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BioWare

From day one, we were informed that as QA testers, we were contractors. We had 3 month contracts, and every 3 months we had to defend our jobs and hopefully get another 3 months. The promise was that eventually we'd be hired on as full time employees.

A typical day at work ranged anywhere from 9 to 16 hours of work depending on crunch, with constant deadlines, odd business decisions, and a rapidly changing culture due to pressure from the publisher.

While the testing and other tasks did prove to be rewarding more often than not, there were days where it was more convenient to sleep on a couch, shower in the gym, and just go back to work. There wasn't enough time to go home and sleep. And to top it all off, the pay was horrible.

Many people got laid off when EA decided to clean house, including people who had worked there for 5-10 years. Many of us contractors didn't get picked up as full time employees, and were shown the door.

-Fun place to work.
-Lots of perks like free breakfast.
-AMAZING people to work with, great peers with so much knowledge and passion.
-Sharp learning curve but there are a lot of people with the expertise to teach and share. 
-The people who work here are the highlight, each person is brilliant and a specialist in their own area, not just for technical skills either.
-It's not a perfect system it seems like most people, especially middle management, does their best to be constantly looking for ways to improve both work efficiency and quality of life.
-Parts of the job can be frustrating, sometimes people see repercussions for choices made by higher ups who simply get to move on to other projects.
-Sometimes subject to some pretty serious "hurry up and wait" style work (seems to be all tech QA suffers from this when talking with peers from other companies though.)

I was brought on as a replacement Development Director for a 1 year contract.  The teams I worked with were professional, awesome and dedicated.  No need to herd cats here.  These pros knew what they were doing and did an amazing job.

The atmosphere was amazing.  Art work graced the walls everywhere.  Meeting rooms have the latest in technology so that you can hold virtual meetings with team members across the world.  And playing the game you were working on was a daily thing.  Talk about a dream job. Will definitely miss it.

BioWare as a whole has amazing developers at it, really bar none in terms of experience.  The studio is very caring about families.  Free Breakfast everyday and a great Christmas Party.

On the downside, EA has become less lenient with the long lifecycle of BioWare products and Management has been unable to properly reconcile this with the team causing, at times, massive overtime and destruction of Work/Life balance.

In saying that - the people make it worth it, for a while at least.

Arrived at 8:30 to 9:00, set up my work environment for the day on my PC. Standup with all team members at 9:45. Tested the game throughout the morning and afternoon, left work at 6:00. Did test planning on occasion with other team members, sorted out work with each other throughout the day so we wouldn't do the same job twice. Gave other employees advice and asked my own questions.

Good place to work.  Not micromanaged, annual reviews, benefits are OK.  They offer frequent employee lunches, and family events, free breakfast every day.

Bioware was a great place to work with excellent people. The culture was awesome, and the original CEO's the best around. Learned more in this job than anywhere else. Terribly long hours and long death-march stretches when nearing project completion.

Company is focused on work but knows that employees who sit behind a computer all day can get tired and unfocused, they have a gaming room with pool table, ping pong and arcades to help people break up the boredom.

Upper management has been known to allocate time and efforts on projects to a design that does not have a cohesive plan or structure. This leads to confusion amongst team members.

It was wonderful working over there , good place to learn ew things and very friendly environment, i learned lot of things both personally and professionally. The management was very cooperative and encouraging to staff with all the support they can.

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