Pros
Farmers seems to value its employees and at least in the Home Office where I work, they seem to value a good work-life balance. The hours are 7:30am-4:00pm and most people in our office adhere pretty strictly to those hours. I do know many people who come in earlier and/or leave later but it is not that common except for upper management. Farmers is conservative and is owned by another conservative company (Zurich Financial) so there is little risk of the company going under during this recession and there have been very few if any layoffs so if you are looking for job security, this is a pretty good place to be. Product Management at Farmers is actually a really fun place to work because the employees are pretty young and well educated. I can't really speak about other departments.
Cons
As a conservative company, Farmers has taken few chances in the past. The company moves slowly and I think the worst and most frustrating part about Farmers is the IT. The systems are so old and archaic you have to find some kind of specialist to look anything up and everyone uses SAS or some older programs to pull data. There are so many problems with our systems and as a product manager I hear complaints often from agents about how hard it is to write business. The agents are the lifeblood of this company so we shouldn't be making things hard on them. Another bad thing is that sometimes it seems senior management is out of touch with what is going on in the world. We live in a digital age and Farmers is a dinasaur amongst agile, new-wave companies like Geico, E-Surance and Progressive. That being said, Farmers has aggressive goals and seems intent on maintaining or growing market share so we'll see where that leads in the future.