Pros
The quality of engineering is high. Most of my colleagues are competent and true professionals. Stress is low if you can deliver. No micromanagement. Possibility of remote work. Time is super flexible. You have to be present at mandatory meetings, but outside of that, you are free to work whenever you want. You get to work on huge enterprise products. There are excellent internal trainings on soft and technical skills, some facilitated (with instructors), some at your own pace. There is a possibility of relocation to another country after a year or year and a half, but wealthier countries have less projects available. If you go on the bench (have no projects - client is not paying for your billable hours), they will keep paying you full salary for many months. Eventually you will get fired of course.
Cons
Compensation is location-based, and there is no transparency. You don't even know what salary ranges are. There is no free stock for L3 in Croatia. Compensation-wise it's better to get into a German, UK, even Polish company as a B2B contractor and get the money you can only dream of here. If you want to travel abroad while you are working (not on vacation), you need to get prior approval. Depending on the project you can wait for access for weeks. During this time you don't do anything but mandatory meetings, if any. This can also be an advantage if your primary goal is work-life balance. You do have to deliver once you get access. You might have to work inside crappy VDI if clients want that. You must become cloud-certified at the associate or higher level for at least 1 cloud provider. You'll have a year or so to achieve that.
