Pros
*If you don't like a new policy or initiative, you don't have to put up with it for very long. The person who came up with it will either be fired, or told to chase after something different in a matter of months. *Loads of training opportunities, if you're an engineer or architect, and want to learn something that a salesperson sold before they made sure someone in the company could support it. *There's so much distrust for "upper management" that you can blame them for pretty much everything, and nobody will question you. Including upper management. *If you're good with Excel, you'll love that it's the only management tool you'll ever need to justify hiring, firing, raises, promotions, what to have for lunch, which shoes to wear... *Paychecks never seem to bounce.
Cons
*Until whatever new policy or initiative they've imagineered dies a slow, tortured death, you have to pretend that it isn't the worst idea since the last terrible idea they had. *The training non-technical people receive is almost always geared toward sales. I'm sure that's great, if you're... you know... in sales. If not, their "leadership training" amounted to multiple days of some basketball coach running a PowerPoint presentation created in 1998 through WebEx, dropping names nobody really cared about, and reiterating a message that could be summed as: "Don't screw up." Very motivating. *There's very little incentive for management to be transparent. Nobody on the team seems happier when you say "Here's this dumb policy that I'm forced to inflict on you." (Really... I tried, and it didn't work.) As a manager, it wasn't as though my managers were more open with me. *Management at the time of this writing is "data-driven", which is a managerial way of saying "If I see two numbers, I can tell that they are different. Also, I'm tired of whatever stories you have that would convey useful information to me, or offer context for the data. Please get back to making sure everyone accounted for the time they spent eating lunch today. Did I say time they spent eating lunch today? I don't care about that at all, unless it makes their time lower than what I think it should be, in which case, I care about it very much." Obviously, you can see how "data-driven" is a more efficient term to use. *You'll have to force your team to participate in "career development" activities, which isn't so much useless as it is cruel. It's kind of like telling a kid about Disneyland, and then making them do a bunch of projects with the promise of going to Disneyland if they do a good job, and then after a year, actually taking them to Disneyland and stopping at the gate to say "Oh, I'm sorry. Disneyland is full." *As a manager, you'll be told that you have very broad authority. Good luck with that. If it isn't being undermined by someone, it's being ignored by them. Go ahead... ask about it in an interview, and you'll probably hear how the last managers were just really bad. Guess what they told me about the managers before me? Yep. *Finally, for the love of all that is holy, you will never, ever figure out how a group of "leaders" can be so tone deaf. Morale problem in the ranks? Let's show them the decked out muscle car that only sales people can win! Morale problem after arbitrarily laying people off a couple of months ago? No problem! They'll be happy to know we're suddenly looking for "fresh, young talent"!