Pros
No matter how bad the day gets, it does eventually end. Time is undefeated.
Zero speed limits in the parking lot on the way out — genuinely the best-engineered part of the whole employee experience.
There's a strange comfort in knowing that any meeting with leadership guarantees the rest of your day will be measurably worse. Predictability is underrated.
Free comedy material, if you're into dark humor. Builds character. Specifically, the kind of character that might sit in their car and do phone screens at lunch.
Cons
Security leadership operates on a "good enough for government work" philosophy, except it isn't actually good enough, and it is, in fact, government work.
Customer requirements — even the embarrassingly simple ones — go in like a memo and come out the other side as an existential crisis. Nobody knows why. Everybody's afraid to ask.
Raises and promotions follow a clearly documented meritocracy... of who golfs with whom. The "good old boy" pipeline runs faster and smoother than any actual IT system in the building.
Several senior/functional leadership relationships raise questions that an actual HR department would probably want to look into, if anyone could find one.
Org chart functions less like a hierarchy and more like a friend group with badges.
Accountability is theoretical. Like quantum mechanics, but with worse outcomes.