Pros
Coworkers are nice. They have bonus vacation up to 3 additional weeks which they are pretty generous about giving. You don’t even have to work 40 hours a week to receive this. This bonus vacation is in addition to your normal vacation days which you can use first before your normal vacation days. Normal vacation accrual is about 1 day per month. They are pretty flexible on when you take your vacation days as well. Vacations days carry over to the next year and any excess vacation you have beyond the bank limit is paid out to you. So it is not a use it or lose it sort of thing. Located in downtown near a lot of good food places. You get to work on a wide variety of projects small, medium and large. Federal, State, City & County, and Private. Opportunity to travel overseas for projects. (Guam, Japan, Korea, etc.) There is a wealth of knowledge and intellectual resources here. Some engineers here are very exceptional at what they do and have a lot of knowledge that you can tap into. In most cases you are not micromanaged and are granted a lot of freedoms that you will probably not get in other companies. They are pretty lenient on things like going to the Doctor and other personal activities. All the snacks you can eat provided by the company. All the lip service you can ask for and more. Amazing if you consider inflating your ego or a good story as a form of currency. Free lunch during most company meetings and reviews which occur fairly often. Since the company is large you get to meet and work with a wide variety of clients. The company gives back to the community through community service, donations and pro-bono projects. The company is locally owned and operated. They pay for about 70% of your parking fee for a stall in town, either within the building or nearby.
Cons
Most of these cons only apply to those who actually take their job seriously, are interested in being/becoming a good engineer, or are looking to further their career. If you are looking to join what is basically a frat house or looking to collect a free paycheck for doing little to nothing, then these cons don’t apply to you: Unequal distribution of work. The 80/20 rule applies here where 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people. Management knows about this but refuses to do anything about it and just makes it worse by constantly stacking work on the 20% because the other 80% refuses to do anything, they are incompetent, or because they are management’s favorites. If you are deciding between the pros and cons of Private vs Government, you will get the worst of both worlds here. A Private Sector workload with Government style rewards. The guy sitting next to you can work 20-30 hours a week and have half your workload while you have to work 50-80 hours a week and you will both get paid the same salary and get the same “bonus” and get the same exact raise. There really is no incentive or reason to work hard here. When confronted about this the company will make up excuses or give you empty promises of “catching you later” because “there’s no money” only for you to be disappointed with an inadequate raise or bonus later on while the higher ups laugh their way to the bank. Extremely high turnover. Many experienced and good engineers have left the company and more than half the company has less than 4 years of experience. Although there is a solid core of experienced engineers most of them are too busy picking up the slack to actually give you a proper education/training. Very cliquish. You are not very likely to receive help unless you are in a certain clique. If you do receive help it will be a lazy half effort sort of thing. Most of the times you ask for help, you will be told to “do it yourself.” The average work week here is about 43 hours per week (if you are part of the 80%) the 20% that does the majority of the work will average about 60 hours per week but if you take vacation (which is considered 40 hours for a week) they will use that to lower your average work hours to try and make it seem like the 20% isn’t working as many hours. Some weeks you will work 70+ hours per week several weeks in a row and you are paid salary so you don’t get paid for those extra hours. You won’t get thanked for working those hours. You will just be given more work and told you are not doing any more than anyone else. There is no loyalty to the workers. The workers are considered to be disposable and easily replaceable. They don’t care about you or how many hours you work. The only interest is in the profit they can put in their pockets.