Pros
People here are really your friends. I didn't meet anyone who wasn't willing to share their work, stories, or even jokes in the middle of a work day. Really pleasant place to work. That kind of environment makes you want to come back every day and not want to go home every now and then. Even if you don't speak French. Note that my experience may only apply to my particular project and it may not be the same case to all other projects. In particular, the organization and management of the project I worked on was ordely and flexible. I did find that at times, it seemed like management was constantly making massive changes to the project in question that were definitely way too early to make assumptions on. I also found that at times, it seemed like there was no clear direction, but when it came down to crunch everything was spot on and it became immediately clear what had to be done. The company offers tons of training courses, both online and in person. Free English or French classes during the Winter and Summer. Great personal gym and tons of medical/health consultation right in the Montreal Peck space. There was also tons of after work events. Plenty of beer and barbecues to attend, water rafting, or amusement park stuff to go to. Definitely always improving.
Cons
Regarding promotions and time-off policies, there is some weirdness there. I never understood how time-off worked. You could "dock" hours, but it never seemed like there was any official way to "dock" hours so you kind of just were responsible for being honest. Which is nice, but is questionable. I noted that there wasn't a whole lot of leg room regarding what your pay was and how you can stand out to get a promotion besides just becoming lead for a team. Sometimes management, again at least on my team, became unresponsive and we fell behind more than once. The PR department I feel is definitely lacking. The company is rediculously secretive apparently due to investors. Yet, everything gets leaked. New projects are constantly getting announced ahead of schedule unintentionally. Also, the PR fiasco with women as main characters was handled utterly poorly. Also Uplay does a lot of fantastic things for us developers, but Ubisoft makes no effort to explain that to consumers. They only see it as DRM, and it really isn't. There is way more to Uplay that makes it great, but Ubisoft itself doesn't acknowledge it. They don't address these kinds of issues for some reason dead on.
