Pros
Free food while you work, as long as you can process nothing but carbs and sugar. You will gain 10 lbs your first month there. The location downtown also gives you a good variety if you like to go out for lunch.
Cons
The environment is high stress. From day one you will be given multiple projects to work on. Those projects will all require you to attend separate daily meetings. These meetings will always create more meetings that you must attend. You will eventually be so inundated with meetings, that you will then spend your time off, writing code to keep up with your projects. All the releases are in the middle of the night, so depending on the release order of your projects, you could have several releases each week. But that wont stop management from scheduling you for meetings early the next day for your other projects. If you are looking for a development position, and the title does not say JAVA - the position is a hoax. All development groups are moving towards JAVA, and they will expect you to know it as well as anything else you are programming in, and they will not provide you with any training. If the position does say JAVA, you will possibly be pigeon holed into working in JAVA 6, because their main application is too messy to migrate to new versions. Management will call people up at home in late afternoons/night, just to get software published to a Test server. All because they made a promise that morning that your code would be done. Many projects are being created by individuals who do not know what they are doing, or have any good project layout experience. These projects are then handed down to developers that are forced to maintain them, and extend their functionality. The moral in the IT department is non-existent. Everyone there is new, because no one is willing to put up with the torment that management wields. You will be told to ask if you need help, but will then find that anyone that can help is away in one of their multiple meetings. Your manager will care more about you logging time against your user stories, then your user stories having any context for you to work from. And if you do not get your time in for the week, your manager will rip you a new one because his bonus is based on you getting hours in, not actually performing. And to handle all this stress, you will force feed yourself into obeseness and heart disease from the free food.
