Pros
- Decent starting salary (slightly below industry standards, though) - Flexibility. Flex schedule and ability to work from home. Great work life/balance. - Strong company culture and values. - Friendly coworkers.
Cons
- Constantly changing. Seems like every couple of months there's a new initiative or a re-oganization (sometimes with layoffs). Changes not communicated well and everything is hush-hush until one day you come in and find out you have a brand new boss and completely new process for doing your work. - As a new employee, due to all the constant changes, it is hard to define yourself and stand-out. You might impress one manager, and then tomorrow you have a brand new reporting structure. - No raises. Company has been trying to expand through mergers and acquisitions, so they end up spending all their money on new companies that don't fit their business model. All this means that they have gone a couple years without giving any raises.. - No defined path to career development. Promotions are given on a subjective basis. Even as you develop in your job, managers are very unreceptive to telling you what you need to get promotions. Seems like a company policy as whole is to stay secretive about promotion requirements. This leads to a situation where people doing the same job with very dissimilar titles. - Managers, at least my particular office, are all a cookie cutter mold of each other. Lack of diversity in the manager ranks (very very few women or minorities). Though average work force is fairly diverse (hard not to be when you are an engineering company), management does not reflect the diversity of the employees. - Must look for opportunities yourself. Their are plenty of classes and growth opportunities, but again, all this is kept hush-hush. Your manager will never find growth opportunities for you, you have to find them yourselves. - A lot of "dead weight," especially in a hold overs from the monopoly days. Many of the older employees don't really do anything (but get paid a lot for it).