Holy crap... Anybody else checked out the recent Glass Door reviews of NCSoft? I looked them over a couple of years ago after the shutdown announcement but havent been back in about a year. They had some bad/mixed reviews at the time. But its gotten 100 times worse since then. Ive seen some negative reviews before, but Ive never seen anything like these. Unbelievable. Apparently employees in their Western offices - particularly Austin - have been seeing the writing on the wall about the recent company wide layoffs for at least a year and a half, if not longer. Heres a link to the particular Glass Door site, followed by some choice excerpts from employee reviews. glassdoor/Reviews/NCsoft-Reviews-E23242.htm Some excerpts - ------------------- ------------------- Aug 17, 2014 “Run while you can ” For those in Austin there is still time to hop off of the ship, jump on your own terms. Even if the most recent entry into the market was a success Austins future appeared to be in doubt. What did NC do to the Paragon office? What did NC do in Seattle? Take the reigns and plan your departure on your own terms. Apparently this is what happens when you drop a customer service manager into a senior executive position. There will be no career advancement in Austin, it was consistently suggested in passing that I consider moving out to California even though Austin is safe and executives promised to routinely visit the office. As the office and career development opportunities continue to shrink, dont blame NCSoft, you need to look in the mirror and figure out if this is the best position to put you and your family. Aug 6, 2014 Let their motto dissuade you. “Never-ending Change.” This is the company slogan and it should come with the disclaimer: Warning: You will be asked in harsh, accusatory and threatening tones to perform inane, illogical technological miracles. You will be told to move the company from one platform (be it a support ticketing system or a backend billing system) to another within two weeks’ time, starting two weeks ago. When you accomplish this miracle, it will be thrown out since the leadership changed their minds a dozen times in the last week. You will be given access to the database after months of requests, and when you see it, you will realize that the slop software pumped out of Korean HQ is no better than the slop management decisions pumped out of Austin. The new slogan should be, “NCSOFT! Come for the ability to say you work in the game industry. Stay because you hate yourself.” Jul 9, 2014 The C-Level executives and the senior management (with only a couple exceptions over the years) are useless and have ruined NCSOFT. Every few years Korea would bring in a new set of executives. They would come in with big ideas to get Korea on board, stay for a couple of years, destroy half the company, and leave with fat packages. Korea finally got fooled enough times and brought in their own executives over the last couple years. Yes, its their company and they can run it how they wish, but they know jack about the West and their only remaining Western executive is running the company into the ground. Jun 24, 2014 NCSOFT is a hostile environment with constant chaos and confusion which they call reorganization. One of the core values is never ending change, which translates to never commit to any direction and abuse your employees by constantly changing their reporting structure, job duties, and priorities. Theyve repeated the same mistakes every couple of years since Ive been here and refuse to accept that gaming in the West is different than in Korea and our customers arent the same. They want to do everything the same as they do in Korea, which doesnt work here, but they are too stubborn and prideful to admit it. Austin is about as bad as it can be now. Our last decent manager recently quit with almost no notice, and another senior manager left at the end of May. They are not replacing one at all, and replacing the other in California. Its obvious the Austin office will close and the new office in California will support everything. The real leadership in Austin, the ones that actually got work done, started jumping ship last Fall and they are all long since gone. NCSOFT didnt replace any of them and its been a desperate struggle by Korea to keep things running ever since. Austin lost all its developers, the entire team quit in the last 6-8 months (all left voluntarily), because of horrible mistreatment by the executives and refusal by management to choose a single, clear direction. Advice to Management: Stop throwing money away trying to rebuild your name here, hire a third-party publisher for Korean games in the West, and call it a day. Jan 23, 2014 At the lower levels, NCOSFT is just long hours, low pay, no appreciation, and terrible working conditions. If you are manager level or above NCOSFT is all that plus horrid chaos, politics. Forget getting any respect if youre not Korean and really forget getting respect if youre woman. NCSOFT is run by very immature executives and Koreans that have no concept of American culture and dont care to learn. In fact they look down on Americans and they dont hide that fact. If youre an American at NCSOFT, youre a second class citizen. If youre an American woman, you arent even that. Advice to Management: Get real executives, directors, and managers. Find people with real business skills, real degrees, and real business accomplishments (being an ex game master, a CS rep, or QA tester is not a substitute for a Harvard MBA or Fortune 50 experience). Look outside the game industry for real business executives and managers that know how to deliver a solid product. You can always learn the game industry but there is no substitute for solid business fundamentals. Every other industry knows this and knows business is business. NCSOFT, you are not special. Domain knowledge is useful, but as most modern companies have realized, outsiders bring innovation and fresh perspectives. Recycling the same old failures is inbreeding and is one reason among many NCSOFT constantly fails. After 10+ years of failures in the West youd think NCSOFT would be tired of the same old insiders ruining the company. Also try realizing this isnt Korea. Notice there is only one bright spot in all of NCSOFT; ArenaNet, and also notice it is the only part of NCSOFT run autonomously and not by Koreans or ineffective, immature executives. (^^^ Once again - SOMETHING about the way Arenanet set up their contract allowed them to get the publishing support of NCSoft while still keeping them almost entirely independent. Whoever negotiated that contract must be a freaking corporate savvy GENIUS. I dont suppose we could find out who that was and recommend their services to help with the effort to buy COH from NCSoft?) -------------------- -------------------- Again - Id say these people saw the writing was on the wall as early as last year. Many saw it when COH was axed. I wonder how much longer NCSoft is actually going to be a viable presence in North America at the rate theyre going?
Posted on: Sat, 25 Oct 2014 18:55:41 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015