Doesn't Recommend
Neutral Outlook
Disapproves of CEO
I worked at Obsidian Entertainment full-time
Pros
- You will make close friends in the trenches.
- If you already live in Orange County and need a paycheck, you can earn one here.
Cons
At the heart of Obsidian is a coterie of apathetic underperformers propped up by a slow churn of overworked, underpaid developers held to higher standards than senior employees.
- You will not be able to afford to live near the office.
- Highly political work environment.
- Obsidian’s development strategy is to expect as few developers as possible to achieve more than is humanly possible, in as little time as possible, with as little support as possible: insufficient management, multiple roles per developer, limited QA, penny-pinching and corner-cutting (no bonuses), and highly scrutinized productivity. Positive feedback is infrequent. The belt is tightened further when success is limited, as though success will increase with fewer resources - however, game scope is allowed to inflate indiscriminately, sometimes by owner demand.
- Absolutely no learning occurring from project mismanagement. If someone insists the next project will be ‘better’, don't fall for it.
- No training for management positions (or any position). There is an unspoken expectation that employees accept, cope with, and compensate for inadequate management/production.
- Continuously changing tasking pipelines as though the problem isn’t that that each producer is expected to manage multiple departments as well as adapt to shifting goalposts from owners.
- The highest paid, most senior people demonstrate the least accountability and, in some cases, the worst behavior.
- Regularly practiced "cannibalism" where developers are 'borrowed' from one project to fill a void in another team - however since Obsidian is reluctant to hire anyone even when necessary, managers on the borrowing team get sneaky, cut deals, and slide work under the table to hold on to the borrowed employee.
- There is no female leadership, and Obsidian has driven away the majority of its female staff in recent years. Women may not experience sexual harassment at Obsidian but their expertise will be ignored, their work will not be acknowledged (in quality or quantity), they will not receive the privileges reserved for the owners’ friends (promotions), and their longevity at Obsidian may be hindered by owner bias - regardless of their value as a teammate and their contributions to the company.
Owners/Upper Management
- Owners seem to be in a perpetual cold war. For better or worse, decisions happen when one them gives up fighting the other.
- People’s experiences at Obsidian will vary dramatically depending on how much the owners like them. For example, leadership positions and promotions are reserved for friends and people who the owners “like” regardless of obvious red flags.
- Hiring preference goes to friends or acquaintances despite qualifications.
- Owners are far removed from the actual work of making games and seem surprised by everything that takes longer and costs more to make than it did in 2006.
- Juvenile antics from owners including playing favorites, holding grudges, defensiveness, passive aggression, avoiding problems, fair-weather friendliness, withholding or being coy with feedback and expectations, and neglecting people they don’t like.
- You will see senior employees and leads refusing to collaborate, ignoring direction, sneaking in content, ignoring feedback, avoiding confrontation to the detriment of the project, being defensive, failing to communicate, going behind the backs of other leads and departments, etc.
- Owners describe Obsidian as a place of innovation and creativity but shoot down anything outside their narrow comfort zones, scrape the bottom of the same barrels, and avoid risk to a degree that borders on cowardice (yet all the while absorbing any collateral cost accrued by their poor leadership picks and mismanagement).
- Owners regularly ignore projects. Other times they procrastinate playing projects until the eleventh hour, then demand changes.
- Owners will not lift a finger to retain valuable employees, who are jumping ship at a regular pace.
- Owners claim to have open-door policies but bringing issues to their attention only wastes your own time - the most serious problems are of their making, or the making of one of their untouchable favorites.
- In the interest of 'transparency', the whole company gets to hear about who an owner chats with at trade shows, which at best foreshadows dead ends and at worst foreshadows bad deals, but wastes everyone's time either way.
- A history of inaction and even retaliation from upper management results in reluctance among lower-rung employees to bring up issues.
- A complete deafness to company morale and emotional health of employees.
Advice to Management
The supposed pedigree of Obsidian, with its best work slipping ever into the past, is is not worth the personal cost of working here. If Obsidian can not or will not pay average salaries, and if it will continue to expect employees to move mountains while being jerked around by all and sundry, then the very least they can do is treat everyone who puts up with it with the same level of respect.
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