Pros
At times of desperation they are willing to pay top dollar.
Cons
After the immediate crisis is over, any commitments they made are subject to change. They don't keep their word! Bad apples stick around. I witnessed several bad hires in IT. Either they were incompetent or extremely difficult to work with. These problems were never managed and the employees just stuck around making things worse. Poor organization structure. Very little communication and cooperation between IT groups resulting in stagnation. This is why Standard gets so far behind on technology and then has to invest in massive catch up projects. They will bring in top talent for these projects, but inevitably they miss-manage the talent and they leave. You have the remaining bad apples trying to manage technology they don't understand and it stagnates.