Pros
Name recognition of State Farm is massive, and it's a trusted brand. It's a large and very stable company that is very conservative financially. I have no doubt that they really know how to manage investments and their money (they've done just that for 95+years now). If you're in Bloomington, IL (the HQ) your pay will be good given the cost of living there. It *will* be less than any place on the coasts, but again COL is so much less. If you're in other locations pay is only somewhat competitive. Of course the pension + 401k is a big hook for many, and it vests after 5 years, but to get any real value from the pension you need to work here 15+ years.... and that's exactly what most people here do. The other benefits here are good at least competitive with most companies. except we don't do the kinds of perks that most tech companies provide in terms of free food. The health insurance is Blue Cross Blue Shield and what we pay isn't massive. Rx co-pays are ok. If you choose a high deductible plan they'll throw $2k into a medical savings account that's use-it-or-lose-it each year but it covers a nice chunk of any medical care you may have during the first part of the year. The pace is is slower than most. Not that your workload won't be fairly high, but things are slow moving. People don't work long hours (unless they really like that kind of thing). It's a ghost town past 4:30 here (we work 8-4:15), and working the weekend is unheard of unless you're an part of the crew doing a release. The fringe benefits of working at SF and living in Bloomington, IL are pretty good if you have kids. They have SF Park that has a pool and mini-golf and sports courts galore as well as discount programs with local and national retailers. Work related stress is only as high as you let it be 95% of the time. There's very little environmental stress with the exception of the frustration and lack of hope in people's eyes you see when things fail to release or release quickly. Once you get in here, you'll never have to leave. Getting fired is next to impossible unless you break the law. If you're looking for someplace to land and then stay until retirement this is your place. I've had a few colleagues who've retired here who came for the last 10-15 years of their career and it worked out for them rather well. That's a pro for the person, but not for the company :).
Cons
State Farm is slowly but surely running itself into the ground, though I do not believe they'll ever go out of business they'll become much less relevant in the market over the next 5-10 years. Here are the reasons I see for that: 1) Technically we use outdated systems (well most insurance companies do) and it's been super hard for this organization to overcome them and try to come into the 20th century (yes I said 20th, because 21st century is a long way off here in most ways). 2) Culturally this place is holding on so hard to "State Farm Nice" and keeping their #1 status and fading glory (they don't know it's fading!) that they'll run a huge multi-year program throwing huge amounts of money at it and then when it produces next to nothing, they'll close it on schedule, call it a success and then move on to the next thing a bunch of consultants told them would help modernize the company. 3) In the desperation to get things done faster, SF is willing to push anything out into production no matter what the customer experience is. There's lately been a lot of pressure to simply show something happening so we strongly suffer from a focus on activity over results that have impact and/or high quality. 4) Their IT department is massive and moribund, with thousands of people who've been there for 20-30 years and have very few modern IT skills and a CTO who either cannot (because of company culture or inability... I really have no idea which) or will not push the company to move to become a technology powerhouse that it *could* be. Similarly he's not being truthful about what he can or cannot get the IT organization to do or not do... or he simply doesn't know. 5) Their approach to people/talent is relentlessly focused on the idea that people are interchangeable resources and you can take someone from Claims and have them do IT-related work and they'll be successful, or you can take an exec from the agency force and put them into marketing, or you can take a mainframe guy and put him into java or database management or IT security. Of course a few outstanding people CAN do this well, but most can't. They just don't understand people with specialized skill sets and hiring top talent. 6) Decision makers are so far removed from what's actually happening in the company and people are so unwilling to confront difficult topics (State Farm Nice) that they don't make good choices. I've heard some of the most ridiculous decisions and reasoning for those decisions that make me believe that the decision makers were fed misinformation or it was so badly mangled in the game of telephone (because individual producers simply don't get any significant amount of time with higher level people without close supervision and message control from their managers.) 7) Management, which is called "Leadership" internally, is usually anything but leading us. There are a few good ones, but more often they are managing their departments in a way to preserve the status quo and/or their influence/career. Top execs leadership style/philosophy is old-school and not very progressive. 1st line managers, like most companies, are a mixed bag. I've had some great ones and decent ones, and I have a few friends who have really terrible ones. 8) They're almost all old, white men who hold the actual reigns of the company, and the very top people have always been lawyers for the past few decades. (As a counterpoint, I do have to say that women are in many, many senior positions at the VP level and in the middle management layers around director level. Minorities of most types aren't terribly visible in management/executives, but the LGBTQ support form the company is high and highly rated).