Pros
Truly a great place to grow as a professional. Our work is challenging, rewarding, and enjoyable in a variety of ways. Our peers are intelligent and reliable. We work in a beautiful atmosphere. We are compensated very well - both in salary and in benefits. A lot of our excellence comes not from management and badgering but from a strong sense of culture, identity, and commitment to doing good.
Cons
1) One's experience here depends a lot on who your team leader is, so performance evaluations and some fringe benefits like the ability to work from home can be inconsistent across employees. 2) Probably the most common complaint is that the "minimum" workweek is 50 hours. We do a lot with very little. The pretty way of saying it is that "we do whatever it takes to get things done" but that really means that you can work 60 hours a week for months and it's your responsibility to become more efficient so that you can try to have a "work life balance." 3) Performance evaluations and resource staffing are based on fuzzy gut feelings. Due to the nature of our work, there is no way to discretely evaluate and measure these things. This can cause tension between those who make decisions and those who have to live with them. 5) It really is a survival of the fittest environment. 6) Our CEO refuses to: put a raft transportation system around our growing campus, put in a cellphone tower, build an airport closer to campus, put in fitness rooms.