Niantic Culture

Oracle
ajyyds

Go to company page Oracle

ajyyds
Feb 3 15 Comments

I have seen many posts on blind regarding the bad leadership, how does the eng scene look there? From the people I interviewed with they all seem pretty nice and enjoyed their work, but I don’t know how it really is within the company. Can anyone share the thoughts? If I want to work for the pogo team, would the culture be pretty bad there and always need to work overtime like a sweat shop? Thanks for any advice in advance.

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 TOP 15 Comments
  • All I can say is, as a once avid Pokemon Go player, what they've done to the game and to the community is beyond disappointing. They had all the opportunity in the world to build up one of the largest gaming communities this world has ever seen. But alas, take a look at app annie or any other MAU dashboards of the game. It's only core whale players left; and even the whale players and influencers are actively renouncing the game on YouTube and leaving the game. Hell myself included.

    This company seems blind (or braindead) to the requests of the community. They say "listen carefully to your customers as their whispers will tell you what to build next". In this case, the community is taking a megaphone and blaring it. Influencers actually banded together and staged a strike on YT where major influencers banded together to promote their communities to stop paying for microtransactions until the company fixes core game bugs. Guess what the company did? It doubled down on its AR efforts that absolutely NOBODY asked for, mostly ignored the requests of the community (especially around Go Battle League), and pretended nothing happened.

    Look we get it; you need to sell the whole "metaverse" play to your investors to get funding and boost your valuations and make your employees happy. But the fact of the matter is, your strategy makes absolutely no sense. This game has succeeded IN SPITE of , NOT because of, the game's shitty AR features; no pokemon go player goes out into the wild, takes out their phones, and say "how cool! i can see pikachu at my feet!". The first thing players do is turn off the game's AR features. And in spite of all the shitty in game bonuses you can get for turning on your AR features; its mostly an ignored feature. So the whole thesis of your "massive player base" going out to "map the world" for you; is absolute nonsense.

    And so now, you have this company that was given this hot once in a lifetime chance to build something good with the most exclusive ip in the world, who openly threw the opportunity into a trashbin, and stomped on it a few times for good measures. They haven't produced a single success outside of Pogo; the Harry Potter game was dog shit btw; and Ingress. Well Ingress hasn't changed much since it first came out. They haven't produced a single success outside of Pogo; and it's not a mystery why.

    I'm ranting now and I'll stop whining. But I was honestly once a huge fan of the game and spent a lot of time and dollars raiding, catching, battling and defending gyms, and most especially at GBL where I grinded through the ranks to Legend. Yeah; at a certain point in time, I just couldn't take that shit anymore and hard uninstalled my game and asked Niantic to delete my account.
    Feb 9 3
    • Niantic / Eng
      fyy

      Go to company page Niantic Eng

       fyy
      Same opinion. As an engineer here I used to desperately want to improve the game QOL, and many others do too. Execs doesn't align with that though, so we have to do it in our "free time". Eventually I got tired of fighting though, and now I just work on whatever I'm told to.
      Feb 12
    • Amazon
      willowty

      Go to company page Amazon

      willowty
      Dude thats what the rumor was when the whole boycott thing started! That engineers passionate about the game are making QoL improvements on their own time or something! Thanks for that! We really do appreciate your efforts, the execs are just making it no bueno! And the PvP bugs.. i dont even wanna get started on that 🤦🏾‍♀️

      Well.. happy CD if you’re still playing! Go catch some hopips and get that dust!
      Feb 12
  • Niantic
    aNkN22

    Go to company page Niantic

    aNkN22
    Culture is better on non game teams in general at this company, needs will vary by sprint. Sometimes the work life balance is healthy, other times there will be whole teams working 12+ hours a day to meet a deadline.
    There’s usually no crunch, but it still happens here and there.
    We have many people quitting and are slow to hire, we are mostly backfilling roles now from people who quit.

    Roadmap and direction from leadership is very volatile, it’s not unusual that projects get killed or postponed indefinitely after engineers already started work on them.
    Feb 3 4
    • Oracle
      ajyyds

      Go to company page Oracle

      ajyyds
      OP
      Thank you so much for the detailed breakdown! I think that’s what I felt when I interviewed, peers seem to be smart and nice. what I saw from other post was the culture seems more like Google as it was used to be under it, like there are very few push on the deadlines (maybe depends on the product/title) not sure if this part still holds. Obviously with the latest funding it tries to hire more people, but among the current employees how is the satisfaction level? Since the potential ipo is also not in the foreseeable future, do you think the opportunity cost would be high to join at this point?
      Feb 3
    • Niantic
      aNkN22

      Go to company page Niantic

      aNkN22
      It really depends on your offer, some people get lowballed, others get very nice offers.

      Our equity has increased significantly in value in just the last few years alone. IPO isn’t anytime soon but there’s always a possibility we get acquired too, there’s a bloomberg article out there that details how we were in talks last year to be acquired by Microsoft.

      I would reference our reviews on blind to get a feel for satisfaction level, it will vary a lot by your own values. Most of my colleagues like working here, but there’s just a lot of frustration with our product and our company leadership.
      Feb 3
  • Amazon
    willowty

    Go to company page Amazon

    willowty
    They keep running a perfectly good game PokemonGo to the ground by building upon bugs and not addressing them. Speaking as a customer, they’re ruining my favorite passtime.
    Feb 3 3
    • Amazon
      willowty

      Go to company page Amazon

      willowty
      Just as an FYI, PokemonGo mayne healthy as of now, but none of their new additions/features in the game have caught any traction.

      Additionally there is a lot of movement in the community to go FTP. It might not be 100%, but I’ve definitely seen people spending less on the game.
      Feb 3
    • Oracle
      ajyyds

      Go to company page Oracle

      ajyyds
      OP
      Agree, same for me. Nowadays I only spent money for gofest. Maybe due to nostalgia I am still seeing people burning their money for brilliant diamond and shiny pearl remark (not developed by gf) maybe it’s just because it’s Pokémon.
      Feb 3
  • Google
    dhdk

    Go to company page Google

    dhdk
    I joined recently. The culture is great, eng is equal partner with pm and UX. It probably depends on the manager, but they seem to support a healthy work life balance. The ceo is inspiring almost everyone. Very talented people with passion and motivation. So far, super happy I joined.
    Feb 15 1
    • Oracle
      ajyyds

      Go to company page Oracle

      ajyyds
      OP
      What team are you in? I think my concern is the growth part, how do you value the upside of Niantic right now when it sits at 9b valuation? Even for acquisition I think it’s huge amount (around 1/7 blizzard’s acquisition value while I don’t think Niantic is 1/7 blizzard)
      Feb 16