Pros
Flexible working hours. The best place for mediocre people.
Cons
Management - Upper management works for top management, the latter works for shareholders. Middle management and down work for engineering. A great conflict of interests between these two groups. “The path to the CEO’s office should not be through the CFO’s office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.” Elon Mask - Management sends regularly motivation/business update letters which are very distant from the work floor reality. Their only focus is on finance % growth; however, this is not the result of the company’s continuous growth and success, but rather achieved by cutting everything to the bone. In the end of the day if my salary and career progression do not go in-line with my duties and achievements, I do not care about any managerial excitement attached to those letters. “A bad manager can take a good staff and destroy it, causing the best employees to flee and the remainder to lose all motivation. Bad managers promote cronies — incompetent subordinates who are easily controllable. Sadly, the crony effect amplifies the bad manager, causing an organization to sink into a rut that it might never escape.” Technology - No investments into people (training, talents, salary increase in accordance with performance, promotions) and tools (processes, software & hardware) due to vigorous cost saving politics. This is the path of regression not progression toward future technologies. HR - Is generally weak. They cannot fight with lazy and incompetent (mediocre) people who were hired by mistake (in a rush?) in the past or just lost interest in doing anything. Some people ranging from technicians to upper management work for decades in that mode with the same level of rewards as others. This makes processes expensive and inefficient, devalues achievements of hard working people, demotivate and demoralize them. Rewards - The company is happy to retain mediocre people at a cost, but at the same time will not do anything to reward appropriately hard working and knowledgeable ones. Unless you are a genius the chances are very little. Awards - They do go to random people just because somebody subjectively nominated a person he/she wants to recognize. Level of expertise - A lot of knowledgeable engineers left the company in the last few years due to the aforementioned facts. Most of them never got replaced. Instead the company spreads the work load amongst other employees. This option does not come with additional monetary rewards. As a result the personnel gets demotivated and product development suffers from insufficient support.