Pros: Flexible hours and smart, passionate co-workers. Many different products and markets to choose from. Allows for work/life balance.

Cons: Competitive. Can eat up all your time if you let it. Low regard in the blogosphere.

Pros: Flexible working hours, good benefits, and a kind of okay pay rate.

Cons: Extremely bad culture. Many leads think more about promotions and career rather than the project itself. Many test leads don't have the technical expertise to understand the technology. They write annual reviews based on impression instead of technical expertise. There's some level of dominant immigrant mentality too. Vague commitments, vague performance evaluation, bad work-life balance. I've seen working emails from one of my leads at midnight and at 6:30 am. Dev leads tend to influence test leads. Some leads don't care if an employee has relevant technical expertise for the project or not. They just assign it, expecting the employee to learn by himself. If he fails, it's reflected in the review, and so on.

Pros: It was a great learning experience.

Cons: The stay could have been better.