Company: Microsoft
Date: 2011-03-23
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: former

Unnecessarily complicated
Pros: - Intellectually very challenging and enriching -- plenty of very very smart people around you because of Microsoft candidate screening process
- Management very open to feedback and when they are not, there are independent internal processes that channel your feedback anonymously
Cons: - Not too much product innovation so it can be pretty boring for a marketing person
- Dominant market share, huge chunk of cash in the bank means there is no hunger to be better and all the talent hired don't have too many "real life-and-death" challenges to deal with and as a result focus their intellectual power on internal processes, perfecting them, honing them. Result: Things get unnecessarily complicated. The culture of complexity in this organization is amazing -- and it shows in Microsoft products.