Pros
All of my pros are not applicable to most other employees. I was lucky and was hired and placed on a team with a good manager and team members that didn't use the propriety ARGO language, so I had intelligent and friendly colleagues and gained useful experience. All 40 hour work weeks without needing to work overtime. That is not the case with the majority of employees.
Cons
-Senior management very disconnected, opaque, closed-doors, and unstable. Upper management does not know what is going on in lower levels and don't seem to care. -Resistant to innovation and change. Most of the base ARGO systems and software consists of 20-25 year old, poorly documented, spaghetti code in C or C++, and most of the client systems are build on either a 20 year old proprietary language or a newer proprietary web application framework that is not stable, not well documented, and mostly word-of-mouth knowledge. -Many teams still use ARGO's propriety language, which is outdated and completely useless outside of the company. -20% of the company laid off in December 2013 with no warning, despite their apparently very large cash reserve and after a massive volume of hiring in the last year. -No to little reward for meeting or exceeding expectations. Sometimes promotions don't even come with a salary raise. Promotions that do involve a raise are usually insignificant or even insulting. -Relatively low salaries, below industry and area average. -Little to no culture. Despite the best efforts of some employees, there is not an exciting or fun corporate culture here, and many employees are like drones. -Bad cross-team communication and collaboration. Differences in priorities makes getting resources from or collaborating with other teams like pulling teeth and basically requires an order from senior managers to get anything done. -Lack of talent. Many of the talented or even average employees leave because they can find better jobs elsewhere, and many of the ones that stay (but definitely not all) are arrogant and not easy to work with. So you are left with a lot of under-performers, some average and talented but arrogant employees, spattered with a small group of friendly and talented employees. -Bad company outlook. The only thing keeping the company up is the fact that its products are already so entangled with large banks that it would be very costly to go somewhere else. -Bad career advancement opportunities. It is not a meritocracy, and advancement is largely dependent on the people you know or sheer luck (in my case, both). -Very bureaucratic. The review process is overly structured, takes too long, and is largely dependent upon having the right flowery wording and hitting certain buzz words. It takes 2-4 months to even get feedback from reviews or for promotions to be decided. The CEO has to approve all promotions, which wouldn't be bad if he knew who he was promoting and didn't take 3 months to approve it. -Lack of trust between senior management and managers. The senior management does not trust their managers to make the right decisions and manage their teams correctly, leading to drawn out approval processes, lack of communication, differing expectations and priorities, and disregard for input by the managers who actually know the people working for them.