Pluspunten
You get real tight with your teammates, like Marines that have been through a secret war together. There were also cool but unreliable fringe benefits, which is what makes them fringe benefits vs reliable everyday benefits; like Seahawks marching band would party at our offices when it was Superbowl and USA Today covered it. One year, my division of the company had a fancy Christmas lunch at a hotel. But it was just that one year out of more than five I worked there. It was like startup hustle energy everyday so when I left Expedia to work at a real start up, I was well prepared.
Minpunten
HR was non-existent for staff or only there to serve corrupt management. A lot of secrecy about little projects and worry about corporate espionage that would probably never really happen. People brought dogs and kids into the office often, even though we did not welcome kids outside of holiday events, and dogs were banned in our building. The company distributed an annual bonus that was not pegged to your performance but to how well the company did as a whole in the last year. One year our CEO got a bonus that literally broke world records for how much a CEO could make in a year, but the rest of us at Expedia got really small annual bonuses and we were told it was because "the company underperformed." It was implied that we caused the underperformance. I found bags of what appeared to be cocaine at least 2 times in conference rooms my team had scheduled. My manager accused me of having affairs with a teammate but did not give same accusations to the teammate I was supposedly having affair with. They did this repeatedly for years and HR was aware but didn't care.