Pros
There are incredibly smart and talented software developers from my perspective in the database division. If you like developing and maintaining systems software, there are many (and sometimes too many!) challenging problems to tackle in the database. If you like to learn and expand your horizons, there are many database components, database internals, algorithms, and optimizations for you to investigate. Developers are generally willing to share their knowledge, unless they are too busy with short-term deadlines. Management keeps politics to a minimum in the database division.
Cons
The company and database division have grown in size significantly in the last decade and have had creeping bureaucracy. Programming-in-the-large is never an easy task.
