Electronic Arts Reviews

Pros

The people are incredibly friendly; the products are dynamic; the management is competent.

Cons

A bit of a split between the different product and label teams.

Advice to Senior Management

More cohesive company, not so split between labels and teams.

Pros

Get paid to work on and with video games every day
Financially sound and growing company
Exposure to lots of new technologies

Cons

Mismatched compensation practices across different departments or teams
Not a lot of recognition of excellent work vs mediocre
Constantly evolving markets and technology make it difficult to keep up

Advice to Senior Management

Review the compensation for all departments, ensuring that the pay practices are equitable across departments. Some departments are sorely underpaid compared to others, and yet many of their permanent staff and managers do complex and highly responsible roles.

Pros

nice environment and smart employees

Cons

lack of direction and understanding of local cultures and government regulations

Advice to Senior Management

employee retention is key. seems like a training ground for other more exciting companies to poach employees from. need to move more into online digital

Pros

Teamwork emphasized
Focused on winning against competition

Cons

Poor work/life balance
Not much opportunity to move to other disciplines

Advice to Senior Management

EA should be a top target marketing professional ($ budgets, entertainment, etc.). Make it so.
Focusing on winning is fine, but focusing on being good might be better.

Pros

Great benefits, great people, fun

Cons

Management how much failure is enough?

Advice to Senior Management

Company continues to lose money, VP and above continue to recievd RSU's? Bonused for loosing money?

Pros

EA is a large company with many resources, both knowledge sharing and HR support. It has a competitive salary as well as many employee benefits. The campus is nice!

Cons

EA is focused on pushing out games a little too quickly and meeting deadlines of the executives, which can sometimes affect the quality of the games, leading to features that have to be cut.

Pros

Your job is to play mobile games every day, and report issues if found. That's the coolest job on Earth.

Cons

You see no growth in the future as you don't work on any test technologies that may be demanded from you in your next job. For people who want to continue at EA, they just have to play games but I feel this wont help in the long run. The salaries are the lowest in the market. Unfair means of promotion are followed. Most of the senior management are mere graduates without the necessary decision making skills. Some of them don't even qualify for a tester job, but are working as managers, as they don't have any scope outside.

Advice to Senior Management

You need to rethink over the quality of people you are letting in. Especially, the senior management team. The practices currently followed are unfair. People approach others to give a decent review on them, based on what you give them promotions. Turn some stones and look beneath. You will know the real caliber and potent of those employees. I believe the management was really good during 2007-08 under CEO Kent Liu.

Pros

Good benefits. Eclectic workforce. Excellent benefits. Nice to have your name in games that are sold world wide.

Cons

Nothing can ever be late. Get to work and stay at work until the job is done. Best to love video games and not just be a Engineer. Lots of turnover.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to engineers not just other managers. Little influence from the bottom up is the reason there is so much turnover.

Pros

Ability to make a difference in the market.

Cons

Career advancement can be really slow. If you're in the wrong part of the company it can feel like a public job.

Advice to Senior Management

Get smaller and more focused.

Pros

Opportunity to work on varied projects and properties and gain a great deal of valuable experience.
Work with passionate people.

Cons

Risk adversion to doing anything new, innovative and original.
Lack of vision and courage and trust at an executive level.

Advice to Senior Management

Doing a great job supporting big titles.............doing a terrible job allowing teams to find the next innovative cool thing.