Pros
Work Life Balance. Many engineers and managers have their own offices with doors (albeit without any daylight). Interesting work.
Cons
Slow decision making. Many office buildings need an update. Many conference rooms lack modern communications and projection equipment. Overall compensation is below average for the SF Bay area. WDC hasn't figured out how to spend more on compensation and maintain their margins. Stock based compensation is particularly weak. The recent increase in turnover all over the SF Bay area sites is a symptom of this problem. The compensation structure makes it difficult to recruit employees from other companies. They can only be hired from college. Too many layers of management, the highest echelons of which are paid too much. Whenever the company decides to spend some money on perks and benefits, they manage to do it in a penny pinching way that is lame. As an example, one of my employees is a single person who is charged $30 per paycheck for her health benefits. Why doesn't WD just get rid of the employee premium for people like her? What would it cost? WD would then be able to say they have no-premium health insurance for single employees. In another example, electric car charging stations were installed. At Google, this is provided for free to employees. At WD, employees are charged for this. How much money would it cost to just make this free? $10k/year? Some pockets of the company have a really friendly and collegial culture while in others, nasty, unhelpful, abusive behavior is tolerated. Along these lines, there are entire groups where everyone is from the same home country. The company needs to walk the talk on diversity and inclusion - groups should be more heterogeneous, not allowing managers to hire only people from their home country.