Pros
The campus is beautiful, lots of opportunity for collaborations and to attend interesting seminars.
Cons
1) The parking policies are hostile towards underpaid employees coming to work on site. I understand they want to promote use of public transit, but this is suboptimal and not feasible for all across the Bay Area. My 45 minute commute each way would turn into 2 hours if I used public transit from deep within San Francisco to Stanford. Is my job to be on public transport? On the other hand, the parking plans are outright unaffordable, with many Staff getting salaries lower than Postdocs, even if the Staff completed postdoctoral training themselves (if you were hired before NIH bumped salaries for postdocs, for example). 2) The whole hierarchical structure in Academia makes publishing scientific research extremely inefficient. Professors are typically swarmed with grant deadlines and collaborations to manage, and if a particular research manuscript is not of urgency for a particular grant, it can sit on their desk literally for years, and there's nothing the other scientists can do about it. This is immoral and unethical in various way, starting from the fact that the research is likely publicly funded through grants NIH, NSF, or other governmental agencies using tax payer money, and thus hoarding unpublished research results is detrimental to the progress of science in general; also, this can have profoundly stymying effects on junior scientists for whom it is important to publish efficiently and with regularity, whereas Professors can afford to "sit on" papers for years because they have many other studies they're responsible for to publish (i.e., for a professor a junior scientist's paper may be "just another paper", while for the junior scientist it is THE paper that they need to propel their careers). 3) There are few opportunities for growth if you're not a Professor or a trainee. For reasons I've never understood, Staff (even Senior scientists) are not elegible to apply for grants, fellowships, internships, exchange programs, etc. They're definitely an under-appreciated, neglected underclass