Pros
If you are excited about product design, or looking for experience working on a good variety of products and industries this is a pretty rare opportunity to do that. Typically projects are fast paced, and you are involved from conception to completion. At many other jobs, the work is so compartmentalized you are not exposed to the bigger picture. At DC, you can work on more of the project than just your core discipline (many of the projects involve industrial design, mechanical eng, electrical eng, etc.). This can be fun and exciting or it can be scary and frustrating. It really depends on you, and how you manage your project. The team of people was fun to work with, and lots of distributed knowledge is available to help tackle some of the more complex projects. Again, designing something you haven't done before can be scary, or it can be a fun learning experience. You will do well here if you can stay positive and don't stress about the small stuff, just keep working the problem until a solution is reached. Also it is convenient that you are only ever 30 feet away from a mill and a lathe, so if you are handy with tools it is easy to make quick prototypes to build confidence in your design with small tests. When problems arise, you can just fix them and move on... This is a contract design firm, so you are encouraged to finish your work within 40 hours a week. Working beyond that is generally rare, which is good compared to other small companies I have worked at.
Cons
You will make mistakes, everyone does. Especially when you are running fast! You will receive criticism for your mistakes. For some people that is scary, or offensive. The way I feel is, if you never make mistakes, you aren't trying hard enough. If you never receive criticism, you can never get better than you are now. People that work here do it because they are passionate about design. Sometimes that means there are "passionate" exchanges or comments made. At the end of the day, everyone here is on the same team and shares the same goal. Don't take it personal. Collect the data, make a correction, move on. For me personally, there were times that I had to do a lot of business travel (including international) and that caused some stress for me at home being away. I don't think that is typical though.