Pros
The retirement plan, at the time I was hired (it's changed since), was very good, and a major selling point for retention and hiring of employees. Also, there's a great training program for new IT workers, and an energized culture for improving and augmenting the railroad's tech stack.
Cons
- Like a lot of other Fortune 500 firms, UP currently has a single-minded dedication to ticking off all the cynical late-stage capitalism stereotypes they can. Layoffs, pay cuts, benefit cuts in the face of record profits and corporate tax cuts, all for the sake of improving the all-holy operating ratio number. - The "Unified Plan 2020" that was recently announced will make things very, very interesting over the next few years. - Going along with the above two, the retirement plan is pretty useless if hanging around for a long career is increasingly rare. - Location in Omaha, NE has hurt recruitment and leads to a glut of new employees from the same universities. The culture of suburban Nebraska has caused problems for minority and LGBT employees (though, to their credit, UP does seem to do as much as they can to mitigate this) - Some teams in IT struggle with integrating all developers/workers into the team in a meaningful manner. This goes quadruple for high-priority projects; UP does not have the people capable of managing and architecting these projects, generally won't go out and find them, and won't listen to them when they do get them. Cold, antiseptic atmosphere leads to clannish, unfriendly teams.