General / Off-Topic ED thru the looking glass

[AJRimmsey]

Wow. The overview is rather disturbing. A company with between 201 and 500 employees with a revenue of 5-10 mil USD a year? Taking the best case scenario of 201 employees and 10 mil USD revenue is an average of under $50k per employee before expenses and overhead. Considering that it costs roughly double an employee's salary to employ them (taxes, benefits, expenses, equipment, furniture, lease, utilities, etc.), that would only leave about $25k per employee and that's best case.

I can't see that as being sustainable. There must be something wrong with the numbers.

often grants and subsidies was why companies i worked for hired graduates en masse,though never with a hire/fire rate like this.


as i said earlier,graduates are told on day 1 if they are being used or abused and this reflects on the work,so its a bad thing to do as it affects production more than hiring a really bad work force cheaply

 

[Colonel Kenney]

Cycling graduates is a common practice. The cream will rise to the top so to speak. If not it is a good starting experience. But the high turnover rate long hours low pay. Sounds like the game industry to me.

However if things were done right, the right way with the right formula you'd see Rockstar/Bethesda like numbers. This had every chance of being that.

 

[Remus]

This looks more like retaliation from some frustrated ex employees who want their little revenge on the company.

In the end, it means nothing. And cannot be linked to Frontiers management quality, nor their games quality.

Don't believe me ? Go take a look at Rockstar's profile, you will see some nice pearls there to.

And yet, all their games are internationally acclaimed.

Sometimes some people think they are the next big thing, but whose claims are refused or are fired after screwing up.

This is their way to get even.

Besides, their management policies are none of my business as a consumer.

All I care is for them to deliver good games. So far I have been satisfied. The day it stops being the case, I'll just walk away with my money, but I'm not seing this happening for Elite for a long time.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Take it all with a pinch of salt. People who are happy, rarely tend to post on places like glassdoor, they just don't tend to think about it. I love my company, think its the best company i've ever worked for, but i doubt i would ever considering posting on glassdoor. However, if i didn't like it, and was dismissed or left, i might just leave some negative comments there.

As for the hiring and firing, low level workers may not be privvy to the real reasons for hiring/firing. 3 months, that sounds like typical probation periods. Nothing to do with budgets. You get a bunch of potentially talented new people in, and see how they perform. Those that make the cut, and don't have unreasonable salary demands, will be kept on. Those who don't, get dismissed, and a new round of hiring starts.

It may be that FD do have some issues of course. Few companies are without. Their communications (or lack of) with the playerbase have often been a hot topic, and it may just be that internally they also have communication issues (many companies i've worked for do).

Regarding my company (which will naturally remain nameless), it does have a decent rating on glassdoor, but we have seen some negative comments on there that begger belief, including outright lies.

But I would always take such complaints with a grain of salt and consider the motivation of those posting.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Ask yourself, when are you most likely to feel the need to air about the company you work(ed)

a. When everything is going swimmingly.
b. When you've got a chip on your shoulder.

For this to have any meaning to me (you all can of course make up your own minds) it would have to be reviews from randomly picked employees which represent a cross section of the company. Not employees deciding for themselves to write a review.

 

[Odan Brota]

Take it all with a pinch of salt. People who are happy, rarely tend to post on places like glassdoor, they just don't tend to think about it. I love my company, think its the best company i've ever worked for, but i doubt i would ever considering posting on glassdoor. However, if i didn't like it, and was dismissed or left, i might just leave some negative comments there.

As for the hiring and firing, low level workers may not be privvy to the real reasons for hiring/firing. 3 months, that sounds like typical probation periods. Nothing to do with budgets. You get a bunch of potentially talented new people in, and see how they perform. Those that make the cut, and don't have unreasonable salary demands, will be kept on. Those who don't, get dismissed, and a new round of hiring starts.

It may be that FD do have some issues of course. Few companies are without. Their communications (or lack of) with the playerbase have often been a hot topic, and it may just be that internally they also have communication issues (many companies i've worked for do).

Regarding my company (which will naturally remain nameless), it does have a decent rating on glassdoor, but we have seen some negative comments on there that begger belief, including outright lies.

But I would always take such complaints with a grain of salt and consider the motivation of those posting.

This. It's the same principle with product reviews.... if you're happy with it, you probably won't leave any feedback whatsoever. If you're upset at it (due to user error or otherwise), you'll roast it online if you are given the platform to do so.

 

[Don Alvarez]

Sounds like every place I ever worked. Sounds like where I work now. I just gotta shrug my shoulders at disgruntled ex-employees.

The reviews reveal a lot more about the people who made those reviews than the company itself.

Additionally most of those reviews are now years old...and this is not 'news', as I've seen this brought up before multiple times both here and on reddit.

That's exactly what I was thinking when i was reading int. The one who "hits it spot on" sounds like Jack Knowitall. We all work with Jack Knowitall - college grad, first real job, two days in he already knows more about it than the guy with 15 years in the company.

 

[AJRimmsey]

did you ever see anyone say about good reviews "take it with a pinch of salt"

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

did you ever see anyone say about good reviews "take it with a pinch of salt"

Of course.

 

[Achilles7]

A positive one can be the result of someone who is complete suckup.

Or Sleutel-fanbois masquerading as a former employee - complete with requisite Adam Sandler/Eddie Murphy quality 'masters of disguise' prosthetics!

And Van Dyke mastery of the English accent..'for shhhure.. jzat isz je cache, I am comingsh from Cambridgsh!'

 

[deckroid]

I find it interesting the former employees are the ones giving negative reviews...

 

[Adhock]

I think there's a comic reference somewhere that relates to this...

Something about awakening the Dark Elder Sheeple Gods by calling their name three times and dooming the Earth to the end as we know it.

 

[PhanttoM]

Yeah from the horses mouth of the people who worked there reporting on their experience working there. That is useless.

Go look at reviews at other companies. There are differences in over score and in individual reviews. You can also gather a lot in watching, what issues are recurring and what are one off.
One toxic review is meaningless, 10 are probably relevant.

Also, these reviews actually confirm suspicion, that people on forums have about the game based on, what is visible externally.

I don't like jumping to conclusions based minimal information/context/description. That's how rumors start.
The pool of 16 employees is too small to be reliable IMO.

More importantly, none of this changes the facts that;
- I don't know their title, position, and thus I can't make claims to what is a good salary
- I don't know their level of responsibilities
- I don't know their personal expectations
- I don't know their career plans or more importantly, where they currently are in said career
- I don't know their qualifications or lack thereof
- I don't know their personality (ie. if they get disgruntled easily or not)

 

[Agony_Aunt]

This. It's the same principle with product reviews.... if you're happy with it, you probably won't leave any feedback whatsoever. If you're upset at it (due to user error or otherwise), you'll roast it online if you are given the platform to do so.

And thus the Steam review system was born....

 

[MottiKhan]

I was only looking at the financials with an eye on longevity. I still say those numbers can't be right.

So I went back and skimmed some of the reviews. Nothing Earth shattering there. Current employee and some former ones happy with the place. Some former employees taking a stab at the company. Most of the bad reviews seem to come from those who have an inflated sense of self or don't understand that companies hire when they need the employees to get after it. Narrow field of view.

 

[Tacyon]

Having come from a very caustic work environment, people will always be scared to voice their true options/feelings due to retaliation or loss of employment. Even when employees got to the GAF (give-a-yuck) point many go mute in the meetings where the "how do we improve?" or "what are we doing wrong?" questions are asked. BTW, when issues were identified and reasonable solutions were provided, they were either ignored or if implemented, were discontinued after a short while)

So the "only former employee posting is odd" is due to they're the only ones with nothing to lose.

The comment that I've contended all along was "Code base was a mess." I've held for a long time that there is little to no code base management going on. This explains how something gets fixed and then the exact same issue shows up several patches later. Old code finding its way back into production.

 

[Red Anders]

Yeah from the horses mouth of the people who worked there reporting on their experience working there. That is useless.

There are people I work with currently who would tell you my employer is a great place to work and people who would tell you it's a terrible place to work. There are also people who have left who would express both opinions. The point about an individual's experiences is just that - they are individual and by definition will to a degree reflect the two sides of the employer/employee relationship.

A real-life example from my own workplace a couple of years back. One of my colleagues had huge issues with my team leader, feeling that their work was judged harshly, that they hadn't received sufficient training to be able to perform their job role effectively and that any attempt that they made to address that situation was rebuffed by the boss. Eventually the person concerned ended up moving onto another team where pretty much the same situation developed at which point they involved senior management and the union, essentially accusing their former boss of 'poisoning' their new manager against them from day one.

What actually happened was that the employee concerned was about as much use as a chocolate teapot at certain key areas of their job role, had exactly the same training and opportunities as everyone else, had also had additional support when it became clear that they were struggling (although this was seen by the employee concerned as them being 'singled out' and 'picked on') and the boss was eventually perfectly happy to have rid of them because it had become clear that there was a clash of personalities severe enough that it was unlikely a resolution could be found that was positive for both parties. She also hadn't 'poisoned' the employee's new boss against the employee at all; however when asked for an appraisal of the employee's skill set by that new boss she had given an entirely honest one in which she acknowledged the employee's strengths as well as identifying areas in which they had capacity to make some improvements. As a team leader she would have been negligent to do otherwise and since the job role concerned carries a reasonably significant amount of responsibility for safeguarding public funds, it's not really one in which someone can be left to their own devices if they don't have the skills or judgement to be able to perform effectively.

My own impression of the employee concerned was that they were one of those people who will look to blame anybody other than themselves for their shortcomings because it's far easier to do that than it is engage in a bit of honest critical analysis of yourself and work to address the things you accept you may not be brilliant at. That said, although I never sought their opinion of me, it would probably have been that I was one of the boss's pets who could do no wrong. It's all opinions. The fact is that I am fairly respected for my own skill set, but it's not because 'my face fits' it's because I've been doing my job for over ten years and I'm pretty good at it. But of course that's just my opinion.

The factual comments in those reviews regarding things like the amount of overtime do seem fairly consistent so it's reasonable to assume that at the time they were written they did accurately reflect the situation. The other stuff might be accurate, or it might not and either way it's still at best an individual perspective. I'm sure the employees concerned were honestly reporting their feelings and experiences as they saw them but you're only getting one side of the story and especially in a work situation, it's dangerous to assume that you're seeing the whole picture based on that.

 

[LeoBartlet]

Glassdoor reviews, stock market updates, steam reviews.

Does anyone on this forum actually spend any time playing the game or do they sit about worrying about the employees feelings or the current price of a Frontier share.

 

[MottiKhan]

Glassdoor reviews, stock market updates, steam reviews.

Does anyone on this forum actually spend any time playing the game or do they sit about worrying about the employees feelings or the current price of a Frontier share.

How dare you suggest having fun in a game! That's not what games are about.

 

[LeoBartlet]

How dare you suggest having fun in a game! That's not what games are about.

Sorry about that it was a momentary lapse in judgement that lead me to say those things.

What I should have remembered that people like to spend many hours searching for anything that fits into their already established opinions.

For example if I think the games crap i'm gonna look at all the negative (and avoid the positive) steam reviews.