Pros
It's a very diverse company and that means that you get to be exposed to many different kinds of people. I've worked for UPS at three different locations in three different parts of the country in my time here and at each place, I met new interesting people. The people are the biggest pro in my mind. I was given the opportunity at a young age to groom my leadership and communication skills. The wages are either on par or above the industry average depending on your position.
Cons
The culture. Up until my ninth year with the company, I bled brown. I loved this company and I loved my job. In my ninth year with the company, the culmination of all the unsavory things that I had witnessed came to a head and I realised that something was not right. That something was the culture. Second would have to be the bureaucracy, it is a massive and the most mundane tasks generally require several levels of approval. Almost no trust is given to frontline management when making general decisions regarding the operations. Obviously, some middle managers have a different mindset and provide a better buffer between upper and lower management but on the whole, this is how it is. Our company likes to remind everyone of the Jim Casey's vision which, if you read our legacy and policy books, you will definitely find appeal in our company. However, we simply do not live by the words that we speak so highly of. All things are secondary to numbers, not results but numbers. We live and die by numbers and with little explanation of the value of these numbers. On the whole, UPS does a great job preaching and a terrible job following through. We claim that people are our most important asset and yet I recall a District Manager saying to me once, "On June 6th, 1983, Jim Casey died and we still made service on packages. Do you know what that means? It means that no one is more important than these packages. We are all replaceable." At the time, I bought into this, but over the years I think that is the wrong message for a company who claims to be about it's people. I would get into the promotion process and the lack of upward mobility for younger aspiring employees, myself not included, but then I fear that I'd be ranting.