Pros
-Historic brands with good market reputation. -Lots of long term employees with 20+ years experience and huge amounts of knowledge. -The Skokie facility still has a "small business" feel instead of feeling like a large corporation. Not as many politics or silos as you would expect in a company of nearly 50k employees (until your project takes you outside of Skokie). -Skokie has Manufacturing/Engineering/Testing/Quality/etc all in one site. Great environment to learn a lot very quickly.
Cons
-Budget cuts hitting R&D. Slowly turning market leading brands into also rans that are living on reputation instead of innovation. They have also been targeting long term employees that make higher salaries for layoffs... which results in talented younger employees not seeing much of a future for themselves in FM. -Shifting priorities due to upper management incompetence. Large projects where the target completely changed 3 times due to upper management changing their mind. -Below average compensation. Top performers are paid market average if they are lucky. -Constant budget games that impact business needs to satisfy short term Wall Street targets. Travel restrictions, hiring freezes, etc -Upper management recently attempted to use some heavy handed tactics with customers, resulting in a pretty significant amount of lost sales. The reduced volume resulted in some employees losing their jobs while the upper management kept theirs. This is fairly typical in modern America but still hurts morale.