MZ Employee Reviews about "machine zone"

Pros

Machine Zone has taken fantastic care of me financially, offering excellent opportunities for advancement, rewarding hard work and proposals. It's enabled experimenting with management techniques. It's well funded for future ventures and the board works to create a healthier road for the future. The CEO visibly works to make sure that rewards for company success can be shared well with staff. It's got 3 meals a day by a reasonable cafeteria crew that take good care of the group. It takes care of a lot of out of pocket costs for benefits.

Cons

We don't know what builds success, but have succeeded a lot, leading to very painful patterns (Projects without staff or roadmap or pitch). Decisions on major company timelines can shift quickly and multiple times a year. Building a 6 or 12 month plan is an exercise in futility for the most part. A lot of teams are understaffed from a constant drive toward shared service models. Promotions often lack filling the gap promoted out of, leaving folks responsible for wider and wider spaces. Accountability is so distributed as to basically have no accountability for almost all of our game products. We brutalize our customers with buggy and poorly considered content, leaving them with the impression we don't care. Off hours incidents are multiple times a month. Some teams crunch excessively.

Pros

Yes, the company has great perks - free food, drinks, snacks, social events, etc. And yes, the company is very successful and enjoying hyper-growth right now. But the best part of working at Machine Zone is the chance to work with some of the most talented people in the industry. The talent at the company is truly best-in-class. If you come in, ready to roll up your sleeves and work, the experience will definitely be a rewarding one.

Cons

The company is growing to a size where there are a lot of new faces. It can sometimes get difficult to keep tabs on who is doing what.

Pros

There are a lot of advancement opportunities at Machine Zone as the company is growing. The work is fast paced so you will need to be passionate to keep up and push the boundaries. If you are then you will go a long way. Machine Zone treats the employees well with compensation, events, social outings, and listening to what you want.

Cons

The only people I have seen leave the company were looking for a relaxed place where you can sit back and code for a few hours and go home. This place demands passion for the work and what we do. But on the plus side, everyone that is working here are talented, passionate, awesome people now.

Pros

Innovative, motivated and brilliant are 3 words that come to mind when describing the employees, leadership and CEO at Machine Zone. I have been here for 3+ years and I am amazed and humbled every day. For the first time in my career I can honestly say, I love coming to work and I lose track of time while Im here. Is it true we work hard? Yes, however we play hard as well. Machine Zone goes above and beyond when it comes to recognition and rewards. Our CEO is a true visionary. He is hands on, always interacting with his employees. He is truly interested in not only the work they do, but who they are. I am extremely fortunate to work so closely with him every day and I know he genuinely cares about his employees. Sam Ewing one said 'Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all.'

Cons

Finding exceptional talent with the skill set required to work at Machine Zone.

Pros

Decent compensation. The SRE team is (or was?) made up of great people on both the personal and professional levels.

Cons

Expect extreme hours during crunch time. But don't worry, it's crunch time just about year round. Not an exaggeration. Absolutely everything requires a ticket. Spend 30 minutes researching something? That's a ticket. Add a new monitoring check? That's a ticket. You love working on big projects? Well, you better love tickets. The most a ticket can cover is a day's worth of work, and even that's discouraged. If the above sounds like micromanagement, then that's because it is, at least directly according to the individual responsible for rolling out this model of work. This all ties into a scrum approach. Scrum itself isn't bad (though is definitely an awkward fit at best for such an interrupt driven team), but I will say, after having worked with scrum across multiple companies, that it's an extremely poor implementation of scrum. If you're excited to do some engineering work to improve the environment and make it more robust, this is not the place for you. The role is SRE in name only. If you don't keep up on the menial work you'll be pulled aside. The menial work is sky high and never ending. It's been acknowledged many times that things will improve Real Soon, and that SRE needs to focus on this menial work for now (as it has for the entire existence of the SRE team at MZ). However, come review time, you'll be dinged pretty hard for not doing the high level work too. What high level work? Weren't we just told we had to focus on the menial NOC work? This is called a double bind. There is also an extremely pervasive culture of fear. Turnover is rampant, much of it voluntary, much of it not. People are called out all the time for mistakes, or more often 'mistakes'. If upper management hears you did something awful, they'll call you into a special meeting which will be a very unenjoyable experience. You won't get a chance to explain what actually happened. Instead, you'll have left a lasting impression with upper managementou'll have left a lasting impression with upper managementou'll have left a lasting impression with upper management, which to say at Machine Zone is a big scarlet for incompetence. I've witnessed this happen to multiple people, where management simply made assumptions and did not understand the actual situation, and blamed people for things that were not remotely their fault, or were unavoidable. But a scapegoat was found, that's the important thing! While the culture of fear at Machine Zone comes from the top, most of the issues with the SRE team at Machine Zone are not so far removed. From the micromanagement to the double binds, these issues are directly SRE related, specifically the middle management. The team has lost 4 senior people this year already, and will be hemorrhaging more.

Pros

people caring culture of Machine Zone

Cons

workload, we usually have to work overtime

Pros

Machine zone provides lots of opportunities to take advantage of. You can grow your career here, learn new things, get a unique experience, improve skills, and meet incredibly gifted people. High pay, endless benefits, and much more to gain working hard and humble.

Cons

Work hours can be really long sometimes, that’s the main con you’ve got to know about the company. Yet that won’t be a great surprise for those who’ve been at the gaming industry for some time.

Pros

Its truly an amazing experience to be part of such a fast growing and innovative team. Over short span of time you end up getting high quality experience working with the latest and hottest technologies in the industry at a massive scale. There is no shortage of exciting projects here, if you want to learn or be part of a project, all you have to do is ask. At Machine Zone if you do your job well and deliver results, you get rewarded very well.

Cons

Similar to any other fast growing company there is a lot of work to be done but the good news is that company provides support and you get recognized and rewarded for it.