Awful - werkgeversreview Senior Game Artist bij Techona

I had the oportunity to work for some months until the office closed in January 2020. I made a lot of friends from different nations. I remember we ate jam, bread, cheese, tomatoes cherry and cucumber ALWAYS.! The HR team had the “amazing” idea of personalized mugs for coffee, so.. you had to take your time to find yours or, become someone else that day. I remember the Friday Beer.. but only the stories, cause every Friday I had classes and then when I stop by the office, there were no beers left at all. I WON THE KARTING CHAMPIONSHIP FROM GAMES TEAM with fastest lap.

Well, where should I start? Employee rotation was VERY HIGH, so all “training” was a waste of time. Because of the constant pressure of delivering fast, the work done was buggy failing in a reworking task. Some people believed they were Steve Jobs, so usually failed at any attempt of “innovation”. IT Security was a joke, people were able to plug any external hard drive and steal code, bring their personal laptops and work in something else rather than their duties. Indeed, that afternoon when the CEO announced that the office was about to close, they claimed ALL employees must sign a resignation letter to allow Techona pay that last month of work… OTHERWISE, Techona will announce a BANKRUPTCY and none will get a penny.

+ by far, the low-level employees are the greatest asset of the company, very smart and friendly people willing to help each other, in a multicultural environment + competitive salaries and benefits (free multisports card, some snacks, friday beers, good offices) + use of latest mobile technologies for both major platforms (when there's time for it)

– improvements or innovations always have to be pushed bottom-up, since product owners rarely care about it – there is no clear roadmap even for the near future, so new features are usually PO's random out-of-nowhere ideas, sometimes not even doable – no bonuses whatsoever, going the extra mile or doing someone else's work (which happens often) is just work you are totally giving for free, no overtime pay, no annual bonus or anything else – you get a desktop computer, so working from home means using your personal device, same with phones, not even the mobile team gets its own testing devices (only management gets laptops and phones) – each team work as independent entities, so requiring another teams assistance usually means it will never get solved, causing server-side issues to be solved on the client – the whole company uses old "proprietary" solutions that rarely follow any standard or common practices, adding extremely unnecessary complexity for very simple tasks