No Career Progression, Low Pay, Big Responsibilities
Pros
Starting with the good: many of your coworkers will be friendly and are hard workers. You will find genuinely good people here, sometimes you might find them in unexpected places. You'll also be working in a pretty small department/office, so you'll get to know the people around you quickly.
Cons
On to the bad: pretty much everything else. In general, you'll end up with a salary that is just about as close to the bottom of the "industry standard" locally for your position. In addition, you will struggle to get any meaningful raises, advancement opportunities, or title changes. I spent the better part of two years taking on an increasingly ridiculous workload for ZERO additional pay or remuneration of any kind. To make this concrete, I went from 1x pay doing 3 roles here to 1.5x pay with 1 role in one job change. A quick note: if you have the option to get a work phone or to not get one, you'd almost always be better off not getting one - many of the managers/VPs expect that you answer it, even late at night or on the weekends. They joke that if you're on salary, they "own" you and you're not limited to 40 hours. I never got one, so I could leave my laptop and not be bothered with work when I was at home. I strongly suggest you do the same. The benefits are lackluster. It's better than nothing, to be sure, but in a "tight labor market," you can almost certainly find a better offering. Virtually every benefit that I received was outclassed (not even close), again, in 1 job change. You will find that you will end up with responsibilities beyond your role. In my case, I took on additional "hats" in stride, because I found that I enjoyed doing the new things far more than the old things I was originally hired to do. In other cases, however, it's not a happy ending. I watched people get hired, get burned, and then leave because they were forced to change into a role they didn't want to do if they wanted to keep their job. Finally, the talent pipeline is effectively nonexistent. In my time there, I watched as the "*****s" in my general niche turned over basically twice, driven primarily by young talent joining -and subsequently leaving - the company. That's more or less a 100% turnover/year rate. That makes it very difficult to train new hires, build up a cohesive team, and make a strong long-term strategy in a department. When I would ask if the C-suite had a plan to address the hemorrhaging of young talent, the answer was always that there was no plan, but it was a good question. In short, the people you work with will be great! However, you will almost certainly get into a position, get some experience, and move to another role in another company.