Pros
This is the best job I've ever had! + I love working with one artist to make an experimental game in a few months. + I love the friendly teams who volunteer their time to preview the customer experience. They made a big difference and taught me a lot! + I love the trust of my teammates in my experimentation. + I love the flat organization where anyone is available, yet we respect each other's time highly and schedule very few meetings. + I love the healthy catering and subsidized Equinox gym membership. 4-years of these perks of working here has improved my mind and body's wellness and fitness. + I love the quiet library.
Cons
This is the highlight of my career so far. The following sometimes challenges my confidence: - Each day, I get distracted by a lot of casual and committee-style chatting. Part of my distraction is the open floor plan and my own introversion. Part of my distraction is the dissonance between purported business goals and day-to-day culture: I wish the chatters were hands-on working. There's around 25% of work hours scheduled for sharing knowledge, collaborating, and team meetings, team bonding, committee decision making, that I'd estimate 50% less work gets done, since those meetings generate follow-up work to do that is based on opinion-driven meetings. This throws off quite a bit of the priorities from the work that has hard evidence backing up its profitability. Those that contribute the least (due to skill-set mismatch, job description, or lack of their management) talk the most, which is distracting and a drain on the whole team's success. - Each week, I get impatient with some managers talking about adding value to customers, when I wish the managers were making simple financial forecasts, researching business intelligence and doing the simple and obvious work first rather than prioritizing high-risk, high-cost projects whose major upside is that it's really fun work to do (I enjoy the work, but have modest forecasts out of what customers get out of some the experiments with less financial evidence). - Each month, I get impatient with games that were blocked from progressing for over a year, and then excuses get made, and new people get hired, but the real causes of the blockage: lack of managerial accountability, and financial forecasting of these decisions. It's a drain on my enthusiasm when around 10% of my work held in limbo for months and the criteria for acceptance get changed in the meantime.