All the usual defense contractor + software problems
Pros
Unlimited vacation, nice location amenities, good people on the lower levels. Pretty good pay if you're in the majority demographic for the industry. If you're looking to make big bucks and don't care what the work is like, it's great. It's a good environment for people looking to get paid and put something impressive on their resume for the next position you don't actually care about.
Cons
Unlimited vacation isn't actually good for you. You'll end up taking less time away so it doesn't get "taken away" because of "abuse of the system." There was no training for management; they just "promoted" programmers by giving them managerial tasks on top of their full-time programming position, rather than ever hire a manager with experience running a team. Getting "promoted" wasn't good for anything but a small raise. If you're not a white man, or you have ongoing chronic mental or physical health concerns, do not apply here. Ethical dilemmas abound, and frequently, minorities or chronically ill folks take the worst of it. Hate speech on the company chat system is tolerated under the guise of "free speech," while accommodations for health conditions are only made under legal duress and long back-and-forth fights. Several minority employees have reported lower pay rates than others doing the same work. Several people left because the company deemed it "too inconvenient" to retain the medical benefits and accommodations the employees relied upon. HR and middle management were both notoriously de-prioritized when it came time to invest in the company. Sometimes it felt like there was only "the CEO and his boy's club," "the poor guy who's supposed to be my manager," and the regular software engineers. A few restructures didn't improve that feeling much, since we still had very few actual trained managers.
