Pros
I have been an employee for nearly 10 years. Honestly, the biggest pro will be the people you work with. Employees have been here for a long time, and often times feel like family. It's a friendly environment. People will give you a lot of help, mentoring is well done and encouraged. Opportunity can often come in places where you have no previous experience, and PepsiCo is great at providing training, opportunity, and time for employees to acclimate to completely new roles. Pay is often quite good, but see my note in the Cons. The company is also quite stable, and is one of the rare places I've worked where you feel like you could build a CAREER, rather than moving on to another company after a few years. In many ways, Pepsi SHOULD be a 4-5 Star place to work.
Cons
That being said, there are a few things that are boat anchors around PepsiCo culture. First, productivity initiatives are directly hurting employees. Employees have watched their benefits just get chewed up and spit out over the last few years, all while hearing the same mantra: "in line with industry standards". The data supporting this assertion is never released, and at the same time, I can't help but wonder why a company like PepsiCo, that strives to be the best, is content with being "in line", rather than at the front of the line? As I said in the Pros, pay can also be quite good, unless you manage to obtain a skillset that dramatically increases your market value. HR policies and processes put caps and limits on your salary progress rate, which means that headhunters coming to call can look a lot more attractive suddenly. I've gotten offers for quite a bit more than my current rate, but admit I don't leave because I enjoy the stability that the company provides. Compounding this is the continued use of the terrible 'stack ranking' or 'calibration' process for determining reviews and merit increases, which prevent people from adequately providing increases, and the increases for even high level performers are extremely low percentages compared to nearly any other place I've worked. The company also suffers from both Meetingitis and Consultant Syndrome. Above a certain level, management appears to be nearly triple booked all day with meetings, many of which appear to have no valid function but to show that you showed up for a meeting. The company could use some policies in place that force meetings to be limited on certain days, and for a meeting to justify it's purpose (as opposed to an email, for instance) in order to take place. Additionally, good ideas that come from employees can often be ignored, but immediately taken up when external consultants are hired, who then interview the employees, mine these same ideas, and present them again as their own insights. The amount of money wasted to consultants who tell use what we already know is staggering.
