Weak management - Recensione dipendente - Programmer presso Playrix

Been doing effects on one of our biggest match-3 games for nearly 3 years now, on new events and feature releases. The mix is interesting: there are the loud effects for big story moments and feature reveals, and there are the small effects around the UI, the kind that just need to feel right when you tap a button. The goal is to make everything feel smooth without getting in the way. Effects don't get judged in isolation, they're evaluated alongside character animation and the win/lose state, so a lot of my time is back-and-forth with art leads and game designers before something ships. You're in the conversation about what should be there from early on, not handed a brief and told to make it happen. The in-house engine has its quirks, but tooling on top is solid. Setup is fully remote, I work out of Cyprus.

The trade-off of the subtle polish work is that when it lands, no one notices. You can spend a week getting a small transition to feel right, ship it, and the response is silence. That's actually the point, but it took some getting used to.

I work from the Yerevan office most days and it's been the right call for me as a junior. Being in the same room as more experienced QA engineers and the dev team has accelerated things in a way I don't think a fully remote setup would have. You overhear a debugging conversation, you ask a question at lunch, you watch how someone walks through reproducing a tricky bug. That kind of learning is hard to replicate over chat. The office itself is comfortable and well-lit, and the food situation is genuinely a perk: three meals a day in the office, properly cooked, varied menu, you don't end up running out for lunch unless you want to. The QA team is a good mix of seniors who have been in the industry for years and people closer to my level, so I never feel out of place asking what might sound like a basic question. Mentorship isn't a formal program with weekly check-ins, it's more that people take their time to actually answer when you reach out. Test management tooling is modern and well-maintained, the bug tracker is set up logically, and processes for regression and release testing are clearly documented. Salary is competitive for a junior position in this region, paid on schedule twice a month. Schedule is flexible enough that I can attend an evening class twice a week without it being an issue. Events are well thought through and there's a real variety. The Armenia gathering last year was one of the more memorable ones for me.

The volume of features being tested across multiple live products takes some time to wrap your head around. The first couple of months I felt behind on context constantly, and you have to be comfortable with not knowing everything immediately.