Pros
An amazing crew of people to work alongside or grab lunch with, even if most of them have left the studio. There is so much talent and passion among that crew, and you can feel it injected into the work they do (even if it is just toy commercials). It's not an awful first job in the industry, since you get to work on extremely low-budget content that no one really cares about. Learn fast with not a whole lot of risk associated. If you stay for any longer than a year you basically become a senior veteran, with all the responsibilities that come with it. You might even get a $2.50 increase in pay per hour. 1 hour lunch break and 2 x 15 minute breaks to take during the day, but you also work 8am-5pm, or 9am-6pm. North Lakes shopping centre is right next to the office which makes for very convenient shopping and snacking. Occasional parties and other social gatherings, along with lunch time events like Smash Bros and Mario Kart tournaments. Pretty wide range of backgrounds throughout the staff, lots of gender diversity as well. It's definitely not an all-male office with a handful of token women, thankfully.
Cons
Upper management is shocking, unpaid overtime is expected and you don't feel particularly respected for your hard work. Working from home is heavily discouraged, even if you live 100km away from North Lakes, but remote people from across the world (likely paid less than the in-house staff) are fine, for some reason. Even when they delete the entire Dropbox folder. It doesn't matter how much notice you provide for annual leave, or someone leaving the studio, they won't do anything to compensate for the workload being done, so be prepared to tackle a two or three-person workload by yourself. The pay is so low that many staff were being paid below minimum wage for quite some time, often not receiving a raise until asking for one. Some people have gone 2-3 years without any kind of performance/salary review. Someone can join your department months or years after you, do the same job with the same responsibilities (or less), but be earning several hundred dollars more than you per week, but they "can't afford" to give *you* a raise. Your annual leave is not shown to you anywhere there's no staff portal, and you instead need to send a direct message to the part-time HR officer to ask how many days off you can use. Formal training is incredibly rare, unless your co-workers have the spare time to help you. Be prepared to watch a lot of YouTube videos since in-house documentation is non-existent, as the priority is always to deliver to client and immediately begin the next rushed project. Staff with health issues (mental or physical) are neglected for weeks, months on end before any form of support is granted for them. Upper management throws a tantrum if you have videos open on your second monitor while you work, even though the work continues to get done. They'll never actually tell you this though, they'll just silently get mad about it and you'll hear whispers circulate from other staff, or a passive-aggressive Slack message to the whole studio. It's not a foreign concept that creative people want some form of stimulation while they work, instead of sitting in total silence. If the work is being done, why punish your staff for doing it comfortably? Even if you, yourself, get by quite well at Pixel Zoo, having to hear the constant problems that all your friends are dealing with is just depressing and frustrating.