Pros
-Decent pay for new grads, if you're sent to a high cost of living city like NYC you'll probably start off with 100k+ salary. If you don't have software engineering skills or aren't looking to work at any real tech companies (household names like FAANG etc) then this is pretty good. You get overtime which is good because you may end up on a project where you'll give up everything else in your life to work 60 hours a week (I would say this isn't usually the case though). -generally cool people -good healthcare -they do all the moving for you, you don't have to pack or anything
Cons
-ancient software that is only supported due to inefficient state governments that don't have any concept of what modern software is capable of, or maybe the market is just too small for real tech companies to bother entering so the only players are Fast, Deloitte, SAP and other accounting type companies that don't have much engineering capability. -work life balance is often either 60+ hours a week on a new project or you do barely any work on an old project that's basically over. When you're on a big rollout managers basically pressure you subtly to sacrifice everything else in your life (family, hobbies etc). Sometimes quite a toxic atmosphere where you feel bad if you want to go home or wanted to do something else on the weekend. I have seen some developers resort to bringing up things like "ah my kid needs to go to this thing" just to be able to leave. They are aware of this type of lifestyle so they do throw a rollout party where they thank your family members for sacrificing their lives with you so you could work on the project though. -flat structure so basically there is no title or career progression, you pretty much go from consultant to team lead and then maybe architect (one or two per office). I guess then if you stay 10 years you might become the project manager, then maybe another 20 you can get director title? 90% of the company are basically consultants with no real title though. -this isn't a tech company and management is definitely structured like it. Architects here probably wouldn't pass entry level interviews at relevant companies because I doubt they know any data structure besides an fda. All the software is proprietary so excelling here means you spent long enough learning the company specific system that isn't used anywhere else, and from a system design standpoint is pretty bad if they ever needed to scale (which they don't because each project is only going to ever be so big). From a technical perspective, if you work here 20 years you probably will not gain any relevant expertise that other companies would value other than some SQL knowledge. -management is a lot of corporate suits and "no we don't work from home" type people that have just been here for decades. They repeat the same koolaid every year at the annual party where you get wasted. Some managers are pretty nice but I have seen a lot of micromanagement, brown nosing and lower level managers throwing people under the bus to make sure they don't look bad to their managers. On the few projects where there is a partner (top leadership that's been around for like 20+ years), managers just either keep their head down or look the other way while brown nosing. -HR sends out about 20 emails a year to the whole company pressuring people to vote on glassdoor how great the company is so they can brag about it during recruiting. Lot of propaganda like this is spread around in general.