Pros
- they pay you on time - usually people are nice to you, but not since current game development takes more than 5 years - there is no long-term crunch (yikes!) because there is no long-term plan or strategy
Cons
- most of the time you get no feedback, unless you are extremely lucky to get a nice manager - a lot of people act as professionals while they have only a basic idea of what's going on - high level management is incompetent (and they never have time for anything ;) - your career there will be fruitful if you are basically a liar (you can always say it's others fault - nobody checks it) - if you join production team, like gameplay or design, then be prepared to erase you all-time-job because a guy at the top didn't like it (literally) - or didn't like you - or both - there are no processes, no defined rules. it's almost like a deathmatch game - you have to always ask others for help because there is almost no documentation (a few outdated documents may still be valid), no TDDs, no GDDs - there is no task estimation, so you will never know if you are hard-working or lazy (you will get annual pay rise anyway) - meetings are always the same: "let's talk about it after the metting" which never happens, so there is a huge waste of time - teamwork isn't effective at all because everyone is chasing their tails and they are always: tired, exhausted, depressed - the worst thing is that many passionate people spend a lot of their time, doing amazing stuff and it's totally wasted