General / Off-Topic ED thru the looking glass

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.

Look at reviews of other companies, see the gripes and see how often are the glassdoors reviews positive. It is more, than (my) common sense would predict. Frontier is not huge, so even 16 reviews is quite a lot and the fact, that they mostly praise the same and mostly address the same is also significant. Also, please note, that not a single one complained about not being fully appreciated or about general uselessness of some or other boss.

Btw, i also work in rather large corporatiopn present on glassdoor and most reviews, good or bad, are spot on. There is nothing to complain about there. Most is simply true.


Also, think about exit interviews. If corporation respects their employees (scheduling that factors in overtimes means, fdev does not, but hey), they bother to ask every single one about their reasons and considerations. Consider this in the same way.
Glassdoor is not your reddit or forum cesspit and to see it as such is to underestimate it.
 
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.

Except when it comes to steam reviews they're much closer to a user version of metacritic. They aggregate positive and negative reviews. Since it's a simple yes or no, you can't exactly "bomb" the game beyond a simple downvote.

I tend to call the Steam User Review system the "Million Monkey Reviews", because the final result is actually pretty accurate. It might take a million monkeys, but over a long enough timeline, you will get Shakespeare.
 
There is this page called glassdoor.com. On it, both current and former employees write reviews of the company.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Frontier-Developments-Reviews-E372218.htm
Frontier has a spot there. It has rather low overall score and plenty of comments from the employees actually correlate to what forum community has long suspected. All in all, it is a very interesting read.
Note: most of the positive things people have to say about the company is about actual workers. Nobody has to say anything about management.
See some rather interesting tidbits.
(Note: i archived this, so it can move to reddit, if local zealots decide to delete it.)

Advice to Management
If you take away creative control from those beneath you they will leave. It's a common problem in the games industry so you're not the only guilty company but you need to learn to delegate.

The same as most positions on the games industry, few if any chances for promotion, emphasis on seniority rather than ability.

Cons
- Overtime, lack of flexible time management
- Paternalistic upper management
- Regular redundancies
- High employee turnover rate
Advice to Management
Trust your employees


This one really hits it spot on.
Pros
Frontier/Braben has high reputation in the history of gaming. But that reputation leads to a dark side - it entails complacency and arrogance leading to mediocrity in later endeavors.
Cons
Overtime day one.
CEO was disinterested.
Code base was a mess.
Lead programmer and senior programmers thought they had achieved perfection - and they had not.
Upper management treated employees like factory components.
Unlawfully asks its employees to sign restrictive contracts after they have signed employment contracts for the job.
Game design is infantile and derivative.
Advice to Management
Learn the value the human race. While Elite was a cool game, it was not genius.


Pros
Slightly higher salary than some other Cambridge games companies. I am told by friends who are still there that they now pay overtime, and have flexi-time, which is a big perk.
Cons
When I worked there, there were redundancies almost every 3 months. The don't personally trust the management as they wouldn't be honest about situations, be it financially, or managerial in the smaller teams.
They did not provide any benefits whilst I was employed there, not even a pension, but by law this has now changed.
They seemed to be constant cycles of hiring new graduates, then making them redundant as they couldn't afford to hire in the first place, then realising they didn't have enough people, so would hire more graduates, and the cycle continued.Show Less
Advice to Management
Don't go on such big hiring schemes when you have to make redundancies 3 months later as you can't afford them. This constant cycle of redundancies lowered staff morale considerably, and it was not a pleasant atmosphere.
Cons
Constant crunch due to mismanagement of time. Reckless spending and hiring without the money to pay for it. Project was discontinued with job losses due to management failings and medling. No managers lost their jobs.
Wage reviews were repeatedly postponed for some 8 months, up until the project was canceled and folks were let go. This came right after Christmas, when just before we were being assured funds had been secured. A lie.Show Less
Advice to Management
My advice is probably not fit for publication.

Cons
There is a lot of mismanagement the scheduling is non existent or has been cleverly calculated to mean overtime is unavoidable. The pay is quite low but I hear things have improved in that regard with some pay being offered for overtime. There are no real perks to speak of past free coffee, tea and cheap biscuits and a free fast food meal if you work long enough. Also while most people do work hard there are a bunch of dead weight that they tend to keep around because of politics and greasing up the chain of command. These are poison whisperers who tend to bring down people with actual skill.Show Less
Advice to Management
Stop with the overtime and offer realistic time-scale, or if the overtime is still unavoidable make some reason for people to want to be there. Also I know the yes men are lovely to have around to stroke your ego but they are clueless and will ultimately bring the studio to its knees as proven by a huge loss and now lack of talent.

Be aware that a lot of such sites are purely made up, and filtering out the truthful from the those plainly lying and just spinning a tail on people's expectations can be tricky.
So yeah, grain of salt. There are also good reviews just to note.
Well that makes for grim reading.
just reading those reviews answers most questions about the state of the game.
Eh, grain of salt, if you want to read bad stuff about any company there's usually somewhere on the net that this is so, claiming to have former employees and such, and keep in mind, that if you go to such sites here and make statements about previous jobs, good or bad, that kinda calls into question the persons stance, there might be fully legit reasons to boot someone, they might be a jerk, and decide to leave a bad review because they were treated 'badly' so yeah, food for thought before you begin calling 'judgement' on frontier, just saying.
 
<snip>
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.

I can relate to that story. Seen it a few times before, as several places I've worked made use of external contractors for short term ad hoc tasks.
DISCLAIMER: I'm not saying external contractors are like this in general, but it did mean getting new employees on frequent basis - Most were good and became recurring, but there is that rare occasion where you find someone not fit for coming back.


I agree on the overtime comments. In fact, those are some of the very few things that we in the community can verify — We've seen Frontier work through weekends on Beta releases. (Just look for the pizza-from-the-community threads and replies from Frontier themselves) :D
 
The part of the reviews about the management and code matches pretty much what I suspected from what I've observed from the outside.

I really would like to see some of their code base. When I've asked ~1 year ago here in the forums about their development strategy and how they test their code I've never got an answer...

Also I'm pretty interested how FDEV wants to sell their engine (Have they at least sold one single license?) in which every of the big player grants free access to their engine (Unreal Engine, Unity, Cry Engine) and as I see it, fair licensing conditions for smaller indi devs and companies.
 
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Been at the same company for over 15 years. I got paid overtime once .. I means in number of occurrences not once as in a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It was a small bureaucratic nightmare to claim it - and it was for a Saturday. Given that, and my consistent moaning about the company - I would give a good review - I mean I have been their 15 years+, but comment on the lack of overtime for the youngsters in my day and now.

That is sort of how I see the FD reviews. I think the lack of overtime payment is a UK thing, unhealthy but very common in companies of all sizes.

I sort of do not expect overtime on project work - unless your lucky and are a contractor, but even then you tend to give an hour a day during peaks in effort required. Bug bounties, "take your misses out to dinner" and other non-monetary rewards are there. In fact I seem to remember using "non-monetary rewards" as a motivating system in an interview in 2008, IEEE did some research in the early 21st century. Tends to work with techies, commercial people not so much. As someone said above - without job role and position, its pretty hard to to measure grievance.



Simon
 
The professional life and the private life are two different things. The professionnal life must remain what it is.... A professional life ...
 
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How dare you suggest having fun in a game! That's not what games are about. ;)


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Typical Elite player.:D

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Look at reviews of other companies, see the gripes and see how often are the glassdoors reviews positive. It is more, than (my) common sense would predict. Frontier is not huge, so even 16 reviews is quite a lot and the fact, that they mostly praise the same and mostly address the same is also significant. Also, please note, that not a single one complained about not being fully appreciated or about general uselessness of some or other boss.

Btw, i also work in rather large corporatiopn present on glassdoor and most reviews, good or bad, are spot on. There is nothing to complain about there. Most is simply true.


Also, think about exit interviews. If corporation respects their employees (scheduling that factors in overtimes means, fdev does not, but hey), they bother to ask every single one about their reasons and considerations. Consider this in the same way.
Glassdoor is not your reddit or forum cesspit and to see it as such is to underestimate it.

This thread wasn't the first time I heard of Glassdoor by a long shot mate.
 
glassdoor needs to be read between the lines and the perceptive dose of salt, but comments are not more biased than ceo talks or official company statements. being a developer myself in a company with a long glassdoor history we are very amused to regularly check, this was an interesting read.

however, keep in mind that people is subjective and projects or departments in the same company may be very, very different from each other. frontier doesn't only make elite. and most of the comments are old. but they do seem to depict an elitist and somewhat stagnating environment.

'code is a mess' really hurted. it's all i care about. and if you pair it with high base rotation, big hiring sprees followoed by prompt layoffs, and with the quality of delivery and bug fixing response time ... oh crap. that's not good.
 
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