It can be great but only if certain circumstances are present
Pros
If you are on the right team you will get to work with the worlds leading companies and largest government entities with some of the industries top professionals. You will learn to develop high end software using the best practices with a team that is distributed around the world and with companies of all nationalities.
Cons
Current executive management sees R&D as an expense that should be under constant pressure for cost reduction. This has lead over the past several years an acceleration of frustration for the most experienced developers as their job entails less and less collaboration with peers and more and more "babysitting" inexperienced developers and QA resources. It will depend on what group you are in and if it is executive management's current spotlight, i.e. you are the "it" team, then you will get decent resources or you are on a legacy product that still may have millions in yearly licensing fees but the only goal is to operate as cheaply as possible. You can be on the same product and go from the "it" team to the legacy team in a matter of months. I have been many times on the "it" team and it is mostly satisfying but even then you will work with some people that you can only wonder how the received a degree in CS. Another issue is developer resources, you will be expected to develop enterprise software on a set of VMs that have inadequate resources. I just gave up on that waste of time and bought my own high end server that I equipped with SSDs to accelerate development. The several thousand dollar cost was worth saving the mind numbing hangs and restarts that are a major hurdle to meeting goals. To an experienced developer it looks as if the message is, "your time is of no value to us we don't care how much longer it takes to complete the task just work till midnight and beyond maybe the test servers will have a reduced load by then". Are they trying to recreate a public university computer science lab? Other decisions by IT will make you do a face plant, for example the official policy for VM snapshots is no more than 2 per VM and none should be more than 2 weeks old. This would be so hilarious if it weren't so sad because you want me to have to repeatedly rebuild a complex software stack every time a multi million dollar customer needs support for version X with SP Y and hotfixes T, L and N. So I need to spend days building and validating an environment because IT is too cheap to pay for some disk space to support the necessary VM snapshots!? Needless to say this policy as well as other equally great ideas were universally ignored. I am for any sane money savings but policies like this just show how clueless many of these management decisions are and those decisions will wear you down. The main point is R&D at this company has slid to the bottom of the pecking order and the often bizarre policies that are a result of this and the lack of any concern for input from R&D will make you dream of fleeing for a smaller and more focused company where R&D and their invaluable input are welcome.
