Pros
Friendly, approachable work colleagues Some skilful people about Learnt some SQL Know their market and have swindled their customers into long multi-million contracts at taxpayers' expense - so good job security then
Cons
Software product laden with technical debt Useless reinventing of the wheel (e.g. Sockets, IPC, String libraries) introduce 1000s of interesting bugs Convoluted architecture for what is, at heart, a simple data-driven Windows application The Visual Basic 6 version of the software is actually better than the new-fangled .NET one Deployment process is horrendous No decent development environments - VMs with out-of-date config, so you can't be sure your software changes will work when deployed to the testing environment More time spent debugging configuration hell than actual software development