Pros
Sometimes interesting work. A few good middle managers. Some smart and fun people to work with. Vacation time and benefits are not bad (if you can use the time off). Good experience for younger engineers. Lots of responsibility.
Cons
Cheap and disrespectful upper management and ownership. Managers make bad decisions and then try to force employees to clean up the mess by working free overtime or dragging them through awful experiences. There is no good reason to think you can treat people like this without them getting tired of it. Is this intentional and is profit all that matters? Many of the upper management and senior engineers who have been around the longest are out of touch and seem to do the least while causing much of the problems. A few are clearly burned out. Most of the owners and management is constantly at meetings that accomplish little or they are micro managing around things they know but ignoring the rest of the business or not listening to their smart people. When problems happen on programs, instead of smart management or working with the customer, the problem is always attacked by ordering more unpaid overtime. This has gone on for years and is causing more burnout than ever before. Salaries continued to be average to low even when competitors will pay more and pay relative to the actual cost of living. Extreme overtime is also not compensated like the vast majority of other companies will do. Plenty of us have left for more money but nothing changes and the upper managers and owners continue to enjoy their profits. Many employees are stretched beyond 100% due to low staffing on programs and several people have become extremely unhealthy trying to keep up with the job. The attitude that employees always owe the company more of their lives for free makes long lasting morale issues. The owners and management not working alongside the employees during overtime makes it even worse. Work schedules are not flexible like almost all the rest of the industry and modern companies are offering. Remote work is not encouraged. Offices aren't that nice and are in an area that is crowded with few housing options. There are awful shared cramped work spaces and silly new management tactics that are trendy and promoted by one or two people in the company but they are not helping and everyone else hates these changes. You cannot force teamwork like that. IT tools and programs are skimped and out of date, or changed to save a few dollars and was a real pain. Everyone was too busy just scraping by to learn anything, get training or improve the way we worked. The company spends lots of talking time and money on the thought of improvement but little actually fixed and simple changes took forever to happen. There is little to no career path or professional training and this was supposed to improve but does not.