What Benefits are WG Employees in Minsk Getting?

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Source: http://news.tut.by/society/433652.html

Hello everyone,

an interesting article appeared on the tut.by Belarusian portal about the benefits the Wargaming employees are getting. You wanted to know why retraining a crewmember role costs 500 gold and not 200 gold or even silver? Let’s find out.

This is Igor Khrol and he works as a gruppenführer group leader of some web thingie derpartment in Wargaming. He states that the company always had a good employee benefit program – it even has its own labour benefit department of three people, taking care of just that. He considers the best part of his job the trips abroad (for example to India and Cyprus, all expenses paid) – to game development conferences, usually 2-3 times a year (“within reasonable limits”).

Igor also likes the dining room, that’s located directly in the Minsk office. The company pays for half of the lunch and you don’t need a purse, everything works based on your employee’s card. There’s fresh fruit and pastry every day and tea and coffee throughout the day. There are two separate gyms (for men and women) in the office and a fitness room with a coach and of course, showers. There is also a large relaxation room with various gaming consoles, a large TV and a massage chair.

The company also buys any books the employees want for their job in paper – after not needing it anymore, the employee returns it to the company library. There are also language courses, teambuilding outings where the employees go together on a trip or for a “vacation”. As a part of the New Year celebrations, the “Leningrad” group (SS: funny, isn’t called St.Petersburg these days?) came to Minsk and there was a huge party with various rooms and activities. Some footage of the old 2013 event can be seen here on internal WG channel:

 

 

There was also a summer “teambuilding” or something and Igor liked it a lot. Plus, sometimes, smaller teams of 10-20 people go on trips as well, these are also fully paid by the company. The only thing Igor doesn’t like very much is the distance of the office from the city center, but this is mitigated by the fact that the company organizes public transport (vans/busses) for its employees, which drive from a metro station every 5-10 minutes. People with their own vehicles have a free parking spot in a closed garage.

The member of the “benefit team” (Anna Dupont) states that WG is analyzing the needs and wants of their employees and acting accordingly, for example previously, they rented a large swimming pool for its employees, but then they stopped doing it, realizing that the employees prefer to do sports in various times. Other such changes include different food on employee request.

Not bad for a Belarusian company! Some of the benefits are pretty standard in western companies of course, but then, WG IS trying to match them. Let’s all buy those unlimited MM vehicles, Igor needs his trips… :)

54 thoughts on “What Benefits are WG Employees in Minsk Getting?”

    • Thats where the money in all good companies goes. Treat your employees right, or someone else might come who does so. In the end its them who earn the money you spend on them. Same as in my company.

          • The comment wasn’t very friendly, that’s right.
            But these benefits are usual in every big company. At least all big companies I know.
            We have a gym at work, too. I get meals 50% off (compared to other people who are from other companies and eat there). I was on paid trips several times and we often get free coffee and fruits. Plus several other things and I’m still learning this job…
            Btw: You heard about Audi (the car company)? Their employees get free beer at work to prevent them to drink secretly…

        • Maybe just “SS never had a job in western company if he thinks this is anything unusual”
          I wish all you western capitalists taste some eastern europe company, I won’t go into details cause you can’t understand it, you would have to born here.

        • “Not bad for a Belarusian company! Some of the benefits are pretty standard in western companies of course, but then, WG IS trying to match them.” Fucking moron.

  2. I think this is fine. After all they made a really good game that we enjoy to bash :D All I hear aroud the world that my employer is bad, it doesn’t give us enough money, bla bla. At least they have a great life, and these things mostly boost the productivity of the workers, so that’s fine for me

  4. Haha, not sure if ‘derpartment’ was intentional with all the mistakes SS makes, but well played if it was. Somehow haven’t heard that one before.

  8. Do we have any info from the other side? How are the working hours before deadline / release of new patch? How are the working hours when hotfix is being worked on? Do they get a salary deduction if something serious gets to the live server (probably the QA department mostly)? Or are they keeping it inside well?

    My job could be seen as a great job as well (for example the fact I am writing from work right now, right?), but I remember stuff like working over 30 hours through weekend, because of server crash and urgent backupping, which was in the end futile, so the deduction cost me pretty much the whole time I made up on that weekend. Or occasional: “We need stuff up on Friday for client”, meaning Friday work to 7 or 8PM.

    • Speaking as someone who’s work in QA in games development and elsewhere (I now run an international QA team), it would be highly unlikely for QA staff to have a pay reduction to due to a bug.

      Bug’s are almost always the result of poor thinking during the design of the infrastructure and architecture or product/project managers changing their minds on a Thursday, killing a weeks worth of work and still expecting it to be finished by the Friday. In most cases, unless a developer or QA is completely inept, it would be completely unfair to lump the responsibility of a bug at either’s feet. For instance, on the product I mainly work on I can safely dump most of the responsibility for our current bugs with decisions made during architectural design and project management 10 years ago when the product was designed and a lack of investment in subsequent years to rectify underlying issues.

    • Exactly. But as stated by SS the whole thing might be pretty standard in western companies but are mostly unknown in eastern europe.

      Another point might be that WG is working in a pretty young industry where it doesn’t matter if you work in Europe, Asia or Australia. The working conditions and benefits will most likely be the same.

  10. So the only thing this guy doesn’t like is the fact that he has to take a free trip to get to the town center?…

    Do these guys have to spend any money at all? It seems they can basically do everything for free: gym, trips, food… what more do you want :P

    • Time, living place (not sure how cheap and easy to find is living in Minsk, though), country not next to Ukraine in war… there are a few possibilities I can think of~ :)

  11. “Some of the benefits are pretty standard in western companies of course”

    This is correct. Human Resource departments attempt to ensure that the best possible candidates want to work for the company, and that they stay motivated and loyal. Often the perks a company hands out count for more than pure salary, thus the perks although appearing to be quite lavish, can cost less than increases in salary.

    I do not know how Belarus works so far as tax is concerned, but in most countries, increasing salary also results in an increase in the taxes both the employer and employee pay, and so perks can be tax efficient as well.

    The Sunday Times in the UK runs a contest each year looking at the 100 best companies to work for (divided into three groups, small, NGO, and the rest).

    Top 25 in small companies here;
    http://features.thesundaytimes.co.uk/public/best100companies/live/template

    Part of the criteria employees judge their employers on;
    Leadership: How employees feel about the head of the company and its senior managers
    Wellbeing: How staff feel about the stress, pressure and the balance between their work and home duties
    Giving something back: How much companies are thought by their staff to put back into society generally and the local community
    Personal growth: To what extent staff feel they are stretched and challenged by their job
    My manager: How staff feel towards their immediate boss and day-to-day managers
    My company: Feelings about the company people work for as opposed to the people they work with
    My team: How staff feel about their immediate colleagues
    Fair deal: How happy the workforce is with their pay and benefits

    I wonder how well WG would do on such a scale?

  14. The member of the “benefit team” (Anna Dupont) states that WG is analyzing the needs and wants of their employees and acting accordingly

    And the players get shit

  16. Yeah, and they even get cockier every Patch – offering now shitty Tanks for Money without limited MM (pure shooting Ducks) to get your money… instead of bringing once the T10 replacements for the British.. or give you a FV4202 for free, cos they screwed up with research..

    guys, wake up

  19. There perks are good even by western standards. I’ve worked in a fairly large publisher before as well as an award winning PS3 developer and while the cash was good, the perks were not that fantastic. I know of a few publisher/developers that take staff away however it’s not all that common for a responsible, long term development studio or publishing house. It’s the ones that splash the cash around which tend to go under fairly quickly.

  20. Sorry, but I don’t understand this kicking in WG (not that they are perfect, and as I play on EU I can understand kicking in WGEU for the support they are proving, but that has nothing to do with the development part). Those benefits here are pretty standard in many IT companies and I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with the price of retraining. People here seem to forget that they are not working for free either, and WG is business as any other, their main goal is to earn money, they never said there are charity.
    Nobody here is complaining about the adds that earn money for google, but I can imagine the butthurt if WG would implement some form of adsense in the game.. And what I love most is, that majority of those people that complain about everything brag about that they never paid anything to WG..

    • The main goal of successful businesses is not to make money (profit). It sounds crazy to some — I am a shareholder of many companies and rightfully I belong at the bottom of the list. At the top are the customers, then the employees and then the shareholder. The main goal of a company is to serve its customers. Ultimately it works best for shareholders if the business is run that way. The worst thing you can do to a business is strip the cash for the benefit of the shareholder.

  21. “Not bad for a Belarusian company! Some of the benefits are pretty standard in western companies of course, but then, WG IS trying to match them.” hmm they are trying to have benefits like the westerners, which is funny knowing that those people are coming from places where a corn cob tied to a stick which is stuck into the ground is called a toilet. Just to clarify myself “how many monkeys do you need to write Shakespeares works…”. Russians trying to catch up with the west: Peter the Great > lot of people died, mostly russians. Stalin > lot of people died, unfortunatly not only russians.
    Yes i’m trolling and i’m joking. But every joke has a tiny bit a truth in it.

  22. Fook me.. gizajob.. goarn….gizajob….

    Yes, most of those benefits are supplied by decent western employers, but.. BUT… I don’t know of many that provide ALL those benefits…

    I’ve worked for Govt depts and (decent) large firms, who provided many good benefits.. but when things got tight the first thing to go was always the free tea & coffee…. the one thing most people liked and used, and noticed the most when it went…

    Stupid yes, but when you go to make your cuppa to have to dig in your pocket for the right change for some shitty machine slops or bring your own in and of course, the kitchen is where everyone gets together for a damn good moaning session…

    Tiny £ cost.. massive PR cost…

  23. Wargaming whacking up the price of everything, because they know everyone will eventually jump ship to Armored Warfare! Aha

  24. Buy those 100€ BT-SV bundles so Ectar (sorry I only know you from WG Eu, your a nice guy) can get a swimming pool in office.

  29. If you think those benefits are good, you should have worked in IT/Telco back in the 90s before the dotcom crash