Pros
High company recognition - you'll never have to explain what Sony is. An excellent primer for junior staff and new college grads - due to Sony's fast-paced work environment, you'll be exposed to a lot of business problems and scenarios that will be invaluable later in your career.
Cons
Organization Hierarchy - even in it's now leaner levels, Sony is a haven for middle+ management. The company is so awash in Mangers/Senior Managers/Directors/VPs/SVPs/EVPs that it's actually amazing there are people in the organization actually there for the day-to-day execution of actual "work." This places even greater stress on those individuals because that smaller section of talent is asked to perform at levels that support the bloated organization. (Obviously Sony is downsizing, so if you're planning on applying, be sure to ask what the manager : individual contributor ratios are in the DIVISION your applying for.) Work/Life balance - perhaps one of the worst in places I've worked at. Particularly for technical/engineering jobs - you'll work similar hours to a lean startup... just without the compensation that generally comes with those kinds of environments. This place WILL grind you - and as Sony downsizes this will only get worse, as now the same amount of work to sell, support, and engineer products is delegated to less and less people. Office politics - cronyism at levels that would rival Government. The intensity of this was directly (inversely) proportional to the health of company. As numbers went down, and layoffs became more common, the environment grew commensurately toxic as working groups and division fought tooth and nail to prevent their silo from being placed on the chopping block. Also, other observations about "relationships with Japan," are accurate - knowing and having strong relationships with people in Tokyo is one of the best ways to ensure job tenure. It's also worth noting that over time, these kinds of environments change both your colleagues and yourself. Lack of transparency - A lot of the discussions/decisions that many of us would have felt empowered knowing about were kept on a "need-to-know" basis - where that "knowing" imparted special status among higher management. Of course there are the "town halls" - but these very often we're cheer-leading sessions, particularly for products that we're less than stellar. Often felt more like being at a TupperWare party or AmWay conference than a legitimate forum for state of the business. Low-ball compensation - As a hiring manager, this was a constant struggle in trying to work with HR to get pay ranges for positions in the San Diego location to *at least* at market levels, often times requiring special arrangements to make that happen. This made retaining talent difficult as companies like Qualcomm, Motorola (now Google) and other Engineering shops could offer better packages. - Raises are paltry, particularly for Tech/Engineering - Best benefits were reserved for Directors and Up One NOTABLE exception was the 401K plan - which up until 2012 had a much higher matching contribution rate than market - with a caveat: 2yr vestment before matching contributions kick in. Not a great place for non-JP engineers - you'll work on some fun projects, but chances are they'll be scrapped, as Sony doesnt have a good track record of supporting products they released that weren't breakout-successes (Aibo, Rolly, Dash, etc.. ). Company Culture = Culture of your direct Manager - if you had a good Director or VP, then you could potentially be in a very positive environment, otherwise it was merely something in an e-mail that didn't reflect the reality of what you were directly incentivized by from your direct manager. Lots of outsourcing - even for domestic operations. This essentially created two classes of Sony employees - the "Blue-Badgers (Full-time)" and "Red Badgers (Contractors)" - and the levels of ownership and collaboration were really almost on a vendor-by-vendor basis. Even more troubling was when vendors had to work with other vendors on Sony projects, as this created weird "tribal knowledge" dynamics in an effort to shunt more billable hours to their respective companies. This placed the Sony employees in difficult scenarios, and often Sr. Managers and Directors inherited messes directly created by these dynamics.