Pros
- You can get some good experience if you're on the right project - Most individual contributors are pleasant to work with - Nearly impossible to get fired if you're willing to toe the company line - Discretionary PTO (though you need to be on call, most projects have a bus factor of 1) - Nice coffee machines - Fun company activities - Plenty of open positions
Cons
- Major blame culture; you'll be given unrealistic deadlines and chastised for not meeting them regardless of why. If you're lucky enough to meet a deadline, management will make the next deadline tighter. I can't remember the last time anyone on the team met a deadline. - Toxic, untouchable "old guard" - Anyone other than bioinformaticists are treated as second-class citizens - Management actively discourages engineering best practices or pays lip service to them. - "Unit testing" is taking screenshots of PuTTY and pasting them into a word document. This is mandatory. - "Code Reviews" are hour long walkthroughs at the end of a project - Dev process is strangled by blind, iron-fisted enforcement of company process. You'll be lucky to write 300 lines of code in a year. - Expect to pay ~$8000 for real insurance. - Merit raises are below inflation (You'll get a pay cut every year, even for "Above Expectations" Performance