Company: Microsoft
Date: 2010-10-20
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current

Great place to learn, if you are active about managing your career
Pros: Pay and benefits are excellent. Access to technology (anything you want to work on or play around with) is essentially unlimited. If you can luck (or maneuver your way) into a good manager who is open and honest, you have a good chance to manage your career, and have a good time. You won't get rich, but you'll be well taken care of.

Despite the cons I list below, if you can be confident in what you do, have regular, honest conversations with your boss about your career, you can learn to ignore the silliness, and just have fun getting your job done. And get fairly well paid to do it.
Cons: The compensation system at higher levels is designed to get people to not play nice together. At lower levels, the difference in compensation between a great review and a mediocre one really isn't that much - you can work collaboratively, learn from your coworkers, mentor newer coworkers, etc. 

The differentiation in compensation at higher levels is extreme, and leads to ... shall we say ... sociopathic behavior being rewarded exorbitantly. It's possible to do well, while still being a good person who respects the opinions and work of your coworkers. It's easier to do well if you can pretend to do that, while making sure you get the credit for good things, and none of the blame for bad things.

*****

MS only really gets serious when a market is threatened, and then it takes time to spin up the machine. Once the train is rolling, we're pretty unstoppable, but it can seem to take a *lot* of effort and public embarrassment to get the train rolling. I still recall the day some VP announced that MS's opinion was that development of the browser was essentially done - there was nothing new left to do. So, the IE team was being disbanded. And now, 6 years later, we're trying to catch up. Same with phone - "the iphone will never amount to anything". I've seen internal talking points passed around about how the iphone wasn't as good because it didn't have a *tasks* app - that's the kind of internal propaganda you'll have to deal with.