Avantages
1) Benefits and Work/Life Balance. Solid benefits package (though it's been reduced in recent years) and generally good flexibility when it comes to work hours. Among the key niceties, they have a "9/80" schedule available where you can work 9.0 hours each day and take every-other Friday off. They also offer tuition reimbursement for advanced degrees, and there are opportunities on certain projects to get paid for your overtime -- even as a salaried employee. Nobody will make you feel bad for taking time off, even during busy times of the year. 2) The Work. This is a large company that develops a wide array of interesting products for military customers. They handle product development as well as a lot of their own manufacturing, so at many work sites you can simply walk down the hall and see how whatever you're creating fits into the larger picture of a massive defense system.
Inconvénients
I don't mean to stress the cons, but these are the things that are "less than ideal". 1) Performance incentives straight out of communist Russia. Yearly bonuses for anyone below executive level are silly small (2-4%) and aren't based on individual performance, but overall business unit and company performance. Also, don't expect anything but a single-digit percentage raise...that's even if you consistently perform well, get a great performance rating, and get promoted. Then crack open the annual report and see some execs making multimillions that are getting better percentages from year-to-year. Average raises for engineers are 3% or 4%, with max around 8%. This is especially troubling for younger employees that need quicker growth to pay off student loans and start families. I've seen many bright engineers that start after college leave after 3-5 years and get 20%-30% raises to go to commercial companies (or even other defense contractors). As a result, much of the young top talent leaves quickly for greener pastures. That, and the fact that it's difficult to innovate due to points 2 and 3, below. 2) Aging workforce. They sure do know their stuff, but a lot of employees are grumpy old defense personalities from the tail end of the cold war era. They're also 90% men and they will make up the majority of your co-workers. I've heard estimates that as many as 50% of the company's engineers are aged 50 or older. Therefore, if you're 35 or younger, prepare to constantly feel like you're working with your dad...or grand-dad. Holy cynicism, batman. Expect change to happen very slowly. 3) Bureaucracy. The federal government imposes a seriously stifling wet blanket of rules and regulations on defense contractors. Pretty much everything is hugely confusing and difficult to navigate (think of doing your own taxes to the twenty-fifth power). There's redundancy in the government's own product line, and the sea of acronyms, paperwork, and process can make you feel small, inefficient, and like it's impossible to understand anything or get anything done. What you do get done will get done slowly.