For an engineer, lots of smart people and interesting problems
Pros
Lots of smart people to learn from Products used in the real world that make a difference for a lot of people Nice facilities Private company not beholden to a board of directors or stock price Good work life balance Nice company culture and tradition
Cons
Location can be kind of tricky, depending on where you are commuting from. In parts of the product, its age is starting to show. When I was there Simulink and MATLAB were launched as the same process. Depending on the component you work on, enormous amounts of code made building and testing cumbersome. Their continuous integration/source control management system is a set of perl scripts layered on top of CVS and is really arcane. (They were moving to Perforce when I was there.) There are multiple sets of tools for managing code submissions, developed by different teams. To be fair, they are aware of these technical problems and were actively working to address them and achieve better componentization of the source code. But it seemed at the time like a huge mountain to climb. When I was there, their policy about working from home was pretty strict (only three days per year?).