Pros
Employees rarely work more than 50 hour weeks.
Cons
HIERAR-CRAZY:
Sperry (software) has a fundamentally flawed management philosophy and is desperately trying to build a hierarchy of managers. Managers are chosen from a pool of friends and family to those that are higher up. Which means managers are people who know nothing about their "domains of expertise" other than what they pecked out of engineers who quit. "Merit" and "Egalitarianism" are cuss words not to spoken out loud.
EXPLOITATIVE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES ARE A HALLMARK:
Managers have to contribute nothing and granted unlimited powers to abuse. The standard protocol in my group was: the lowest rank of employees did all the work, including development and research, following which they were asked to train their manager and write reports which were for his leisure reading. The manager would then, WEEKLY, take all the data/figures out of the report, carefully strip out names of individuals who actually performed the work and present them to his superiors and peers in "team meetings" which we were asked not to attend. The justification provided, literally, for this was "we don't waste time in presentations with names".
It was common for the managers to stamp their names to be on our invention disclosures. It was common for managers to stockpile reports from everywhere and pull them out in meetings misrepresenting the work as their own ("WE" did xyz) and without permission. In academia, you'd be fired for plagiarism. Here, its a survival skill for managers.
Employees in the lower ranks, interns and coops were often ordered to train their managers on technology and were subsequently graded by the managers using a "PPR" process! At one point, an expensive consultant was hired for an entire year to train my manager.
Of course, as a result, most people who contributed to the development of products have left - usually the young crowd in the lower ranks. Every year during summer a pool of interns and coops would come in from Univ of Houston. Every single year, full time job offers would be made and every single offer was rejected.
LAID OFF FROM BOTH ENDS:
From the top they are being "let go" by Halliburton as a result of the Baker Hughes acquisition and the fact that Sperry's technology is far inferior to Baker Hughes.
From the bottom, a lot of employees have quit contributing to some of the highest attrition rates I've ever seen. What's left of course is a group of managers scrambling to take ownership of things that several generations of engineers have left behind.
IMMIGRATION SABOTAGE:
There is a very concreted effort at this group to do only as much as is necessary to keep you in the country while doing everything possible to seriously limit your opportunities. This is accomplished by delaying your Green Card as much as possible (until the 6th year on H1B) while making promises to do it earlier during a hire (one year after hire I was told). I spoke to others at the group and I was able to confirm that this wasn't an isolated incident- that this was a systematic and widespread practice.
OTHER FUN FACTS:
When my manager was asked why he hadn't done any work in YEARS, his response was verbatim - "you'll understand when you have kids". On another occasion it was "I've just been in so many meetings".
A few weeks after I was hired, I was asked by my manager to forward every single email that comes into my mailbox to his.
I was also asked to prepare daily reports for my work. When I protested, he said he'd do me a favor and make it weekly instead.
Engineers, even senior ones work in noisy cubicle farms, while managers relax in their offices. Its like being in a fish market.
Median employee age of 50.
RECOMMENDATION:
If you're an engineer, this should be your very last option; its a soul crushing environment.
If you're applying to be a manager, this is great place to work, you'll have a very relaxed environment and can hire as many people as required to train your for your job.
If you think any of this is exaggeration, you just have to get in touch with ex-employees to verify.