Pros: The Brand. Smart people do actually come to work there to pay their dues and move on. They have the best journalists and written articles, without a doubt.

Cons: Whew! Where do I begin.... * Everything is political. It's all about if you are in the "IN" group. * People who failed spectacularly get promoted. It's the one place where you can fail up pretty consistently. * They still run on old, dated technologies like SVN, Prototype, etc. They do boring things and use boring tech, with the notable exception of the newsroom who can build code that works for a day, and then you have to fix whatever they broke in the process after that day. * They use a ton of good people to build terrible products. * Be careful if you build and design a pay model that is highly successful. The paper pushers in upper management will get nervous about their jobs and pigeonhole you so you can't take their job away from them because they don't actually do anything. * Make sure you aren't too successful. That's grounds for getting fired at NYT or at the very least for a glass ceiling to be put over your head. * They have about 25 layers of middle management too many, and the CIO and CTO aren't even credible or knowledgeable in the world of tech. * I don't have a positive view of management. * The pay is minuscule compared to what the market is yielding. The NYT calls it "Leveraging the Brand." I call it insulting.

Pros: The company is family-friendly and a low-pressure environment. There is never pressure to work nights or weekends. The people are smart. The atmosphere is polite; no one yells at one another.

Cons: You need to fight for good assignments. I was left with little or nothing to do a lot of the time, which gets demoralizing. Software developers don't have much role in product decision-making. Newsroom is where the power resides. Bureaucracy makes decisions and product releases slow, though the company is working to change this.

Pros: People are nice and smart. The building is beautiful, and, hey, it's The New York Times! Most employees are capable of great work. The paper really is making great strides into the digital age.

Cons: It's a very strange mix. Most managers want to improve products and change the procedures that prevent problems from being fixed and useful work from being done efficiently, but somehow they can't. Managers spend their time talking with other managers and are only vaguely aware of what their employees are doing. The Agile process is used not to empower developers, but to control their actions minutely. Vastly inefficient procedures take up people's time, and programmers are highly respected as a group but end up individually as powerless serfs. Frustration is common, and secrecy and control rule.