A nepotic, top-heavy, woefully mismanaged company that responds to stressors by squeezing its most underpaid devs harder and harder.
Paradox sells itself on being "one big family" and having "no hierarchy" but is in reality and practice visibly, provably nepotic and full of double standards. This is a workplace where the Old Guard and management can get away with nearly anything under the sun, provided they drink whiskey with the right people at After-Works.
During my time at Paradox, several employees were sexually harassed by their manager (with physical and digital evidence of this). In response, the studio moved this manager to work only with senior men as a solution. To add insult to injury, this shameful result came about only after several weeks of arguing, as studio leadership wanted the affected to keep working under this manager.
The wages are atrociously below the Stockholm game industry average. Any attempts over the past 5+ years by devs to bring this to attention have consistently been met with hand-wringing from upper management, who claim there's "nothing they can do" to increase salaries -- despite a 40% profit margin (higher than Apple's) and hundreds of millions of SEK in net profits year over year. Meetings are supposedly held to address this issue, and yet year after year, nothing changes.
Salary setting is grossly inconsistent to level of experience and education. New employees with no prior relevant work experience routinely begin on several thousand SEK/month higher salaries than their colleagues with many years of AAA experience, irrespective of performance or team feedback.
Meanwhile, managers and recruitment bemoan how difficult it is to recruit new employees, and how Paradox has a problem with retention, and somehow no one can solve this Rosetta Stone of mysteries. When multiple employees (and their union representatives) point to low salaries and inconsistent promotion standards as the single biggest cause of low recruitment and poor retention, management just digs its heals in and refuses to change.
Senior leadership at Paradox varies from well-intentioned but toothless to pathologically petty. And I mean petty. Double standards are rife at this company. One employee will get praised and promoted for something another is lambasted and denied promotion for, all depending on which of the Old Guard you've managed to impress or annoy. Any attempts by an individual dev's team and coworkers to prove they are being underpaid or mistreated is invariably met with stonewalling from studio management, who will literally respond to salary negotiation attempts by employees with the phrase "we don't negotiate with terrorists."
HR and leadership is vocally, explicitly anti-union -- a very dangerous stance in a country that has almost no labour laws and no minimum wage, where labour conditions are kept high by its >86% private sector worker union membership.
I worked at Paradox for several years, being constantly praised for my excellent caliber of work and for how much of a wonderful cultural fit I was, and yet this never translated into compensation. I worked on the top-grossing, highest priority project in the studio, and there were only 13 developers working on it when I quit.
13 whole developers on the highest-earning (by far) game, in a studio that employs over 350. What do those other employees do? The majority of Paradox's employees are in Publishing, where wages are across the board an order of magnitude higher and work consists mainly of sitting in on meetings (where they decide on how to squeeze the lowest-paid devs even harder, evidently).
My only regret is staying as long as I did. I was immediately promoted several seniority levels at a different studio, and my salary increased by over 10000 SEK overnight.
If my current job fired me, I'd get more from basic unemployment insurance from the state on my new salary, than if I returned to Paradox for full-time work. Needless to say I'm glad I left -- though merely being treated like a respected professional at my new workplace, and not a disposable monkey with a keyboard would have been enough on its own to warrant the change, sans any improvement in compensation.
