyalty to your direct manager and team therefore means nothing. If higher management wants something, it will happen regardless of how this affects you, your peers or even your manager. If you are a junior and need a step up, this can be a place to spend a year or two. If you are an amature that needs a way into the industry, this is also a good place to start. Even though this company is around for quite some time, its track record has not warranted any growth into a well rounded and talented developer. There is not enough in-house knowledge when it comes to running a game development company and because of the low pay, very little benefits, and very low-standard workplace circumstances, it is very difficult for them to attract or keep industry-veterans, talents or educated people. Leadership positions and especially department director positions, are given to incompetent people just because there is no alternative. Skilled expats are often much more competent than their native Czech colleagues but are mostly ignored. I experienced a lot of incompetence and low emotional intelligence among leaders and employees. Some departments are completely unapproachable and unwilling, so collaborations are extremely difficult. There is no unity and no shared passion. There is little understanding of what it takes to connect disciplines, there is no knowledge of modern workflows, there is almost no-one that holds a degree in project management, design studies and/or game development. Creativity is not nurtured, instead it's killed by pragmatism and ignorance. Programming often has the monopoly on decisions at the cost of everything creative and it's damaging the quality of the product. There exists a true lack of trust from people that themselves have no education and no experience, are mostly afraid of change, and feel intimidated by others that do have degrees and half a creative brain. If you have enjoyed proper education outside of the Czech Republic, you will find yourself explaining basic stuff to colleagues and even leadership. They barely speak English and without proper education no one understands what is taught in universities, it makes them insecure, defensive and unwilling to learn. When you propose improvement it will not be acknowledged. This is soul draining if you are skilled and experienced, and a burnout is guaranteed for the ambitious and knowledgeable people that take pride in their work. All your degrees, years of training, research and passion mean nothing when you sit in a culture where everyone is free to challenge anything, while nothing outstanding is ever accomplished. This aspect is really extraordinary and something I never saw anywhere else. It's perverted when a Master or PHD has to defend his expert contribution to people that barely speak English and have no experience or degrees. Why even hire experts then? Even your direct colleagues in the same discipline will often only have job-hopped to get there and never truly studied for any specialty. This creates a huge knowledge gap, even with leadership, which is very frustrating. Then the perspectives towards other companies; Some here are very quick to note things wrong with the competition. The most annoying thing I experienced was that some would openly shame competing developers that other colleagues were going to work at. After resigning, these people were still there, sitting out their notice period, while their soon-to-be ex-colleagues were bad-mouthing their new place of work. It was like they were saying; "well you might quit, but it will be just as bad there, as it is here." Well this is not true. I think just about any other company will be better than this one. I would say; first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye. The tools that are being internally developed have no sense of usability, no regard for design and workflow. No sense for what developers need, to be happy in their job and produce high quality content. The entire thing is ran by programmers and incompetent leadership without a single creative bone in their body. Nothing here is done for the employees that develop the artistic side of the games. Instead, all is done to get a mediocre quality product out into the world at a time set by higher management. It doesn't matter how bad it is as long as something goes out. Most leadership and management positions are filled by people that are not trained in project management or creative studies. They also have no previous experience at other game developers, so everyone is just trying to invent the wheel over and over while being too arrogant to actually learn from other successes and failures. As a senior employee with experience and one of the few that has multiple degrees I still was on the outside of an impenetrable ego-bubble, powerless to influence anything. Higher management doesn't know what it takes to make a good game and when a concept is justified to pursue. Middle management does have good ideas, especially if they have a few of the good designers working for them, but those ideas are often blocked by higher management and their inner circle of old timers/veterans. If not blocked, higher management sets their insubordinates up for failure by unreasonably limiting resources and setting crippling deadlines. Higher management does not understand what makes a developer nice to work for. They assume everyone shares their vision, but in reality, publishing, the cto, ceo, and cfo are all very out of touch with what a good game is and what their designers and developers need in terms of time, tools, workplace, and gratification. They hold to their own ideas and it's shown to be wrong time and time again. Extremely low pay. I heard that some juniors even make as little as 750 euros a month. At the same time it is reported that revenue is steadily increasing. This clearly is not reflecting on the game quality and the employees needs and workspaces.They don't even purchase multi-user licenses if they can get away with a single user license. Most individuals are very nice people but somehow in the context of the company, it's hierarchy and infrastructure, it does not hold up. Creativity, education and emotional intelligence are all severely lacking in this company. Creativity, ambition and modern views are pushed back. Toxic culture. Male privilege rules. There is a culture of talking behind each other's back. Politics are the fuel behind progress and collaborations. Lots of talks but no solutions. Expat unfriendly. Czech people are preferred even though publicly the company profiles themselves differently. In reality expats have been known to become isolated from collaborations because colleagues refused to speak english. Efficiency is extremely low, communication is dysfunctional, atmosphere is toxic and collaboration crippled. There is very little unity and the atmosphere is always tense between departments. Many people communicate in a very fake way as an attempt to get something from another department. Whereas game development should be a unified effort, instead, very skilled people are often forced to partake in this political toxicity because less competent people need to be spoken to just right, in order to convince them to get on board or simply do their job. Team leaders, directors and other management, blatantly use transparent and engineered approaches when speaking to other leaders or subordinates to get things from them. Interaction between departments never seems to be open and natural. The wrong people have too much influence on matters they know nothing about. The worst thing is, all of them have started to believe this is how it works everywhere. I can tell you now, this is not true. Higher management and publishing have very little understanding about development and sets rigid deadlines with no respect to development, setting up their people for failure time and time again. Technical and creative employees fail to collaborate due to obsessive pragmatism. Recommendations from technical disciplines are always preferred by leadership at the cost of all else. Design talent is underestimated. The turnover is high here because creatives are treated as a dispensable workforce. Your opinion will likely get you isolated or you will burn out because you can’t do what you know is right for the game and for yourself. Because technical skills are idolized over creative skills, there is an incredible shortage of employees that are well-read and educated in design studies. If you share a study, or an article, no-one cares and it visibly goes right over their heads. Proper terminology used by people that actually went to school is often even laughed at and belittled. Upper management is old fashioned. Their management strategy is based on the premise that employees do not want, do not care, do not know and will exploit the company every chance they get. One example of this is forcing employees to log every minute of their day. Another example is the sick leave you will pay for yourself. Micromanagement galore. Which is even more idiotic when enforced by incompetent leads. Critical employee-needs are ignored. Both in regard to health, workspace and in terms of tools and their ability to do their job right. Leadership lacks knowledge about the modern workplace, specialist needs and maybe even doesn't care. Even though your direct team and manager have the best intentions and the relationship is good, it doesn't mean the company won't cancel you, first chance they think it's beneficial to them. No one has your back and high management can stop your job whenever they see fit. People are never sure or have a feeling of safety. Regardless of performance, it is always unclear if your job will survive the next year. Working from home is frowned upon and this is also openly expressed by management during the pandemic.
Svantaggi
please see above . . .