Pros
Applied is a very generous company - they do care about us as employees. Benefits are fine, vacation and sick are very good, good holidays including New Year's Eve and your birthday. I believe their intentions are good and that the people running the place are genuinely good people. Most of them anyway. As a manager of people, I saw that they would almost always err on the side of doing the right thing by their employees. At least in my organization and the ones I worked with closely. They're also very profitable. VERY profitable. VERRRRY profitable. The company is stable. LOTS of opportunity for growth. Many promotions every year, many people moving to different departments and getting a lot of exposure. From what I've seen in my little slice of the Applied universe, people were compensated fairly.
Cons
While the company is stable, senior management is the land of shifting sands in certain parts of the org. You never know who's going to get the axe and for what. I've seen some of the most hard working, knowledgeable contributors terminated for things that were absolutely not their fault. I would not advise anyone to take a position of Director or above at this company. I like the CEO, but he has made a series of terrible decisions that made me fear our stability was short-lived. I hope that's not the case. I hope that he is removed or moves on before it's too late. It pains me to say that because he's a really decent dude. I think he's just over his skis and more than a few of his executive team can't help because they are too. Some of his executives are the same. HR can't get it together, I was there for five years and saw four different chief people officers. They're all talk, no action as well. Then you got one of the "business units" run by a madman. How is he still in his job when they have consistently failed to meet their objectives? This was an essential, growing part of the company until he was placed. Marketing is a...well I don't know if there's a word for what Marketing is right now. Ya went too far, people, and you forgot the fundamentals like good grammar. And work/life balance is just terrible. They would set these big objectives that were impossible to achieve, especially without a very high level of executive collaboration. We didn't have that when I was there. The thematic goal/defining objectives idea is great for some companies, but the idea is to keep it simple - we went way too far afield for it to work, I think. No t-shirt slogan is going to fix that.