Pros
The people in postdoctoral affairs were very helpful in mediating and compensating me for the abuse I endured under my postdoc mentor. Postdocs are not At-Will employment and mentors must detail why your performance is lacking and then give you reasonable time to improve. While that a benefit because my mentor could not fire me she instead resorted to abusing and making me miserable until I quit from overwhelming stress and anxiety.
Cons
My postdoctoral mentor, I write with no exaggeration, was possibly a sociopath with bipolar tendencies. She believed people either to be 100% good or entirely bad. There was little to no in between with her. It only took doing a few things to displease her to fall into to entirely bad category. For me it was insistence to work on hypothesis driven projects with good potential to produce a publication. What I did not know was my mentor is basically a statistician dabbling in biological research for fun. She had no need to publish as her funding came in the form of a gift from the known family of drug pushers for Oxycontin. Once I had fallen into the bad category, she attempted to ruin me entirely. She covertly transferred my projects to other lab members, and had my mouse colony I had been breeding for a future project entirely euthanized, a project for which she had already planned for and had protocols. In addition to all that she told nasty lies about me to other lab members. She also lied to me and told me everyone in the lab hated me. When I suggested having an open discussion to address issues she became frantic yelled at me and insisted the issue not be addressed. I did try to address people to try to mediate any issues and found that the issues were entirely lies. That was pretty bad, but things really took a turn when I was falsely accused of research misconduct and then banned from the university on the basis of mental health issues, which I had never discussed with my mentor at all. The university should be ashamed for discrimination on unfounded lies about a persons mental health status. Ultimately I was cleared on any wrong doing in a nearly half year investigation and compensated given that the abuse had forced me to resign from my position.
