Pros
You can build a global personal network based on the colleagues and customers you engage with. Doing solid work that solves real problems will get you noticed. Most years, Cadence holds an internal technical conference that provides additional opportunities to burnish your reputation among peers. Not everyone gets to go, but those who do can use the event to launch collaboration across business units and geographic sites. Most employees are happy with their local teams, and reserve their suspicion for other business units and senior management strategy. Lots of former employees come back through acquisitions and direct recruiting. These are usually the senior contributors who figured out how to manage their career opportunities at Cadence.
Cons
Vacation benefits have been a disaster, unless you were senior enough to bank enough hours. Fortunately there has been some softening over the last year to move towards a more rational and employee-friendly policy. Career advancement is pretty easy until you get to Member of Consulting Staff, beyond that you need to be seen working on customer engagements that management cares about. Higher level promotions are rare for the operations teams and software generalists.