Pros
Awesome benefits and compensation. Lots of smart talented people to work with. If you can cope with chaos and survive in an environment where every little piece of domain knowledge is something that you will have to dig out of the cold, hard frozen ground, you can be happy here. It is possible to learn a lot of new skills, depending on your situation. I personally feel that I have grown by leaps and bounds in terms of my software automation knowledge even though my projects are constantly cancelled at the whims of capricious management decisions from people who never even talk to me personally or even look at the work I have done. Despite this, I feel confident in calling myself a Selenium expert after just 14 months of working here and I started with no Selenium experience whatsoever. I also have grown in my Java skills by leaps and bounds. I have gained valuable, solid OO development experience as an automation developer that I have not been able to get anywhere else.
Cons
The company relies too much on antiquated tools and technologies and WAAAAAY too much on homegrown tools when there are more modern, better designed, often open-source options out there. There is no consistent tool chain in place for basic things like: bug tracking, source code management, build management, project management, test case management and release management. The SQA process here is nothing like the industry standard best practices that you would find in another company of this size. In fact, I don't think that management really even understands what SQA is or should be. Requirements development and documentation is a joke. Requirements are often not clearly documented anywhere nor is there any standard process for formulating them and communicating them to development teams and testing teams. Trying to find out how to do basic things is a nightmare. Lots of people will tell you, 'It's on the wiki.' The 'wiki' is a rat's nest of outdated, half-written broken pages where there is occasionally a nugget of useful information, but you will be forced to take a long and frustrating journey through nuggets of incorrect information before you find it. Don't get me started on the test environment systems. Okay, do get me started. Test environments are a mess. People are forced to share a few systems where there is incomplete oversight regarding what is or is not actually installed on them. It is not unusual for people to step all over each others' toes trying to test out something because of the lack of communication between various parties using the systems. The architectural limitations that are baked into the products makes the challenge of spinning up a cleanly separated test system for anyone who needs one impossible and there seems to be no impetus to fix it even though countless hours of productivity go down the drain because we don't have this ability. There is a consensus that there is something 'broken' about the SDLC process and the tool chain, but effecting change for the better seems almost impossible because it doesn't appear that anyone with any authority to make change happen even understands what the problem is or how to hire people who can figure it out. People who try run into a wall of politics that would make the Great Wall of China look like a pile of paper mache after a monsoon. This company operates as if each separate team were a start-up company where people are just free to do whatever they want. There is a culture that is openly and actively hostile to the idea of submitting to standards and practices they didn't pick themselves. To be fair, it is not uncommon that someone trying to impose a 'standard' is trying to make people do something stupid and ineffective because they don't have the technical understanding that is necessary to pick a good one. So, even though we need some standards rather than our current cowboy wild west way of doing things, there is a history here that justifies hostility and suspicion regarding anyone who tries to impose one. With the eagerness of a small child on Christmas Eve, I await the day that the right set of people with the right personalities and skills are able to surmount this situation.