Vantaggi
Incredibly talented, dedicated, intelligent personnel who are highly motivated by the mission. Great opportunities to work collaboratively in a campus-like environment. Reasonable flexibility on work location, with options for remote, hybrid, and on-site work (depending on role and requirements). Good benefits. Fairly diverse workforce for the area (Colorado, USA) with many researchers from other nations. It's a good name to have on your CV if you're an energy researcher.
Svantaggi
Funding is reliant on Congressional whims, and with current administration's aversion to anything renewable, sustainable, or strategic, the risk of layoffs is very high. Leadership team is mostly senior researchers who have peaked but still want to do research and are not effective "business" managers. Communication from LT to staff is pretty much one-way and not always transparent. Typical bottlenecks in getting LT attention. LT expresses interest in operating more efficiently but does not devote real resources to supporting that objective. Silos between business management systems persist. Risk management model is immature (projects, systems, institutional) and most decisions seem to be made based on intuition rather than data. Some progress on diversity representation in management but it's been very slow.