Pros
- Hard to get fired, unless you want to be - Extremely easy place to disappear and get a paycheck - Decent benefits - If you end up under the "right" VP/middle-management structure, you can do well
Cons
- Extremely regressive technical culture - Decent benefits mean salary tends to be lower - Culture largely built around a model with a heavily-populated middle-management class, who primary and historically manage contractor teams, not FTE devs - As a result, strong culture of disempowering technical decision-making at the team level, and at the individual level. - General lack of middle-management with people management skills and technical awareness. - Overstuffed middle management layer leads to a lot of turf wars and fights over relevance - "too many claimants, not enough land" - which can be massively frustrating as an individual contributor. - Very little interest in doing things the Right Way, lots of interest in Being Seen Doing Things, whether you're doing them the right way or not. - Because of the above, technically skilled people are, as a general rule, not retained for very long - they either get frustrated and leave, get bored and leave, or get better salary offers and leave. - Technical promotion tracks that are *theoretically* on par with people management tracks do exist, but in practice amount to becoming a specific VP's pet and having even less influence on technical direction than you did before, and the entire parallel tech individual track is heavily modeled in IBM's old approach, which should tell you something.