Electronic Arts Reviews in San Francisco, CA Area

Pros

Flexible work schedule and a variety of career opportunities.

Cons

They are using too many contractors.

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

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

Great flexibility and a lot of on site perks like free gym and good child care and great lunch cafeteria. Work time was flexible.

Cons

Only Manager and upward got perks like telecommuting and offsite visits to other locations. everone below that was a bit canceled out.

Advice to Senior Management

Management should sometimes be more conscious about all the people that make the place work, especially the once that make all the details for the games.

Pros

looks good on the resume
free meals depending on crunch time and team budget

Cons

no consistant free meals or any other perks unless you are top tier management
super high costing on-site daycare
very poor-to-zero EA University class options or support to learn new things
bad higher management leading to poor middle management with company goals
very slow to change anything
behind the times in mostly everything, with bigger egos than creativity ratio with most game design teams

Advice to Senior Management

Morale is low in most every studio because upper management keeps trodding down a path of bad decision making. This impacts performance and creativity and inspiration down to the lowest positions, so the corruption is deep. Overall, you just don't have good designs with your games which leads to bad systems (lol agile) and even worse QA.

Pros

People are fun, easy going, friendly and cool
Managers are experienced, fun and great to work with
Best benefits package in the entire games industry
PTO system is non-confrontational (online form you fill out; manager clicks yes or no; you are rarely denied vacation as long as you have time accrued)
Company shutdown at Christmas through New Years = about 2 or more weeks Christmas vacation, fully paid, every year.
Salary is competitive
Large networks
EA Want Ads is wayyy better than Craigslist!
TGIF - free beer, chilled drinks and snacks where lots of people mingle, play ping pong, generally have a good time
Company Christmas parties are amazing!

Cons

Skill-wise does not give much room to grow; not challenging enough
Company is too afraid to take risks; will end up doing the same games and same mistakes over and over again.
Frequent lay-offs, especially around Christmas.

Advice to Senior Management

There are lots of talented people who are wasted in the company and not given a chance to achieve their full potential. And there are some untalented people who got in somehow and are able to secure their jobs yet do practically nothing.

Pros

- Nice people
- Relaxed work hours

Cons

- Performance of the company is poor
- People are not that motivated
- Not great career advancement prospects
- Too much middle management

Pros

Free games, relaxed environment, good chance of promotion

Cons

EA has a bad reputation in the industry, Senior management aren't great

Advice to Senior Management

Too many levels of management, there are a huge amount of people who don't do anything and just meddle

Pros

(most) co-workers are brilliant and fun to work with, some innovative IP, looks good on your resume, you get lots of game credits quickly, casual environment

Cons

poor pay, minimal (or no) recognition for good work, constant crunch, poor management, poor work/life balance

Advice to Senior Management

Some of the managers (director level) just aren't good managers and only took the job for the pay. They break HR rules (and laws) regularly, treat people very poorly and will do anything to dodge necessary paperwork.

Pros

I always looked forward to coming into work. My contributions were always considered, and usually made it into the final product.

Cons

San Francisco and the Bay Area are fun and beautiful, but the cost of living will catch you off-gaurd if you don't do the research.