Pros
Day to day work was very independent. Largely, I was left unbothered and able to work on what I felt was needed. Severance was provided upon my layoff, due to restructuring (although it wasn't very good). Colleagues were wonderful. No weird drama, great folks all around.
Cons
I was part of a company which merged into Aspen in recent years. RTO mandate was a dealbreaker due to personal/family troubles. Started as 2 days in-office, gradually shifted to 3, and more-recently 4. For a while, this was micromanaged through check-in/logging. My colleagues who I collaborated with were international, so for me, this was showing up to just fill in a seat. Pay wasn't very good. Cost of living adjustment was the only thing I experienced in the way of raises. Bonus structure had the potential to dish out a few paychecks' worth of money, but bonuses in these situations are always a case of "well, we didn't meet the desired 'numbers' this year so you're only getting part of it." There are performance reviews, but given the lack of raises and carrot-on-stick bonus system, there was zero incentive to put in more than the bare minimum. The IT system is extremely awkward. There is a baffling number of vague categories, and if you choose the wrong one, your ticket goes ignored until you directly email them about it. Even if you thread the needle, it takes forever for things to get resolved. I had a clunker laptop which was bluescreening like crazy, and instead of replacing the thing, there was stalling, push-back, and so forth. I had to use a personal one (from COVID times) to do my work for almost half a year. In two separate ticket attempts, I reported a login portal I needed to access, and was told "oh, that's the same as your login in this other spot." I'd tell them that isn't the case because I couldn't log in. Both times, it resulted in "huh. That's weird" and no progress. I had to contact colleagues with access to files I needed in order to get past it. The *biggest* problem I had: before the merge, I had a physical Linux machine. They only wanted Windows machines in the building itself, so we were given Windows laptops which connected to VMs housed elsewhere. We lost dual display capability (super important), and the latency was horrific. We're talking 4+ seconds, on average. Any requests to IT were often left with shoulder-shrugs. The loss of a physical machine and being shunted to a slow VM reduced my productivity by orders of magnitude.
