Vantaggi
Great flexibility in work-life balance. Working hours tend to be flexible, and employees are very accommodating to non-work commitments and activities. Great benefits. Health, dental, and vision plans are excellent. For a company in the US, there are lots of vacation days (over 4 weeks). Very good networking opportunities. There is a wealth of groups which do all kinds of fun activities. Groups meet regularly and it's an excellent way to get to know coworkers and make office connections. The location. The Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina is a great area to live in.
Svantaggi
Frustrating experience dealing with work computers and tech programs/tools. The computers are really locked down and it's often difficult to find the right tools for the job that aren't years out of date (I've seen this process improving, but slowly). There is little flexibility in choosing your tools for any particular technical task (it's not an option to install what you like). GitHub is blocked for most people. Abundance of middle management. I've been on a team consisting of half managers and half workers. Certainly not every team is like this, and it's probably a result of being a large place. There is a severe lack of technical knowledge among large amounts of employees (working in a software development environment). Many people aren't skilled enough to do their jobs well. One example: a manager on my team doesn't trust automated regression testing (they are not technically knowledgable about the development process) so even though we have a fully automated regression testing suite, people are required to *manually* test everything in releases before managers will approve the release, soaking up large amounts of time and resources. Knowledge of the basics should be expected, as it's a software development center. As a developer, is can be extremely frustrating to deal with so many people who don't know a thing about coding or development or computers at all, but are still supposed to work in a technical job. Recognition and compensation is often largely tied to who you know, and less about how much of a difference you make. Of course, many people received what they deserved or even more, but for every person I know has been compensated/promoted fairly, I know another who was not at all compensated what they should have been. Which position you find yourself in isn't predictable.