Vantaggi
You certainly can learn and grow here as a specialist. But if you're a junior - you must be careful not to blindly trust everything your senior colleagues do. Do ask specific questions and be on alert to cross-validate the information you've been given with other colleagues preferrably outside your department. Worked will really strong QA specialists that knew their products, understood problems on several levels, including downstream services maintenance and work specifics. There's a free lunch for those who work in the main office, which is nice. You also get 2-3 additional days off for working extra hours (which I never did). You can talk to everyone even outside your team and everyone usually is friendly and try to help. Salary is always on time.
Svantaggi
So many employees care more about their resume then they do about providing best possible service for their clients. The company really attracts this type of people, don't know why, but I've seen it many times. Another big problem is - people higher up the ladder couldn't care less about your input. They do call meetings, encourage you to tell what you do and don't like about all aspects of work, but then this data never gets acted on. It seems they do this just to report that they did or wipe their ... with it. Go figure. Segregation of duties is a myth in some teams. You can have dedicated guy who can't specify a new feature so that all corner cases are covered. He will meet with other departments and do stuff no one understands why. I understand it's exciting to learn something new, but it's not kindergarden - first do what've being paid for, then do everything else. Developers are encouraged to cover for PMs and DevOps yet no one will do your job for you. I worked with a brilliant girl who'll question the design and in general do more for a product than her boss and... he wasn't bothered she's doing his job AND HERS. Another problem is lack of technical oversight. If you want to use relatively new technology you didn't use before - there should be an opportunity to sit down with a person who know this thing inside and out, who will give you practical advice. Yet I never saw that - and this led to several screwups that clients noticed. There may be a wiki page, but in 99% of cases you can find its contents in online docs. There's also a belief among people that just by working here all the work you do is top-notch. Some will get lazy and internal quality of the products suffer. I worked with a person who clearly was a mismatch (both in terms of expectations and skills). She worked her socks off for 2 years, doing 12 hours a day, she was really energetic. Changed several teams and in the end I think she resigned. Whether she knew the problem or not - I have no idea, but I have it on good authority several people she worked closely with gave honest feedback (that she need to work better on X, Y and Z). I think her main problem was she didn't know responsibilities of her position well, but that may be due to the fact these wasn't explained clearly when she was hired. HR will try to enforce rules that are illegal (like making you split the second half of your paid vacation precisely the way you do with first one) - although I've never seen someone actually hitting that rule. I think the whole idea from management is basically "we'll hire great people and give them freedom, they'll figure it out (both in terms of financial gain, which products we need, etc)". Well, if that's the case - it's not working great for my particular department). Not that many people can live up to this promise