Pros: Awesome gold-plated benefits and office. Some interesting problems exist in some groups. However, it is completely dependent on the group. Good summer party. Generally smart colleagues who are nice to work with. Generally meritocratic.

Cons: When the benefits and colleagues are the high point of your day, something is wrong with the work. With the exception of a few groups, chances are you will be working on an ancient software stack where the focus is to do a paint job and ship features as soon as possible. Not only is R&D management aware of this, the senior-most managers actively evangelize paint jobs and to leave the rotting guts alone. This goes against every engineer's basic instincts. Industry standard software practices such as unit testing, high availability, integration testing, and quality control are verbally supported but not practically espoused in the over-arching Time-To-Market company motto. As an engineer, if you make peace with the fact that this is not a software company or a tech company by a long shot, you will be happy. Unfortunately, that also means that your skills deteriorate over time, and with my shift to a startup, I had to face an exceedingly steep learning curve. With all the myths propagated by management that compensation is top-notch, it is not. It is above average but not in the league of software companies offering equity. I left to join a small startup and got pretty much what I was making and some equity. Hmmm, management... need I say more? All the reviews talk of terrible management, and it is true. As an engineer, you will not be treated as a professional but as an untrustworthy resource that needs to be constantly monitored. This is reflected in their recent inability to hire engineers to fill open positions.

Pros: It's very bright and sunny, which might seem trivial, but I personally find it very good for my mood to work in a bright office. I like the financial aspects of the work, so once I found the team working on precisely what I was interested in, I became quite happy and satisfied. Don't worry too much about the "free food"; most of it is junk food, though the fruit is great. If you like finance more than cutting-edge software engineering, you'll find it a pleasant enough place to work at (on the good teams). The bad teams, well, they are out there; do your homework before accepting the offer.

Cons: Some of the infrastructure is legacy. This shouldn't be a con for any seasoned developer; it's a fact of life. However, if you're a whiny b**** straight out of college, you might find this distasteful. There is some politicking, and people get promoted partially based on their temperament and how well they get along with other managers. Again, this shouldn't be a con, but if you are young and naive, you might find this also to be distasteful. The only really big con is the annual review process, which is a curve-fitted algorithm to award future compensation based on relative (within your peer group) performance. I would advise newcomers to negotiate as hard as you can before signing, because once you are in, there's a good possibility your compensation will stagnate.

Pros: Good pay, good benefits, free food, classes for employee development, and philanthropy.

Cons: Long hours, lots of legacy code, inflexible development process, work culture indirectly discourages teamwork, proprietary system, bureaucratic.