Sony PlayStation Employee Review

I worked at Sony PlayStation

Pros – If you're a gamer or a developer, this is probably a fun and good environment for you. People stay here for a long time (tons of lifers) so I would guess that there are probably reasons to stay (job stability, good working environment, satisfaction with teams, comfort, etc). Pay and benefits, flexibility are also strong points to being at this company.

Cons – The main problem is not technical, in my opinion, but rather operational. There is no structure at all to the organization, causing tension and a lot of unnecessary runaround which lessens the company's ability to innovate and do things quickly.

There is no formalized assessment process (no standardized yearly or quarterly review), the outcome being that high achievers leave because of lack of acknowledgement and progress. Worse, the slackers stay, creating a culture that accepts underperformance, laziness and schmoozing to get ahead. People complain about no/few raises, but truthfully, if a comprehensive assessment system was implemented, many of these people would probably be on performance improvement plans. Teams are totally complacent, people do their work mindlessly as they have always done in the past and yet find it acceptable to whine and moan that they aren't being rewarded.

The organization is very top down, with senior leadership relying on old ways of doing things because that is what is expected at the top. There is an over-reliance on customer research in decision-making. But if you dig deeper, you realize it's not because having research will lead to positive outcomes (b/c clearly they have not) but because research backs up recommendations, and is therefore primarily meant to save one's ass. You can't blame somebody for a misstep when research said that it should have worked out, right? Innovation is typically not backwards or sideways looking. It's forwarding looking. Research is never going to help you out with that.

Finally, there never seems to be a master plan-- or at the very least, it is not widely shared with the entire team. People operate in a bubble which leads to complacency and idlemindedness. You can't get excited to be part of a solution if nobody seems to know what that is. There is the mindset that things are always changing at the last minute and so master plans are never followed. But it would seem like if you never had a master plan in the first place, you will never know how close or how far you came from hitting your target. You just ended up where you ended up.

Advice to Senior Management – The mentality that "we don't need it because we've never needed it" doesn't really fly anymore. Not having a stronger IT infrastructure is rumored to have facilitated the PSN hack attack last year. It is reported that $50million was spent on marketing the PS Vita, which seems excessively high. You need to articulate what you plan to do, assess whether you have the right people in place to do it, put together a plan to execute and then double back and see if it worked. Seems like a pretty standard way to run a business. Not sure why this company deviates so far from goals... oh that's right, no master plan... I forgot.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend