Pros
The environment at corp. HQ in Glastonbury is very clean, modern and new - very nice building. For me the, flexibility was very good (work from home and move hour around when I needed to), my peers were wonderful, and the bosses I worked for were not stiffs and were liberal with the expense accounts as a reward for working hard or strange hours. Going out with coworkers and your boss picking up the tab made up for aggravation of odd hours, etc. It also went far to build teamwork and better get along with those you work with. There was this work hard/play hard mentality at Open for awhile and the comradeship it build was a powerful thing and drove us to do some great things and worked to build respect between coworkers. Seriously, I don't think that most management in a lot of companies realizes how far this sort of thing goes in building team work and lifting moral when times are tough. I also felt that I had the latitude to work with little oversight and could put together tech solutions whatever way I saw fit so I guess you can say that for me I felt empowered in my job. This is strange to say but I feel the senior management was pretty competent, specifically the CEO is relay sharp as well as some of the other senior leadership I spoke with or worked with.
Cons
Well any smaller company will demand more work from employees I feel so there were some long days, but not necessarily routinely. The bigger problem was that the company lost a lot of its 'charm' once they started acquiring other companies and rapidly growing. When the moved into the new building that was so nice and scrapped the jeans/T-shirt dress code for business casual I knew days were numbered. Yes I know small companies need to grow up but this was sad a sign that things were going to become more corporate. Sure enough one acquisition after another the company lost its personable feel and started to become more political. Politics eventually overwhelmed the desire to find the best solution but rather the best solution given some unnecessary constraints (as set by politics). As is typical after several acquisitions products were eliminated or consolidated, sometimes loosing some people associated with them. This caused confusion in some cases as people previously comfortable with the products they worked with suddenly owned something entirely foreign to them which caused support issues and frustration in general. Also with the infusion of many people from other companies talents were overlooked because responsibility of products or services was moved to some other office. I hear that this continues to be the case from the folks that I keep i touch with that haven't moved on yet.