Pros
The products are fantastic. I'm lucky enough to get hands-on with a lot of them, and they genuinely are some of the best cars in the world. Some departments don't get a lot of time close to the vehicles, but fortunately I do. The work itself is also actually very interesting, and the subject matter does lend itself to you going the extra mile in order to get things right for the car.
Cons
The culture is getting increasingly toxic. Departments are becoming more 'tribal' in the face of the increasing adversity from the outside world (Brexit, the Diesel scandal, etc etc) as they try and make sure they hit 100% of their own metrics and targets and thus ensure they're out of the firing line of the senior leadership. This means that cross-departmental collaborative working is difficult, and the cars are suffering for it. Similarly, there's a tendency to hide errors or 'greenwash' (colour in all the 'red' problem numbers with 'green' to make it look better) when approaching a programme gateway because holding up a gateway is seen as considerably worse than stopping to fix the problem by senior management. As such, the problems never really go anywhere and only come out of the woodwork right at the end of a programme's development cycle, causing the entire business to run around in a panic trying to fix a myriad of issues that have 'only just appeared' right before a car is supposed to be released. Finally, while there's plenty of space to move up the ladder if you are a people-management person (which doesn't actually require any engineering knowledge) there's very little chance to move upwards in a technical role. Once you've become a Technical Specialist (equivalent to LL6, the least senior management role) there really is nowhere to go unless you stop being technical and start managing programme gateways, timing and people.
