Glu Mobile Employee Reviews about "upper management"

Pros

- Lot of amazing and talented people to work with. - Projects can be fun to work on. - Great location - Fun social/holiday events every year.

Cons

- Extremely poor upper management. Don't be surprised if your studio gets closed down and your jobs sent overseas because of their poor business decisions. - Pay could be much better. Negotiate hard for a good wage if you're considering working here, because you wont get a raise. Do not expect to ever get a bonus, unless you happen to be at their "current" top preforming studio or if you're in the upper management. - Glu's current strategy seems to buy studios, collect their IP's, is said studio isn't profitable in a year, close studio and send the IP overseas to India or Russia. Rinse and repeat.

Pros

The people are great. The studio culture is wonderful. Flexible work hours and environment.

Cons

Betting the company's success on the free-to-play market is risky at best. Studios are pigeon-holed into specific game genres regardless of the teams' skills, experience, and knowledge. Upper management and corporate teams treat individual studios as disposable assets. If the business plan from corporate don't work out, the studios get shut down while the corporate teams move on to their next poorly-thought-out plans.

Pros

Work/Life balance. Coworkers were cool. The campus and business park had a lot of nice perks. All of my team managers were great.

Cons

Upper management is disconnected from the individual teams. If the game your team is working on doesn't do well, expect to be laid off.

Pros

Fun company culture and work environment.

Cons

Upper management don't know what they are doing.

Pros

Working on something more complex than match 3 games. Lunch every Wednesday. Breakfast every other Friday. Free drinks and snacks. Elaborate company parties.

Cons

Upper management has no idea what they are doing. They are all people that aren't gamers. They're just businessmen with MBA's from elite colleges. In the last two years, the company's issues have been solely due to bad management: from bad decisions made for what games to make, to bad project management, to not giving enough resources to the teams that are actually making money. In the end, the workers are the ones fired while management keeps their jobs and extremely high salaries.

Pros

Great environment, terrific co-workers, pretty good benefits.

Cons

Upper management not sure what they are doing. Instead of reinvesting in teams, they make the easiest call and shut down the studio. They also farm out a lot of work to cheaper and inferior studios overseas.

Pros

The people at Glu star are great, the people who were at Glu W were also great. Great snack choices. Food is always provided for overtime. Lots of talent!

Cons

After 2 years of working there, I've seen countless people leave or get laid off because of bad decisions made by upper management, mostly from SF. Management doesn't pay the price when this happens. They aren't very competitive when it comes to pay. Games are stuck in a rut. Russia is cheaper, you might lose your job to one of them. :) Lots of talent being wasted.

Pros

Good people with the talent and the drive to create refreshing and innovative freemium games. Descent work-life balance.

Cons

Upper management has unrealistic goals considering the fact that there's no true investment in proper prototyping and game vetting. Upper management consistently chases the latest mobile successes without the wisdom to reach beyond what's hot now vs having the insight or intestinal fortitude to be truly innovative. All about short term gains. E.G. Fast follows and clones of existing titles. No loyalty to dedication. Everyone is expendable. Poor security management. By this I mean employee's sensitive information has been compromised more than once. W2s & SS#s FOR ALL EMPLOYEES HACKED!

Pros

At the studio level things were mostly good. Aside from a lot of strange hiring/firing decisions, which mostly trickled down from what I'll touch on in the 'Cons' section, I loved my day-to-day at the office. The people were great, the location (Bellevue, WA) was pretty nice, and when we were allowed the grace to do what we wanted things tended to go very smoothly.

Cons

Cooperate tended to lie to their employees more than not. And I do mean more than they would tell the truth, it seemed. They would say things like, "We will not be downsizing. In fact, we will end up increasing headcount." then a month later lay off dozens of people. This is one example of many, but an example I use because it was one of the more common lies Niccolo in particular fed us. The folks running the show (the c-suite), I'm convinced, have no idea what it means to make a game. I feel like this is all too common in cooperate-run studios, but with Glu it seemed particularly egregious (I say that having worked in AAA). Niccolo, and a few others just below him, toured the studio to "see what we were working on" a few times throughout my time there. Each time it was a lesson in ignorance. They seemed to have absolutely no idea what they were looking at and could hardly even speak the game development language. This incompetence was not limited to just development, it seemed many of the poor hiring philosophies implemented in upper management of studios has/had them hiring based on how well they like person as a person not as a developer. This led to a plethora of crippling issues throughout development, including ignorance of proper development practices, pipelines, management, you name it. Go figure, hiring someone based not in skill and experience ended up being a poor call. I fully expect no one at Glu to have learned from this mistake. Glu actually made the decision to shut our studio down at the end of May. A decision I still have a hard time justifying to myself, considering our studio was lean and (more importantly) profitable. The c-suite then decided to offload all of our projects to the Moscow studio, a studio who's track record has been nothing but failure since my time at Glu started. As a result they have been non-profitable since before I started had there as well. To top everything off, a few days ago I received a letter from the company explaining a breach in security/information. One of the folks in HR received an email from someone impersonating Niccolo requesting they upload all W-2 information from employees who worked there in 2015 to a website. They complied. This was a textbook spear phishing scam. The company had just willingly uploaded all of our personal information to a phishing scammer. They then chose to wait 2 weeks to notify their employees. More likely, they had no idea anything was wrong for the majority of these two weeks. We are still receiving information as to how bad this breach really is. Some are reporting instances of information leaks to their family members as well. At this point in time it is assumed that anyone/anything referenced on our 2015 tax information is at risk. Niccolo does not care about your product unless you are making a celebrity game. He does not want innovation, he does not want integrity, he does not want you to succeed. He wants the game to have a title with a big name in it so he can show how good that looks to investors and people looking to purchase the company. If you want to make a good game and have some level of security in your job (and information) I would recommend working anywhere else but here.