Pros
Very stable employment. In certain areas, the work can be very cutting-edge In certain areas (ExpressVu), they can be reasonable about expected work and project management.
Cons
The respect for people in other groups or as employees can be nonexistent at times, on all ladders of the company. In one company all-team-meeting, the CEO was asked about the employees working 12-hour days in a Pennsylvania-based facility, and his response was "it's great you have the work." and really didn't see their problem of, "hey, we would like to go home" as stated in the question. Group-to-group, internally, the game of "ask for everything like you needed it yesterday whether you do or not" happens entirely too often. Within the software group doing the flagship set-top-boxes for Dish, unbelievably unrealistic deadlines are made in some effort to drive a product and 'incentivize' working weekends. In the end, software engineering becomes an exercise in managing technical debt and covering-up bugs or hacking things together so you get your evenings and weekends back from overpromises of management. Don't think for a second your heroics will be rewarded when it comes time for raises. Quite a bit of the problems have to do with the fact that it's a hardware engineering company, and software is usually the last thing between a product collecting dust and generating revenue---I don't think that is ever going to change. I had said in a previous review that this is a good place to start your career, and, I'm not sure that is entirely accurate. It's good in that it's a stable job with very minimal politics at the entry-level. It's bad in that the development of maturity as a software engineer, is lacking. Things like estimation, architecture, and maturity in product-ownership can be hard to develop if you don't go out on-a-limb and get it yourself. ...but overall, at the end of the day, it's not a horrific place to work if you need the money.
