Pros
Great company with excellent work-life balance. Great colleagues. Top-notch smartest people I've ever worked with. Can't stress this enough. Flexible work hours. Occasionally had early/late meetings but not presence not compulsory -- although staying definitely helps personal growth. Extremely friendly towards beginners. Good starting salaries. Huge incentive towards independent critical thinking and problem solving. Teams focus on real problems. Interesting, challenging and rewarding projects. Some very good managers although not true for every team unfortunately. R&D very well insulated from politics and customer pressure.
Cons
Many of their products are market leaders, but overall the company is falling behind in technology, and they don't seem to have the will or resources to keep things competitive in the long term. Senior management sees the solution as purely marketing and acquisitions of other companies, instead of investing in refreshing their own tech. R&D are not treated particularly well. Benefits are well below average and salary growth is a function of time in the company instead of value or performance. Other annoyances such as cheap work laptops, lack of machines and disk space to run tests, and slow development environment (citrix/vpn). Most supporting teams (facilities, QA, testing, IT, HR, marketing) are too independent and may decide to focus on things outside of R&D control/interest. This leads to lots of annoying facilities and logistics problems: poorly located office, dirty bathrooms, dirty cutlery/dishes in the kitchen, heating and plumbing problems, undrinkable coffee because the machine is never cleaned, etc. Most problems are simply due to lack of collaboration from facilities, and R&D can do nothing about it. Questionable hiring strategy. Too much focus on hiring smart people (regardless of experience) that end up requiring three years training, combined with high turn-around. Current situation is that there's too many very senior, very comfortable (stuck) people as well as too many complete beginners, and nothing in-between. What are you going to do if/when the senior people decide to leave?
