Avantages
9-80 for salaried workers, not the hourly, which is every other Friday off. In some cases can negotiate it to every other Monday off instead. High pay. Bench strength; nearly always there is backup, meaning few people have 'all' their work waiting for them after a week of vacation. Is pretty good for a Fortune 500 company. They try to promote workers with people skills, not necessarily the best worker--causes resentment but leads to better managerial skills in the first few mgmt levels.
Inconvénients
Middle managers only one level up can cancel 9-80 when they want to, for as long as they want. One incident of slow response to a floor problem and some managers cancel it for months. Valuing 'get along, go along' over everything else means there is no innovation; the nail that sticks up gets pounded down. When there is a bad manager or bad engineer, they often punish the careers of the first 3-4 people to complain rather than the perpetrator. Have seen a whole dept. sign a petition to fire their bad boss or they will quit en masse, and the manager was simply moved to another dept, not fired. Within a year, there was talk of doing the same petition there.