Pros: A 3-month training session basically teaches you everything you need in the company. Then a "reversed" career fair lets you choose the team you want to join. Two days of team shadowing will allow you to get in touch with potential future team members. Great work-life balance. Personally, it's always 9 to 5. Great benefits; medical insurance is awesome.

Cons: The codebase is old. C++ is not as popular at other companies. The code architecture is very complex and hard to understand. There are no official documents for internal tools.

Pros: I worked for the BDE (Basic Development Environment) team, and thus understand that my experience is not completely the norm. My team was composed of mostly subject matter experts from the C++ Standards community: John Lakos (who has more degrees than Sheldon Cooper), Alisdar Merrideth (the lead of the C++ Standards Committee library team), etc. They were all very personable and very knowledgeable. I was given a real project which I owned completely and was made to feel like I was a real member of the team, not just the intern. I also was given carte blanche to work as many hours as I desired (as an intern I was paid hourly), so that was really great as well. The HR/Campus recruiting did a great job setting up events and making a really great internship experience. In fact, they still take me out to dinner each time they come into town.

Cons: Working for John's team means a lot of time is spent on tasks that are not necessarily programming. I.E., writing documentation, and all of the sections of a BDE component that are really comments (at least from a programmer's standpoint). You get used to it, and once you learn what is expected from these sections, it is supposed to be less than 30% of your time. However, for a ten-week internship, by the time I got the hang of it, my time was over. Another point is that you test your own code (again, this is true for my team, not for many others). This is not necessarily a negative, but it again is work that some Software Engineers would prefer not be a part of their duties.

Pros: Pays well, stable, lots of potential -- in some alternate universe.

Cons: 90-hour weeks, stifling bureaucracy, backstabbing politics, personal degradation, self-destructive technology choices. Think of it as being chained in a salt mine with open sores. Living in New York is a special kind of hell, too.