Pros
- Daily casual dress allowed. - Work/Life balance is great but if you're just working the minimum number of required hours don't expect this to work in your favor in the eyes of management. - Semi-flexible schedules can be determined by you and your manager with a little advanced notice. Of course some managers are more flexible than others.
Cons
- Single career path with very limited advancement opportunity. - Company cutting every good employee benefit to save on expenses even after laying off hundreds of people. Tuition assistance gone, increased health insurance costs for employees, reduced 401k matching and merit increases are laughable. - Merit increases are based on review measurables and a rating scale that make it confusing and next to impossible to qualify for a bonus. It is my belief this is done on purpose so that the company can easily slash bonuses with no explanation. - Don't plan on being very popular with your colleagues unless you want to socialize with them (i.e. fantasy football, streaming sports games online, company parties and social events that you have to pay for yourself). - Don't plan on being popular with management unless you're a brown-noser and keep your opinions to yourself. Fastest way to get a "negative" reputation is to vocalize an opinion that goes against the grain. - Significant number of job functions being outsourced to Pune, India office so I have to assume this will lead to additional layoffs in the states at some point in 2011 with the potential. - Technology initiatives are a joke. The most complex technology available to assist with manual work is a fancy spreadsheet someone in Houston will be praised for making that's basically worthless. The more feedback from teams that say it's worthless the more likely it is that management will suddenly make the new tool mandatory for use, thus making a boring job infinitely more complicated just to satisfy some obscure compliance policy that didn't exist 5 minutes ago. - Many programs and systems used are antiquated and not conducive to a highly productive atmosphere. We're talking mainframe terminals folks!