Pros
If you are someone who can "work" the system. If you are a younger worker, if you are a man, if you are not a minority, if you are not disabled, you /might/ be able to work your way up to a more or less livable wage.
Cons
Very poor work-life balance. In the almost 9 years I worked for a Citi site /no/ women were promoted to higher management positions... none. Although men with less experience, less education, who fell into the magical zone of 25-35 years of age, white, adhering overwhelmingly to a particular religious preference were promoted and mentored. The HR department saw employee concerns as bothersome (with some notable exceptions). Senior management excelled at talking the talk, few actually walked the walk (with a few exceptional and notable examples... of whom there has been no equal). Merit pay is really not merit pay. Senior management decides based upon budget how many can receive top evaluations that merit pay increases. In a department that employs say 100 people this can mean that only a handful can obtain a score to merit an increase, regardless of whether their performance merits one or not. They start with what the department will receive in terms of budget and then they work their numbers from there. One poor manager can truly mess up an employee's life. Senior managers express the view that employee benefits are "given" to employees rather than earned compensation. Bureaucracy is be all, end all, to the point where attempts at quality control reviews earned violation warnings retroactive to the employees being notified of policy changes on call handling, and even created a circumstance where employees could be coached on a "high risk" call, but the employees were told they had to sign they had reviewed the call handling with their manager, but they were not permitted to see or to understand what the high-risk factor was, to listen to the call, or to know any of the reasons why (or to even be able to review what was written on the reverse side of the document presented for their signature). If an employee balked or raised questions about these sorts of practices, they risked being labeled as "difficult." Older and longer term employees would have goal posts for performance changed in apparent move by management to rid the company of more highly compensated longer term employees in favor of younger, newer hires (even giving newer hires different performance goals to meet for call handling).