Top-heavy with Unscalable Leadership - Anonymous employee Scopely Employee Review

First of all it's worth noting that the games are developed and measured for their ability to make money, not for their ability to entertain. Some people won't mind this, but hard core gamers beware: this will not be the place for you. To put it another way: if you're looking for a company that focuses on making incredible gaming experiences, you will be disappointed. As another review put it, this company is solely concentrated around making as much money from their players as possible. Burn and churn. They grant employees similar treatment, cranking as much out of them as possible and discarding them once they're burnt out. Other problems abound, from praising those who prioritize work over personal life (while pretending to encourage people to maintain work/life balance), to credit heaped upon leadership and not the talented folks that put in the effort, and everything in between. Instead of writing an essay-like review and walking through each individual issue, I thought it'd be beneficial to focus on one major problem: leadership. The company is an upside-down pyramid, with so many 'leaders' leaning on so few individual contributors. This becomes problematic in a number of ways. First off, much of the leadership lacks gaming knowledge (and I don't just mean experience in the industry, I mean a connection to the gaming culture) and will strive to strictly hire folks with said knowledge, only to disregard it the minute that individual walks through the door. Too often leadership is unwilling to say "I don't know", and trust the expertise and ability of the incredible talent that has been recruited. Leadership also regularly sacrifices investment in employees for the sake of production, creating a nigh-impossible path for hard-working and engaged employees to grow and develop along toward their desired mastery. There are many more, but there is one preeminent flaw that I'd like to focus on. This particular problem I'll call micromanagement drive-bys. Definition of micromanagement drive-by, (noun), the act of a manager (or leader) jumping into the middle of (usually lower down in the hierarchy) someone's work in order to alter the outcome without full context or expertise in the area, all while not maintaining personal responsibility for that project. Example: My manager came to my desk and told me to that the argument I made in slide 13 was soft, and that I needed to mention the potential impact of the upcoming presidential election. The problem is that my manager doesn't even know what the deck is about, there are only 8 slides, and the material in the presentation covers 2014 to 2015, making the upcoming election irrelevant. Am I expected to somehow still include this feedback in my deck? I don't want to ignore it and receive critical feedback for failing to incorporate it. It's safe to assume that over half of the problems in the company stem from this type of micromanagement, and here are some key examples: it removes the sense of ownership over projects, it limits growth opportunities, it removes the space needed for creative problem solving, it takes up an unreasonable amount of leadership time, it cultivates an environment thick with the fear of making decisions, it creates a culture centered around displacing blame that discourages communal product alignment, it ensures terrible expectation management, and it ultimately ends up making a Scopely a horrible place to work.