Pros
Owner is a highly motivated, driven and tech savvy person. His interests and business ventures are varied and successful. Access to and work with just about every aspect of information technology from mice to data centers to in house IP based phone system and everything in between. If you take the initiative to learn (mostly from outside sources), you can become a true expert with any given system. The other techs are great people and fun to work with. There wasn't any office politics when I was there and we all had each other's backs. Food, they get it. Techs like food and there is a fairly well stocked frig and pop machine. Yearly outing for those who "met the mark" (read continuously worked weekends and long hours) As to the question of "would you recommend to a friend"? For a new tech or engineer what needs the experience., they're great. For the seasoned tech, you'll see fairly quickly why its a revolving door.
Kontras
The "free breakfasts" once a week are because you're required to be in 1hr 15 minutes early on wednesdays for an all associates beating... err meeting. So not really "free" but comp for getting in 1.25hrs early. When they said there'd be some over time, they weren't kidding. But since you're salary, 60+ hours weekly doesn't affect them much. But your personal life takes a toll. You're expected to be available 24x7 Very often, the attempt to increase motivation came in the form of psychological browbeating. Hypermicromanaged. When you ask for clarification or direction on a project, you'll get a "why do I need to be involved" but also then get critized when you took the project in a direction they didn't expect or end up wanting. There was an excessive amount of wildly in appropreiate sexual (locker room) comments made frequently by the owner towards/about the employees and/or customers. But since the owners wife is "HR", no where to really go with that one. No work life balance. For the employees. No raises to your already low salary. ~30-40% below market. There are bonuses, however IF you get them, they also don't change in level so after a few years the net affect is null. They never went outside the organization to learn. Not about our technologies. Not about their business practices. Not about how best to treat their employees. There were several talks that were held after waves of employees had left. But nothing changed. Lip service was all it ended up being. Forget trying to fix it.