Pros

- Great devs, you’ll love your core team minus a director or two and most of the company owners - Despite cons below, devs and hanging out with fellow employees outside of work is great - you get to work on RPGs (except Pathfinder and a few other games in past not being RPGs)

Cons

- Compliments on performance or any feedback at all is rare - All gender issues in reviews below, lot of women have resigned, although lack of promotion and training happens to everyone - Pay is below average, raises are minor, money seems to be in a trashfire somewhere (DICE parties, sponsored or attended). What seemed to generate revenue for the company doesn’t last long, keeping the treadmill going - Sense owners have checked out. CEO and owners absent a lot (especially this year and last – they’re more concerned about their new houses or renovating their houses than work), two in particular fight a lot, cold war-style (CEO and Exec. Producer) and waste time for months - Morale can get low - “Popular” review at top of queue is a paid featured review for Obsidian being an Enhanced Profile (it’s why the date is out of sync) - it’s also least helpful and super generic - Sense that if not an owner idea, it’s not going to go anywhere (different if kept within team) - Few job expectations except design, job training is negative reinforcement (less “do this, here’s what I want” it's more “you were wrong to do this” or “don’t do this”, kills morale) - Owners and several directors not held accountable for own tasks and responsibilities, esp. when causes problems for rest of team with delays or by them trying to do too much and add too many features - Owners literally demand respect, do nothing to deserve it - Owners and directors worse when involved with a project, can waste weeks of time based on decisions or eventually “fade away” leaving team holding the stick - Your department will get assigned devs without warning, they will be the type you don’t need (usually producers or desginers/artists no one team wants to work with), and you don’t get the people you DO need and have been asking for - The transfer of employees like this is often a further issue b/c their work performance has never been brought up with them, so it falls on the new team to do what the old team and the owners failed to do (not always, you get good ones, too) - Sometimes these employees are protected by owner friendships, adds further difficulty - Multiple tasking systems that never stick and are never adhered to, change often and tasking systems seem random - Owners ask teams to set up pages to get feedback, then don’t provide any feedback (except CEO, but comments are unhelpful) - Tasking systems further undermined by owners promoting them, then flipping the table and throwing it out the tasking window with sudden requests and no time assigned to do them – WHY TASK THEN - Tasking and programs that DO work (Slack) are strangely resisted - Lot of owner friendships and lot of subsequent employee friend retention as a result when higher-performers are let go – worse, NEW bad friend employees are hired, esp. in production, adding to the mess and inner circle - Get IPs but upper level doesn’t support them or believe in them (Pathfinder Adventures) – some team members don’t either - Poor contracts, but worse, exploit good ones with publishers, damaging relations with "cost padding" with no reason – team gets blamed - Refuse to pay contractors for work in order to create leverage with publisher to pay a milestone, team has to deal with it - Projects can get canceled suddenly with no back-up plans - Mistakes are not learned from, and common procedures for situations not established, even when easy to set up - Reviews either don’t happen, are late, and provide no direction for growth – worse (also said in other reviews below), reviews have a lot of individual bias – a lead’s opinion of your performance is worth less than an owner’s distant opinion of you, but you’ll never find out until too late b/c you don’t even get a review or feedback - Job you’re hired for may not be your job title, resulting in sudden surprise demotion when you ask why your title is different than it is - No management training, esp. production - Producers at Obsidian often end up switching to other roles in order to enjoy games again