Pros
The disillusioned notion that one's work may have an intrinsic value (pharmaceutical research) rather than just participating in an effort to build another cash machine. The people are quite dedicated to their work, friendly and information sharing was never an issue. Nice location and office. Hardware and tools are satisfactory-to-good as long as one does not have to do any UI development.
Cons
Repeatedly, project scope is/was drastically underestimated. Forget work-life balance, evenings, weekends, sleep & vacation. Each project is given a two week development cycle regardless of what is/was involved (there are several “two week” evolutions that ended up lasting several months). “Two week” evolutions may imply agile development but that would be an acute misperception. The majority of the work involves (tweaking / adding new functionality) to rather voluminous “classic” ASP pages (think VBScript) and (tweaking / adding new functionality) to tsql – think views that wrap views that wrap views that wrap views that wrap views. The staff (which primarily consists of Software Engineers, QA personnel and Project Managers) is generally young and minimally to moderately experienced. The management employs the relatively unbridled youth and exuberance of the employees to affect the horrendous timelines. There is an attempt at code reuse but it generally amounts to dependence upon previously generated objects that obfuscate some other logic meant to solve some other problem/issue. As each (solution/project) is associated with a unique database instance, [viewFoo] may, and usually does, do significantly different things on different projects regardless of the fact that they have the same name and owner. As a result, haste and (relative) inexperience often (usually) lead to “Big Balls of Mud” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_ball_of_mud & http://www.laputan.org/mud/). Now multiply this by 100’s while trying to interpret "technical" specifications that are written for sales-purposes and that read like the instructions of and ADD-ish chef. There are ongoing efforts to improve the infrastructure, methods and techniques however all have been stymied by schedules, emphasis on irrational deadlines and the lack of investment in paying down technological debt. Most persons in the engineering department actively seek other positions but often find themselves a bit ... mired ... due to visa sponsorship related issues. Annualized turnover for developers is > 60%, for QA it is > 70%.