Pros
If you're interested in learning technologies, then FarHeap is for you; since starting there, people have learned JSF, Facelets, Tomcat, ActiveMQ / OpenMQ / JMS, JCR, etc. Free sodas and food. Lunch every Friday, and if your group is working really late on a time-sensitive project, they'll often buy dinner. They also have a great ping-pong room to help burn off steam or to wake yourself up when the 2 pm food coma hits. It's a young office - I would estimate the average age is 25. They are interested in hearing employees' ideas. Any employee can submit an idea on a "one pager". Well-stocked supplies cabinet. 401k matching plan. They do seek a work-life balance. Policies within the past year have changed the environment dramatically. They only time period they request your presence in the office is 10:30 to 5. VPN is readily available. Open-source software used almost everywhere.
Cons
FarHeap is a good place to get your feet wet if you're fresh out of school (hence, the average age is young), and as soon as you get that experience or a better offer, time to bolt. Salary and benefits. Just about everyone in development is underpaid. We also just got the new numbers for the health plan - what was once a great PPO plan is now an ugly PPO plan. The HMO plan is not much better. One week of vacation AFTER you complete your first year, and again, one week of vacation after you complete your second year. The salary / benefits issue is one reason why they're heavily understaffed. Which leads me to the next issue - the company's interest in employees' ideas: they haven't shown interest in branching beyond the existing business model. Admittedly, that's up to them, but IMHO it's time they start experimenting a bit before they find their chief business - online business printing via OvernightPrints.com - is out of business due to competition. The main excuse is that they're understaffed - that's because they don't pay enough. Meanwhile, there are a bunch of developers eager to try new things, and they're being held back. It brings to mind the Langston Hughes poem "Dream Deferred". The development office is in an industrial section of the city, and it's not exactly the nicest office in the world, at least compared to the corporate office which is only 5 minutes drive away. Supposedly we were going to move into the corporate office's building a few months back. That now doesn't look like it's going to happen. The division director, chief architect, and talent recruiter all have offices. The rest of us have low-wall cubes. It can get quite noisy in the office. More than a few people - including higher-ups - have been highly unprofessional at times while inside the office. I'm told the owner is better than he used to be; even then, it's a wonder this place hasn't been sued for sexual harassment. At least one member of HR has claimed ignorance even though they observed inappropriate commentary while in the office. Binding arbitration employment contract. Employment contract was missing paperwork - paperwork that they still haven't been able to produce. The developer PCs are massively underpowered. A 2.4 GHz single-core Pentium 4 with 1 to 1.5 GB RAM was a great machine a few years ago. In today's world, that's nowhere close to bare minimum. Regarding the use of open-source - there are two problems with this: 1) There's a big NBH (not built here) perspective in the development group. Which leads us to building really hard to maintain and buggy software. 2) Some open-source software is great. Much of it is really, really bad, and doesn't do what we need it to do, which in turn makes us less efficient.