Pros
- Great co-workers - Good offices - Above average starting wage - Opportunities to influence strategy - Cash bonus for whitepapers and patents - Flexible working hours with bonus vacation day(s) - Individual yearly training budget
Cons
- The only realistic way to increase your wage is to go the management path, meaning all the smart people are promoted to a position where they're incompetent, and new hires will have to come in to deal with their legacy code. - Wages are much lower than the industry average between year 2-15 of working there. - Extremely many managers, due to the first point. It's very likely that one of the managers in a chain will take credit for your work. Since it's their word, to their manager, that decides your yearly performance and wage gain, you'll have to suck that up. - High level of micromanagement in some teams. - The whole software division is practicing what can best be explained as "agile waterfall". - Lots and lots of maintenance of old products, with only small bursts of new feature developments. Many great developers left for greener pastures because of this. - HR team is horrifyingly understaffed, and all but hostile to the employees. Some co-workers got threatened with termination if they took their paternity leave as planned, because the government had been slow when processing their documents. Another time, the entire division was threatened with legal action because HR assumed malice, when the reason was poorly constructed and leaky toilets in the new office building. - C-level execs want to be involved in every financial decision, leading to lots of red tape for even the smallest costs. Often, people will just eat the cost themselves instead of dealing with it.