Pros
Pay is decent and above others in the field. Health benefits are outstanding. Parking is only $25 per month. I worked in their network support devision. My co-workers are and were awesome! Really a great experience with them. The ENE mentors are also great work with as long as you are willing to show then you care and want to lean. Training was ok, and you WILL lean a lot about networking and security while you work at F5. I hear the Dev guys get RSUs and a starting of ~95k....work at F5 if you are in Dev.
Cons
The work is awful, in part because everything is a metric, you almost have to ask permission to take a pee. In fact if you need to "take a pee" during your on-call phone rotation, you can get docked. Everything you do is highly mico-managed. From the number of tickets you solve to the amount of time you spend on the phone. The expectations are not well suited for bonus program which is a joke. They do not offer any RSU's for level 2 NSEs. You will almost never have time to take a lunch break because it is so busy. They can not hire enough people to work the job in part because it is such a horrid job. Before I left they were talking about putting in a punch card like system When I was working there I had a base of ~68k, I thought that was very decent, was I wrong. They work every last penny out of you. With the skills and knowledge needed to do this job, you can go somewhere else and make an easy upper 80k. Vacation PTO policy also sucks. 18 days off total sick, person..ect So in the tech industry that's really not all that great. Not to mention the this job is so stressful no one sick ever uses a sick day so everyone comes to work sick. The management culture is awful. Other than the management, it is highly political and you as the NSE will be the first to be used as a scape goat. Lots of "policy" in place to avoid setting up a customer environment or touch a system but it is very grey area and if you screw up, you will be politically killed for it. The main HQ has 3 buildings, the first two are very nice and look like a tech company. The one NSEs are placed (except floor 1) in was in a state of decay when I was there. Not to mention NO WINDOWS, for the NSEs, all the windows are taken up by the managers offices. It's so dark and depressing in there. Oh yea and don't forget if you walk over to the other building they give the Dev guys free snacks. Also, someone from Microsoft should audit the hell out of F5.... again. I asked my manager multiple times for a MSDN license to run my VMs for reproduction environments. I kept getting the "it cost to much" answer" I finally did get my proper MSDN license when I applied for it via finance, my manager never said yes...aka I suspect they are using lots of un-licensed software. All and all, F5 is a tech company which is managed with old school ideas. Don't work here if you can avoid it. The only reason why they are doing so well is because they have almost zero completion.