Pros
Their customer panel and the field of activity will give you a plus value when you will be looking for your next jobs. The team was nice and talented. Cool projects. Good flexibility for work-family. Teleworking available. In the best days you will have Tim Horton muffins. That usually means we are appreciated, without the words. Ok culture because we are all fans of the video game industry, however very few occasions to talk or experience it inside the building for too long without remarks that we are slowing the production. If you apply there and you a woman, you will be protected from most bad things. Maybe because you are no challenge to the Director and therefore not a menace. If you are a student, they will be happy to profit even more on you, but it will not make anything easier or more easy for you.
Cons
Apart from what the director publishes on the company website and social networks, you cannot legally tell the name of the customers and you cannot talk or show anything in your resume or portfolio. While confidentiality is definetely normal in the industry, you won't be allowed to share how hot you are. Very bad direction. If you enjoy your work, you are lazy. A great worker is the one who seems to be constantly under pressure and not too happy. If you talk with colleagues too much, you are wasting your time and you prevent the others to be on time with their deadlines. Which can be true if there are abuse, but it is to a level that impacts the ambiance and the sharing of techniques used in games. Many of us were taking anti-depressing medication to manage that relationship, including leads. The director can be cool, but his nice smile never means that tomorrow will be any better. We rarely found any meeting useful, because the Director monopolizes 80-90% of the conversations. Meetings are therefore mostly one-way. One-way makes any relationships dull and opposite of efficient. This is first-degree leadership. A good leader should not do everything to differentiate himself from his team, to remember them they are all replaceable, monopolize conversations, almost never consult the team and leads, etc. A good leader makes all he can to make employers feel good, respected, important, empowered, will listen and will consult his team. So many artifices, so much it became an inside joke. The nice office picture on the website; the reality is the office is in a garage, is crowded enough to smell your neighbor or catch his disease, uncomfortable chairs, subpar hardware to work on, sometimes has a lot of noise distractions, and regularly smells bad because of piping problems. Bad tour of the hardware-side of things for the software workers, as those 2 departments are not located in the same building and since there is no complete guide tour after interview. Furthermore, when you go toilet, you will practically be right beside your boss. The interior of the office space does not reflect any culture. No posters, no plants. White walls. Very cold ambiance. Cannot wear shorts without remarks, in case a customer comes, which is rare and would be ok, but not written in the initial work contract. There is promotion for products that do not exist. To the customers (selling a lot of promises of features the engine cannot correctly support, just because they sounded cool to the sole decision-maker who is not a technical person at all, resulting in a lot of pressure and sometimes deception because leads are rarely consulted at the right moment; before a sale). It is easy to sell dreams to customers and then just transfer all the pressure to the devs to fill the orders. The director loves to think himself as the world leader in this field. The reality is that any new company with a bigger team working in the field of VR and simulation like UbiSim can totally sink the company overnight. Gameplay is previlegied over graphics, but this is due to lack of polish, lack of time, lack of resources, and because simulation has different requirements than video games and also because VR needs to run at higher FPS. Was PS2-PS3 quality at best. This however can change if the engine used changes. Very small team for many very big projects. More deadlines than people in the team. Overtime is paid but 1:1 in a time bank. You will have to sometimes lower your tools so the Director is able to keep up with the team tools. He can barely use a computer with the efficiency expected in this high-tech field, and suffers from dyslexia so sometimes you have to imagine what he wants to say and not only take his words for cash. Almost a male-only environment. Very low salary for the high level of responsibility. The main reason given is that people around Saint-Hyacinthe don't have to go into traffic to Montreal, and that you should accept this very low salary because working with video game tools was your dream. I recommend you working at Simleader only if you don't have high expectations, agree to barely impact decisions, can handle continuous stress, can manage to be ignored, but know how to use this work experience later to benefit the continuity of your career.