Pros
Plenty of learning and potential for growth and good pay. You work with some amazing people, but normally the truly talented ones leave as they see the glass ceiling and management above it. This is a place where only management grows and developers are evenly let go or become management. If you enjoy managing others, and are popular, likeable, and take credit for other's work while elevating them too.. you can go far here!
Cons
Think of this job as a stepping stone, a path to something better, AS clearly the company is thinking that of you! There's inner circles in this company, if you can't get into the inner circle your be let go. The company is not ran by technical people and the technical skills, are viewed as "hire and fire as needed" and contracted out around the world for cheap labor. One year your learning top needed skills, and then another year your training your replacements, in other countries like Brazil, India, Philippines, Belarus... to replace you. I've been thru many projects offshored and laid off twice. You slowly learn that those that stay have a specials social skill to point out how everyone else is wrong, or broken and argue that they get it all right the first time. But if you get close to them, you normally see others running behind them fixing, correcting things as they have a team of people to do things for them. Or you realize they are the happy drunk person everyone loves... One good technical person, will always loose to a team lead / manager with a team doing 3 to 5 times the work of the one technical person. So the tech, dev types go, get let go, and the team leaders/managers stay, as they sell to management they did it all (but actually the team did). And even the ones that have this special skill, their projects, ideas, I've seen other departments individuals, steal the name, the idea, learning this year's later, the same name, idea re-used just different department ran by those with more influence at headquarters. This company will do some big changes: Think, always Changing, is part of its core. This company has moved a lot of people to a new location, or home to work and then 2 or 3 years later, the department shuts down and lets everyone go. And later you learn the project was sold for profit, or jobs outsourced to other countries and the company as a whole profits, but individual employee's are displaced, jobless. This company has no commitment to its people, just its Stock Holders first, and managers second, employee's third, and contractors last but I think this is true for all companies..
