Ubisoft Reviews

Pros

Comfortable and secure - If you´re in the good graces there´s always a new project waiting for you when one ends, or if you decide not to continue with the current one. Location - For those of us not too fond of the downtown area, the Mile-End location of the main office is great. Pace - In all my years as a designer there I´ve rarely ever crunched. (though this is very project-specific)

Cons

Top-Down structure - Ubisoft is a family run company with 15k employees, and it shows. Absolutely everything about the company is top-down and about enabling the family to keep control. This enables cronyism and cliquishness, which in the worst-cases results in the types of harassment and toxicity that´s been in the news in the last couple of years. Creative Tasks - Designers are scribes and coordinators more than creatives, even on the "small" teams Lack of training and support for leads - After being promoted to lead I received no training, mentoring or support on how to perform the role well.

Pros

- nice perks in some locations - interesting IPs - work / life balance, most of the time

Cons

- salaries lower than competition - hard to grow outside management - little opportunities to grow within the company - company is too big to really change, newcomers can find it hard to evolve in - communication is weird, secrets from studio to studio or team to team - internal engines are old and hacked to ship everything, by each team, further hacked on each following prod - internal middlewares and teamwork is far from ideal - most production work is integrating stuff from said middlewares, or other productions, and debugging it to make it work - lack of creativity - IPs are getting old and lack of renewing concepts

Pros

Working for Ubisoft, free games, health, dental, gym, various other services and events

Cons

salary is terrible, not at all competitive, HR is terrible, max they stay is 6 months. They treat the certification department like terribly. They want you to do the work of production without any of the benefits or pay. treated worse than most other departments and no one seems to really care. The job posting vs. the actual job is nothing alike, but they do that so they can pay way less, as if it's a very basic level entry job. Also the hours are 9h hours a day, yet they constantly praise a work life balance. It's more than anywhere I've ever worked in my life and working 45h a week somewhere it's impossible to drive because there's no parking leaves no for life. Your whole day is work and it's insulting to constantly hear how much they believe in "work life balance". Words are empty.

Pros

- Ubisoft as a company has a good culture, but your mileage will vary based on the department you end up in - The neighborhood is cool, there's plenty of cool restaurants and shops around - Salaries are competitive for the Montréal Market - Internal mobility has a lot of positions open and applying to other positions is easy - You can spend you entire career there if you want, people rarely get fired and the jobs are stable

Cons

Regarding Engineering & Platform: - Lots of red tape - They expect the backend devs they hire to be SREs, so know Ops, possibly be on call - Toxic atmosphere, it feels like the employees are scared to speak their mind - Orwellian levels of gaslighting from the managers/directors, their own shortcomings and mistakes will never be acknowledged and their impact greatly diminished. They will put the blame on you or find another scapegoat. - Abnormally high amount of turnover & burnouts compared to the rest of Ubisoft - Claims to care about mental health but will antagonize you at every opportunity - Teams work in Silos and are expected to depend on each other, magically - Constant scope changes, chasing a moving target - Directors are most probably sociopaths Regarding Ubisoft: - HR has no teeth to investigate toxic behavior - Directors are either untouchable or don't care about other misbehaving directors - Lots of internal politics