Pros
This was my first job out of college. I have to say that HDD's are a very mature industry, which made it kind of hard to get my foot in the door and get jobs actually assigned to me. Why would they give me work when everyone who works here as been in the HDD industry for decades and can do everything faster/better than a new hire? The pay is not amazing, but I've gotten a lot of promotions and salary increases in the couple years I've worked here. I have a lot of friends who work significantly harder than me at other companies who don't get any recognition. WD recognizes hard work. Hard drives are endlessly interesting. They are a mature product and there isn't a ton of research/hands on stuff going on, but you could easily spend your whole life learning about a hard drive. It's endlessly complicated and requires skills from every engineering discipline. The Sandisk merger has kept WD healthy and the stock has been going up. WD's stock is very volatile, but that's a good thing with the ESPP since you get locked in to the lowest price the stock hits in each 6 month payout period over 2 years. So the stock plummetted to $35 a while back, but that's actually a good thing because now I'm selling at $90. Volatility is great for ESPP
Cons
Everyone seems to be close to retirement age. A lot of people just don't really care about putting in work and are just trying to kill time until they can retire. The training at WD is mediocre. I basically had to figure out my job on my own. The only people who would give me the time of day were the technicians I work with. The WD market is shrinking fast. It most likely won't be long until we don't make laptop drives anymore. Same with desktop drives. At a certain point I think all that HDD companies will make are drives for data centers.