Perfect place... to tank or end your career
Pros
Good work Life Balance Relatively low stress environment Access to many industry experts Pay is comparable to the area (but on the low side) Good benefits Flexible hours Great to raise a family It is a place where you retire or end your career. Slow paced, long development cycles.
Cons
-It is not a place for young folks to start a career: they would ask you to work on software, methodology, tools and resources from the 80s and 90s when HP was king. -The fact is that almost nobody uses that anymore, so for young professionals it means professional suicide and your career marketability goes to zero the longer you stay there. -Some of the design groups have been a closed system for decades. So in many aspects they are obsolete. -Aging population that refuses to adapt, change and embrace new technology, new methods, -HP era legacy tools that nobody else uses and that are a huge and heavy anchor to modern 21st century technology. -Managers and HP era folks will stop any movement for change. The motto is: "It is what it is even if we are in the 21st. century" -They are decades behind in terms of methodologies, CAD tools, exposure to the modern world. -As an outsider, you will be pretty much kept outside the loop for several years, Either you stay until your external options go to zero or you react fast and find a better and modern place to work. -Many incompetent managers totally disconnected from what is going on the trenches and just there to make themselves look good by taking credit for other people's work and effort. -Absolutely no visible ethnic groups inside management ranks, which is sad given that there are great foreign trained professionals with great capabilities that beat any USA trained professional.
