Pros
Relevant to all: Good pay and benefits. A little on the low side, but still competitive. Good, positive company culture Annual company-wide adults-only winter holiday party at a nice venue with catered food, speeches, and prizes. Quarterly bonuses, and wellness incentives. In-building exercise room with attached showers...though hardly anyone uses it. Relevant just to IT/Software: Programmers currently have their own office, though that has changed in the past. Capable CTO / IT manager who understands his department's needs. The end users of the software are mostly in the same building, so there's easy access to the users. You'll have a good PC, two or three monitors (per your preference), and a sweet mouse. Management is very willing to invest money in hardware and software if it'll help you or make anything easier. You can have lunch together as a department about half the time, usually while watching an episode or two of some shows. Occasional on-the-clock team building activities, usually a trip out to eat plus a movie at the theater. Everyone goes out to lunch for birthdays, and the manager will pay for the birthday-person's lunch. Department-mates frequently bring in donuts or other tasty goodies to share.
Kontras
Relevant to all: For the last year (2018-2019) Inovar has been struggling to recover from moving to a new building, which set their production behind by more than they anticipated. They've lost some customers and had to scale back their workforce as a result. I'm confident they'll recover in time. (Historically they've upgraded or moved about once every ten years, so expect that around 2028.) Most office (as opposed to production-floor) employees are in a big cube farm. The cubicles are high-quality, but they're still cubicles, and they're all 2-person affairs. Fortunately, IT/Software has their own separate offices, as does Accounting. The production floor is loud. The office cube farm is isolated from all that noise, but IT/Software is not. A fair amount of noise comes through the doors/walls. Mil/Aero contracts means high-ish security and lots of inspections to maintain company compliance certifications. This doesn't affect the IT/Software department very often, but it's a thing. Relevant just to IT/Software: No testers, no automated testing. We just started doing peer testing / code reviews a month ago. No one-click deployment, no scheduled releases Not relevent for software devs, but IT would care: The server room has water-based fire suppression, despite repeated warnings to upper management that this is an extremely bad idea. This was not corrected when a new building was purpose-built for Inovar. Back-end software is coded in VB.net, which is C#'s ugly cousin. The code base is...messy. Lots of older pages are 10k+ lines long, all inline. Newer areas are better, breaking out models and reusable code. Department is currently all-male. There's some low-key sexism which would probably not be expressed if the department had a decent mix of genders. (I don't know of any other departments with this problem.)