Pros
Cognella recognizes good work and encourages you to bring your A-game every day. I love the environment--the yoga classes, ping pong tournaments, bocce competitions, trivia lunches, chair massages by professional masseuses a few times a year, softball, boot camp...it sounds like working at Google or another tech start-up, but Cognella has all these benefits and more because it has a "work hard, play hard" mentality. We do great work and strive for excellence. The bar is high. Being excellent is a must. To do our best work, Cognella recognizes that we need to bond with our teammates so when a stressful situation comes up you can feel comfortable working out the problem in a constructive way, possibly with a Cognellan who works on a totally separate team but with whom you've cheered and high-fived and stared down over the ping pong table. The workload is fairly heavy--this is not a place where you can hide at your desk and play around on Buzzfeed. But Cognella doesn't feel like a mindless, soul-sucking environment, and the work is fulfilling. Overall, my favorite place I've ever worked.
Cons
A few of the managers are only so-so at actually being managers. These few seem constantly overwhelmed and defensive when something they're responsible for goes wrong. One department has a very high turnover and the manager views this as normal instead of looking for and expecting better of those employees she hires for. I think it leads to dissatisfaction on her employees' parts when they feel like she expects them not to stay very long and treats them accordingly.