Naughty Dog Reviews

Pros

seriously talented veterans , The studio has a great work environment and lots of opportunities to learn from co-workers.

Pros

Creative input, freedom, and world class artist to work with. It's a top notch company that cares for it's people and truly wants to make the best games out there!

Advice to Management

Keep it up! It's a great place to work and it's important to keep that passion and drive going

Pros

Work on amazing games with great people

Advice to Management

Positive reinforcement works

Pros

Best work in the business.

Advice to Management

Stop treating your employees as disposable.

Pros

- Great people. Some of the most inspirational, passionate, and dedicated I've worked with.
- Games are second to none in their genre. Contributing to them was a constant source of inspiration and satisfaction.
- Benefits and and additional compensation were great.

Advice to Management

- Be more transparent about studio wide issues and initiatives. Hold health surveys and more company meetings; give employees a voice. Be transparent about growth and improvement.
- More technical / tool development investment could improve art production flexibility and allow for iteration and change requests.
- Junior engineers on staff could free up experienced engineers and allow them to achieve more and not get bogged down by UI development and simpler tasks.

Pros

The work is extremely full-filling. The people who work at Naughty Dog are some of the best in the industry. You will grow as an artist

Advice to Management

Schedule better. Loosen the terrible crunch.

Pros

Utopia for game development. So much freedom. Everyone is incredibly passionate and dedicated. The structure is very flat and you can simply work on what you're interested in (within reason of course). Extremely friendly people as they hire based on personality. Cool internal talks from other industry professionals. Engine is incredible and constantly evolves to be better, week by week.

Advice to Management

No feedback is good feedback is the mantra, but positive feedback can go such a long way in boosting people's motivation. Leads should try to pick out positives along with the much needed critiques.

Pros

You will work on the best games in the industry, and constantly be challenged to do your best work, including things no one has ever done in the industry before. Good work is recognized and rewarded.

Advice to Management

Crunch is a hard thing to solve, but is probably the #1 reason people leave. Better scheduling is hopefully in the pipeline.

Pros

Great devs: You can tell these are some of the best of the best they rarely mess up meaning you work less.
Great people: Most of them are funny, fun to hang around, and make for great friends.
Great engine: Their engine is incredible to make 3D person games and a lot easier than something like unreal 4.
Money: I got promoted 3 times during the 4 years I worked there (3 TIMES!) and they really sort you out and can tell who works the most and single them out. Started around 80k a year and went up to around 170 k a year in the end of employment before I got a better offer.

Advice to Management

Work on the crunch time before games are released if you haven't already since it's been 1 year or so since i've been there. Also make your qualifications a bit harder for more high paying jobs, I started programming when I was 13 way back and I felt WAY more experienced than people that made double what I made. Especially when it came to code.

Pros

Everybody knows what they are talking about. There are no real producers so you get assignments from leads who know what they are doing. The atmosphere is very friendly even during crunch. I could work here forever from what I've experienced so far.

Advice to Management

Doing good. Last crunch was a bit extreme but you mentioned you are working on trying to spread the schedule more evenly. Thanks.