Pros
1. People are congenial and smart, the closest industry experience I've had to academia. 2. Products are definitely positive contributions to society. 3. Products are highly profitable, always a plus if you want a job that pays well and lasts. 4. Surroundings (free parking, walking trails, on-site gym and basketball & racquet courts, etc.) are fantastic.
Cons
Though the products are highly advanced, much of the software architecture is long in the tooth and very complex, thus hard to change or maintain. Don't come to a software job looking to learn much of value outside the company. Probably the greatest disadvantage is the lack of management expertise in the software arena...the people in charge are typically PhD physics majors, and though they're fine people, anyone in management with real software project management experience has long ago left in frustration or been laid off to cut costs. Engineers typically take on many test and PM duties, setting and monitoring their own delivery schedules and writing/executing their own test plans and so on. This is partly due to past layoffs where middle management was cut (managers were expected to "manage" 13-17 people by the time I left), and partly because upper management simply doesn't understand what developers do or the role of software in the product. It's considered a costly but necessary component that's there to drive the core technologies, those being the transducers and beamformers. Software itself as a competitive asset isn't part of the value equation. Philips was very good for me, close to home and not too intellectually demanding. Philips takes unusually good care of its employees considering it's a large multinational corporation, with a pretty fair approach even during its cyclical layoffs. I learned a lot of interesting ultrasound physics there. But in the end I had to leave in order to keep my software skills current. The software world moves too fast to keep doing the same thing for 10+ years.
