Babel Media

It's freelance work, so everyone is out for themselves to be seen as more productive than the next to ensure they get called in to work the next day.

Good place to work if you live at home and don't have to worry about paying bills. There's no stability in the work. You might work one day and then get called in a month later to sit around for 3 hours to see if a team needs a replacement. You only know if you're going to work the next day at 9pm the night before, so your life revolves around waiting for that email and can't plan to do anything with family and friends.

If you make plans and then get an email that you work the next day, you have to cancel those plans. If you are unavailable when they schedule you, they are less likely to schedule you again for any amount of time. The only way you can have a life and work here is if you don't depend on this job for any kind of stable income.

The work itself in a contract Q.A. house is enjoyable - logging bugs you find while roaming through a game.

However you're underpaid, have almost no control, very few prospects for advancement, and it's not going to change.  And it's roughly seasonal work, so you may be out of a job come winter.

The upshot is that if you're focused and you stay professional (while still having fun) and slug it out, you can move up to become a senior tester, a lead tester, a manager, or even move to an actual AAA studio.  After that you have a shot at a lot more things - design, production, operations, programming.

Lots of fun! You're a video game tester, they're relatively laid back, never had problems with management or getting hours in the high season. Next to no hours in the low season though. Expect no income from about November-May. If you can handle that or get a seasonal job to cover the low season it'll work out. They recently added advancement opportunities so that's nice but I have yet to see how they work as you are on an on-call contract so if they have no work, you have no work.

Overall it was pretty decent. They are really stiff with the bug writing guidelines and they sometimes don't make sense, but you still must follow them. Sometimes you will get conflicting messages about the guidelines from the test leads and people working on vetting the bugs. They can stop calling you in for work without any notice, which is stressful and can put you in a tough position, like I am currently in.

Typical work day would coming in and getting ready to test a new game that is in progress. Management team was great. They taught us well on how to look for bug errors in video games. Co- workers were really cool. There was nothing really hard about the job, but the most enjoyable part would be coming to work everyday to test and play that new project before anyone else can play it.

Loved the culture, loved the work (testing games), but hated the hours. You don't know if you're working until the evening before, around 6 PM. Work isn't guaranteed unless you're lucky enough to get a contract. Otherwise, people you work with are nerdy, fun-loving, & relaxed. Most important thing you need for this job is attention to detail because you're logging detailed information about bugs in the game and repeating your steps over and over.

Babel has lots of work available during the summer, and provides experience working with the technical depths of modern consoles and mobile devices.

However, they strongly resist paying anyone more than minimum wage, and even management positions are lot of work for little pay. Great for students, poor for those seeking a profession.

There are some really tedious tasks at times. The more you move up the less you'll be playing games but you'll be paid more. Some people move up but no useful management training is provided so there is an unnecessary amount of attitude between staff. Also nepotism is rampant. If you don't have a friend inside you won't last if you get called at all.

- On call contract, which is a blessing and a curse, there is little certainty in knowing when you work unless you're friends with lead testers
- Seniority seems to overtake aptitudes in terms of advancement, as such there are many awkward people in leadership positions that shouldn't be
- Pay is low, but i assume that it's an industry standard

Typical day is a busy one.
Learned what linguistic correction is.
Management is friendly.
Co-workers are fun to exchange with.
The hardest part is to keep the concentration on an even keel.
Watching the video games slide by slide.

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