Pros
The work involves some of the most unique and truly innovative structural engineering projects you can possibly find. Being on the borderline between academia and industry, you're doing research while doing commercial product design. Also, the connections that some of the higher-ups in the company have are incredible and expose you right to the cutting-edge of new developments.
Cons
The company is run horribly. The Principal is also the Chairman of the Board and the 50% owner of the company (with most of the rest of the company ownership being his own family members) - so there's no real accountability for the Principal. Management jumps on startup company fads when they occasionally read about them, then drops them just as quickly. For example, instead of hiring a marketing or business development expert to help grow the company, the company hired a "Storyteller", and then fired them several months later when it turned out there wasn't actually much story to tell in the tiny firm and the person wasn't accomplishing much. Some of this can be forgiven as a learning curve in a small company that's just launching. But simply hiring professional consultants and having meaningful accountability in an independent Board would have solved many problems. Over the past year, the company went from 9 employees to 4. As a general rule, if you're firing more than half of your employees in a short span of time, then the problem isn't the employees - the problem is management. Each person was also fired in incredibly unprofessional and drawn out ways. Management had a habit of suddenly cutting salaries or hours several weeks before a verbal firing. Adding insult to injury, there was a habit of timing such firings or pay cuts to occur immediately before an employee's scheduled vacation.