Pros
People are great. Colleagues are all smart, professional, nice people (with few exceptions). Management is very open and takes a genuine interest in their staff's career development, beyond just staffing their contracts. There's a great culture of collaboration and support, nothing competitive or cutthroat. Work-life balance is excellent. Level 1 consultants are capped at 40 and in my experience that is strictly honored by management. Above level 1 I've averaged around 42 hours per week and rarely exceeded 45. If you're working from a company office and not client-site, you'll most likely have flexible hours and telework. Career growth and advancement opportunities are there if you want them, but can be weak if you aren't actively pursuing them. Highly motivated people are able to advance quickly in salary and title from Consultant to Associate. Above that it's less clearly defined, you generally will have to be able to sell work to get the next promotion but it seems like most are able to get grandfathered in to their first management roles when their manager gets promoted. There's definitely a big culture of promotion from within -- the CEO started here at age 23, and I get the impression that the majority of senior leadership has worked here for 10-20+ years, often as their first job out of college or out of active duty military service. Benefits are solid. The 401k in particular stands out-- immediate vesting, great fund choices and fee ratios, 6% match for your calendar year contributions as long as you're with the firm on December 31st. $5,500 available per year for external academic tuition and certifications, and there's great free internal training available on top of that. 15 days of PTO for junior staff, and you don't need to take time off when you're sick as long as you can log in to your laptop and telework.
Cons
The work at times feels meaningless and like a waste of taxpayer money. I suppose that's the norm with federal consulting. The federal government is notoriously slow-paced and bureaucratic-- simple, quick technical fixes can take an inordinately long time to get the required approvals and funding. Everyone seems very content with their work but nobody seems particularly excited. One DoD client I work with manages a multi-billion dollar budget with a series of disorganized Excel workbooks that have no traceability-- they can't get funding to invest in even basic database and analysis platforms. Pay seems to be a little below average versus competitors (~5-10%), counterbalanced by advancement rate. Although benefits are good for the most part, the people who have been here since before we went public will tell you about how much better they were back in the day. If you get stuck on client site, a lot of the pros listed above do not apply. No flexible hours, difficult to network with colleagues and thus difficult to advance your career.