Pros
Brand name. As much as one may want to downsell this after working here, this name still ensures you will get calls from recruiters at better companies with much better engineering cultures. For now, this is true. Next year? Who knows. Big Blue acquisitions have never ended well. There are few good engineers, especially at principal level or above. If you get to work with the really good ones who have a track record of shipping impactful projects, it would be a good plus in your career. Not every engineer at this designation is good though, so watch out for the not-so-obvious rotten apples, because there are a lot of them. Work life balance is ok. Your manager would usually care if you are clocking a lot of hours, but then again at same time, he may not care whether you are fulfilling your potential and having a great career. He might actually not give a damn about those. Some of the work can be busy work created by lack of direction from the very top.
Cons
Many downsides to working here. I won't recommend this company even to anyone I don't know, much less the people I know and care about. Absolutely, no way. So, where to begin? VP and Directors are pretty much lacking in providing direction to the company. This is a company that missed reaping major benefits from every major technological change that occurred right under it's nose. Sure, the company has engineers who write software that runs on public clouds and mobiles. But why work in this company if the direction is set by other companies? Talk about lost potential and a misguided sense of doing something useful as an engineer. There are other companies that can take your inputs, and take them to fruition, while enabling you all the way. Competitors have better track records at launching products with customer validation, and with much less fanfare and self-adulation. The entire top brass, from VP and Director level, to the CXOs, ought to have their performance examined for the past 10 years. People and employees who were better at providing direction have moved on, long time ago. The ones currently remaining have been here for long, have learnt nothing from failures, haven't been held accountable for stagnating product lines and failure to create new product lines. And morale is bad. Engineers quit mostly because they fail to find a sense of purpose and ownership, which they eventually get at other companies. Product management culture is absent and abysmal. In the several years I worked here, I had never met a competent product manager who could sell his vision to engineering teams. Lot of PMs winging their way around, with product success not attributable to them. This place has a lot of failed products, and there is a history of rebranding and embedding such failures in other products, to provide a sense of utility and not have work go to waste. Reflections and postmortems are either not done, or done for the sake of hiding failures under the rug. So, you not only get to see poor people management that demoralizes you, you also get bad product management, with the end result that you would spend hours working on features that aren't relevant. It can't get any worse than this. Clueless engineers enable this culture, by not demanding accountability from key stakeholders to ensure staff deliver impact. Some are busy fighting over minutiae and trifles on memo list. Some others enable bad management by brainwashing other staff into thinking the culture is fine, and as if this were normal at a growing successful company. And a few other engineers at very senior positions have pet projects that you might end up working, by accident, where there is no meaningful and measurable impact, with all round bad decision making. You get to know of this lack of impact and the damage it does to your career, only when you've assessed yourself against peers - until then, you're just as clueless and brainwashed. I mentioned memo list. That mailing list is probably a reflection of how the company has lost its way, chasing its own tail, while other companies have emerged as better and more desirable places to work at. This company has devolved into a laggard that focuses on selling support for software to other laggard companies. What was the last piece of software sponsored by this company, that was the choice for a new emerging startup? Did any of the projects here eventually go on to create outsized impact, that resulted in the Googles and Amazons taking notice? No. You'll struggle to find answers. If you are quitting Red Hat, better hope your recruiter doesn't find out about this. Bad pay. When I worked here, appraisals were done every 18 months, and there was a good chance you would get a cost of living increase for great performance where you had to break your back, work with asinine coworkers, and deal with clueless managers. Slap in the face. One of my managers discovered this small concept of inflation and how ideally pay rises had to factor for inflation, some 20+ years into his career. Spoke volumes about how compensation is treated as a subject in this company. Avoid. Run like hell like your life depended on it - I did, just too late, and it took years of hard work to negate the shortfalls of working here. You are going to be doing much better work elsewhere, rather than this place that advertises heavily but has very little to show for.