Pros
There were some really great people. Really great people. Then they all left, and are still leaving in droves. New building is nice but designers do need monitors, yano? There are people there who really do care, and try to help. But they've been robbed of any power to do anything. Mental health provision has been quite good, and work is flexible enough.
Cons
Pay is below market average by a LOT. Gender wage gap absolutely exists and I've seen this happening in practice. I was actually shocked when I left and saw how much more I could expect to be paid for a significantly better job. Mediocrity and poor work is ignored, even when it's flagged over and over again. There are people who do nothing and are routinely left to it, while their squads flounder and suffer - meanwhile, there are people doing enormous amounts of work who (if they're lucky) might get a sticker every so often with some frivolous in-house HR bull, and the reward of significantly more work - usually mopping up after those who do little more than mess about. Seemingly no oversight on work quality at all. Agency work is often rubbish, digital are ignored, the creative people in the actual design team are never even given a brief of what's coming, never mind any input. Brand are historically absolutely nightmarish to work with, rude and aloof 90% of the time. NOTHING IS DELIVERED EVER. Ever. I worked there for 5 years, and apart from campaign and production materials, I had literally 3 years where nothing I designed went live. Everything gets lost in the mire while product teams change props for the fifty-millionth time that day, management restructure everything every few weeks (and those at the bottom are left trying to make it work until the next time), and projects you are the authority on are removed and put into the hands of others to either ruin or start again. All design thinking reads like it's come off a design blog, it's nothing to do with being 'user centred'. NOTHING is user-centred, it comes from one person's head and is expected to be created, regardless of experiential, legal, or technical constraints. Design leadership is unbelievably poor, the design director turns up to meetings with the entire department knowing nothing about why he is there, insults people's work, provides lacklustre and illogical direction for the user experience. Also, poor work is routinely celebrated, and those doing huge amounts of work are blocked from completing it, and then given supervisory work to do as well. No progression, apart from into 'Specialist' roles with an insultingly small pay-rise, powerless design management roles where you're clearly expected to just do as the higher-ups say, or the design lead roles that are notoriously bad because you have to actually deal with the higher ups themselves - widely regarded as being bullying, hectoring, and unreasonable to work with - which filters down to the coal face, believe me. Design system gets routinely spit on and ignored, despite being one of the only parts of the business that was achieving it's goals or making things less of a nightmare for everyone. Noone listens, ever. Everything is always passed elsewhere, or becomes a sticky note on a damn Miro board somewhere that gets forgotten. If you need something and ask for it, don't expect to get it any time soon, if at all. Also, inter-squad communication is non-existent for the most part, so noone really knows what anyone else is doing - crits happened, but they turned into giant show and tells with the same people showing stuff all the time, while the ones who do nothing just hid in the shadows. The only way we could get proper crits was to organise them ourselves and not tell management about it. Urgh, I could go on.