Pixar Animation Studios Reviews

Cons

Only baseline pay, challenging path to advancement

Cons

Pixar is great ... as long as you're part of their clique.
They staff projects based on who you know v.s. your actual skills so make sure you kiss up to the right person. Very high school, so find the popular kids and hope they like you.
Some of the legacy staff expect you to fawn over the fact that they worked on Toy Story or A Bug's Life 20 years ago.
Execs say they care about diversity in race and gender, even hired an expensive VP two years ago to handle diversity, but their actual staffing numbers and every day culture doesn't reflect that.
Very little upward mobility, but that's common in animation.
HR only serves in the interest of executives, but that's common too.

Cons

Pixar is great ... as long as you're part of the clique.
Projects are staffed based off who you know v.s. your actual skills. Make sure you kiss up to the right person. High school culture, so find the popular kids and hope they like you.
Execs claim to value diversity, even hired an expensive VP of diversity two years ago, but their staffing numbers and every day culture doesn't reflect that.
Upward mobility very difficult, but that's common in animation.
HR only serves in the interest of executives (also common).

Cons

Pay for the bay area, especially for those that missed the stock years, is hard to make a future with. There isn't much chance of owning a home on a Pixar salary no matter who you are. Upward mobility is insanely difficult since very few leave.

Cons

Low pay compared to other animation studios. Slow growth opportunities.

Cons

Low wages (because they can), inefficient and unprofessional middle management, dramatically stratified class system (anyone working in production gets royal treatment, studio staff are second class, etc), in spite of efforts to diversify it's still largely white men in positions of power both in the studio and leading creative projects (actually directing and writing movies)

Cons

Relatively low compensation as an engineer.

Cons

Bureaucracy and low esteem in the management. "If Disney say we'd do something, then we do something".

Tech people are treated by the management layer as low-valued nerds, or "just another IT guy". Never mention their existence during any large events, for example, the premiere.

Very unfriendly to foreign employees. One has to struggle here for 5+ years before getting support for EB1 visa application cause the company is afraid of employee's job changing.

Cons

Not a lot of room to grow. You will be at a disadvantage if you are hired from resume and interview alone vs. knowing someone who already works there.

Cons

I was hired full-time as run of show for 6 months after I did an internship for about 6 months. With just about a year of getting to understand the company, I found that it is a very hard place to grow and move around. This mostly comes from it being such a small company, just around 1200+ employees and so everyone here comes as their dead-end job, where they intend to spend 10-20 years. So if you come in entry level, it may take several years to see any growth. I can't say the same for all the Production roles like TDs, artists, and such, but that's my general feel.