Wonderful people limited by mismanagement
Pros
* Incredibly talented employees * Some of the best people you'll ever work with (depending on team) * Flexible schedule * Gaming culture, the company feels young * Room to grow within your position * Great Chicago office location * Talented engineers, designers, product managers * Incredibly smart CTO * One of the few gaming peripheral companies taking risks not to blend into the gaming crowd * Inclusive employees who want you to have fun at work If you work in engineering, design, ux, or product development you should work here.
Cons
Working at SteelSeries depends entirely on your team. If you work on product, software, or digital you'll likely have a wonderful experience. Your experience could be a 5 stars if you work on a team mentioned above, or 1 star if you're a part of the teams mentioned below. I would not consider working at SteelSeries currently if you work in marketing, PR, or creative. Here's why: SteelSeries as a company is adverse to criticism. Bad ideas run rampant in middle management and often ruin the potential of great products. "Bikeshedding" is a common problem for products, promotions, or new ideas. The CEO refuses to hire a CMO, so he does his best to do two jobs. This is not adequate and results in sloppy direction and leadership that is constantly changing directions with no long term vision. All of the creation of real work (outside of the product team) is done by lower level employees who are the true stars of the company. Nothing would be created, launched or released at SteelSeries if it weren't for these employees. Self introspection rarely happens. The only way to succeed as a company is to admit your faults, shortcomings, and missteps so you can learn from them. Major changes to branding, tone, and visual design was often pushed back on, the company wants to be different from it's competitors without actually taking the risk. Those running PR, eSports, and Marketing are simply out of touch with the industry. There are plenty examples of this, the recent Bully Hunter campaign is a great example. Terrible execution of what feels like an exploitative approach to a real problem in gaming. Anyone voicing their opinions against these continuously bad ideas were ignored. Most of these ideas are hatched in secret and started on so by the time they are revealed to the greater company it's already too late. After a campaign goes poorly, is there an effort to discuss it and realign the companies priorities and values? No. The people in charge write it off and continue on to the next one. The marketing, creative, and PR teams rarely, if ever, use data to support their ideas. Choices in product presentation or web design that are proven to make less money end up taking more precedent simply because the CEO "feels" as if its the better move despite data showing the contrary. At one point the entire previous marketing team (only one person out of this 6 person team is left) pitched a more inclusive idea for marketing a new headset line. Instead of this idea being praised, discussed, or used, they were reprimanded. That's right, reprimanded for spending their own free time trying to improve a product they believed in. Creative also suffers from this approach to leadership. The creative team has larger goals and dreams for a branding direction, but leadership lacks experience in modern web design and would rather spend money on external creative agencies than hire talent in house. The result is a visual brand direction that's all over the place. There are also a few bad apples at SteelSeries that are employed out of favoritism instead of talent and are constantly moved around instead of let go. Many of the teams are also spread across the globe. Working remote is great, but when a company is this fragmented between time zones you're not going to perform on the same level.
