Pros
I was given lot of responsibility (relative to how low stakes our projects were) without that much experience, which helped me grow quickly. I had opportunities to learn a lot through my projects and time to learn a lot outside of my projects because the timelines were very laid back.
You definitely get the idea working with German Siemens employees that you would have to be really bad at the job to get let go, and you don’t need to worry about the company going somewhere.
It’s a great safe career option if you just don’t want to work that hard and don’t care if the company’s success has anything to do with your work. You can learn a lot if you want to, but you have to apply yourself voluntarily because the success of your projects barely matters.
Cons
Flip side of the coin — work on my team felt super meaningless. We set our own timelines, and nobody really argued or wanted to work fast. All our clients were internal, and our contacts within the customer team often showed very little interest in the projects. Trying to get requirements out of the people literally paying you for a project was like pulling teeth.
The success of my team was so disjoint from the overall success of any higher level of organization, that I was often reminded that “our team is not revenue-producing” to encourage me to use the full budget for every project I led (so that we wouldn’t appear too profitable and have our profit targets increased by management the next year).
I had maybe 7 different managers in 3.5 years, sometimes multiple at a time, and only 1 of them actually knew what work I was doing. The company in general seems to be kind of a lower-to-middle-level management mess, with layers and layers between the people on the floor and the decision-makers. I also got the idea that my management was a bit of a boys’ club.
I ended up leaving the company because I was constantly fighting for raises. I was contributing way above my pay grade, and management was aghast at the thought of giving one person two raises in a calendar year, even though I was clearly underpaid. My salary went up 47% + equity when I left for a smaller company where individual software developers have an impact.