Pros
In terms of the work, it's interesting; they're using some technologies you normally don't see, which is good. The engineering groups, at least, are generally filled with smart and often truly helpful people.
Cons
The place is very much a Dilbert cartoon. If you think engineers with impossible deadlines should be given ten year old, entry level PCs with 2GB of memory to build a million line code base, while managers should be given i7 laptops with 32GB and SSDs so that their PowerPoint presentations run quickly, this is the place for you. The company asks you to like them on Facebook, and then blocks Facebook, that sort of thing. In case you want to know what you're in for if you join, this was my first week: After going to first day orientation with HR, we (engineering new hires) then had a meeting with our team's manager (or maybe the director, it wasn't clear). This was a second orientation, which seemed to duplicate the first one, except almost all the policies had different content now, completely contradicting what we'd been told by HR. When this was pointed this out, we were told to refer to the "official" policies. They said that all of the official policies are the intranet but no one seemed to know where, and no one could find them. And we couldn't find them because IT had not given new hires intranet access. Apparently it's not really important, and we were that "no one really follows policies here anyway". From there, I got to my desk, where I had an entry level PC from around 2008. I thought it was a mistake, but I was told I should actually consider myself lucky, since I had a full 8GB of memory. A low-end i3 with 8GB of memory is considered a high end development machine here, apparently. Until they upgraded to Windows 7 last year (and some people are still using XP), the average machine was a supposedly only a Core Duo with 2-3GB. Our manager was actually bragging that "everyone in the department now has at least 4GB of memory", as if this is considered cutting edge. The sad thing is, as far as Thales goes, that's probably right. My PC wasn't even set up with the required developer tools. There was no compiler, no access to source control system, or any of the other required systems. The PCs are locked down (no administrator rights, no installation rights, restricted network access, disabled USB ports), so you can't install anything yourself, you have to have IT do the installations, and it takes weeks of running around to get that to happen. The next problem was researching the problems online, but IT blocks so many web sites, it's nearly impossible to find anything (technical blogs and discussion forums are all blocked), so we were using our phones to research how to fix these problems, because there was no other way to access the internet. So many of us were having problems that management responded by calling a meeting, but all they did was tell us that it was our responsibility to get our systems working, and that we can't use the fact that we don't have usable computers "as an excuse". And then we all were warned not to "waste time" on phones during working hours, and told we would be reprimanded if they saw us using our cell phones. Despite all that, if you can get a working system, hole yourself up in the engineering area, and avoid management as much as possible, there's some really interesting work, and you can learn a lot.
