Pluspunten
- Super friendly and supportive coworkers (more so than anywhere else I've worked in the nearly 15 years of industry experience - 4 other companies before this one). - Super cool and engaging project. - At every tier of the company, everyone seems highly engaged and motivated with the project - making it better for the player (better quality of life, better trust and safety, etc), cool new features, optimization, pushing for new supported platforms, etc. - Great transparency with full-time employees: weekly company meetings which cover all the different teams' focuses, business development, etc. - Alternating weekly brown bag style "Town Hall" meetings to cover different teams' priorities, methodologies, etc. and play days where everyone is encouraged to hop into Rec Room to keep a better pulse on things. - Very agile company with management being very receptive to evolving needs and creating new internal teams as needed. Note: this isn't like the nasty reorgs you find at a place like Microsoft, but more that motivated and interested team members voluntarily join other teams based on needs and desires. - Working in and with Virtual Reality - it's awesome! - Unlimited paid time off, which is actually encouraged (I've worked elsewhere where unlimited paid time off was actually heavily socially restricted through pressure and guilt from management or project cycles). My manager has regularly encouraged me to consider taking time after a project ends and when I first joined, they encouraged me to plan a vacation for myself in the future so that I "had something to look forward to" on the horizon. Management has repeatedly said that they very sincerely do not want their people to get burnt out, because it's bad for everybody. - Regular 1:1 meetings with team leads (every 1-2 weeks or as desired between team member and lead), as well as semi-regular 1:1 time with studio leads. Management seems pretty receptive to ideas and general input. - Daily morning team scrum meetings, which I find to be helpful with engagement and accountability. - Rec Room keeps a weekly client release/deployment schedule. This can certainly be a turn off or a negative for some people because it can feel aggressive on its face, but it should be noted that individuals nor teams are expected to necessarily be delivering every week. It just means that we push something new every week, which tends to lead to quicker turnaround for bug fixes, iteration on features, and helps to keep the engines greased and the tools sharp so to speak. This release schedule helps to put enough pressure on teams and individuals to be motivating, rather than grueling. - Pretty great relationship with players and the community in general. Rec Room has actually hired several players and community members as full-time and contracted employees. - Somewhat standard vested equity over 4 years.
Minpunten
- Not a super con, but just something I'm getting used to: a large number of the employees at Rec Room came from Microsoft and as a result, they've borrowed a lot of Microsoft's more plan-heavy workflows, which leads to more document generation for projects before actually getting to the code - design and technical documents, which require buyoff from relevant stakeholders, which can really slow down the initial process of getting a project really rolling. However, solving the problems ahead of time and getting buyoff from relevant team members tends to lead to fewer surprises, more oversight, and help in solving problems. I'm just so used to working at other game studios which tend to be quite a bit less plan focused and where problems are solved more as they come up. - Once again, not a big con at the moment, but Rec Room is getting larger and is hiring a great deal, so management will have to navigate through trying to keep the company feeling "small" and inclusive. It's very easy for a rapidly growing team to start feeling corporate and less personal. This hasn't been a major issue for me just yet, but because of the circumstances is a potential concern for me going into the future.