Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-12-10
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former

Turn10 - horrible place for a contract
Pros: Lots of talent and people to learn from, decent machines to work off of, working on Next Big Game can be exciting,  well stocked kitchen, good parking.
Cons: From a contract point of view~  You're going to be disposable as a contract.  The best thing to do about it is just accept it and do your work and not take anything personally.  Don't get starry eyed about maybe going fulltime there, you will find at least a dozen contractors who have been going in and out for years and never gone fulltime (and many of them deserve it).  Instead of hiring in, lots of jobs are being outsourced overseas.  When your contract year is up, just take your 100 days off and hope you'll have work when your break is over.  By the way, your "break" means unemployment, which means filing at the unemployment office and applying for jobs every week.  This lifestyle as a contract will be forced upon you.

Lots of closed door meetings won't include you. You won't have any say on what level you work on, if you're moved to another team, and won't be involved in finding solutions.  Even if you don't have any say in the matter as a junior, there's a lot that can be learned simply by being a part of meetings.

You'll be forced to use a contract vendor and they take a huge cut of your salary.  There is no apply directly at Turn10 (this seems to be the Microsoft standard).  You will end up working a ton of overtime into the evenings and weekends before deadlines.  Don't be surprised if your lead gets to go home at a decent hour to have dinner because they have "family".  You won't be given the same courtesy if you wish to stay valuable, whether or not you have a family of your own.  If it's the holidays and you are forced to take time off due to studio closures, hope you saved up enough money so you don't take a big hit on your paycheck. Many contracts feel forced to work surrounding weekends so they can get a decent few days off for vacation.  Any overtime hours must be pre-approved.  Your lead sometimes will try to give you too much work for a 40 hour workweek and you'll be forced to work some unpaid hours to keep up with their demands or have to admit that this is more than 40 hours which makes you "slow" (work smart, not hard.  But also recognize when the deadlines aren't feasible).

Due to the realism of the games, everything will be made off of strict supply of reference.  This can be cool, but if you are an artist that likes to create orcs and dragons etc from an artistic vision rather than a realistic one, this job will be just that - a job. Don't get your hopes up about making anything for your portfolio either, all the cool stuff will most likely be outsourced. Not to mention there's so much overlap in the levels that nothing will really be your own to claim.  Don't be surprised if someone takes the bulk of your work like a model, applies a texture that Tech Art made, and plops it in their portfolio claiming it as their own.

If you're not really interested in racecars or motorsports in general, pretend that you do. Learn how to act excited even when you're really not to better fit in with the studio.  Don't bring up any interests you have that will make you seem weird or not part of the team.  See if you can get an invitation to "Guys Night" on Tuesdays to get beer with your male-only coworkers (yes, this was a thing).  Never mind the fact that most of the studio is male and that this is excluding the minority.

Upper management doesn't care about you personally.  They care if you get stuff done on time and done well so don't get involved and thinking you're making friends with anyone (it's best to just accept this early on in order to function).  Fulltime employees are too busy watching out for themselves within the Microsoft foodchain and don't care to mingle with contracts much.

People do get sabotaged in to losing their jobs here.  Some leads will hold you back from allowing you to doing your job with conflicting and false instructions, impossible deadlines (not just difficult ones, impossible), create bugs and shift the blame to the contract etc.  Upper management, HR, whoever, they don't want to hear about it or deal with it if you're contract.  If the lead says you won't jump high enough, you're out no matter how much evidence you have of the lead being inadequate.
   
I've never been happier to end a contract.  Out of the few jobs I've had in the game industry this was the worst of the lot.  I would not recommend this to any one planning on going in as contract unless they really need the work.  If you end up at Turn10 as contract never stop looking for other work in the industry.  Don't commit to a job that will never commit to you.