Benefits are there, pay could be better. Once you are in, you are in.
Pros
Opportunities are there for you to jump from team to team. You can expand your knowledge and skills more than other places I'm sure. Also nice to know that the job security is there. If you have a remote role, work/life balance is nice. If the opportunity presents itself to get a clearance, go for it. Getting someone to sponsor something like that is far and few.
Cons
Work culture. It's virtually non-existent. Not every team functions this way, but most of the teams I've worked with don't really invest the time and effort to teach you or welcome you to the team as much as you'd expect. You really have to be great at learning on the fly. Often, you'd think that the effort you invest in projects will result in a higher merit increase at the end of the year, but sadly there are only very very few people that are labeled as "excellent or high performers". This leaves you settling for 3% raises year over year. Unless you jump from team to team and hope to persuade the next team that you deserve more. Only managed to see myself get bumped about 20k in 5 years, which sounds good, but compared to the market, I should have been around double that by now. Northrop is a great place to start your career, or at the tail end of it. No more than 5 years consecutively in either case.
