Bare in mind, I have heard that specific pros/cons can vary significantly across different groups at the lab. With that said, my personal experience has been lacking in a number of different ways.
Make no mistake- the lab is not a meritocracy. It's all about who you know, who in upper management likes you, what credentials you have, etc. etc. Perhaps that is not exclusive to the laboratory as an organization, but nonetheless, I feel that it is much worse than in the private sector.
Another con that I have personally experienced is a lack of mentoring opportunities. The lab recently started a mentoring program, which has been good from a general career cultivation perspective, but in terms of technical mentoring, there has been a lot to be desired.
Related to the point about meritocracy, there is a strong emphasis on academic credentials to the point where advancing within the organization without a PhD or a Master's degree is virtually impossible. This is my biggest gripe, actually. I've met my fair share of PhD's who are vastly unqualified for their positions, and I've also met my fair share of folks with just B.S.'s who are brilliant at the lab. You will rarely, if ever, see someone with only a B.S. positioned above associate staff level at the lab, let alone in a management position.
The last con is the ladder ranking system. It's an outdated, often inaccurate representation of how staff members compare to one another performance-wise. If all of your staff are hypothetically performing at an adequate level, using a system of purely relative comparison to weed out the bottom 10% seems silly. Not to mention that one's ladder ranking is often more representative of how much political capital they have than their actual performance.
Oh, and the way presentations are done is a joke. I stopped attending seminars (intended for a lab wide technical audience) very soon after being employed due to their inaccessibility. As an outsider, they tend to be very difficult to follow. The lab is very stuck in its ways when it comes to technical presentations, and those ways aren't pretty.
