Best place I've ever worked, but is slowly turning into just another corporate husk.
Pros
Rackspace is by far the best company I've ever worked for and has literally changed my life for the better, both physically in improved health and well-being, but also emotionally because it provided me an environment where I felt like I belonged. It's truly the first job I've had where I've been able to experience the positive impact I'm making on others in a real way while also at the same time getting to touch technology that's so new it won't even necessarily "hit shelves" until over a year later. You will meet many smart, talented, passionate people at this company and they will help take you on a mental journey you never thought was possible. Many of them will end up being your new best friends. When you mix together the energy and talent with the technology resources available you end up being involved in some amazing projects that really put you on the bleeding edge of what's possible. You'll always be learning something new and being exposed to new ideas. Put this all together with a culture that embodies responsibility, honesty, transparency, and getting the job done and you end up in extremely effective teams that thrive on honest feedback and doing the best they can do.
Cons
I would say the two biggest downsides of Rackspace are: 1) The upsides are shrinking. As the company has grown the beautiful and unique culture that makes Rackspace so great has diminished considerably. This is largely due to poor hiring choices in leadership which has been extremely impactful in a negative way on the company even after some of these poor choices are dealt with my letting those leaders go. In some particular groups leaders that were fired over 3 years ago still have a lasting negative impact on how things are done because new leaders brought into to replace them did not effectively identify the things which their predecessor did wrong and fix all of them. In many ways this is a failure of middle management that's caused because of the tendency for new leaders to bring in a cadre of cronies that follow them from whatever corporate husk they left, and if the leader gets fired, the cronies stay making it that much more difficult for a new leader to effectively resolve the things that didn't work. 2) The general level of compensation is well below market rate for a technology firm. It's pretty much always been this way, but most Rackers were okay with this in return for getting to be involved in such a wonderful culture and company and getting relatively unrestricted access to company resources to engage their minds on whatever it was at the moment they wanted to learn about. As the company has grown though the culture has dwindled and with it more restrictive policies have been created which prevent employees from being fully mentally engaged in the curiosities that drive them. It's led to a situation where many of the bright talented people I interact with come to work every day not sure exactly what they should even be doing because they don't solve problems by mandate, they solve problems by discovery. A company where it was once acceptable to have beer during meetings as long as you weren't drunk at you desk and where every employee had significant access to technology resources to try new things just to see if they'll work is what lead to the creation of many of the innovative technical concepts and methods of achieving them that exist today. Instead we've replaced that with company policies that won't even let me stream a documentary from Netflix on a separate monitor while I'm pulling an overnight shift in operations effectively monitoring systems which are highly automated in case an immediate response is necessary. This lack of compensation and this failure of culture has lead to a massive brain drain as the vast majority of long-time old school Rackers are bailing on the company. Anyone who is a strong technical talent is in high demand in the market, especially the likes of those who helped drive the beginnings of Cloud computing. Failure to compensate these people properly while demanding that they comply to asinine policies is a guaranteed way to lose them and with it lose the company's ability to execute effectively.