Bad culture and rigid old-school micro-management style senior management team
Pros
Fun multi-cultural environment where you'll get to learn a lot but avoid staying for more than 6-9 months.
Cons
1) Blame culture trickling down from the top to the bottom: You're always in fear of reporting issues as you'll be the one who gets reprimanded and questioned "How!?" and "Why did you spot this only NOW!!?". This results in people trying to cover up for each other and hide issues from management. There's a strong focus on blaming the people not the process; If the process is extremely prone to human-error then humans must simply not make errors. Meanwhile, the process will never get re-examined, because senior management will say "This is how we've done it for years" 2) Low autonomy combined with low trust results in a micro-management heavy culture: Politics between different departments with QA inferiority complex, once you join as a lowly QA peasant, you'll always be looked down upon by management as a QA peasant no matter how far you make it. 3) Extremely low-tech: For a leading video game publisher, Activision (Dublin) is at least 5-8 years behind in technology. Be prepared to relive the spirit of the 90s with emails and excel sheets used for nearly everything. No investment in tools whatsoever. 4) Complete lack of transparency from the senior management: Decisions involving you will be made at a top level and will not be communicated or explained to a peasant such as yourself until the last minute, this will not change even if you become a team leader. 5) Compensation is consistently below the market average for nearly all roles: Be prepared for unprecedented levels of stinginess no matter how well the company is performing financially.
