Pros
-Pay is pretty good, especially if you live cheap. If you prove yourself you'll rise up fast and get decent raises. Lots of folk work overtime (myself included) and that pays okay (not time and a half unfortunately). -Flexible schedule structure; they start most everyone on a 10-4 schedule (10 hours a day, 4 days a week, be in between 9AM and -3PM), but if that doesn't work for you you can go to the older 9-80 schedule or even a standard 5-40. - You have some flexibility in what/where you want to work, in my experience; if a project isn't quite the one you're interested it, bringing it up to your manager(s) can get you shifted to something a bit more in your interests. -Mentoring culture is huge here and lots of people are more than eager to teach you things. There is some encouragement to branch out beyond your core knowledge base and seek sub-specialties.
Kontras
- A lot of good old boys still around, pretending that there is just one "right" way to do everything. They love to talk, and while some of them do actually do something (and do it well), a lot of them like to sit on their laurels and tell us about how they did x and y on a program 20 years ago. -No real consistency between projects; every lead engineer has their own preferences on how a drawing should be done, or how the release process should go. - Expect a lot of overtime, some unpaid (5 hour OT gate during the week, but weekends/off days have no gate). - Some of the work will be very confusing with constantly changing requirements, redundant/wasted work; this is often caused by poor communication within the engineering teams and management as well as from external customers.