Pros
As they have no clue about testing (system testing was a new concept to them) you'll look like a rock-star for the first few months as you explain the benefits of test requirements and system testing, auditability, and so on, as they listen to you with their mouths open in astonishment at this new heresy... There are some genuine moments of comedy - such as project managers deciding that the best approach to testing is to get the new test team to author the functional specs, whilst the BAs author the test scripts from them and do the testing....
Cons
Company motto should be "If nothing else works, a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through". Technologically and ideologically incompetent. Most of the permanent staff are lifers and have never worked anywhere else, and have therefore no idea about other ways of working - and are too scared to try something different. Useless at project management as an organisation. The project managers are more concerned with their own inter-company 'networks' than actually delivering anything of quality. No inclination to ever change their failing processes, even when clients are warning them that another occurrence of having to send the code back (when it won't execute, because they don't understand the concept of testing) to NT will result in loss of client. A lot of this is born out of ignorance and arrogance. There is a culture of blame. Various teams are constantly at loggerheads over whose fault it is for either developing a system without first having the requirements, or waiting until a project is going critical and they 'borrow' resource from other teams in a desperate attempt to meet deadlines. It's like the old Jasper Carrot joke about anthrax in pick 'n mix at Woolworths, in the respect that people are only bothered with their own job, and just ensuring that they pass their task on to the next person in the chain, regardless of the quality. Avoid like the plague - there is nothing to enhance your career by working there. You'll wonder how a large organisation can survive whilst being so inept at delivering IT, until you see the sheer volume of live defects and the very large off-shore team devoted to operating manual workarounds in live.
