Q&A With Osmo Employees

For engineering roles, very similar questions to google interview questions. You'll code on a whiteboard (or over a doc online if it's a phone interview) mostly.

"unlimited" -- generally if it's okay with your team you take vacation when you feel appropriate. That tends to mean less vacation though because of the types of people who work at the company.

Everyone is pretty open to feedback, management, coworkers, etc. There are some tools for official feedback that management is trying to get used.

Generally once per year the whole company is salary adjusted (to some value below market rate)

Self-Paced, but everyone's "self-pace" is pretty hectic

Working with children, seeing their reactions to games, and also working with my talented coworkers.

Fairly secure

As an engineering hire: Study google-like interview questions, a lot of our engineers are from Google or similar companies so those will be the types of interview questions you'll get. You should also have a reason for working at Osmo over other tech companies since you'll need that desire to survive.

Two types of people: People who want to just follow and be told to do their work, go home at the end of the day, and don't mind much about culture or pay. People who put their lives into their work, where their hobby is their work and they enjoy bettering themselves outside the office because Osmo doesn't do anything to better its employees.

My work with my smart and talented coworkers creating great products that everyone at the company loves is what keeps me coming in. The compensation, company culture, and management leave something to be desired.

It's very much up to the individual and how much they put into the job. Leaving early on a day when you have something to do is the norm and not seen as bad.

If you think of the T shaped engineer, more of the breadth is challenged by doing many different roles rather than depth in any specific field. This is for a game engineer, for other engineering roles it can differ.

Multiple times per year the entire company will take a day offsite to brainstorm new game ideas. Some team events: cooking class, cirque du solei, game release parties, pizza party

How difficult it is to try and plan projects that require both hardware and software. How difficult it is to move release dates when as timelines change.

In the whole company there is a fair amount of diversity. In the engineering team there's not as much (mostly male heavy, but that is generally true everywhere). The culture is very open to everyone though.

Some are in offices which can hold 4 people (probably about 5 of these offices). The rest are in the open area, generally clumped together based on function or what product people are working on.

- Waffle Wednesdays - Provided lunches (forkable.com) - Employee Discount (for all your friends who have kids in the target age range) - "unlimited" vacation days

Somewhat lower than other startups in the area. A fair amount lower than the big tech companies in the area.

The engineering team is split up generally into 1-3 person teams that work on a specific game/project for a few months to a year at a time. Generally one person will be the lead engineer per project and depending on how big the project is they (and management) will go and find other engineers around the company who have schedules that will accomodate. Sometimes during crunch time near release extra engineers from other game teams will help if needed.

Management on the engineering side is done with a pretty light touch. Each team is pretty self sufficient and outside influence (on the engineering side) is mostly pulling help in rather than rules/etc being pushed onto you.

It depends project to project, and people drive themselves more than anything else. Some people are very good with managing their time and others let shorts deadlines get the better of them. Near end of project deadlines most engineers will be working late with 10+ hours a day. During normal times, engineers generally work 7-10 hours a day.