Pros: Exciting projects that are NASA

Cons: No telecommuting flexibility, limited benefits, and a demanding workload.

Pros: Exciting and interesting projects, a unique chance to contribute to public research outside of academia, wonderful colleagues, thoughtful management, treated with respect, and a great work/life balance.

Cons: Directly subject to federal funding and politics, with lower pay than industry. A limited budget resulted in a hiring freeze, so there is more work than employees can handle, and projects are delayed as a result.

Pros: It's always exciting to work on stuff that is planned to go to space. Furthering the goals of space exploration, human space flight and scientific discovery never gets old.

Cons: For a place that constantly talks about and promotes work/life balance, it seems to say "what life" and treat you like a cog in the machine, especially if you are on a high visibility program like Artemis. If you work on a smaller program, don't get too attached to it either, because chances are it will get axed right when you're in the middle of it and then you're left with nothing to do for who knows how long until they can find more funding, and if they can't, they might just stick you in some undesirable job that you weren't hired to work in the first place, or look for reasons to cut you loose entirely. NASA can't hold or manage its funding to save its life. Even the big program like Artemis, where all the money goes, probably won't carry out its full program life cycle. There's very little coordination between programs. There are constant ego flexing matches between government, contractors, and OEMs to see who can make who look worse. When it comes to management sticking up for their employees in any situation, forget about it. They will say or do whatever it takes to cover their own behinds.