Zynga Reviews

I have been working at Zynga full-time for more than a year

Pros – I work with incredibly bright, passionate people ever day.

Cons – Our stock price seems to be in a real slump.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

I worked at Zynga full-time for more than a year

Pros – Catered meals every day, great benefits, decent pay, good creative people with a lot of talent, good workstations, not too much crunch

Cons – most good ideas are ignored, high turnover, company says it needs to innovate yet it slams the door in the face of any actual unproven innovation. The company seems to like the buzz words but not the actual meaning behind any of them.

Advice to Senior Management – You can talk the talk, but you don't seem to have any one in charge who actually is willing to walk the walk. Figure out who is stifling the innovation and get rid of them.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

I worked at Zynga full-time for more than a year

Pros – You are surrounded with very very talented and motivated colleagues who inspires to work more and achieve more! As long as you bring strong work ethic, quality work, and collaborative attitude, you will meet amazing talents and get to be part of great team.

Cons – Very very hard to find good mentors and managers. I personally had a horrible management experience at Zynga which basically made me look elsewhere and got a job. A company that puts "Be your own CEO" and "Meritocracy" should eward on employee on performance. I sadly saw lots of politics which made things harder to make things happen.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

I worked at Zynga full-time for more than a year

Pros – Great benefits along with some great people you meet along the way.

Cons – The game making process is not evolving fast enough. Too much following of what's trending right now instead of being innovative and unique. Management seems to think there is a formula to make a successful game but they forget the number one factor of a successful game is the fun factor. Too much focus is made on their amazing ability to gather data, which makes them over reliant on it.

Advice to Senior Management – You have some great teams over there, start believing that they can make games without all the ridiculous approval proccess. It stifles creativity and just makes teams cater games to what you guys want instead of the players.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

I worked at Zynga full-time for more than a year

Pros – As the title said it was a learning experience. The scale of the games gives you immense opportunity to learn if you are on the back end services team. We used relatively new tech stack such as redis, node.js, coffeescript while it was still a up and coming thing. Free food and snacks are good and did offset some of the salary cut the pre-ipo hired took. No limits on hardware and quality equipment to work with.

Cons – I personally felt the cons outweighed the pros and thats why I decided to leave.

* While the learnings were fun, it was a short lived experience. The learnings stopped once I realized that the company tends to repeat itself again and again and is not keen on taking a step back to realize what might or might not be working.
* Company is risk averse w.r.t technology. Proven numbers around performance with modern stack was dismissed in favor of PHP only because the company had lots of PHP developers/ops and thought they OPS might not be able to support it.
* Working in a remote studio was absolutely painful as we got work that SFO didnt want or didnt care(this was fatal as it meant your quarterly bonus was non existant)
* Merit increases were highly political. It went to SFO people always and unless your manager had good impressions about you, you end up getting nothing.
* Product managers and directors can be extremely political. Our remote office clearly felt the directory preferred young engineers as they put more time at work that than the ones that had families.
* Not all perks werent matched as SFO even for a US satellite office. No parking match.
* Zynga does not value engineers at all. I would be surprised if any thing like a Spanner, Hive, HipHop, Kafka or any such innovative tech stack come out of Zynga as its just not valued or rewarded. If you did a quick fix that ticked unique users up in a month then you will be recognized as a star or an atlas or whatever crap they paraded in company meeting. On the other hand you spent weeks to improve a bad PHP code base and reduced server count, you get nothing.
* unprofessional executives - The way the chief people officer behaved was shocking. Their on stage interactions with other executives on quarterly company meetings was awkward and embarrassing.
* Mark Pincus - Extremely reactive founder. It doesnt take much to spook him and he will quickly change directions. For instance when the Sims took off he killed projects to put those folks on "the Ville" game only to realize in a month Sims dying off. Ville met the same end.

Advice to Senior Management – Start valuing engineers..you spend a lot to hire the best yet you dont listen to them. Product managers run the ship and their focus on short term returns is coming back to hurt you.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

I have been working at Zynga full-time for more than a year

Pros – Very exciting business, things are constantly changing and employees are constantly challenged

Cons – No work life balance at all

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

I have been working at Zynga full-time

Pros – [1] Excellent food for breakfast, lunch and evening snacks. 5 different caterers for 5 working days, one of them is a 5-star hotel. Multi-national cuisines - salads, soups, main course, starters and icecream everyday! You'll love this place if you're a foodie. Only 1 or 2 companies in India probably have better food than here. Period.
[2] Quarterly appraisal cycle and bonus payouts (that is, you don't have to wait an year for your pay hike or bonus payout :-)).
[3] Smart developers around. Zynga hired a lot of smart folks from good companies/colleges (I hear hiring standards have declined recently, I'm not sure)
[4] Good growth and quick change in roles (this 'pro' existed 2 years back, may not be now)

Cons – (I'm not gonna just compalain about the cons here. Wherever applicable, I'll indicate how you can use these cons to your advantage, if your conscience / opportunity at company allows. See points mentioned in '=>')

[1] Clearly not an engineering-oriented company. Very few (I repeat, very few) people get to work on good-technology. Most developers work on projects involving only editing XML files, adding PHP array entries, editing CSS, integrating animation/image files into front-end code etc. Only products that US office doesn't want transitions to India office. The other way around, products that's technologically cool built out of India office gets transitioned to US. Around 60-80% of the developers here can be quickly replaced by front-end developers or multi-media chaps (who just have an NIIT course on CSS/JS/Flash).
=> Keep your expectations clear. Don't come here to work on cool technologies or anything. Earn salary and leave.
[2] Lacks dignity of labour. Clearly, following is the tiered system one would notice within a week of joining:
1st-grade employees: Product Managers, Producers, UI Designers, Artists
2nd-grade employees: Developers, Engineering Managers
3rd-grade employees: QA
Typically for all the good things that happen in your product, Product Managers and Producers get credit. For any bad things, blame typically goes to developers and QA. General Managers almost always listen only to Product Managers or Producers. As a developer, I get deeply hurt sometimes. Can't imagine what would our QA be feeling every day!
=> If you want to join Zynga as developer, come with clear expectations that you're not respected like in other companies. Then you'll feel better.
[3] Product Managers and producers call the shots in almost all teams (to know what a 'producer' role means, you may have to google a bit). As a developer, you'll have little to no freedom to disagree with them. Engineering managers are powerless here - there is little they're able to do, even if they want to. This has a direct negative impact on developer's work-life balance, severely. A freshly graduated MBA can make 7 to 10 year experienced developers and their engineering manager dance to his/her tunes. Unfortunately, Product Managers in India Studio are very short-sighted (focus is on that particular month's revenue, sometimes that week's - instead of thinking long-term). This attitude is obviously bad for company as well as developers. Developers end-up working for short-term goals and hence sub-standard projects.
=> You can expect a good hike / promotion if you're in good terms with Product Managers and Producers in your team. Their quarterly feedback on you matters a lot (I repeat, a lot)!!! If you're into developing features, do whatever they tell you to, howsoever foolish it might seem or howsoever damaging their decisions is on product - don't question. Also, don't spend unnecessary effort in impressing these Engineering Manager fellows with your good programming skills or hard work or anything. If possible, move out of feature development and work on some platform stuff with an architect directly.
[4] There is lot of office politics (a lot) - this is not a general statement that one passes in any software company, but a bit more severe. This one involves a lot of people across roles. There are multiple nexuses in office.
=> If your conscience allows you, be part of one such nexus. Be in good books of key people in your team and company HR. Never (I repeat, never) provide correct feedback about these key people in your team to HR.

Advice to Senior Management – Develop the company to be a more engineering-oriented - other this attrition would continue (may be aggravate). Overhaul the India office.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

I have been working at Zynga full-time

Pros – Fun, good environment, no pressure,

Cons – No upside in career and management sucks at times

I have been working at Zynga full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Free gym, food, snacks, enough soda to turn you diabetic.
A lot of people are willing to teach you things if you ask.

Cons – Raises and bonuses are based loosely on a merit system that is reliant on goals set by your manager (who might or might not even understand what you do). Even meeting and surpassing goals can you get nothing.
Internal structure is designed to keep you in your job you were hired for, almost impossible to get into another department.
There is always lots of churn, hard to keep anything stable for more than a 3 month time frame.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

I worked at Zynga full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – -Compensation + generous perks. Zynga has a lot of financial resources and the ability to make Blockbuster titles. Whether they use those resources intelligently is another story. Free lunches, dinners, gym, health care, etc.
-Opportunity for advancement - a lot of it, if you can manage to get recognized by the right people. That last sentence is key.
-Average production cycle is a lot shorter than working in console development, which means more shipped titles in less time (if your team does it right)
-Dynamic workforce - fairly easy to transfer within the company.
-Has gotten better at recognizing games that won't succeed, and killing projects early. This could still use some improvement.
-All star IT department that bends over backwards for employees.
-Dog friendly environment usually makes it a joy to come to work (as long as the dogs on your team are well-behaved)
-Overall, I really liked my experience with Zynga. I was lucky to be well-recognized within the company, and felt like my voice mattered and that I was contributing a lot to the projects I was on. The sense of ownership diminished substantially over the the 3.5 years that I was with the company, in part because of rapidly growing team size, and in part from the increasingly negative morale that permeated the office.

Cons – -If you're not a programmer, product manager, or high-ranking designer, you're a second tier citizen. The company not value each discipline equally. From a ground level, you can see this in the referral bonus drives (2x bonus modifier on getting a PM or Developer (engineer) hired versus any other discipline).
-Hectic and disorganized. It's hard to filter the noise sometimes; games in my experience have never shipped on time; we constantly thought we were two weeks out from shipping, which meant a lot of crunch towards the launch of the project.
-Company size has grown substantially and explosively since I started; because of the lack of organization and general chaos, I don't think we grew intelligently. This resulted in several studio closures after a very aggressive.
-Work environment encourages politicking. Meritocracy = sometimes you get recognized for your skills and contributions, but you better make sure the right person sees it. Can be cutthroat, to the detriment of the quality of the game, as individuals plan terrible, un-fun features that maximize quick revenue but ultimately tank the game as we bleed users who can't put up with it anymore.
-Impossible to get recognized if you're not on a succeeding project. Zynga funnels resources into its blockbuster teams, and the pool for bonuses/promotions/etc seems dependent on how well your game is doing (monetization, DAU, etc).
-Extremely hard to get recognized at a remote branch, unless you're working a lot with people at HQ who can vouch for your talents. May be a moot point, anyways, since many remote studios were closed.
-Cynicism, jadedness seems to have infected a good portion of the workforce; depending on your team, morale can be a bummer.
-Thrash. A lot. There's been a ton of reorganization among upper management; I think part of it was to reduce the churn in projects to get fewer dissonant voices in on the greenlight process.
-Tendency to let projects run on for too long, with too many resources, only to can it 9+ months later.
-Extremely risk-adverse. "Innovation" is a joke, as every project seems to have Frankenstein'd each successful element of every previous title until games are hard to differentiate from each other and mechanics don't make sense in context; seems like stuff makes it in just to satisfy the green light checkboxes.
-Work/life balance is what you make of it. It's easy to live at work when you get catered lunch and dinner.
-Feature cadence on live games can get unreasonable. Your team needs to be good about recognizing when to dial it back; if you've got an aggressive General Manager who's 100% about meeting numbers, enjoy sleeping at Zynga.
-Weird animosity between departments, depending on your team: Product Managers and Designers don't seem to get along. You should be working in tandem to make a game that is both fun and profitable, not against each other to get your way.

Advice to Senior Management – I think you're at a crossroads - you have the opportunity to succeed in a major way, following the successes of your former titles. But if you don't wake up and take some risks, a smaller, more agile company is going to smoke you. Get back to your roots with smaller team sizes; the huge teams are too disorganized and not everyone's able to contribute 100%. Throwing as many people as you can on a project does not make it wrap up any faster or better; recognize those diminishing margining returns and keep your teams leaner. Get over the IPO. Just, get over it and don't fret about the near-term stock price- if you start looking more towards the future.

Or you can keep doing what you're doing; but I don't think it'll continue to work. I think the company's values aren't aligned with its employees' anymore, and you need to address that. Some of your top talent is being ignored simply because they aren't actively working on your biggest hit, and that's a shame. I'm pretty sure you can see the iceberg in the horizon - it's not too late to steer the boat in a different direction. Don't be the Titanic.

Also: Consider reducing the swag budget. By a lot. After over three years with the company, I'm pretty sure I could go a month without doing laundry solely by how many Zynga-branded t-shirts I own.

– I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company