Pros
-Benefits are good -Not a stressful job for the most part -Employees are easy to get along with, aside from a few exceptions -Members of the development teams can work remotely one day of the week
Cons
-Pay is very low, switching to an entry level job at a different company had a ~20% higher salary then my 5 years of working at Applied. Raises are very low and sometimes you'll get a small bonus but it's rare -No meaningful career advancement. No incentive to work hard. You may be able to move laterally to other departments though -Company will always boast about impressive sales numbers and growth, yet the people who are actually putting the time in to make the products don't reap any of the rewards -The companies usage of Agile development methodology is bizarre. The scrum masters act as though they are the bosses of the team's, even though they are not and should not be. No other company I know of that uses Agile has this issue. I think the biggest reason for this was that many managers/supervisors were made to be scrum masters that had no skills other then micromanaging. This caused lots of issues in many scrum teams