Naughty Dog Employee Reviews about "long hours"

Pros

You will work on the best games in the industry, and constantly be challenged to do your best work, including things no one has ever done in the industry before. Good work is recognized and rewarded.

Cons

The crunches are hard, lots of long hours at the end of the project. Your spouse must be ok with this.

Advice to Management

Crunch is a hard thing to solve, but is probably the #1 reason people leave. Better scheduling is hopefully in the pipeline.

Pros

ND is a top studio with some of the most talented folks in the business. Lots of great people, really passionate about doing great work. Sony the parent company, seems to take a pretty hands-off approach and avoids meddling with the studio.

Cons

Most everyone works in an open office plan environment. The noise can be very distracting so pretty much everyone has noise-cancelling headphones. It is a high pressure environment, like many game studios. And there is pressure to work long hours. While the studio has expanded greatly, the management style has not changed much. The net result of this is that there are people in management roles who shouldn't be.

Advice to Management

Greater transparency would be nice. Also the wrong person in a management role can do a lot of damage. Having a mechanism to detect and correct that would be nice.

Pros

The people at Naughty Dog are very talented, the best in the industry. It's a great place to grow and learn and push yourself.

Cons

Striving to reach perfection often leads to long hours, but end result is a great product.

Pros

You get to work on some of the most amazing and critically acclaimed games. You get to work with THE most talented people in the industry, everyone they hire is a seasoned professional- Senior or Lead level actually. They pay very well for this talent and if you perform well and stick around you get WELL compensated for it with shipping bonuses and quarterly bonuses that can be a very big percentage of your yearly salary! The Culture is fun and people are friendly and have lots of activities and lunch time fun together. The Leads are very nice and respect you and ask your opinion on things, not just order you around. A+++ Would highly recommend.

Cons

Standards are very high and there can be long hours and long crunches, but that is just because everyone is committed to making the best game we can, and they compensate you very well for working so hard.

Advice to Management

Try to reduce the lengthy crunches, as others have said.