Pros
It was steady work. The work was never physically demanding for me as a 35 year old male. You should be able to meet at least two people who are truly professional. If you love America and want to protect it you will find like minded people who, for the most part, truly love their country.
Cons
If you love America and want to protect people you may learn that they would perhaps be better off protecting themselves and you should look for other outlets for your patriotism. Inappropriate advances by aggressive female staff, borderline sexual harassment. Inappropriate behavior by male staff having illicit affairs with female staff. Management at the highest level of airport security having multiple affairs with subordinate females. Passengers and flight crew will treat you like absolute dirt, but you get used to it, which might not be a good thing either. The more work you do the more likely a mistake will happen and you will be caught in the middle of it. This is bad because there are many people in this world who will work harder to get out of work. This culture of teamwork at TSA leaves more work and potential mistakes for those that work the hardest. The more mistakes the best employee makes then the more she or he is less likely to get promoted. Also, the more time an employee is away from work nosing up to the management the more likely they will be promoted instead. In other words, less opportunity for the best employee. If you are a hard working, self-starting type of person that your management grows to count on, you will not even get the chance to train for promotion because you will be doing the work for the people your management would rather see promoted. Favoritism is a common theme especially in big government. Diversity is courageously tackled at TSA, but if you are blonde-haired-blue-eyed then be prepared to hear the kinds of racially charged things you would never dream of saying if the roles were reversed. I was verbally threatened by another employee of darker skin tone I kept quiet out of fear and of course nothing came of it. Also, on a countless occasions I was made the joke with statements such as “White is right, huh, (myname)?” However, only one time I abruptly warned another employee to never discuss the disabilities of a passenger on the floor. This employee was having a laugh at the passengers expense, the focus went from his inappropriate comments about people with disabilities to the management focusing on me, a white man threatening a young African American man. If you are smart like me and were to run into this kind of treatment you would probably find another job as quickly as possible because it begins to look like a set up. Finally, it was almost three years ago that I walked away from TSA. Since then I have been unemployed scrounging for odd jobs. Without laying out my level of education and record of patriotic service in the armed forces I must tell you that I have never been able to get past a second interview with a company in the past three years. I do not mention that to get sympathy as an unemployed veteran, I say this because I have great qualifications, but I can not even get a part time job with Home Depot as a cashier. It is bizarre. I am not much of detective, but either two things are happening. First, people never want to hire a previous TSA employee or second, someone in the organization may have the ability to do what would otherwise be illegal for most companies. If they can make it difficult for me, then they can do the same for you. Either way, “Unemployed after TSA” has been the most substantial “con” I can present, and it hopefully illustrates to you just how bad things could be if you decide to work for them. Basically, if you work here and it doesn’t appear to be that great a job for you then there is a small chance that you will suffer for it a long time afterwards.