Pros
--Some of the best compensation and benefit packages you will find anywhere in the corporate world. --Management is considerate towards the personal needs of employees and work/life balance really exists here. --Great brand name in the industry and the company has a good reputation as an ethical and upright corporate citizen (despite some high-profile cases suggesting the opposite). --Company seems well positioned to capture the assets of the baby-boomer retiree market.
Cons
Oh, so many of them. I can speak only of my group, but looking at all the comments made here, apparently it is the same elsewhere. Many (if not most) senior employees (VP level and above) didn't get there because they were smart, were productive or were visionaries or were good subject matter experts. Neither are they great leaders and neither are they perceptive of how to make things work. They seem to have made it purely because they knew how to 'game' the system. And the system tolerates this because there is no system to objectively identify top-performers. The bi-annual performance appraisal is a farce. And something very striking about the place is that we don't have any benchmarks of how long a certain job or project should take and we willingly spend $1000 on a project that would get done with better quality and shorter timeframe for $200 elsewhere. We are an island of mediocrity and I wonder how we will survive (forget thriving) in a brutal marketplace. What kind of a fool's paradise are we living in here?