Pros
- Socially, there is no hierarchy. It's really easy to be friendly with people at all levels of the company. Getting beers with a director after work as an entry-level program manager is a relatively common occurrence. Conversations with people at all levels of the company will take on tones far more casual than you may expect. - You demonstrate your value as a resource with your work and especially with the size and strength of your intracompany professional network, not the amount of time you spent at your desk that week. This is truly one of the best, most progressive aspects of TI's culture. - Working at TI, you will receive a crash course in the "human" side of your discipline (the part they never taught you in school). Getting a project off the ground and working for your customers will require buy-in from about a million other teams before it's possible. At TI, obtaining buy-in can sometimes be an incredibly counter-intuitive process. That is, it doesn't usually mean convincing people your ideas will help the business, but rather convincing them that it's worth it to them to let you proceed. This would be a con, except that making it through this crash course will overprepare you for the political side of jobs at any future employer. - It is exceptionally easy to move around into different teams at TI. You express an interest, get some recommendations, and you're in. - They pay well and seem to pride themselves on it. I negotiated poorly and they still had no qualms paying me more than I expected. - A manager who likes you is a manager who will sponsor all sorts of business trips around the world.
Cons
Professionally, the organization is very hierarchical. Entry-level employees do entry-level work, and middle managers at TI likely define "entry-level" differently than you do. I heard the phrase "have to pay your dues" more than once while I worked there. Often, team managers do what program managers normally do, while program managers do what assistants normally do. This can get extremely frustrating as you witness your team's direction slowly evaporate while your manager gets lost in the strategic customer-facing work and you do the time-consuming simple tasks with which he or she would rather not be bothered. This means a 5-person team with a manager and four experts executes like 1 person who has 4 assistants.