Pros
The only pro I can see is that they have a good number of vacation days relative to most other companies and the pay was OK.
Cons
The Charles River Development division of State Street is the worst company I have ever worked for. Within a month of arriving, I realized I had made a mistake. The place is a pressure cooker where all the developers are assigned more work than they can accomplish during a sprint. Working evenings and weekends was fairly normal and was needed in order to get your assigned work done. I knew engineers who routinely worked 60 hours a week and even they got laid off. In general, the code base is huge, but has little or no documentation, neither in the code or nor external documents. In the many years I worked there, I never saw design or architecture diagrams. Design, architecture and documentation seemed to be somewhat foreign concepts. The design is in the team lead’s head. One engineer told me that it previously it had been company policy not to put comments in the code. So you are left to debug through lots of legacy code trying to figure out how the code works. Because all the engineers are under intense schedule pressure, almost no one will take the time to help you. It’s not that they are bad people, but if they take more than 5 or 10 minutes to help you, they won’t be able to get their own work done. All the companies I have previously worked at had a sense of teamwork where engineers helped each other solve problems. With a few exceptions, you are on your own and it is sink or swim. The company is in pattern of laying off the expensive, senior engineers and outsourcing the jobs or bringing in H1B visa workers. They appear to be in a drive to reduce salary costs. In hiring, like many companies, they have a high preference for hiring H1B workers over domestic workers. They are cheaper and can’t leave if another company offers them a higher salary. The technology base was really antiquated when I got there, but they were trying to modernize it. The modernization process involved moving major components to a new cloud architecture. It seemed that they were laying off engineers from the legacy components groups and hiring different engineers at different sites for the new cloud work.