Company: Microsoft
Date: 2012-12-14
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Confirmed

I miss the old Microsoft (minus the sophomoric and moronic/sexist harassment of course)
Pros: Back years ago when Bill was in charge, this was a great place to work whether you preferred stable products or wanted to work on riskier, innovative products.  Decent salary, benefits, perks and great people
Cons: **harassment and hostile (boy's club) but they were trying to grow out of it (unlike so many companies today that encourage that behavior and then cover up any culbability if someone goes public).
**tendency for upper management to follow rather than lead and ignore innovations (like new UI's that were already ready to go before iPhone was even thought of, or great new architectures for 3D that were super fast on regular PCs but the project was killed because some PM took over who wanted the devs for his DB project!), i.e. petty empire building
**tendency to treat some groups or contractors as second-class, dime a dozen people (destroys teamwork and makes good people leave the profession, further diluting the quality talent pool of contractors or other groups like writers and testers (I was there before the class action suit that resulted only in MS changing to A- and V-, i.e. a loophole, rather than better treatment of its contingent staff).)
**terrible evaluation methods where the bar is always raised and the employees are made to feel like they are terrible (soul-destroying in order to convince good workers that they should never leave, i.e. they'd never get a job elsewhere and MS only keeps them out of the goodness of it's heart...yes, I was told this and found out the contrary when I got angry at such manipulation)
**fear management, fear environment in many groups
**unrealistic schedules where you are told to build something in half the time the estimates say, and if you don't meet that schedule you will be scapegoated come review time.  I refused to sign off on such a schedule but was overruled by my manager.  when we shipped the product (to great reviews by the way), I was given a poor rating at review time for missing the schedule dates (we actually hit exactly on the schedule I had created as the realistic one) and for 'not being a team player because I argued with my manager about such things'  He even created items that were false to add to my review.  I left.  He stayed and the group was finally dissolved by upper management because it was doing such a horrible job on the following projects.  He was kept and supported, given good reviews, by upper management (to avoid having to explain his actions).
**horrible managers allowed to stay there (see above story)
**expectation that you will do 60-90 hour weeks, and will get dinged at review time if you dont
(you would be anyway if you weren't the manager's friend or fav)

still given what I hear from former coworkers regarding the past ten years and currently, this was 'the good old days'