Pros
- Nice location - Really nice people to work with - Lower-level management is pretty decent despite their limitations - The work will be interesting and challenging for about a year or two since you will need to learn their product line.
Cons
- Once you learn the product line, the honeymoon will be over. Since upper management will not put adequate effort into product development and most of your job will consist of maintaining legacy software and augmenting it with only features needed to get the next contract. - Raytheon bought the company several years ago, seemingly with the intention of bleeding out their product line rather than nurturing new development and keeping the atmosphere of innovation alive. Therefore, resources allocated for new capabilities and software refactoring for the current software suite (developed in the late 90's) is small. Only devastating bug fixes are worked and annoyances to the customer are ignored. For you this will mean frustration with upper management and low job satisfaction. - They have slowly been reducing benefits to save money. - Someone here mentioned a great work-life balance. While if possible they allow you to work at home and are considerate of needing time off for illness, etc., they will often make you come in on the weekend for weeks at a time with no extra compensation. Usually this is based on either poor planning by our ingenious project managers, some contractual obligation or another imagined need for software to be completed often in an environment where requirements are in flux. - You have little room for advancement. The small company environment, stunted growth and projects with little-to-no collaborative development throw a blanket of malaise on top of any aspirations you might have to become a real technical lead. Technical directors really just bean counters and Raytheon Solipsys these days is pretty much always a sub-contractor, so actual experience in technical leadership is hard to acquire. The only option is general management and, well, there are only a few of those positions which are already taken. - While there are some pretty smart people to learn from there, most of the innovators of the company have left because of reasons stated above.