A crossover between an academic and a corporate environment
Pros
Access to cool technologies and infrastructure Opportunity to work on exciting projects and to learn a lot. You can meet many interesting, highly educated and quite intelligent people. Pays very well. Lots of perks. Good work life balance if you can avoid being sucked into too many projects. Company was very supportive of its employees since the start of the pandemic. Looks good on CV.
Cons
Highly political. Lots of huge egos hired from the academia (quite a few senior scientists are quite arrogant or have prima donna attitude). Promotion process is opaque and political. A class division between Research Scientists and Research Engineers (despite both often having practically the same skills and education). Strong gender bias in staffing, recruitment and management hierarchy ("boys do research, girls do HR and project management") the company seems unable to fix, despite all the talk about D&I. Too much emphasis on PR and image building, too little self-criticism and humility. Failure of high profile projects is usually swept under the rug. Many projects are being pursued which have little scientific and practical value, just because someone thinks they're cool (or can't come up with better ideas). There's quite a lot of group think within research groups, often because the group leaders (usually university professors) hire their former students or academic co-workers. Cliques are common. Influential managers are often added as coauthors to papers they had very little to do with. Most importantly: the company doesn't know where it's going. Less and less people believe that the hallowed AGI is going to be achieved any time soon. However this is not acknowledged officially. In the absence of clear direction, people are messing around and focus on self-promotion.
