Pros
Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL) has possibly the best employee benefits of any company you will ever work for: generous retirement contributions, great health/vision/dental insurance, free life insurance, an on-site health clinic, a large and well-equipped on-site gym, an on-site daycare, free lunch on Fridays, and many other great benefits. The compensation is fairly competitive considering the low cost of living in the Pullman, WA area. They treat their employees very well and encourage a healthy work-life balance. (As an engineer, I rarely have to work more than 40 hours a week.) The company leadership has a great vision of how they want the company to grow. The company is expanding rapidly but stably and has yet to lay off any employees. The founder and CEO of the company, Ed Schweizter, is intelligent, inspirational, and has a great attitude. I have no doubt that SEL will grow to be a successful multi-billion dollar company in the future. At SEL, you get to work on products that improve quality of life throughout the world by making electric power grids safer, more reliable, and more economical. The work provides unique experience on developing high quality, rugged industrial products. It also gives valuable experience in understanding how to design and test products to meet regulatory standards (FCC, CE, UL, IEEE, etc).
Cons
Working at SEL is boring. There aren't many new product development projects, so most of the engineering work is just sustaining or doing maintenance on 20-year old products. (Finding alternates to obsolete parts, making products lead-free, reducing BOM cost, etc.) The sustaining work isn't very challenging and often doesn't have a hard-set deadline, so it's easy to fall into a bad habit of twiddling your thumbs and doing hardly anything for weeks on end. Opportunities to work on new designs are few and far between, and they only seems to be assigned by luck of the draw. Performing well on a project doesn't increase your chances of getting more interesting work in the future. The lack of development work makes it difficult to gain basic circuit design experience and grow your engineering skillset. Also, this company loves documentation. Around 75% of the day-to-day work is spent writing test procedures, reports, specifications, design reviews, etc. The company has a culture of diving deep into the details, making sure every corner case is covered, and documenting everything along the way. This is great for developing high quality products, but unfortunately it tends to go past the point of necessity and begins to feel like a waste of time (especially when you're working on a simple design change). Sitting at the desk writing and reviewing documents all day isn't very fun. Finally, the company doesn't foster a fun atmosphere. We don't celebrate much, and management discourages fun activities like dressing up for Halloween, decorating people's desks, and those sort of camaraderie-building diversions that brighten the workday. While all the employees are very friendly, the work atmosphere itself is straight-laced and serious.