Pros
Good work life balance for the most part. Friendly and smart people, many of whom have worked in Cadence for many years and know their stuff very well.
Kontras
The company is in an industry that has been stale for years. New value propositions are difficult. The end result is most R&D are doing maintenance work and bug fixing for very old code, rather than building something new and exciting. Like other EDA companies, the company didn't view itself as a software company for a long time and doesn't have good software practice. The software is not well tested or peer reviewed, is somewhat difficult to work with and can be bug prone. Fixing old bugs often leads to new ones and there are no company-wide enforced procedures to prevent that. Compensation used to be good. Now it is still somewhat around average, but hasn't kept pace with non-EDA software or semi companies that are doing well in the valley in recent years.