Pros
- Great educational, medical and transportation perks - Great bonuses and employee discounts on PlayStation and Sony products - Lots of opportunities to travel overseas, particularly to Tokyo or London - Supportive leadership that lets employees explore different career paths and grow - Passionate coworkers who love gaming and are really into what they are doing - A low-conflict environment with a strong drive for consensus and respect - Agile development practices with continuous improvement, hackathons and quick adjustments based on lessons learned - Work from home opportunities in the U.S. and management focused on results, not attendance - A quirky and creative environment typical of the gaming industry - A company that encourages playing games at work - A very approachable CEO and most other top leaders - Lots of women in leadership positions, even in Japan (mostly up to Sr. Director level but also some VPs)
Cons
- Incompetence is sometimes tolerated indefinitely, true to the life-employment model of Japan - Managers frequently lack the most fundamental people management skills and don't know how to motivate their employees - Lack of open conflict leads to a lot of back-channeling, politics and having to read between the lines - In the Tokyo office, expectations about work hours are insane and no one can work from home, which leads to female workers still largely being forced to choose between having career success and being single, or having a decent but unimpressive job at PlayStation and having a family - The super-Agile style of the San Fransisco office frequently clashes with the Waterfall thinking of Tokyo - As of 2018, analytics is still not a big part of decision making and a lot of product managers are weak - Employee performance management is unpredictable and convoluted. There are no company-wide OKRs and it's hard to understand how performance goals are measured