What's your email? I don't want to go into salary details publicly.

On low pay: when I first arrived at The Corporation, I made nothing for the first nine months. I was an "intern", and they don't pay interns. I'm not complaining. It was excellent experience. After that, I was paid a very low salary. A year and a half after that, I was paid "slightly less than low, but still half of what an average developer makes" salary. So the pay wasn't especially good. I was there for the experience anyway, not the pay.

On incompetent management: We had a "daily report" to fill out each day. The idea was to list what we did, what we were "blocked" on, and what we will do soon. On Fridays, we had to fill out a weekly "time allocation sheet". We would assign percentages to various categories of what we spent time on. (e.g. "50% primary tasks, 30% debugging, 10% meetings, 10% other".) We also had many, many meetings. One day, a few months before I left, all developers spent over four hours in meetings. (The "Monday Morning Meeting", followed by the general "Developer's Meeting", followed by the "Version-one-point-something Product Meeting"... Over half the day spent in just meetings.) Our direct manager was very controlling. A few times, he walked by and asked people to implement a brand-new feature, claiming that "it would be easy". So he was apt to gloss over details, and the details are often the hardest part of software development.

The biggest reason why I left The Corporation is because I wasn't learning anything anymore. The three years I worked there were filled with nonstop learning... up to about six months before I left. At that point, it became hard to be passionate about the job, because I wasn't doing much that allowed me to grow as an engineer.

Are the conditions at your gamedev job pretty good? I heard from a friend that The Corporation was an outlier, and that every one of the five other gamedev companies my friend had worked at were a lot better, so I'm still holding out hope for the gamedev industry in general.