Pros
Really nice employees, that's #1. There is no such thing as a company without jerks, but A+E has few of them. That is a Godsend for anyone who has worked in entertainment long enough. 235 is a nice building. I had an office, but even the bullpens aren’t bad. Benefits are good, pay is alright, but you’ll get a pay bump if you move to a better network. Lastly, every few weeks a police dog comes in for LivePD, and if you time your "coffee run" to the seventh floor just right, you might get to pet them.
Cons
If you cannot get hired at first tier entertainment outfit, A+E is an OK way to get a start in the business. You need to know though that not a lot of people successfully make the move to a major network from A+E. The reason people stay so long is that the Disney, Netflix, Comcast, Goolge, Apples of the world don’t respect A+E, and usually won’t hire people from there. They realize that A+E is mostly a group of blue state liberals making cheap television for the red state conservatives they dislike. How do you train that out of a new hire? That has been the case since the Duck Dynasty era. Right now you should only work for A+E if you get really excited about law enforcement. Almost nothing else works but LivePD, which to Big Fish’s credit is an official cable hit, and a few shows on History. The decision to abandon scripted shows will probably generate revenue in the short term, but it dashes any chance of becoming a respected cable network. Lifetime gets credit for some interesting programming, but the bread and butter is still Hallmark movie imitations. And in case the general public is reading this, nobody who works at A+E knows what FYI is either.