Pros
Your job is extremely secure. Since esri dominates the gis industry, growth is decent and layoffs don’t really happen. The software produced is also used for some really laudable things, e.g conservation.
Cons
The culture and software process is very 1980s, and things are extraordinarily slow to change. When I started around three and a half years ago my team was one of the very first to be using git. Everyone else was still using starteam. Testing (except for throwing code over the fence at some poor sucker) and ci/cd are almost unheard of. There are also a lot of office politics, and a definite “old boys club.” Finally, getting help or resources from teams outside of your own (and often, even on your own team) is like pulling teeth. It felt like engineers completely ignored my requests or questions until I had demonstrated that I wasn’t an idiot and earned some social capital. Now imagine that you’re working on something that needs to work with Pro, ArcGIS online, the latest version of server, and the sdks. Good luck getting any of the engineers on teams other than your own to share knowledge. As a result, everyone does things their own way and integrating the “platform” involves lots and lots of duck tape and prayer.