MZ reviews about "hour"

The board of directors and other executives allowed the founder to take the company in too many directions and the wrong direction. The Legal and HR teams eventually demoralized the staff with arcane work hour policies, overly litigous requirements, poorly handled layoffs and divestitures, and deception through avoiding divulging information about the company. Due to all of this there was just a lot of bad management and results that were accepted. Product and game engineers that didn't deliver new games. IT that didn't enable the workforce. Cost overruns and poor planning within TechOps. The company shows that all of the money in the world from users and venture capital cannot make a well-run company.

It is challenging to have core hours that are so late, but nice to come in later. I wish we had a little more flexibility there. The Game Production teams are working extremely hard, which means a lot of hours for them at month end. What makes MZ successful is the blood sweat and tears put in by everyone. That also means some teams have a window of critical crunch time, and we need to find creative ways to support them.

Place is great for people who like politics and maneuvering through the corporate ladder. I've seen junior associates get promoted leaps and bounds because they were willing to put in the hours. It's not really about impact, it's more about perception, and how many hours you're willing to clock. No one really even plays the games that work on the games or are even gamers. Designers only look at excel sheets and a person I worked with who ran an important team she barely even knew what the IP was about or games in general. The work environment is terrible because everyone just puts in hours versus works intelligently. This means working on weekends and a culture that promotes this. This literally means weekends at 1am. You can choose not to do this, but your chances of moving up regardless of your tangible impact will be close to nothing. They'll tell you things are getting better, but the leads here don't value it. Everyone on the team I worked on that were the leads pretty much worked all the time and super inefficiently. I've never seen so many people do things so inefficiently. Because everything is so inefficient everyone has job security which might be the intent. I've worked at other companies where three people could run a game. This company has about 30 people run a game because it breaks up all the pieces so everyone gets their tiny slice. They're also majorly possessive about their little piece so it's impossible to garner any more efficiency. Literally if you do something because it's more efficient, but someone else was supposed to do it you'll hear an earful about overstepping your role.

Zero work-life balance. Everyone works long hours. Face time is very important. There is no WFH culture. If you're not in the office then you're not working. Expected to make quick decisions on unbaked data expecting to hit goals. Mismanagement in terms of comummunication and guidence. Managers and directors take all the credit. Unlimited vacation time but not allowed to take any time off due to workload or blackout dates.

Time off, even if approved, can be cancelled and forced into reapproval if the company is crunching for something, even unrelated teams, and a lot of pressure is sometimes applied to not take time off. "Core hours from 10am - 7pm" which means everyone stays later than they should. Not a lot of emphasis on fixing things that are breaking, just pushing out new things so there are constantly live issues causing some people to drop all their work with deadlines to handle what's breaking. Generally seems like there isn't a good sense of how to get out of bad months/quarters/years except to work the same people harder, which then leads to more mistakes.

The hours were long, too too long

- Horrible work-life balance: Expect to be working 50-80 hours a week if you are a part of the Design, Analytics, Live Operations, Product Management. You should also expect to be asked to cancel your time off, and be frowned upon if you refuse to do so. - Extremely fast environment that focuses on reactionary tactics rather than solid planning and execution. Expect for plans to change every single day MULTIPLE times. This will increase the amount of errors every team makes and lead to a lot of post-mortem meetings that could have been avoided. - Volume over Quality: If you're passionate about making GOOD video games, don't come here. They will make promises to you about your opportunities to build out and rebuild games. If you still aren't convinced, require your demands be written in your contract. They will refuse. - Micromanagement: The everything needs to go through the CEO, even your time off requests. Team leaders have no say in how their team operates and Executive Producers dictate every single thing you do. That's not to say the Executive Producers are bad, they have to deal with the CEO looming over their shoulders at all times. Expect to be contacted on your days off. - Discretionary Time Off = You're less likely to actually take time off. They say there's no limit to how much DTO you can take off, but HR keeps tabs on people the moment they've taken more than 40 hours of DTO.