Pros
There are some really brilliant people across many disciplines, but they are few and far between. Lots of diversity in the NYC office is a plus, although diversity drops off significantly the higher up you go in the C-suite. Recently renovated office with a view of the East River and Brooklyn. The admin staff is nice. Decent coffee and bagels on Friday. They pay architects really well compared to other firms.
Cons
By far, the most dysfunctional management I've ever encountered in the A/E industry. I was never able to figure out what the many layers of management actually do, but I know what they definitely DON'T do is step in to resolve high-level conflicts with clients, projects and staff. On top of the inept and spineless management, there is a project controls group whose primary purpose seems to be billing hours in order to let you know that your project is over on hours. If you need staff to actually produce anything, good luck with that, because the production staff is made up entirely of either interns who are fresh out of school and need to be taught everything, or people who work on government projects and therefore take half a week to draw a box. For every one smart and productive person at this company, there are maybe 10-15 people who manage to do just enough work to not get fired. Every group runs like a little independent company, so there is virtually zero opportunity to move around between teams. You cannot bill to overhead, so if your project slows down or gets put on hold, your only choices are to keep billing to the project anyway and run your budget into the ground, or sit around waiting to get put on furlough. You have to create everything from scratch because there are no company standards - no Revit families, no standard details. You're lucky if you can find a decent title block or meeting minutes template. Benefits are total crap for the size of this company - nothing but high-deductible health plans that cost an arm and a leg. 401k match has a 3-year vesting schedule because they know that nobody is crazy enough to stay at this company for that long. The only reason I'm giving a 2-star review is because I made so much money here, but it's not worth the stress and potential substance abuse issues you may develop from dealing with the non-stop BS.