Unfortunately I didn't listen to the warnings of a previous employee
Pros
Lots of interesting work. Good compensation and benefits.
Cons
I hate to use this word, but i was "bullied" by a wanna-be manager who my supervisor told me in no uncertain terms was NOT my manager, but who continuously acted like it. My boss told me word-for-word, "Stick up for yourself", instead of handling the situation like a manager should have done. I was left on my own to fight for small project requirements because this bully unfortunately was in charge of a database in which I needed a small table to fulfill a project requirement. For no good reason, he would not "allow" me to have this table and so I was unable to fulfill the requirement for the project. Amazingly, several months later, he decided he needed a table that contained basically what I had asked for, and since he could, he created the table for himself - for one of his projects - but intentionally created it in such a way that I still could not fulfill my requirement. After I refused to be bullied by him and started ignoring him, he started going behind my back, badmouthing me to my boss and others, which I didn't find out until later since my boss didn't say a word to me about these things until I was called into his office and written up. Ultimately, I was fired for missing too many days of work due to a serious illness my boss was aware of. Was this legal? I wish I had seen it coming and filed for FMLA, but thought I was doing a good job and was shocked when I was called into my boss's office and fired. The warning I failed to heed from a previous employee was that "Ferguson is a 'Man's World" and will always be that way. Also, there was so many access controls in place for developers, it make it very hard to get anything done because I was always depending on someone else for something, even in the DEV environment. WAY over restrictive. It was a very non-supportive environment for a person with over 20 years of Software and Database experience, with a serious illness which I struggled with a on a daily basis from Jan. until I was fired in July, 4 days after my 1 year anniversary. I just have to chalk this one up to experience.