Pros
The name still carries weight in the industry so it might open doors when you leave. I guess tons of snacks and food is a pro if you care about that sort of thing.
Cons
Almost everything here is a con. The turnover is incredibly high and the reasons are blatantly obvious. It starts with horrendous pay for staff members. Freelancers are fairly well compensated but staff are grossly underpaid. The Mill - and most Technicolor entities - are known in the industry to low-ball in the worst ways. If you are looking to support a family, this is definitely not the place. If you are looking to support yourself and put some extra on the side, this is also not the place. Furthermore, people are not getting raises. Wages have been extremely stagnant. During my time there I personally knew of a multitude of people who hadn't gotten a raise in 4 years. The Mill likes to spend a ton of money on fancy parties, snacks, food (that often lands in the trash) and other unnecessary garbage, yet somehow doesn't have the money to pay its employees an adequate rate. Second, the favoritism and bro culture. Actually, the culture as a whole. The artists that "grew up" with the Mill (meaning they started their careers there and haven't worked anywhere besides the Mill) are favored by management for prestigious projects and promotions. The people that have actual tangible experience - meaning those that have worked in feature film for example - are undervalued despite their superior expertise. I have personally experiences bro culture and borderline sexual harassment behind closed suite doors. If you are a woman, once again, not the place. If the favoritism and the passes that supervisors routinely get weren't so blatantly obvious, I probably would have gone to HR to report those offenses. The pipeline is horrendous. If you've ever worked in episodic or feature, you know what a pipeline should look like. The Mill does not have that. There's a lot of manual labor involved in getting things to work, things that should have long been automated. Additionally, overall the workflow is a complete mess. Often you will work on a shot that has long been omitted, with producers failing to tell your so. Or you will work on something that someone else is also working on, again no one informing you. There isn't a clear distribution of tasks and that type of mismanagement wastes a lot of time and energy. Last but not least, the projects in the Chicago office are of the lowest quality in all of the Mill offices. If you are expecting to get high quality experience here, this is the wrong office. You might get those projects in LA or NY but not in Chicago. For 2D artists it will be a lot of paint and roto and the little CG work this office does is very junior level. Hence, no real career development.