Pros
Good job security - I know of no lay offs during my three years there. Nice facility - good cafeteria, and a store for candies and chips etc They do a decent summer BBQ thingy
Cons
Hired as a software developer, I expected to develop software. That is simply not the case. They have SO MANY continual production errors, (many due to poor data setup) that 95%+ of your work is trying to rapidly solve production issues, often in a 'critical' status. Personally, I found that very stressful, particularly the fact that it feels endless. Each developer takes it in turn to carry the on call pager. 99% of the pages are completely unrelated to front end development (where I worked) but still they come to us. You are on call 24 7 for a week. Extra pay for doing this task? $15 a day. (It was $25, but that was deemed to be too much...) A director I spoke to there, said knowledge of the Great West business is far more important than knowledge of Java. It must be for that reason, that so much of the code that I saw there was poorly written - Huge, rambling methods, no documentation within the code, very little Null Pointer checking; the list goes on. As does the endless critical production tickets. Finally, I discovered recently, that you lose your health benefits on your last day of employment. All of my previous jobs have allowed the benefit to continue to the end of the month. That system works fine as you should be able to smoothly transition over to the new job's benefits at the start of the next month. For people with chronic conditions, this is simply not good enough. In fact, I think such behavior should be illegal. I repeatedly called and emailed HR on my last day, but they did not respond to me.