Pros
Prism Microwave took a chance on me despite having an unorthodox educational background and little professional experience as a software engineer. Once hired, they provided me a ton of opportunity for personal growth, learning new programming technologies, and general freedom. They were awesome - they let me kind of do what I want technologically, as long as I showed up and made progress on the software I was responsible for building. They also provided great mentorship, including Darren Cutting and Wesley Sarratt, from whom I learned a ton about RF and software engineering. It was a very neat place to work - I built software drivers for testing equipment, programmed temperature chambers and network analyzers, and learned how to build RF matrices. I haven't had as much fun at a job since! Unfortunately, I didn't quite appreciate the freedom and how cool my upstream were until I got into "the real world" and learned how suffocating management and corporate environments can be. I wish I had had a better attitude... but hey, live and learn. One thing I won't ever forget: how nice my co-workers were there and how important the "community" was to them. We frequently went out for extended lunches (along with our managers) and got together outside of work.
Cons
It was a small company that had little oversight and required individuals to be self starters. Not for everyone.