The good:

You will get paid what you are owed.

They will not get you an F visa or whatever the current bullshit visa is and tell you that it's okay; they will not fuck you on the visa.

At my center there was no overbearing management, and there isn't a shit ton of sales pressure.

My coworkers were great, too. The atmosphere is usually pretty laid back.

HR staff are generally not malevolent lie machines, though there have been some dishonest people, it is WAY better than my previous school.

The bad:

The curriculum ranges from okay to laughable. For older students it's pretty flexible and the materials provided are pretty good. For younger students the old materials were NOT EFL materials, and were about 1/2 to 2/3 inappropriate for this purpose. We made do and came up with a pretty good system for using what was not garbage, though.

The new materials ARE made for EFL, but the flash cards have some baffling visual metaphors (which is okay if it's only a few, but it isn't), the songs suck (to the point that even little kids don't usually like them), and it just generally shows signs of having never been tested or having sought any input from teachers during the development process (which was looooong). If you go to work there now, you'll have to deal with that.

The new course requires materials that the centers do not have, or which are not organized in such a way as to be usable in a timely fashion. You'll be skipping a lot of activities unless they've gotten their shit together.

While there isn't a lot of dishonesty in HR (especially now), there is a shit ton of incompetence. You need to watch them like hawks, not because they'll try to deliberately screw you, but because they don't know what they're doing.

As a result of this, there was a wave of resignations among the foreign teachers a while back. This led to a massive increase in workload for all the remaining teachers, especially the CTs, who began quitting en masse. This was after almost two years with no one quitting for anything other than medical or family reasons. I had a long chat with the current foreign HR guy about this, I don't know how seriously he takes it.

While Maxen will not facilitate illegal visas for employees (and at least in the past would do so for Z-visas), they will hire people who bring their own illegal visas. Rumor had it that they had lost their ability to sponsor Z-visas due to hiring too many illegal workers, but as of this summer they had apparently gotten it back. That could just be sponsoring the visa via an untainted subsidiary, however. New Oriental has a lot of them.

And speaking of illegal (or in some cases not, if they're on legit student visas) workers, they hired a bunch of non-native speakers...all white europeans. These guys' English is good, but no better than the best Chinese teachers. They are just there to put a white face in the classroom. Maxen provides a vivid reminder that it doesn't matter how you teach, they don't actually care about your native speaker status, it's all just a show.

As with most such jobs, though, if you are a good teacher and do a good job, you can rack up some more lucrative private lessons on the side, of course.

Maxen is better than most of the other big-name language mills. The only one I've heard spoken of more highly in Beijing is Eaton Kids. But it is still just a language mill.

I can personally vouch for the Jinyuan center, the other Beijing centers seem okay from what I've heard, and the principal of the Guangzhou center is a good guy whom you can trust. Otherwise, your mileage may vary.