Lucasfilm Animation Reviews

Pros

wonderful place to work on the ranch

Cons

no communication, not even money

Advice to Senior Management

communication

Pros

- Great long term job for people who want stability and have a family
- they bend over backwards so you can have a proper time off
- very nice people
- peaceful place

Cons

- limited growth in terms of learning and sharpening your skills
- limited growth in terms of promotion and career advancement
- not very nice recruiters
- very top heavy management (your raise is determined by the president of the company even if you are just a technical assistant)
- very tough to get more than a 4% raise

Advice to Senior Management

- Invest in your employees
- pay people a decent wage
- provide them free overtime that's not boxed at trader joe's

Pros

- Incredibly social, diverse, talented, and active people to work with
- Absolutely beautiful campus
- Robust internal wiki of learning anything you want about different production pipelines throughout the Lucas umbrella
- Director of the show is very energetic, positive, and uplifting to be around
- Parties are thrown every week or so for releases, meetings, and special events
- Access to all the campuses and stores (Skywaker, Presidio, Big Rock) with wonderful staff
- Enrichment classes offered by the best in the field are available free to all employees
- Meet and comfortably mingle with celebrities and industry icons on a daily basis
- An unbelievable theater experience every week for upcoming movies releases at Skywalker Ranch

Cons

- Management excessively micromanages, shows indecisiveness, employs passive aggressive conversation styles with employees, and has a knack for turning small problems into large ones by approaching all issues systematically without room for common sense
- General self praise given from seniority blatantly overlooks the elephant in the room that everyone sees
- Big Rock Ranch offices were initially designed for the business end of Lucasfilm, so it has a very closed and corporate feel to it, unlike other studio designs that foster creativity and interaction between production staff
- Very expensive to eat on site. Besides bringing a lunch, you have no options nearby. It's supposed to be subsidized yet it's as expensive as stadium food
- Absolute refusal from management to spend any money on their employees' happiness and to help reduce everyday financial burdens
- Raises, even annual ones supposedly built-in, are very hard to come by and advancing within the company is nearly impossible due to jobs being moved to overseas
- Very long and expensive commute if you opt to live outside of Marin county in order to have a social life after work
- Morale is increasingly dismal as seen by just walking through the hallways
- No free food, no free transportation, no free gym, no free bridge toll, and many internal costs... it's actually a heavy strain on the budget to simply work here.
- More care goes into the Lucas estates than the care of the employees
- Creativity is put on the back burner when you are hired. The spark of trying something new is aggressively frowned upon, even as the company is still taking form

Advice to Senior Management

Generic praise, excessive micromanagement, and an unwillingness to budget money to provide free services, which are common at competing studios and similar industries, isn't the way to build and keep your talent base. Bringing in a food truck every so often doesn't actually conceal the fact that people are unhappy knowing they could be much better off elsewhere.

George Lucas is a business genius and marketing visionary that has set up a very profitable company for decades to come, but many of the people responsible for helping him keep the company strong are clearly not cut from the same cloth.

Pros

if you believe in the force this place is for you. lots of talented people to learn from. lots of licensing giveaways

Cons

it's run rogue. make sure you befriend to right people in order to survive. remember you work for the empire.

Pros

- Fun & Creative
- Great health care insurance benefits
- Flexible
- Multi cultural environment
- Management is understanding
- A cool company to work for because of the work that is done by them

Cons

- Leave Entitlement can be better
- Career Progression is too slow
- Too much alignment to HQ
- Communication breakdown at times with HQ due to time difference

Advice to Senior Management

Management is generally ok except that they need to fight more for the SIngapore office in order for us to be fairly treated.