Company: Microsoft
Date: 2014-02-04
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

Big challanges. Changing times. Overhead. Opportune impact + opportunity.
Pros: At Microsoft you can literally work with a team to offer an epic product and then watch it fail or succeed, from early stages through design, implementation and then market reaction. And then there's an option to always keep working if that doesn't work out. If it does, you'll watch your promotion velocity improve to great proportions. If not, that's ok, go try something else every 12-18-24 months - many groups ship so many cool things you often can just move within projects under a group of directors.

The 2014 calendar year will be one of a lot of change: instead of performance ratings, the rewards will be handed out in a slightly more opaque process, but ideally taking into account an entire team's feedback, contributions through others, and I'm excited to see that happen.

With Satya onboard as the new CEO this will be a fun year and everyone will see the results in one way or another quickly.
Cons: Very ineffective functional organizations, the pendulum as swung toward a lower accountability model in the functional engineering disciplines, so you'll have a very crisp, defined world to work in, and until the higher levels you just don't have the right title, experience and connections to land exciting work. I feel for the newer hires.

With recent changes across the company to reorganize for One Microsoft, there's been a lot of level inflation in some groups that makes years of hard work feel disregarded and unrewarded.