Pros
Pay is decent and benefits are good, most offices are nice. A core of true believers still remains, people who care about customers, products and each other.
Cons
The true believers are being swallowed up by a crowd of opportunists who are focused only on seeking political favor from senior leadership. Many of these opportunists barely know who their customers are and what they want. A few years ago, Autodesk decided that it couldn't grow and compete by acquiring technology (it long ago gave up trying to innovate organically). Its new strategy, which has been increasingly visible over the past four years, has been to extract more money from customers who can't switch away easily from its products and to reduce costs by systematically cutting "experienced" employees, regardless of performance, and replacing them with interns and new hires. Of course, every company needs to turn over its skill base to stay relevant, but at Autodesk there is a pattern where low performing, highly paid but politically savvy employees are retained while higher performers are let go. What's worse, some of the new hires aren't always top performers (to be fair, some are excellent, but why settle for just some). The environment has become increasingly political, and a company that has always struggled to listen to customers has become practically deaf to them at this point. Oh, and the sabbatical seems like a cool idea, but when you compare it against a standard vacation policy it's not such a great deal.
