Pros
There have been a lot of lessons learned over the course of the company's 10 year history that have allowed the company to change for the better. From the top down, GD has a culture of hiring really, really cool people with great personalities who are easy to talk to and work with -- pretty much everyone who is at GD is smart, driven, and excellent. The mission is excellent. There are some real winners among the newly hired leadership, and of course, the CEO is a wonderful guy.
Cons
Before you sign up to work here, let's remember that this is a Series H company. Series H. There is a reason for that. Look up the tech companies that have successfully gone public, and look at their series beforehand. Headlines scream that GD is a $1BN company about to go public, but valuation says nothing about effectiveness of the business. And a great mission isn't enough. Valuation is also set by investors, and right now, the investors want their money back. Compared to what GD may have once been, these realities create a different culture with a lot of pressure. While leadership does a good job of shielding everyone else from this, the pressure manifests in covert ways that are counter to GD's principles of transparency. Given changes in the recruiting marketplace, GD's products are not getting easier to sell, and an entrenched codebase make it difficult to iterate productively to modernize the product features. All of the above affects the day-to-day.
