PlayStation Reviews

Pros

Work with amazingly talented people who are world-class at their craft and still down to earth.

Advice to Management

Keep hiring amazing people. Remove friction created unnecessary procedures

Pros

- Great educational, medical and transportation perks
- Great bonuses and employee discounts on PlayStation and Sony products
- Lots of opportunities to travel overseas, particularly to Tokyo or London
- Supportive leadership that lets employees explore different career paths and grow
- Passionate coworkers who love gaming and are really into what they are doing
- A low-conflict environment with a strong drive for consensus and respect
- Agile development practices with continuous improvement, hackathons and quick adjustments based on lessons learned
- Work from home opportunities in the U.S. and management focused on results, not attendance
- A quirky and creative environment typical of the gaming industry
- A company that encourages playing games at work
- A very approachable CEO and most other top leaders
- Lots of women in leadership positions, even in Japan (mostly up to Sr. Director level but also some VPs)

Advice to Management

Focus on training your managers in people management skills, particularly if they manage people from different work cultures. Normalize work expectations across different regional offices to reduce bias, such as "everyone in San Francisco is lazy". Raise the bar for the Product Management organization and train your PdMs to be true product leaders. Stop protecting poor performers just because they have been with the company for a long time - it's bad for everyone's morale. Make VPs and Sr. Directors get out of their offices and talk to each other and their teams - they are not on the same page most of the time. Reduce hierarchical and cocky behavior in the London office, which is contrary to the spirit of PlayStation.

Pros

A great place to work.

Pros

Good facilities (gym is great)

Pros

We make video games for a living!
Fun place to work
PlayStation is highly respected in the industry
Much of the work is cutting edge
Diverse and respectful workplace

Advice to Management

Communicate more openly

Pros

The people, the technology, the environment, the cool factor of working at PlayStation, the fact that you work at a company that has customers who are not just customers they are fans! The executives are actually really cool people who do not sit on a pedestal. In fact, all of the management team and all of the individual contributors are genuinely sincere people who really care about the product and that’s an amazing thing. The VPs and SVPs are incredible, approachable, knowledgeable, thoughtful and caring about the fans first. They practice what they preach for sure when it comes to being the best place to play (and work!) It’s really an incredible place to work for so many reasons. The benefits and the perks and everything, I won’t even describe because they’re what you would expect… Simply amazing. It is definitely the coolest place I’ve ever worked and that’s a high bar. There are so many great things to say about this company that I would probably spend the next hour writing them but I don’t know if anyone would ever read all the amazing things I could say.

Advice to Management

Keep being awesome. Please look to your new hires as fast promotions because you have a lot of people who are stale. Make new opportunities even if they don’t exist. You will be rewarded by loyal talent you can rely on and make the stale people need to become fresh. Watch the burnout pace and hire well above and beyond your budget. There’s always room for new directors even if you think there isn’t. You’re gonna have the customers, you might as well get ahead of it. Drop the price point of some services and listen more to your customers about that and major feature requests. You really have to act faster to what the consumers really want. Don’t triage twitter and reddit... think of it as free user testing, and please listen to them. Just one last note to the Senior leaders, please take this advice as honest as it was a really true pleasure working there.

Pros

Smart colleagues, great strategists and fun place to work

Pros

Focused on creating fun high quality products.

Advice to Management

Trust and empower your employees. The DNA of the company is made up of gamers from all backgrounds. They want the company to succeed and are willing to work hard to make PlayStation the best place to work.

Pros

Great Company to work for.
Interesting problems to solve.
Great perks and Swags.
Lunch every Tuesday.
Lots of great internal talks and KT sessions almost every week.
Bi Annual Hackathons where interesting projects are made and productized. Some of these projects are already in the market.

Advice to Management

- Take care of current employees, don't go running behind new talent just because they can offer short term goals. Thing long term about employee morale and retention
- Improve communication among different sites and remove managers who are just trying to pounce on other teams work. It is very bad for team morale.
- Try to standardize processes. Don't let age old processes dictate how things are done just because teams in Japan do not want to change.

Pros

- Relaxed environment with great work-life balance
- Friendly and fun coworkers - fantastic culture
- Great environment to be in if this is your first corporate job or new to gaming or tech in general